Ramifications of the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' Approach

Raising Education to a New Level -- A quantum leap in the power of the system that implements education will open up the potential to conceptualize and actualize significantly more effective education solutions and more efficient ways to deploy them.

Scalability -- We cannot know upfront which education innovations will succeed and in what contexts and for how long they will bear fruit. The cost both in capital and in time, of testing ideas is currently far too high due to the lack of system support for implementing them and determining their merit. Furthermore, given the current lack of uniform implementation methodologies, we cannot implement, much less test, the scalability of any idea across the important dimensions of education. It is for these reasons why mobilizing mandates, like 'leave no child behind', cannot succeed without an enabling infrastructure in place to support its broad implementation. This lack of scalability limits the projection of education reform strategies. Scalability across the important dimensions of education (e.g., cost, 'barriers-to-access', personalization, culturalization, reusablity, evolvability, content quality) can only come from a unifying implementation infrastructure that models ('enables') those dimensions. Without such an infrastructure, education solutions will always be limited in the scope of applicability (i.e., they will be 'islands' or 'point solutions').

Building-Blocks -- The WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will result in a rich set of education-related building blocks that can be used to rapidly 'assemble' and configure a broad range of potential education solutions.

Education-Solution Templates -- In addition, 'best-of-breed' templates of education solutions can be retained for reuse by other stakeholders, resulting in improved development speeds and costs.

Leverage -- The leverage gained from a building block approach translates into significantly higher speeds and lower development costs, a broadening of the types of stakeholders (i.e., nations, cultures, companies, universities, schools, teachers, parents, and students) who can engage in the construction of education solutions, and an increase in the dynamic configurability of the education solutions.

Shift of Power -- The leverage provided by an 'Enabling System' approach causes a shift of power into the hands of local stakeholders and out of the hands of remote traditional education solutions developers. The design, assembly, and configuration of each education solution will occur closer to where and when it is consumed.
Customization -- By providing small interoperable building blocks, the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will change the granularity at which education reform strategies and education solutions are conceived and constructed. Education solutions will be customized locally to the needs of every stakeholder (i.e., learner, teacher, administrator, or national education bureaucrat). The customization will predominantly occur automatically, but may also involve some degree of human control (if appropriate).
Education Reform -- The customization mechanisms will provide the framework for creating and implementing education innovation and reform. Dimensions of customization will be defined, integrated, and used to spearhead the evolution of education through research programs. With customization integrated into the fabric of delivering education value, all 'barriers-to-access' dimensions (e.g., cognitive, personal, financial, cultural, etc.) can be addressed and potentially lowered just before delivery, thus facilitating the consumption of education value.

Change in Mindset -- Customization will result in a fundamental change in the dynamics of producing and consuming education solutions. It changes the mindset away from the creation of large prescriptive broadly-applicable 'one-size-fits-all' education solutions to a mindset of constructing smaller simpler more targeted education solutions, that can be easily reconfigured.

Frictionless Delivery of Value -- The WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will 'enable' high quality education value to be delivered free from the 'friction' and 'disconnects' that are introduced by current fragmented and inflexible methods of implementing education solutions. Education solutions, carrying education value, will be able to deliver the full load of that value, thus significantly elevating the quality of education delivered to the consumer. With the WEgrid 'Enabling System' approach, true multi-dimensional education reform will be achievable.

Granularity -- With the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach to education reform, the goal is to enable a large combination of potential education solutions, each to be formulated only as needed. As a result, the granuality of 'building block' components is hierarchically smaller and smaller so that a broad diversity of education solutions can be constructed out of smaller components that are in turn constructed from even smaller components. (For example, a 'school' [a big education solution] can be constructed out of smaller interoperable components to support the various administrative, marketing, and functional requirements of the school. Departments [smaller education solutions] can be 'plugged-in' and within those departments, courses [even smaller education solutions] can be plugged-in.)

Simpler Education Solutions -- Because the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will enable education solutions to be created closer in distance and in time to the consumer, they can be conceived to be far simpler than prescriptive broadly-applicable education solutions that must carry extra baggage for their generality.

Complexity Tamed -- The ramifications of enabling simpler education solutions are far reaching. The complexity of addressing education reform is no longer concentrated in the production of large broadly-applicable education solutions. Instead, it becomes distributed by enabling us to move from thinking about static combinations to thinking dynamically about a small set of simple abstractions that will be used to create the building blocks from which education solutions will be created.

Broader Spectrum of Lifetimes -- Because of far lower development costs, education solutions can have very short lifetimes, existing only as long as is needed to achieve a specific goal (e.g., a class project). On the other hand, longer-termed education solutions (e.g., a school) have the advantage of being highly adaptable to change.

Interoperability -- Education solutions developed under the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will enjoy a high degree of interoperability, enabling them to interface with other education solutions.

Currently, because an unified system infrastructure does not currently exist for supporting the development and delivery of education solutions, the construction of today's education solutions is limited by its focus on 'getting the job done' (i.e., inward looking to implementing the delivery of intended education value). Little or no consideration is given to unification issues.

Market Efficiency -- By significantly shortening the engineering cycle in which innovation occurs, the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will dramatically increase the rate at which education reform happens. In addition, by lowering the cost of the cycle and providing an efficient validation environment, the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will cause the proliferation of the testing of new ideas. Furthermore, it will also promote the validation of riskier 'out-of-the-box' ideas that would be prohibitively expensive in cost and in time under the current environment.
Also, as changing times, new technologies, and shifting paradigms cause old formulas to lose their effectiveness, new ideas or variations can emerge to produce a gracefully evolving dynamic system that continuously meets current global education needs and is designed to evolve to keep pace with a fast-moving future.

Consumer Protection and Standardized Accreditation -- With the globalization of education, the primary concerns of current education regulators are consumer protection, standardized accreditation, and regulation. Andrée Sursock notes that:

‘Globalisation constitutes a threat to heretofore-protected European higher education systems. There is a need for consumer protection and regulation, especially to curb what some perceive as ‘rogue’ transnational providers. Paradoxically, this need is felt more acutely in the more protective and homogeneous national systems which do not offer sufficient choices to students and cannot integrate (and therefore regulate) non-official institutions.’
Under the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach, the system will establish an infrastructure that not only supports effective resolution of these issues, but at the same time integrates those solutions with the other non-globalization issues of education (e.g., personalization).

In a Transnation Education Project (2000), it was recommended that 'It would benefit the education sector if confusions caused by the differences in the perception of transnational education could be reduced by the adoption of an agreed understanding of what should be included in the portmanteau term ‘transnational education’. The eradication of this sort of confusion demands an 'enabling systems' approach to the globalization of education.

Closing the Semantic Gap between Requirements & Implementation -- The formalisms and semantic consistency provided by the WEgrid 'Enabling Systems' approach will enable education reform initiatives to be defined and implemented consistently. The requirements of national, regional, and local education mandates will be defined in precise terminology that maps exactly into a concordant implementation form, thus precluding any misinterpretation.