Learning in the Cloud

Software is eating and reorganizing schools

Two related essays from the past decade shed light on alternative education's future:

• Why Software Is Eating The World - Marc Andreessen

• Software Is Reorganizing The World - Balaji Srinivasan

We've seen the software is eating the world narrative play out over the past decade with major tech companies rising in power and value.

Now, we're seeing the software is reorganizing the world narrative play out before our eyes with startup cities and remote work making geographical location less important.

For higher education, if these two narratives continue to play out, we'll see digitally native schools blossom over the next decade.

As I note in 3 Reasons Online Schools are Inevitable, online schools will thrive in this changing landscape because of their:

• Technology: the ability to easily integrate new software into the fabric of the schools (software is eating the world).

• Accessibility: the ease of meeting online in a remote environment (software is reorganizing the world). "The future of technology is not really location-based apps; it is about making location completely unimportant." - Balaji Srinivasan

• Flexibility: software enables online schools to quickly iterate and improve based on people's needs (software is eating the world).

An important point of software reorganizing the world is that the internet is global and interconnected. Any niche topic or group can find a home organizing online.

For online schools, this means that education on the internet can appeal to the most specific and narrow topics.

Every subreddit is a community of people that are organizing together to discuss a topic of interest.

As software eats and reorganizes the world, online schools will play an important role in educating each new subset and community of the digital frontier.

These online schools won't look like traditional schools. Some of them will call themselves startup accelerators or cohort-based courses. However, the overall trend is toward moving education online.