Transformation is Happening in Education

This is a draft of an article I am submitting for publication.  It describes the class I teach at Sawyer Business School, Suffolk University.  

I divide the students in the class into six teams.  Five of the teams are assigned an eTextbook device and the sixth team is given a paper textbook for use through the semester.  The digital technologies have changed as new devices have emerged.  In the last semester I included: Amazon Kindle, Sony eReader Touch, Apple iPad, enTourage eDGe, CourseSmart.   The students in the class are also part of my study of digital textbook adoption.  I have been conducting this research as an ongoing longitudinal study over the past two years, to track the trends in student attitudes and behavior toward their use of digital textbooks (eTextbooks) in higher education. 

Background: 

As education has become a higher priority for the country there has been a greater focus the quality of learning and on the economics providing learning tools and equipment (textbooks).  In the 21st-century there is a clear and emerging desire by all stakeholders to take advantage of rich media and access to information provided by the Internet to provide better education. Concurrently the textbook industry and the broader industries of all print media are being disrupted and transformed by digital technology in the form of e-books and eReaders.

The challenges facing each of the major stakeholders (publishers, authors, bookstores, students, etc.) in textbook industry transformation are relatively similar, whether they are on the supply side or the demand side the equation. Each of the stakeholders is facing significant disruption in the marketplace that will profoundly affect their economics, operations and business models. The creation and distribution of information or content in printed form (aka books) is a highly integrated system facing business transformation on the supply-side mediated by adoption rates on the demand side. The dynamics and rate of transformation are being both mediated and catalyzed by a series of social, economic and technology forces.

General Observations:

Students in today's classroom are becoming much more technologically savvy every year. Their comfort with technology comes from growing up in an environment where they have encountered, and in fact been bombarded with new technologies at an ever-increasing pace. Digital technology pervades every aspect of their lives: how they play, how they socialize, how they communicate, and how they learn. These students have grown up with digital devices, and they are on the cusp of a generational cohort that is expecting technology to be integrated seamlessly into most experiences in the personal, professional and social aspects of their lives. It is a foregone conclusion that they are looking to further integrate technology into their academic life as much as possible. These cultural forces of technology are meeting head-on with the traditional academic environment. The academic environment of today can be characterized as a dynamic tension between tradition and innovation, i.e. balancing enhancing the foundation of existing knowledge, while pushing the frontiers of new knowledge. These forces are driving both the content and the media of academia.

In the Sawyer Business School, Suffolk University, Department of Strategy and International Business, Boston, MA, a section of the strategic management class students are participating in research and exploring the technology disruption and industry response in the publishing market.  They are focusing particularly on the textbook segment of the market which is being significantly disrupted by the advent and influx of electronic readers, tablet-like devices, and digital textbooks.  The class, Management Strategy 429 is the capstone course at the Sawyer Business School. The Sawyer Business School focuses on global business education and offers undergraduate and graduate degrees. Suffolk University is a private, non-sectarian university.  Suffolk employs nearly 800 full-time and adjunct faculty members, who instruct approximately 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students.  Mitchell Weisberg  (me) teaches this section of the course with a focus on business and industry responses to disruptive technologies.

Plan to read more about this research and class in future blog entries and in other journals, publications and conference sessions.  Also, invite me to speak on this at your conference or group!