Disruption has probably been overused in many areas now. From media, to advertising; from innovation, to consulting.
Disruption is also one of the buzzwords that have been used in education lately, yet few really seem to know what it means. I found this article written by Dr. Michelle Weise, who was a senior research fellow with the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation at the time of writing. She is now executive director of the Innovation Lab at Southern New Hampshire University.
In higher education especially, there’s a tendency to take an exciting technological advancement, call it a disruptive innovation, cram it into the classroom experience, and then hope that efficiencies will magically appear. But a disruptive innovation doesn’t necessarily entail a technological breakthrough. In fact, in our most recent work in higher education called Hire Education, Clayton Christensen and I underscore that there is true disruptive potential in online competency-based education (CBE) aligned to workforce needs even though the parts of this whole are not at all new.