Educational Content and the Buying Hierarchy

This weeks reading in The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen includes the concept of the Buying Hierarchy.  Products are bought based on four factors in order: functionality, reliability, convenience and price.

I want to apply this to online teaching content.  Material that could potentially replace the text book.

Functionality – There is a lot of wonderful content out there and more being produced for free all the time.  In addition we know how to get groups of users to collaborate to create content and there are a lot of people in the world who know the basic K-12 curriculum.

Reliability – I rank this as near total failure.  It's true the web sites aren't down.  But most schools can not reliably get a student looking at a web site.  Their computers don't work reliably.  Their internet goes down and can be filtered to the point of being unusable.  Home access is also unreliable.  However, computer prices are going down rapidly.  We will shortly have $200 laptops and I believe
Negroponte's predictions of $50 laptops.  I expect reliability to go up quickly in the next few years.

Convenience – I think this is where LMS systems will start to come into play in the K-12 world.  Right now online content is an enrichment. If it becomes a mainstay of the classroom, LMS systems will add the convenience of organizing access to the material and facilitating assessment.  So basically my prediction is that LMS systems become important in the K-12 market once students reliably have access to computers and internet.

Price – Most of the content is free. We covered the price of computers under reliability. Is price unimportant in this equation?  I don't think so. The price of using online content includes the teachers' time in finding the content and creating a lesson plan.  This will be an interesting area to watch for innovation.  Will people create full year courses aligned to individual state standards? Once you have an LMS in place these could be loaded into the LMS with IMS standards.

Then what happens is it starts over again!

Functionality – Once all the content exists, the question will be what is most effective for learning. Here is where we will see learning theory, universal design for learning and tools like LAMS become important market forces.

Where does this leave MEL? It is an LMS that enhances effective learning from online content.  Thus its a bit ahead of its time as far as the mainstream K-12 market goes.

The Innovators Dilemma says the solution is to find niche markets that value the product's attributes.

I have a couple ideas...but I think I'll leave that for another blog post.  Meanwhile, dear reader, what do you think? What markets value online learning that is more effective for the learner?  Leave a comment!

Thanks