The Consumerization of Learning

It is time to go "all-in" with digital transition and realize its true end-point.

Containing studied critiques and survival strategies, my new book, The Consumerization of Learning is a distillation of knowledge from an epic road trip to 87+ cities in three years meeting educators. This is a book for educational leaders, teachers, and parents as well as curriculum publishers—everyone with a stake in education.

Find out about schools in the age of experience, the digital war for balance, what the future "you" will do to gain knowledge, the market blur, the jerk, digital curriculum evaluation, the hidden villain in institutional learning, teacher transformation, the anti-tech of love, educators as software mavens, schools becoming thrilling expos, conquering time, and other epiphanies.

Chapters include:

• Conquering Time
• The Grand Scheme
• A Model Architecture for Schools
• The Characteristics of Digital Curriculum
• Evaluating Digital Curriculum
• Un-gating Potential and Rigor
• Love, the Anti-Tech
• Paying for It

With this book, I hope you experience a deep and transformational dive into the disruption at hand for the way leaders lead education digitally. It highlights consumerization as the act of making something desirable and consumable by the individual.

If schools fully discover and adapt to consumerization's ingenuity, it has the power to give teachers back time spent custom building every digital resource themselves; time that can now be turned to attention on students, to create more hands-on learning activities, and to guide students in the fullness of a digital learning experience.

Read my book and join the discussion about how schools are finding a new relevancy at the natural end-point of digital transition: maximized live experience and quality digital learning, also known as "expo" education.

I’m including an excerpt from chapter three below. Each week I’ll continue to share sections out on my LinkedIn page. The book is available on Amazon.com.

====

Backstory, Chapter 3

Reaching the End-Point

Is there an end-point of the digital transformation for institutional education? There is and end-point, but getting there will require what may seem like never-ending and exhausting change. At both public and private schools across the U.S., what I have learned is that it is really a journey of five to ten years. It’s achievable.

In most of the cities I visited, I shared a vision for where the bulk of the market is going and how fast, based on our research and our direct observation. From the very beginning, this vision included a change continuum that ends in what is known as the “Age of Experience.” It’s an economic term and represents our present age as beyond merely a focus on information and technology. It is conceptually a time when our “online and offline identities are converging…accelerating the development of experience-driven products.” Most teachers and school administrators agree to the logic of it their journey of change ending at this point because it resonates well with their internal terminology such as “blended learning.”

Education executives are relieved to hear about an end-point in view, because they don't want to keep shifting the pieces and parts of their operations around indefinitely, guessing as to workability of their plans. Continuous disruption has a feeling of having some deep wrong that can't be named. Change is needed but disruption is something more.

Education will be joining the Age of Design because education, like all of the continuum of years spoken about in this chapter, it will inevitably level up to where the rest of industry has already gone.

In the Design Years, a tangible shift in how institutions communicate and articulate themselves as parts of a community, real or virtual, will become apparent. This could also be called the Golden Age of School Administration such that a new higher level of executive skill will enter in. It could be known as the “Coding” of education if the viewpoint of institution-as-intelligent-software-interface gets popular like it currently is in Industry.

Schools will know they are in the Design Years when they are most focused on their survival in their markets, like when they are gaining more competition from local private schools and unschooling or consumerization. When demands for more and more Charters and other separate avenues are ever higher despite the technology they have brought in so far, then schools are at a crisis point of their design. Tweaking and augmentation, and using analytics, and a few new hires and some firings of personnel are not cutting it; they need a clean slate. In addition, they will have reached the Design Years when their leadership and a few forward thinkers in that school or district realize that the sum of all their disjointed, mostly teacher-level efforts, with a few pronunciations by leadership, against the demand of its population is still inadequate.

This is where an awareness will alight such that, compared to other super-tech imbued industry, (our) institution does not have a disciplined, and refined cohesive highly technologically enhanced administration that delivers on its promise. It is not constructed to win; it must be deconstructed and then rebuilt into a winning platform exactly like industry must do when it is marginalized or run-out-of-business by competition. It must find its “hook” in the present economy and social structure, which will undoubtedly be founded on tech with all other elements playing second fiddle to that central channel.

The Point about Time

Before moving on to discuss the last “Experience” stage, let’s make a point about why this is all happening. In every city for the past twenty or so, I have mentioned that there are four pillars of the universe we all know and love and those are: space, matter, energy and time. Those are the “things” of our universe upon which all else is built. As mankind, we have built an ecosystem of each one of these in turn standing on the shoulders of the one before. We first focused on survival by busily conquering spaces. We had to hold a lot of space to find enough game or fish, and later farm, so defending and holding onto our little corners of the world was very important.  Kings and Queens and all sorts of regimes and governments have warred for nation-states. Later on, in the focus on space, people have taken on mortgages and decorated. Our learning in the early part of the original Earth space-race was parents-as-teachers and monasteries for higher learning. 

Mankind then moved on to the Industrial Age and conquering matter, building bridges, inventing air flight, and in general making a lot of stuff. 

The next evolution was into Energy and all things having to do with it including all trade and making computers and the Information Age. This Age, also known as the Knowledge Age, was the vast accumulation of things-to-know while also distributing those widely. Since money is what people are paid for their labor as an exchange mechanism, it is a form of energy. Like manipulating electrical grids, that Age has included financial market manipulations and more.  Government have focused in this Age on oil and any means of producing energy directly, but, as an Age, mankind’s dedicated focus on energy as an issue is almost over. 

The last pillar of the universe, and the one that is now drawing the most attention from advanced societies is time. What the present generations are most focused on is how they can have a good life. They consider that knowledge is “done.” It’s on the internet, isn’t it? Born-digital learners often think that someone, somewhere already knows something about anything, and that that knowledge can be found. They are therefore prone to focus on experience, including learning-as-experience. The Millenial generation is even into the “Tiny House Movement,” abstaining from mortgages and going mobile with their living. They are less interested in things, in buying and acquiring since things are so easily obtainable, and more in their own ride through the years emotionally and exploring the external world. This is, from an economic point of view, a vast and interesting new frontier to be conquered. Conquering time as a consumable, as something aided by the delivery of services of all kinds has many potentialities for new industry. For learning, it could mean developing delivery mechanization to compress some parts of knowledge acquisition into exceedingly short acquisition timeframes by learners and for other parts of knowledge, expanding them out into challenging and intellectually thrillingly theatrical journeys.

Experience

After the Design Age comes the Age of Experience. Schools will level-up from design to education-as-experience with online and physical interactions so artfully crafted together and personalized that the life-journey of the student will be mapped and adjusted with consummate ease. Some might just call this "personalized learning," an idea that has been around awhile. Actually, very often schools get the definition of “personalized learning” a bit backwards – personalization in the software field is really something you do yourself. Individualization or differentiation is what a school or teacher would do for the student. What can be done with the full capabilities of software design realized, including virtual reality and intelligent learning engines that adapt lines of inquiry for an individual student, are promising an unlimited potential for experiential learning.

In reality, the world could be going someplace with institutional education of truly majestic impact through a far higher capacity to individualize and transport learning from mediocre into new highs of students achieving real intellectual creativity and employability. “Geniuses” will abound because the system is built to help them excel on their greatest potential path. The ramifications economically are beyond description.

Stepping Into the Future

Not familiar with the idea of the Age of Experience? With the rise of Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft battling for collections of devotees, big business has entered a level of branding and product that is self-evidently called "Experience." Disney is the high watermark brand of this concept. If you've been to Disneyland, you've had an experience. If you've joined Amazon Prime, you know that they will send you emails at midnight to see if you will rate one of the movies you just streamed off their site. Facebook sends those nifty anniversary videos to keep engagement at a high whine, capturing attention in order to capture everything else you do. Starbucks is a prime “experience brand” with all the theatre of making a cup of coffee individualized.

Large brands, as cultural phenomena, provide valid clues for where education will need to arrive as an end-point, and not because it is an ideal, but because it will be an expectation driven by other consumer experience. This is no different than the computer-tablet revolution, which happened first to shift consumer culture. As industry filed in behind it to offer more technical benefits, it delivered even greater social functionality, which in turn shifted culture again to expectations of things like same-day grocery order delivery and more, which in turn shifted industry, and so on.

Education will need to be providing personal value, as judged by the individual person. The only way to do this is to make it a self-determined and experiential thing, being self-determined through the vast possibilities that exist, while also taking care of students to reach minimal goals of reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies. Attaining this experiential level will be above typical design into best-of-breed brand. This is the difference between a local community college’s cache and the Ivy League schools already. Attaining this through technology interface woven in with human interaction is a high art, so the Age of Experience is above design and into a more artistic rendering of the attainment of knowledge as a service. It is aesthetic, even fun. 

Schools and districts will know they have reached the Age of Experience when they find themselves considering the depth of individualizations they can do. Right now individualization, a.k.a. “personalization” by most teachers, is the art of mildly adapting the same whole group lesson so that the slower student gets remediation to catch up, or that the student with hearing difficulty is given a special headset to listen in on some video, or that fast-Johnny gets to go play more math games online, or other educational leisure activity, because he has already finished everything. In schools where this definition of differentiating instruction is in play, you will see progress boards, typically with little gold or colored stars showing the progress of each individual student against a known set of lesson plans.

Teachers busily unleash the faster kids while helping the slower – rewarding with time the lowest common denominator, which actually penalizes the faster students more. Parents see these boards and silently gloat about their child being the one with the most stars, or are saddened by the child with so few. It is for this reason that the Age of Experience will be forced upon the Education arena. Consumers know that full adaptation is available from mentors and the sea of knowledge available on the Internet, and will seek those things out rather than allow the inequity of not-truly-adapted environments. Costs to do so are coming down and incentives to achieve are going up. When schools are having real conversations that almost obliterate the “whole group” learning modality conceptually in all directions, then real individualization can start occurring, and real experiences shift.

Another direction schools will go in the Experience Age is towards giving real hands-on and theatre-style or field-trip type moments to balance the screen-time learning. This is the number one thing that can be done to provide relevancy and criticality to physical schools—but it will come at a high cost structure. The promise of things like social virtual reality may mitigate some of this, but it is still screen-time. The art of real-life activity, things that draw out collaboration and communication between students locally and with like-minded others globally, will be the customization that schools promote as their marketable brand, because any high motion and interaction experience is so appealing to all students. As education comes through the technology transition, there predictably will be a renaissance in sports, music, art, labs, and more—all tied to tech and analytics.

With device wearables, virtual and augmented reality, and the internet of things, this end-point to the transition seems to come full-circle to where we were before we started the tech transformation: still with functioning schools but transformed beyond recognition in many cases.

This predicted end-point is more like a network with a bright center chandelier-like hub that is perhaps a physical place but is most definitely a virtual one, around which students coalesce, but surrounded by thousands, if not millions of contributive bulbs, points of individual light that individual students float out to visit in random patterns before reporting back to the central hub and later graduating up to another hub. This allows every individual to have an individual experience, impossible to do at scale until a high-level of technology is absorbed into every fiber of the Education enterprise. The end of this book looks at this hypothetical future.

The structure of education upon arrival by any institution to this loosely-defined end-point is in question, but for certain the function will have been modified.

Since form typically follows function, we have some interesting years ahead for all teacher and administrators to adapt through, before arriving in the Age of Experience.

=====

REVIEWS

"The creators of Amazon know the future of retail is direct to consumer. The founders of Uber know the future of transportation is on-demand. The visionary at Tesla understands that the future of energy creation and storage is distributed. LeiLani Cauthen knows the future of Education shares all three of these characteristics. In The Consumerization of Learning she shares her expansive knowledge of what it all means."

• Erik HeinrichFormer IT Director, San Francisco Unified School District

"LeiLani has been asking essential questions as she investigates the educational system across the United States. In approaching trends and gaps from a business lens, she is able to highlight areas that may seem obvious after she points them out but may have gone largely unnoticed or unconsidered from an education focused lens. In the three years of knowing LeiLani, I've gained new insight and perspective shifts, learned about broader trends, gaps and predictions for future movement in digital content and strategy, and been able to fit together puzzle pieces I didn't know I was missing before. She has a forward thinking vision for the future of education, paradigm shifts, organizational shifts, with students at the center."

• Dr. Michelle Zimmerman, 2016 NCCE Outstanding Technology Educator of the Year, Microsoft Innovative Education Expert at Microsoft Education, Teacher/Researcher, Renton Preparatory Academy