Disruptive Education: Implications for Higher Education in Vietnam

Abstract

Higher education (HE) is entering a turning point, as there is a prediction that over half of the U.S. universities will fail within fifteen years due to disruptive innovations of technology-enhanced education in general and the massive open online courses (MOOCs) in particular. Will these innovations change how we teach in the future? The purpose of this paper is to examine the MOOC provision in the context of Vietnamese higher education and propose new business models that integrate MOOC platforms into the institutional platform in response to changing demands of the education market. To this end, we apply the theory of disruptive innovation and perform a comparative case study of a data-driven confirmation model at a national scale. We found that MOOCs teaching and learning platforms play a disruptive role to change the process of higher education significantly and that the theory of disruptive innovation is applicable on a national scale. However, the pattern of radical changes does not exactly follow the theory of disruptive innovation. Disruptive education is scalable but under certain necessary and sufficient conditions. The paper proposes consistent higher education policies, and new business models for the traditional universities to cope with future challenges and gain competitive advantages in the global education market.