But a new study released Thursday from his think tank, the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, depicts a future of education, particularly at the elementary school level, that isn’t nearly as stark as that. The paper, which refines theories on blended learning Christensen and his colleagues have laid out in the book “Disrupting Class” and other studies, introduces the idea of hybrid innovation. While Christensen’s famous theory of innovation mostly focuses on disruptive and sustaining innovations, the new paper offers the concept of the hybrid.

Often, the researchers argue, sectors experiencing disruption go through an extended phase in which old and new technology exist side by side, providing “the best of both worlds.” In education, many approaches to blended learning, which combine online instruction with traditional classroom learning, fall into this hybrid category.

“What’s clear to us from this theory is that schools will be here for the long haul,” said Michael Horn, executive director of the Institute, a co-author of the paper, as well as a co-author of “Disrupting Class.” “The future of learning is blended learning for the majority of students.”

In particular, he said, elementary schools will increasingly adopt less disruptive styles of blended learning that rotate online learning activities into a student’s schedule but still maintain the basic structure of a traditional teacher-led classroom. For example, schools will continue to “flip” their classrooms with videos (from Khan Academy or other sources) students can watch online, but mostly rely on classroom teachers to shape the experience.

At the middle school and high school levels, where students tend to have more personalized, modular schedules, he said, the school setting will remain in place but the classroom structure will be upended. In those grades, educators will increasingly adopt more disruptive blended learning models.

For example, students looking for more advanced subjects or languages not offered at their school could supplement their in-school experience with online classes – even massive open online courses – that barely involve offline instruction.

Horn said that one of his hopes for this most recent paper is that it helps give educators some clarity around what they can and can’t do to drive innovation in their classrooms and schools.

While superintendents, principals with some autonomy and a healthy budget, as well as philanthropists may be able to introduce more disruptive online learning models into their classrooms, Horn said, the most individual teachers and those with more limited budgets could likely do is encourage hybrid approaches.

“For the first time, it gave us a much clearer idea of what people in education could or could not do to bring about this future,” he said.

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Earlier this year at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng and edX president Anant Agarwal were asked about the likelihood of full MOOC degrees. Ng gave a diplomatic reply, emphasizing that Coursera isn’t a university but a “humble hosting platform.” But, later, Agarwal told me that he fully expected pure MOOC degrees to emerge.

“Universities are already giving full degrees for online education, for distance online education, so what is different? Extension school programs and online programs are already giving full degrees. So why is this anything special?” he said at the time.

In a post on Udacity’s blog, founder Sebastian Thrun compared the announcement about the new online degree to the moment he proposed to his wife and other “moments in his life [he] will never forget.”

“Ever since Peter Norvig and I launched AI Class, I have been dreaming of putting an entire computer science degree online, and to make access to the material free of charge, so that everyone can become a proficient computer scientist,” he wrote. ”Education has become much more exclusive, and getting into a top-10 computer science department, like Georgia Tech’s, is still out of reach for all but a chosen few.”

Taught through Udacity’s platform, only students granted admission by Georgia Tech will receive credit and will pay based on individual courses or the entire degree program.  A pilot program is expected to begin in the next academic year with enrollment limited to a few hundred students, but they plan to expand over the next three years.

Given the need for more workers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields, the companies decided to focus on computer science.  If the program goes well, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Udacity expand into other subjects with master’s programs. But Georgia Tech Provost Rafael Bras told Inside Higher Ed that the format may not be as suitable for other disciplines.

“We’ll wait and see,” he said. “I believe this is quite appropriate for professional master’s degrees but I also believe it is less appropriate for non-master’s degrees and certainly for other fields.”

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On Wednesday, Chegg, which now bills itself as an online “student hub,” said that it is partnering with ed tech darling du jour, Coursera, to provide digital content, including textbooks and other materials, to students enrolled in its massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Through the partnership, Coursera students will be able to purchase Chegg material, as well as receive some publisher content for free. They will also be able to make use of other Chegg features, including Q&A forums, search and highlight options. Coursera students could still purchase content from other sources, but the company said it offers lower prices than other vendors and students wouldn’t benefit from the social options connected to Chegg content.

The companies declined to share financial details of the deal. And, when asked whether similar partnerships with other MOOC providers edX and Udacity might be on the horizon, CEO Dan Rosenweig said, “Our vision is to become the leading connected learning platform… We’re not going to limit ourselves to anything.”

MOOC providers have faced more vocal challengers in recent months, but this deal underscores their steadily growing influence. Even if their completion rates hover around just 10 percent, Chegg clearly wants to be able to get in front of the millions of learning-focused eyeballs that are being drawn to Coursera.

Until now, Coursera professors have only been able to require supplemental content that is available for free on the web and recommend textbooks. Chegg said it will enable the MOOC provider to make some publisher-created content available for free during the course. Students will then have the option to purchase the full eTextbook from Chegg for continued learning after the course.

As of the partnership’s launch, just two courses will offer Chegg content but, over the next few months, the companies said it will expand to several dozen of the site’s 370 courses.

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The company’s analytics engine also helps instructors and students for the duration of a course, warning instructors when students are falling behind on key concepts and offering insights that could help them keep up. “It provides deeper insights to teachers on how to achieve better outcomes, what’s working and what’s not working,” said Desire2Learn CEO John Baker.

Based in Waterloo, Canada, Desire2Learn offers a learning management system for colleges that’s competitive with Blackboard and says more than 10 million students in higher education use its technology. Its new analytics product, which the company calls its Student Success System, builds on technology the company acquired earlier this year in the purchase of DegreeCompass, a course recommendation engine developed at Austin Peay State University.

As students progress through a course and interact with Desire2Learn – by digitally reviewing course materials, submitting homework assignments, communicating with classmates and completing tests and quizzes – the system’s algorithms continuously analyze each student’s personal collection of education data.

Instead of just giving the teacher a dashboard showing students’ grades and completed assignments, it looks across all of the material to isolate the areas in which each student is faltering, suggests pathways for student improvement and predicts their grade at the end of the course.

Before beginning a course, students who have completed one semester can use the tool to predict how they might fare in that course – and Desire2Learn says it’s 90 percent accurate at predicting the letter grade.

The new tool is part of a larger push in education to use data to improve student outcomes. CourseSmart, technology supported by McGraw-Hill, Pearson and other publishers that allows professors to track students’ progress with digital textbooks, similarly gives instructors a steady stream of data showing student engagement and performance (although it doesn’t make predictions). But while some educators are ready to embrace a data-driven approach to education, others feel like it smacks too much of Big Brother, and that could be a potential challenge the adoption of products like this.

Image by Vixit via Shutterstock.

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“I was struck by how, in a first-world country, you have women who don’t see themselves as inventors and problem-solvers,” she said. “Women don’t see science and engineering as fields that are accessible to them.”

Chklovski had planned to pursue a PhD in aerospace engineering and then work for an aviation company. But, along the way, she decided to switch gears and launch the non-profit Iridescent Learning, with a mission of bringing a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curriculum to high school girls and encouraging women engineers, scientists and other high-tech professionals to be mentors.

And now that the program is gaining traction in the U.S., she’s expanding its scope to countries around the world.

Meetups meet massive open online classes

Through its annual Technovation Challenge, girls across the country take part in a 12-week mobile app development program that includes involvement from female tech leaders like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Edmodo CEO Crystal Hutter. Participants meet with their team and a teacher or local mentor each week in person, as well as follow online instructions through P2PU, an online open education project.

“[The program is] like a hybrid between meetups and Coursera,” said Chklovski.

This year, for example, the program challenged more than 100 teams of girls to create a mobile app that solves an issue in their community. Some of the finalists, who will pitch their ideas to judges from Google, Dropbox, the Office of Naval Research and other STEM organizations this week, include an app that pairs nonprofits and volunteers and a mobile service for school attendance taking. The top team will win $10,000 and support to bring their app to market.

Given the dearth of programming instruction in the U.S. schools — it’s not offered at 90 percent of U.S. schools, despite the fact that programming jobs are growing at double the pace of other jobs, according to Code.org — more startups and nonprofits are stepping up to fill the instructional void.

But, as Silicon Valley knows so well, the need for technical training is even more pronounced among women and girls. While about 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to women, the percentage of computer science degrees earned by women is in the low double-digits. In addition to Iridescent, organizations like Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It and Black Girls Code are zeroing on the gender gap in technology with programs that give women and girls technical training and support networks.

Inspiring women inventors in the developing world

In the seven years since its launch, Iridescent has raised millions of dollars from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research and it’s partnered with top tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Twitter and LinkedIn to mentor and educate more than 17,000 girls in NY, LA, Chicago, Boston and the Bay Area through its several programs.

For the first time this year, international teams competed in the Technovation Challenge. But Chklovksi said she wants to reach beyond more affluent teams overseas to girls in the developing world.

While Iridescent can shoulder the cost of providing teams with mobile phones and corporate partners with international networks can help provide access to other technology, Chklovski said that as they expand, a bigger challenge may be infrastructure issues — for example, reaching areas that don’t have widespread Internet access. For teams in those regions, she said, they’re moving content to USB drives so students aren’t dependent on the Internet.

Other teams may face cultural barriers. This year, a team from Ghana that wanted to participate in the challenge ran into difficulties because it was only culturally-appropriate for middle-aged men to have mobile phones, not young girls. Translating the program’s content from English into different languages will likely be another issue as Iridescent boosts its presence in the developing world.

But Chklovski said they’re learning from their efforts and are working with their partners’ local networks around the world to troubleshoot problems that pop up. And to be extra sure teams in more remote areas can still complete the program, she said that for next year they’re removing the 12-week schedule so that teams have ample time to complete the curriculum.

“[The idea] is girls in third world countries looking at a phone and saying, ‘I can fix this’,” she said. “It’s having the confidence to think of themselves as inventors. We’re changing the way the public sees girls and the way that girls see themselves.”

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In the past year, the university has welcomed MOOC providers like edX and Udacity with open arms — in addition to launching a first-of-its kind program with Udacity to award college credit for courses taken on its platform. The school has a growing partnership with edX and plans to create a dedicated resource center for California State University faculty statewide who are interested in online content.

But discord seems to brewing among some faculty.  This week, professors in the Philosophy department said they refuse to teach an edX course on “justice” developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to their university.

In an open letter (first published by the Chronicle of Higher Education) to the Harvard professor behind the course, the San Jose State faculty members argued that while they believe that technology can be used to improve education (by enabling instructors to record lectures so students can replay them, for example), they believe MOOCs could “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Will MOOCs lead to two classes of universities?

Not only do they worry about a future in which fewer perspectives are offered by universities (“the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel,” they say), the professors argue that the MOOC model will lead to two classes of universities.

“One, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant,” the letter says.

In the past year, MOOCs have picked up considerable momentum – Coursera, for example, says more than 3 million students have enrolled in a course and 62 top universities from around the world have signed on as partners. And they’re starting to show their effectiveness in blended learning classrooms. In a pilot program at San Jose State, a professor leading an introductory course on electrical engineering incorporated content from the edX course “Circuits and Electronics,” assigning students videos and problem sets to review outside of class. According to edX and San Jose State, the pass rate in that blended class was much higher than the pass rates in conventional classes.

More faculty members show resistance

But as MOOC providers carve out a bigger presence for themselves in higher education, university faculty members are beginning to raise compelling concerns. Last month, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the long-term impacts of MOOCs on the U.S. university system. Namely, they argued that they would perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching and lead to a centralized system of higher education that weakens middle- and lower-tier schools.

The San Jose example shows that just because university administrators are willing to embrace the MOOC format, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t deep resistance from their faculty. And, given that some believe that the MOOCs’ honeymoon period is winding down, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more examples like this emerge.

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On Wednesday, the startup said it had partnered with several schools of education and other institutions and museums, including schools of education at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Virginia, the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Modern Art, to bring free professional development courses to teachers via the web.

“We looked at our technology and realized that for 7-year-old kids, streaming university content for them wasn’t going [to be effective]. But the lever for that 7-year-old kid may be to help them get a better teacher,” said Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng.

Most school districts don’t have the resources to offer quality professional development programs that match the interests and needs of individual teachers, he said.  Typically, teachers are pulled out of their classrooms for a few days a year (disrupting instruction for their students) and are required to follow the same program, regardless of the subjects they teach or their strengths and weaknesses.

With its new courses, Coursera said teachers can focus on the topics, areas of expertise and pedagogies that are most relevant for them.  For example, early courses will cover topics including content development, the common core curriculum, character education and implementing flipped classroom and blended learning strategies.

The courses will follow the same format as other MOOCs on Coursera and will adopt the startup’s peer-grading approach. For example, teachers could write a lesson plan or videotape themselves teaching and then receive feedback from other members of the course.

Teachers, educators and even parents can take the new courses for free but, as with other Coursera classes, they can pay $30 to $100 for the “Signature Track” option, in which their identity is verified and they receive a certificate at the end of the course. Coursera’s hope is that, in time, school superintendents will award teachers continuing education credit for the courses. But Ng said that, so far, they’ve only had informal conversations with superintendents about the possibility.

Given the attention MOOCs have received in the last year, it’s not so surprising that the phenomenon is spreading to K-12 education. Conversations are underway about adapting the MOOC format for K-12 students and other educational organizations are offering one-off MOOCs for teachers and administrators. But Coursera is the first of the major MOOC providers to make a foray into K-12 education and given the debate it and its rivals Udacity and edX have stirred among colleges and universities, it will be interesting to see how it is received by K-12 educators.

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Since launching last year, the company, which calls itself the “Khan Academy of Latin America,” has produced more than 3,600 instructional videos on math and science topics for Spanish-speaking students, teachers and adults looking for content on finances and other practical matters. On Monday, the startup said it was taking its biggest step toward making money with the launch of a new online marketplace, called Aula, that enables teachers and other users to create online lessons and upload their own videos to TareasPlus.

“We’re trying to push the teacher to create content of his own,” said founder and CEO Hernan Jaramillo. “It allows the teacher to simply create his own set of courses and easily share it with his students.”

While teachers may already have access to learning management systems (LMS) that enable them to share video and other kinds of instructional content with students, Jaramillo said they tend to be cumbersome and clunky to use. For $24 a year, teachers can use the web and mobile-optimized TareasPlus to curate video playlists made from content produced by the startup and other users, as well as include questions and exercises for students and track their progress.

The bigger revenue opportunity for TareasPlus is the capability for teachers to create and host their own courses on the site. Much like instructors on online learning startup Udemy, teachers can offer courses for free or a price of their choosing with TareasPlus taking 30 percent of the earnings.

Targeting Spanish-speakers in the U.S. and around the world

Initially, Jaramillo said, the company thought that its users were individuals aged 13 to 25 who searched online for math and science questions related to their studies. But it realized that about 40 percent of its users are older – aged 35 to 65 – some of those adults include teachers who use the videos in classes or on their blogs, but others are parents looking to review content before helping their kids or adults looking for practical instruction on calculating monthly mortgage or car payments.

To date, Jaramillo said, just 5 percent of the site’s users have been based in the U.S.  But over the next six months, he estimates that the figure could double or triple as TareasPlus uses its new marketplace to attract a larger global audience and builds up content relevant for U.S. users. For example, he said, many of its U.S. users are adults searching for help with “daily math” and finance problems, so future courses could include “math for moms” or “math for traders.”

Earlier this year, Khan Academy announced a partnership with the foundation supported by billionaire Carlos Slim to translate its online video content for students in Mexico and Latin America. (The non-profit is focused on translating its content into more than a dozen languages.) But Jaramillo said his company’s new exchange gives teachers an opportunity to potentially access Spanish-language content from a greater range of sources and make their own lessons available to a wide market.

The startup, which says that it has attracted users with search-engine optimized video content, has raised $1.8 million from online education company Academic Partnerships and says it receives 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors each month.

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The San Francisco-based company, which last year grabbed headlines with a $25 million seed round for its plans to bring an Ivy League-level education online, on Monday announced a $500,000 prize that will go to one educator per year for making advancements in higher education.

The point of the award is to help elevate the teaching profession and bring attention to people creating breakthrough learning experiences, the company said. That it will likely help the young startup build its brand certainly doesn’t hurt.

In addition to announcing the new prize, the startup said Roger Kornberg, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, would serve as the Governor of the Minerva Academy, an honorary institution that will include educational innovators from around the world.  The Academy will be responsible for selecting the winners of the new Minerva Prize.

“Respect for teaching has declined over the years. Teachers were once one of the most esteemed members of the community and, in some way, their remuneration reflected that. But today that’s much less true,” said Kornberg. “The purpose of this prize [is] to enhance the public appreciation of people who today make a great sacrifice and devote their lives to this profession.”

As student debt climbs and more question the value of a high-priced college education, startups of all kinds are emerging with different models for online education. In attempting to lure both top students and top professors who might otherwise gravitate to the country’s leading brick and mortar institutions, Minerva has an audacious vision.

But beyond raising $25 million from Benchmark Capital, Minerva, which is led by founder and CEO Ben Nelson (the former CEO of Snapfish), has attracted the support of several high-profile leaders. Former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is an advisor and former U.S. Senator and Governor Bob Kerrey (D-NB) leads Minerva’s Institute for Research and Scholarship.

Image by Sergey Nivens via Shutterstock.

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But this week, elite liberal arts college Amherst snubbed edX after months of courtship, highlighting concerns about how MOOCs could change higher education over the long term. The faculty wasn’t opposed to online education in general but approved a proposal for plotting its own path as opposed to joining edX, according to Inside Higher Ed.

A few of the faculty’s concerns were Amherst-specific, the news outlet said. For example, some wondered if MOOCs, which by nature include tens of thousands of students, are inherently at odds with the college’s mission of encouraging education through small residential communities.  And others wondered how edX certificates bearing Amherst’s name would ultimately affect the school’s brand.

But others had larger doubts about the future impact of MOOCs on higher education.  Citing an internal report on edX, Inside Higher Ed said the school worried MOOCs could:

• Perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching, which preferences lectures and exams over seminars and teacher-graded papers
• Take tuition dollars from middle-tier and lower-tier schools
• Lead to the centralization of higher education in the U.S.
• Exacerbate the star faculty system

Amherst’s decision follows a survey last month showing that while a majority of professors view the MOOC format favorably, less than a third of them believe students should be able to receive formal credit from their schools for successfully completing a MOOC. An earlier survey of university chief academic officers revealed a less glowing view of MOOCs – just a third of the respondents said they believe that their faculty accepts the value of online learning.

While professors and institutions are beginning to realize the benefits of experimenting with digital content and online learning formats, Amherst’s move shows that they want flexibility in determining how to do it and that institutions are willing to consider different models. That’s good news for other startups and companies in the space. The three big MOOC providers have received considerable attention recently, but colleges have plenty of options for bringing learning online, including 2U, Instructure’s Canvas Network and startup NovoEd.

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