markets and business models and technologies is a falsehood… my assigning 'myth' to 'disruptive innovation' is meant to highlight the ways in which this narrative has been widely accepted as unassailably true.
Nobody wants to just create a useful tool; it has to disrupt an industry. Education, perceived as slow, resistant to change and old-fashioned, is seen as ripe for disruption. Christensen, Horn and Johnson (2008) themselves have deemed it so, stating, 'disruption is a necessary and overdue chapter in our public schools.' Hence the Avalanche report justifies itself by claiming that all of the key 'elements of the traditional university are threatened by the coming avalanche. In Clayton Christensen's terms, universities are ripe for disruption.' In his criticism of the impact of OERs, Kortemeyer (2013) states, 'OERs have not noticeably disrupted the traditional business model of higher education,' because for something to be successful, only disruption counts.
We can see many of these elements in essays on MOOCs. Let us take Clay Shirky's essay 'Your Massively Open Offline College Is Broken' (2013), as it generated a lot of interest and was considered to be a thoughtful analysis. In terms of our narrative essentials, Shirky even has the ‘education is broken’ meme in the title of his piece, and later states it boldly: 'I have a different answer: School is broken and everyone knows it.' He sets out a reasonably convincing case about the finance issues associated with higher education, although he does not question finance models. Shirky cites a book Don’t go back to school (Stark 2013) which interviewed 100 people who had dropped out of school and gone on to be successful. Largely they then self-teach themselves using internet resources, an example of the Silicon Valley model being applied broadly.
In his previous essay, 'Napster, Udacity and the Academy' (Shirky 2012), he compares the impact of MOOCs on higher
