What is disruptive education?

Disruptive education allows people to access better professional and employment opportunities, and is also an excellent investment for the academic field.

To begin with, it is interesting to delve into the concept of DISRUPTIVE, understood as that process that breaks with all types of traditional paradigms. Now, applied to teaching-learning, disruptive education is characterized by being innovative and by its ability to break classical worldviews. Indeed, it can be stated that disruption in education also tends to leverage new available technologies, to achieve what has never been done before.

For decades, the traditional educational model established the limits of how, when, where, and who. While this allowed for standardization of curricula, on the other hand it left thousands of people out of university education, whether due to issues of distance, economics, or even learning styles.

Disruption in education is everything that generates viable opportunities for people to acquire knowledge and skills that provide advantages to their daily lives. For this reason, it targets a sector of the population that had traditionally been displaced from higher education.

What are the paradigms that disruptive education breaks?

To better understand this concept, it is important to analyze what comes to mind when thinking about high-quality university education. It is unlikely that aspects such as high cost, the face-to-face nature, and the fact that it demands practically all the available time and energy of students would be overlooked.

This results in only a fortunate minority being able to access it, which in turn continues to promote deep social inequalities.

That said, some of the paradigms that disruption in education combats are the following:

1. "Not everyone can access higher education"

Thanks to the educational disruption that online education represented, the current paradigm holds that any person with a mobile device and internet connection can access, at least, a good amount of quality educational resources.

This has been one of the most important social revolutions. However, as will be seen later, online education and everything it entails is ceasing to be disruptive and is becoming the new norm.

2. "Disciplines have limitations and must be studied separately"

In this sense, disruptive education understood that the current economic system and society demand professionals capable of integrating different areas of knowledge and putting them at the service of real-life problems that are rarely well-defined in a single field.

Through technologies and methodologies such as integrative project-based learning, learning by doing, learning paths, and cross-cutting training, it has become possible for students to generate practical and multidisciplinary experience.

Furthermore, it is possible to give it the approach that students consider best suited to their interests, rather than having to comply with an inflexible academic curriculum, designed to learn concepts rather than adapt to new realities.

3. "The main purpose of university education is to form economically successful individuals"

For years, people studied a career with the main objective of accessing better economic conditions. Today, other benefits of higher education are gaining equal or greater importance.

While academic training continues to be one of the most efficient ways to have a better standard of living, disruptive education advocates for aspects such as sustainability, social responsibility, ethics, and the psychosocial and emotional development of students.

For example, methodologies such as design thinking not only test students' theoretical knowledge and practical skills, but also lead them to take a more sensitive stance towards the problems and challenges their community faces.

4. "All students must learn in the same way and at the same pace"

Thanks to advances in neuroscience, we now know that there can be great variability between students' learning styles and this is absolutely nothing wrong or abnormal with it.

Furthermore, the context of many students may prevent them from devoting two or three consecutive hours to study, or preparing overly lengthy assessments, which represented an impediment to accessing most university classes and exams.

Adaptive learning, microlearning, and gamification are just three examples of methodologies that open the possibility of learning in other ways and that continue to be disruptive, since they not only adapt better to the natural way the brain acquires knowledge, but have also enabled thousands of people to obtain certifications they would not have been able to achieve with conventional education.

In summary, while the economy, culture, and lifestyle have undergone drastic changes in recent decades, in many ways education remains anchored to the paradigms and methodologies of the last century, even though they are no longer offering real solutions to students' current needs.

Many experts believe that university education is failing in its mission to train professionals with the skills needed to progress in the digital society, which is why promoting disruptive education is so important.

Interested in discovering more? Find out why proctoring promotes educational inclusion here.

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