The World is Flat - Lessons for Distributed Learning

As many of you may know, I recently finished The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. While I don’t agree with all of what he has to say about globalization, his notion of technology causing the commoditization (“vanilla-cation”?) of certain industries really hit home with regard to distributed learning shops at my university, specifically those engaging in instructional design and development.

Some background: When Penn State's World Campus started its ID&D unit, it was really the only unit on campus to deal with projects directly involving distributed learning. A central unit did instructional design, but mainly as faculty consultants or one-off projects within courses; not necessarily tackling an entire course at a time. The World Campus, on the other hand, was a production shop—and recovered its costs.

As time went on, folks at the colleges rightly saw that they could also do what the World Campus instructional design unit did—and receive a larger share of the profits from courses as a result. I’d call this the “first outsourcing” for the World Campus design function. Places like the College of IST and Earth and Mineral Sciences started doing ID within the colleges, not only to make more money, but also to foster a closer relationship between the IDs and the faculty members of those colleges. In addition, this fit much more closely with the philosophy that academic content should reside within the Colleges and not with some central administrative unit.

Enter what Friedman calls “Globalization 3.0." The way I see it, design shops are starting to question why we’ve treated content in the way we have, given the flat world we’re in today. (More on content in another post). Today, design at PSU has become a vanilla commodity. Let me quote from the book to illustrate: “In the old days,…you didn’t have to be the world’s best, because you never thought you were competing with the world. [Now]…everyone can see what everyone else is doing, and everyone has the same tools, so you have to be the very best, the most creative thinker. Vanilla just won’t put food on the table anymore” (p. 344).

So how do we do this? How do we become the most creative kids on the block? The good news is that many design shops are already doing it. “Because niche businesses [like distributed learning] can get turned into vanilla commodity businesses faster than ever in a flat world, the best companies today really do get chest X-rays regularly—to constantly identify and strengthen their niches and outsource the stuff that is not very differentiating” (p. 357). And that’s exactly what my shop is doing with the courses we currently maintain for the Commonwealth Campuses and our World Campus students. We’re “re-outsourcing”—but this time, back to the WC so that our shop can do the things that will give us a strategic advantage.

The exciting bit about this is where individual units can differentiate themselves. Each shop could become the place where new models for distributed teaching/learning (formal or informal) are created--and each one could be different. Design shops like mine need to take a good look at their processes and methods, and really think about what gives them a strategic advantage in the flat world. They need to decide where they're going, and knowing where they've been is only the half of it.

In fact, many places are stuck in the "where we've been" paradigm. As noted in The World is Flat,

The business organization consultant Michael Hammer once remarked, ‘One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don’t want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh (p. 451).

It's difficult to "let go" in this manner, for lots of reasons. Power, knowledge, and feeling like your personal work is important and made a difference are just a few reasons folks have a tendency to cling to their history. The key is to acknowledge the history without allowing it to become a millstone around your neck. We need to ask questions whenever the word "history" or the phrase "in the past" come up. We need to ask, "How does this knowledge move us forward?" "Is there a lesson we can take from this that will help us to do something better or different now?" The answers determine history's place with us without allowing it to drag us down. The key is to think outside the box, while still acknowledging that the box exists.

So what's next in distributed learning? I think that 3D and haptic interfaces are just two examples of what might be on the horizon. It’s good news to me that our shop is looking now at how we can leverage these technologies (while they're still expensive and more difficult to use). That is exactly what we should be doing in order to have it as one of our core competencies when 3D starts to become more ubiquitous, especially as it relates to learning experiences.

Which brings me to the notion of cooperation. If design shops at my institution each had a niche strategic advantage, and we actually learned how to cooperate with each other (instead of competing for some perceived finite pie), then we will be able to truly take Penn State to the next level, going so much farther than any one group of us can go alone.