In pursuit of profits, the lowest tier of some industries have been relinquished to newcomers allowing the brand leader to focus on the upper segments where not only the margins are larger, but the competition against those they once emulated, is  much more eye-catching. The newcomer usually takes advantage of some technological core or disruptive model that works better at the base of the market and the disruption is taken upstream into higher market segments. Both new entrants and mature players are perusing profits but at different ends of the market continuum. The only difference is that the newcomer is operating where the margins are small in the lowest tier of the market while the established manufacturer is gradually shifting production upstream where the margins are larger as they relinquish control of the base.
Until recently education has remained impervious to these market forces because there has been no technological core or pivot to leverage the disruption and democratization of content. In the Higher Education market teaching universities could only attempt to emulate those they wished to compete against because they could hardly hope to disrupt them. Today however, a good teaching university which may not be at the top of the league tables can take a suite of technological tools and move upmarket if it can attract a technology savvy leader and if it opens itself to the intellectual firepower available inside the globally mobile gig economy.
The old schools are designed as integrated institutions. Their courses of study are designed around a set of interdependent architectures. Changing one thing means that you would have to change everything else. In the age of liquid capitalism however, modular architectonics and open-standards by which the components come together are challenging the old schools. With modularity a facilitated network business model for teaching and learning is needed unlike the former process model to manage students who now have a Playlist of Apps instead of list of courses and readings as they learn anytime and anywhere along a path at a pace that is highly personalized as their iPhone.
Their blended learning environment is rich with tutoring-bars and there are only grades, no classes; no subjects, only phenomenon and experiences; no class-teachers, only teams of experts. Inside the soup of Apps, tutoring bars, learning labs and modular content the role of the teaching-team becomes the selection of bits-and-pieces to customize the experience of learning for each student- taking into account what they bring to the enterprise, how quickly they want to move on, what they want to do with the new material and what are their personal cognitive dispositions to the content they aim to master. In the future there will be too much material to teach and institutions will only be able to differentiate themselves in the market if they are able to facilitate the network.
These concerns provide the impetus to review the colonial crucible of West Indian education and to offer some suggestions that will allow the Caribbean mindscape to rendezvous with a world that is anything but standing and waiting for the West Indies.