In the 16th century people believed that the Earth was the center of the universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution) . It must have come as a shock to the intellectuals of this particular era when Copernicus argued that it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun. To back his arguments he introduced scientific method. Beliefs were challenged by scientific rigor. Gradually science transformed into engineering and humans learnt new skills to build new structures.
Something similar is now happening in education. Books and classrooms have been at the center of how knowledge and information is distributed. In comes the Internet. Books and classrooms move to the edges. The internet is taking center stage.
Universities seem to be surprisingly slow to react to this change. As with Copernicus, the science of the internet era is gradually turning into an engineering art and discipline. We are learning how to design internet enabled businesses and institutions. It is time for the internet engineers of education to step in and to design internet centered schools. This seems to be happening already in the US, but not in Finland.
In strategy the PESTEL framework is a known tool for analyzing ones strategic position. Recently I was speaking on the experimentation I have done together with my colleagues with online education at a conference of higher education research in Finland. I was somewhat surprised with the atmosphere at the conference. Among the participants there were politicians, sociologists, economists and administrators. All the letters in the PESTEL framework were represented, except for the letter T. The letter T stands for technology.
The education environment, when you think about it, has not had to go through and experience technology enabled radical change. The education environment in Finland is built around public offering. There are no private universities in Finland. It seems that within the Finnish educational decision makers, there are no individuals who have experienced how the very existence of one´s organization, including its services, business model (free education?), legal structures and the way it is organized, can be questioned by the existence of new technologies. The internet has changed and continues to change the industrial landscape of the Finnish economy. It is alarming to observe what seems to be a depth of ignorance in the local educational community. The present leaders of educational systems do not seem to see a need for “the engineers of internet based education”.
This is nothing new in the history of innovation. Major radical innovations have always come from outside existing institutions and incumbent businesses. Internet enabled education is gradually reaching maturity and closing in on a tipping point.
The key question really is: where and when will education tip?
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