Challenges to the Professor

I have been focusing mostly on the college classroom and addressing my material to university faculty. this is because that's the venue in which I teach. I'm currently a lecturer at Suffolk University, part-time. (I am looking for a full-time nontenure university teaching position if you know of one.) However much of this material applies to the K-12 classroom setting as well. A few colleagues teaching in that arena should please feel free to add comments on your experience.

Bringing innovation into the classroom is a challenge to faculty. In fact it is a series of challenges, each with many dimensions. at the surface there is a simple matter of selection and a gathering of class material. Some books exist only in one e-Reader format, some in multiple formats, and some not at all. And the challenge only begins here. Having selected the book, the syllabus must be adjusted to address the material included in the text. Page numbers and locations vary from one e-text to another, and may even vary within one e-text to another depending on the font size selected by the user. Diagrams, charts and other visual aids for the students are often displaced in the device displays.

Students however show very different degrees of acceptance of the devices. Many of them, having grown up with digital devices with her whole life are very comfortable with the eReaders and they quickly embrace them. Others are less enthusiastic. Some students print out hard copies of the material on the digital device to read and study from. Others spend the time reading the digital device but they take their notes on paper which makes sharing more cumbersome. At this point about two thirds through the semester and seeing good acceptance of the devices but the jury is still out. At the end of the semester I will be looking back and see if there is any either quantifiable difference in learning as evidenced by student test or quiz scores.

I'm finding that I often have to read the material on multiple devices just to be familiar with the materials presented on them. This creates a significant amount of additional work. I also need to be able to respond to questions referring to a location number into digital text, and to be able to find references in written papers from the students that referred locations in the digital texts.

In a future blog I will write about other tools that are brought into the classroom that may eventually tie into the digital books. This includes our use of wiki's to remove barriers of time and space.

And so the experiment goes on.

Innovation in the Classroom Studying Technologly Disruption

At Harvard, students study business cases of companies that have already resolved a situation and learn from past successes and failures... here at Suffolk University we are jumping into the industry disruption and studying it in Real Time. ("Real Time Case Study") There are no answers for the strategy questions we are studying - the companies and the industry (textbook publishing) we are studying are wrestling with them just as we are. And we are sharing our information with them. This is an opportunity that we are providing to senior business students that would elsewhere most likely be available only to MBA students.

What is different is that we are actually participating in the industry disruption that we are studying. This creates a unique experience where the students are actually studying the market which is themselves.

We have turned the traditional educational model inside out. Instead of going out to study these businesses and the market, we have brought the market into the classroom by explicitly taking on the characteristics of the target market for e-textbooks. To make the situation more of an immersion, these college student teams are using the technology and "being the market" which they are developing strategies to support. One team each has Sony Readers, Amazon Kindles, CourseSmart online textbooks, or paper textbooks. The remaining team is the "wild card" or entrepreneurs who have the freedom to enter wherever they see the greatest business opportunity in the textbook publishing market.

Teams are competing against each other and against the market on a field where all the rules are changing - profit pools, distribution channels, retail bookstores - there is no "level playing field". What is challenging for the students is that there is no one "winning strategy". Depending on their business goal, there can be more than one "winner"; this could be an eReader maker, a publisher, or a content provider.

In our class, we are following a structured approach to study management strategy, but the results of the discussions are anything but structured. In the discussions, the teams present aspects of their strategy and each team harvests the "wisdom of the crowd" to advancing each of their own strategies as they interactively learn more about the market, their capabilities and environment. Like in the real market, information reveals itself as soon as it is created, and each team must adjust its strategy to respond.

The Publishing industry is being Transformed

Over the past centuries, and even more so in recent decades we have seen technologies transform industries – for example the steam engine transforming an agrarian society to an industrial society and the transistor transforming industrial societies into information societies. At another level, we have observed the transformational impacts of technologies changing industries: consider the music industry and peer-to-peer technology, or how communication is being changed by different economic models on the Internet. The cycle of these technology driven disruptions are becoming more frequent. They are almost part of the daily life in business. These disruptions challenge existing strategies and businesses and create the opportunities for new strategies for established and emerging businesses.


In the at Suffolk University strategic management class (taught by Mitchell Weisberg) students are exploring the book publishing market, and focusing particularly on the textbook segment of the market. The book market is being significantly disrupted by the advent of electronic readers and digital textbooks.