Treating Students like Customers
I believe that education is behind the times in the United States in part because the standards for what constitutes a “good education” is embedded in a set of archaic principles from the last century, e.g., the big R’s. New ideas or concepts like CSS (Customer Self Serving) and ZMOT (Zero Moment of Truth) have had an impact on how many companies market and interact with their customers. With a few exceptions (higher education models like Udemy, Edx and Coursera) interactions with students – the educational institution’s customers – have been top down. Treating students like customers is a research and marketing mainstay for corporations who consult young people often about their products and services. Movies, music, video games, clothing, computers, smartphones, sports and athletic accessories industries are going after this young market for their ideas. These same demographics are often ignored when it comes to what it is that they want in an education. Instead the decisions are left up to their parents and school administrators. We live in a marketing-oriented world. All of our institutions must perform according to a need and/or problem to be solved. How best to know what the needs are for students? Do what marketers do…ask them. Treat them like the ultimate customers that they are.
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A Disruptive Technology: Ideas
Our young people are tasked continually with managing their own future from the days of “and what do you want to be when you grow up?’ to the end game when they discover no matter how much they tried to project into their great unknown, they didn’t learn what they needed to learn in order to have a successful life – a whole life – let alone what their purpose might be. Ideally, their education should have given them the opportunity to decide what tools they would need early on in their lives; tools that could fuel their imagination, that would take them to concepts and places that fire up their ability to dream and big.
Any generations’ students/youth have different ideas about the world than their parents and teachers had. For today’s students we are an older gen, so we are guessing that what resonates with them are diversity, technology, win win, big data and transparency. That they are concerned about equality, rights (animal, human and the planet) different cultures and happiness. They understand that data is better at telling us what happened then it is in predicting the future and therefore they are not overwhelmed by the past when it is time to be creative about future. Perhaps…if they were asked they might say something entirely different to the educational institutions they learn in today. Assuming that is where “quantum leap educations” are occurring.
Imagination + New Ideas = Change
