The long tail in a distribution
The concept of the Long Tail as it applies to Web 2.0 is best illustrated by the Amazon.com business model. Prior to Amazon, bookselling was a network of publishers selling in bulk to a network of retailers, who stocked shelves and sold to customers. The limitations of shelf space limited inventory, and even the most basic business model dictates: "stock what sells most."
Amazon turned that model on its head by separating inventory and distribution from the book buyer (the buyer selects titles based on description, title, author, subject, recommendations, cover art, etc. without actually having handled the book physically). Early skeptics doubted that the Amazon model would amount to much - after all, books are tactile things and buyers like to "feel the heft," so to speak. What the skeptics did not take into account is the statistical phenomenon known as the "long tail."
In a distribution curve arranged left to right by quantity, the left-most part of the graph displays the most common or popular items, decreasing in quantity as you move to the right. In many, many distributions, there is a clear clumping at the left extreme, representing the "core" or "head" of the distribution. In bookselling, those would be the Stephen King novels, the Steven Covey self-help books, etc. Exactly what one would expect to find in any Barnes & Noble bookstore. In our higher ed analogy, those are the Associate of Arts, Associate of Science, Associate of Applied Science in Nursing degree-seeking students.
Amazon's business model was not so much focused on the left part of the graph, but the long tail to the right - the area where any one data point may represent an insignificant fraction of book sales, but cumulatively may actually exceed the popular items on the left. Here's how one Amazon insider described it: "We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday."1
College 1.0 is very much driven by a Pareto distribution (the popularity of the left side of the graph) in both the degrees it offers and the courses it schedules. Limitations in faculty and facility, driven by the classroom-credit hour model, act as inventory restraints.
College 2.0 will find ways to exploit the long tail, to be able to respond to the many education needs of the community that don't currently fit into the left side of the distribution. At the ultimate, a College 2.0 implementation will successfully satisfy a single person's unique need.
Just as a Waldenbooks retail outlet in the mall can't satisfy a unique demand for a title, neither can the College 1.0 model satisfy a single need way out on the thin end of the long tail. A new model based on assessment, demonstration of readiness, constructivism and competency units is required. Where will that model emerge?
posted by Brad Reed @ 7:24 AM
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