For those not familiar with the Open Education movement or Open Education Repositories (OER), please see my earlier post on Open Education. This entry applies Clay Christensen's theory of "jobs to do" marketing and explores some challenges and opportunities for OER repositories using that perspective. Both of these entries are based upon ongoing discussions in the Open Education Practice and Potential course in Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education, and I'm grateful to my classmates as well as instructors Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar for exploring these topics.
Clay Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation has come up a few times already in our class for some obvious reasons (see earlier blog post on Christensen and education and also see his more recent piece on disruption in higher education: Disrupting College). Christensen has another theory that I also feel is directly pertinent to Open Education and OER.
One of the paradoxes facing Open Education is this: as the movement and community grow in popularity and reach, it may actually become more difficult for potential participants to find the open content they seek. This type of "consumer confusion" in the OER marketplace would occur due to the sheer proliferation of repositories and portals for OER content. We've already had class presentations on several repositories, some with overlapping missions and content areas, and yet several of our own classmates have ideas for new portals as final projects. That's natural since educators, academic institutions, organizations, entrepreneurs, and students all may desire to create their own sources and channels (with their own value-added perspectives and strategies) in the open content arena.
So how should OER portals market and recommend their content to educators? How repositories structure their sites -- everything from differentiating themselves from other sites to structuring their search engines and content metadata -- will be a key factor in ensuring that matches are made between OER resources and the educators who might utilize and benefit from them. This gets directly to the "finding, getting, using" problem that we've discussed in class with relation to educators and content. As more repositories are created, and as more content is created, one good "problem" that might develop is that the content itself might become a sort of commodity. Meaning that one day there might be equally good high school physics open content on one repository as on another (or perhaps the same good content is available across many repositories). But then the value of the repository itself -- specifically it's capability in helping you find the right content -- is the true differentiator and value proposition to the educator.
Here's where Christensen comes in. He has been continuing to develop a theory called "Jobs-to-Do Marketing". Here's an excerpt from an article describing his theory (from the article "Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing", Harvard Business School "Working Knowledge" website:
When planning new products, companies often start by segmenting their markets and positioning their merchandise accordingly. This segmentation involves either dividing the market into product categories, such as function or price, or dividing the customer base into target demographics, such as age, gender, education, or income level.
Unfortunately, neither way works very well, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who notes that each year 30,000 new consumer products are launched—and 95 percent of them fail.
The problem is that consumers usually don't go about their shopping by conforming to particular segments. Rather, they take life as it comes. And when faced with a job that needs doing, they essentially "hire" a product to do that job. To that end, Christensen suggests that companies start segmenting their markets according to "jobs-to-be-done."
..."The fact that you're 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product," Christensen says. "It may be correlated with the decision, but it doesn't cause it. We developed this idea because we wanted to understand what causes us to buy a product, not what's correlated with it. We realized that the causal mechanism behind a purchase is, 'Oh, I've got a job to be done.' And it turns out that it's really effective in allowing a company to build products that people want to buy."
So far it seems to me that OER repositories are following the standard paradigm of segmenting their audience ("elementary" vs. "high school" vs. "higher ed" educators) and also dividing their product into categories (topical disciplines, and also type of resource like "courses", "articles", "simulations"). Using such categories and hierarchies does provide value toward matching content to educator. This makes sense if the 'job' is defined as follows: "I am a high school educator looking for physics simulations". And in fact that may be the most common type of job required by educators.
But it is worth exploring whether there are alternative/additional 'jobs'. For one thing, right now it would seem that you would have to perform that 'job' across multiple repositories. I easily found higher education business content on almost a dozen OER repositories. Some content items were replicated in multiple repositories on the list, but there didn't seem to be any one repository that contains all items. So at the very least would fulfilling the "find me my content" job be more readily achieved by creating some sort of federated search that pointed to multiple repositories?
And are there additional 'jobs' desired by educators? Is it important for them to search not by subject or content type but instead by learning objective? Is it important for them to find content associated with a particular type of open licensing so that they know in advance that all resources will be editable by them (searching with premeditated intent to remix)? Is there a job around mapping OER content to paid content (one would imagine the market for free/paid mixed syllabi is much larger than the current market for 'free-only' syllabi)? Is there a job in recommending OER from search tools within learning management systems (or at whatever point faculty build their course syllabi -- their 'starting point behavior')?
Our instructor Brandon Muramatsu described it as follows: "Most of the metadata in the repositories is about the content itself, and not about the use/application...Most folks are finding the resources/content they need not from specialized repositories, but rather from general Web searches. Which then leads to the question for me, what's the point in a general repository that doesn't include context and use?"
Hopefully taking the "jobs-to-do" perspective will provide yet another tool for us to use in considering how OER repositories can be most effective. The article quotes Christensen describing traditional product/service organizations with regards to this perspective:
"Most organizations are already organized around product categories or customer categories," Christensen says, "and therefore people only see opportunities within this little frame that they've stuck you in. So you have to think inside of a category as opposed to getting out. You've just got to make the decision to divorce yourself from the constraints that are arbitrarily created by the design of the old org chart."
OER and Open Education represent a new "org chart" for the dissemination and use of educational resources. We should take the time to ensure we aren't constrained by old paradigms when we build upon this new model.
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