Online competency-based education

Following up from my previous post on my experience with Coursera, here are a few links of interest (mostly) relating to online education, with a focus on “competency-based education,” i.e., education directed specifically at teaching people to become competent at one or more tasks or disciplines: “Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution” (Michelle Weise and Clayton Christensen). Clayton Christensen is famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which I think is useful not so much as a proven theory but rather as a way to structure plausible narratives about business success or failure....

2014-09-28 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla and the future of education, part 2

[This is part 2 of a two-part post. Part 1 discusses the future of education and the possibility of customized online educational offerings as a disruptive innovation that might eventually grow to rival and even dominate traditional educational systems. It ended with a question: what does this have to do with Mozilla? I now attempt to answer that question.] Online education evolves to be user-driven, not vendor-driven By definition disruptive innovations allow users to do things they could previously not do, or could do only at great expense and/or effort....

2008-07-24 · 14 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla and the future of education, part 1

[This is part 1 of a two-part post; part 2 is here.] Lately there have been a flurry of posts and associated comments discussing possible future activities that the Mozilla Foundation (and by extension the Mozilla project) might undertake in support of its overall mission and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. This post is an experiment in thinking about an area the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla in general) might consider getting involved in, one possibility out of the many that have been discussed in the various posts referenced, and one of a number of themes that might inspire particular elements of an overall strategy....

2008-07-24 · 7 min · Frank Hecker

The Firefox value network

In previous posts I discussed the basics of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory and considered whether Firefox is a disruptive innovation. In this post I try to describe the ”value network” for Firefox, using Christensen’s definition: “[a firm’s] upstream suppliers; its downstream customers, retailers, and distributors; and its partners and ancillary industry players” (Seeing What’s Next, p. 63). I also discuss how the Firefox value network overlaps (or not) with the value networks of Microsoft and others....

2005-06-26 · 9 min · Frank Hecker

Firefox and innovation

In a previous post I discussed Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive innovation” theory (as popularized in The Innovator’s Dilemma and other books) and how it applied to the rise and fall of Netscape. In this post I turn to more recent events, and attempt to answer at least some of the five questions with which I ended previously: Is Firefox more of a sustaining innovation or a disruptive innovation? In what sense is the Mozilla project pursuing (or could pursue) disruptive strategies, whether based on low cost or competing against nonconsumption?...

2005-06-14 · 10 min · Frank Hecker