7 ms·

It's still hard to predict how well these efforts will work, but I've rarely seen a domain more ripe for reform than undergraduate education. If there's a ripe

by pg 14y ago

It's still hard to predict how well these efforts will work, but I've rarely seen a domain more ripe for reform than undergraduate education. If there's a riper one, it would be K-12 education. That's the really big prize, measured both by how much room there is for improvement and the forces arrayed against you. But if you're feeling heroic here's the place to go: http://imaginek12.com http://imaginek12.com.

yequalsx 14y ago
In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. I've been teaching online math classes for 7 years now and those classes almost always perform much worse than face-to-face classes. I suspect that the reform that will come will be more in the form of enhancing face-to-face classes and not replacing them. Maybe more flipped classroom style reform. For all of it's perceived badness the lecture format is remarkably resilient in that it's better for the average student than any of the current proposals that I've seen or experimented with. Disclaimer: I'm an average teacher (below average?) and much of my opinion comes from personal, anecdotal experience.
- dave_sullivan 14y ago
  Do you have any opinions on the "student's desire to learn" factor of online vs offline classes you've taught? I suspect that many online colleges might attract students looking for something "easy" and potentially more likely not to try as hard. I wonder how your experience would compare with one of coursersas math classes, eg stats or probabilistic graphical models, particularly counting only students who attempted to actually finish the class.
  - yequalsx 14y ago
    Possibly more information than you wanted. I teach at a community college. Typically people think of Stanford or Large State University when they think of higher education. Around 1/3 of all higher education students are community college students. The smaller, regional state universities make up a large portion too. The last part of your last sentence caught my attention. We don't measure only the students who actually finished the class. Anyone who is registered after the drop/add period is counted in the statistics. A student who drops my class next week (this is the first week of class at my college) is counted as a failure on my part. Now at my college I'm dealing with a segment of the population that the big universities don't deal with. Two-thirds of our students place into pre-college math classes. Tonight is the first day of class for my elementary algebra class. It's at the 8th - 9th grade level. The class is a blended one. It meets once a week in person and is online the rest of the time. My experience is that 60% of the students took this class because it doesn't meet as often as the face-to-face sections and therefore they think it is easier. The remaining 40% took it out of time necessity. Their life situation is such that they need more flexibility on when/where they learn. Around 30% of the class will pass with little to no active help on my part. 50% will fail and 20% will pass due partially to my efforts. I have devised a model for higher education that incorporates MOOCs and retains the need for teachers; though fewer of them. In my talks with the Office of the Chancellor several years ago there was no interest in pursuing my ideas. I do believe higher education is going to evolve but I don't think MOOCs alone are the way to go.
    - dave_sullivan 14y ago
      No, that's good info, thanks for writing it up. Speaking for myself, I did city college then transferred to UC. The difference in the quality of education was minimal, but the difference in the quality of the students was pretty significant. Even then, there were many very intelligent people who could get good grades but seemed to be going through the motions and learning at a pretty superficial level. I think there are a few things that benefit a society as a whole: roads/power/infrastructure, fire/police depts, arguably healthcare, arguably a standing military, others--I think education is definitely one of those. Education can mean different things to different people, but I tend to think of it as the ability to efficiently obtain the information/expertise necessary to pursue large goals. For example, if I want to build a new kind of car, there's all kinds of stuff I need to learn. Traditionally, I might go to a university known for doing good car research and I might learn enough to get a degree. The knowledge I've acquired in the pursuit of this degree does not necessarily represent the optimal knowledge mix for achieving my goals. Therefore, I've always viewed 'school' in general as a subpar use of my time--probably why I did so crappy in school. Instead, I've been interested in the minimum viable education needed to achieve my specific goals. This doesn't mean a superficial study of the topics, it means narrowing the focus to the areas that are key for accomplishing specific goals. MOOCs seem to be a great way to do this--a happy medium between a linear education and random internet research. An additional benefit is that it can bring high quality education to the whole world for little to no marginal cost. Like I said, I think education lifts all boats, and this applies to educating the world as a whole also. The world will still need teachers, but it will be less of them, as you suggest.
- alberich 14y ago
  Maybe that is because face-to-face classes offer a richer experience for the students. Also, it doesn't feel so boring when someone is talking to you (e.g. watching a video on the computer screen is not the same as a person talking to you). Although you can record live lectures and replay it afterwards for online classes, I feel it requires a higher level of motivation for the students to watch it and actually pay attention to it. Of course highly motivated students can fill the gaps alone and don't need this extra motivation from a dedicated instructor in the room. For the rest, I guess face-to-face classes will be the best for a long time.
  - yequalsx 14y ago
    There is something about that interaction, boring though it may be, that is better than online courses. Some students will benefit from MOOCs but a large majority of the students won't.
  - danteembermage 14y ago
    I think the silver bullet will be when you can sit down with your own personal Watson have it socratic method you. A really good teacher can find the boundary of understanding and push students to think at near maximum capacity by carefully asking questions just out of their intellectual reach. I think that's the power of lecture and I don't think we're too far from replicating it (50 years maybe?) Clearly when we have human level AI you can just use those, but depending on energy efficiency and cost of power that may take much longer to be cost effective, even after we have them.
    - jerf 14y ago
      "sit down with your own personal Watson"... "I think that's the power of lecture" This does not follow. The virtue of a lecture can not be that you are getting personalized optimal Socratic dialog. Only a couple of people in the audience can be getting that at a time. Optimal Socratic teaching will probably never disappear, but I'm still not hearing a lot of defenses of lectures qua lectures that still don't generally boil down to "It was good enough for me, it's good enough for them".
  - 14y ago
- FrojoS 14y ago
  > In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. Interesting perspective! I'm not sure I want to agree, but thanks for sharing. One of my friends, a particular smart one, always said: "Not only is a book a better teacher, it also has more character." And I generally agree. Very few classes, even at top universities can compete with a well written book. Its hard for me to tell, how effective a "book only" education would be when I spend most of my life getting degrees, accompanied with lectures. The few home schooled people I know are very knowledgable and smart but I'm not sure if that proofs anything.
  - yequalsx 14y ago
    Thank you for your response. I strongly disagree with the notion that the book only approach is efficacious. Very, very few people learn through this method. If it was effective I think a lot more people would go this route instead of through university. In 500 years or so of books being cheap they never even once came close to disrupting the lecture format.
    - alberich 14y ago
      I'm not sure that books were so cheap in the last 500 years. Many people didn't even know how to read back then. Or did they? Besides, it is questionable how many of those books of 500 years ago were good books for learning. One most presume that the books were cheap, analphabetism were very low, and most books were truly good for the common people to understand it. I'm not sure this situation was entirely true :)
- cube13 14y ago
  > In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. Ultimately, I think you hit the nail on the head. This isn't a problem that can be solved with technology alone. It's a social issue, and one that technology can certainly assist in solving.
- pg 14y ago
  I wasn't talking about the format so much as e.g. the rate at which college tuition has risen relative to inflation, and the consequent bloat at universities.
  - cube13 14y ago
    I'm not sure how much of an effect a startup can have in this area, though. This is much more a political and social issue than technological. Startups like Khan Academy can certainly change the way that people are taught and how they learn, but they aren't equipped to change tuition costs. If you really want to change that, start a PAC and start pressuring elected officials. That's where change will happen.
    - pg 14y ago
      They're most likely to do it by creating alternatives to the traditional college degree.
      - muzz 14y ago
        We have private colleges and universities. They are in competition with each other. Market forces should already be in place, driving efficiency and driving down the cost of a college degree.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
    - jonnathanson 14y ago
      IMO, the elephant in the room is credentialing. Khan Academy needs accreditation similar to (or identical to) that conferred upon universities. Alternatively, it needs to sponsor or build competency and credentialing standards. Students who earn these credentials, or demonstrate these competencies, can prove themselves to be "college educated" in a given topic. College is still considered necessary, and often irreplaceable, because many job markets demand it. They need to see some sort of accepted credential on an applicant's resume. If we move away from credentials, and toward demonstrated skills and competencies, we can remove the stigma that the job market still associates with self-teaching and internet learning. We all know that a credential on a resume is no guarantee that the credential holder is competent. So the side benefit of a move from credentials to competencies would be the burden of proof. People able to prove their competencies would not necessarily need credentials, and people hiding behind credentials would be forced to prove themselves competent.
- jseliger 14y ago
  I'm a grad student in English at the University of Arizona, and one thing I've observed is that many if not most of my students probably could learn much of what they learn in my class if they were extremely motivated. But most of us aren't, and class provides a pre-binding incentive structure to actually do something, where the default would probably be to do nothing, or hang out on FB or HN, which is close to nothing. I've written about this issue in more detail here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-department-of-no-shit-technology-and-computers-are-not-a-silver-bullets-for-education-2/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-department... and elsewhere. People have said that college in its conventional structure will remain essential right up to the point where middle-class families can't afford it any longer, and I have a feeling we're reaching that point. If you'd like to know more about why, check out Why Does College Cost So Much? Tl;dnr: Baumol's Cost Disease combined with student loans (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/0199744505/?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/01997445...).
  - yequalsx 14y ago
    I will look at your links when I have time. My initial reaction to what you wrote is to look to history. Before the 20th century college was expensive and rare. It's costs were very much out of the range of the middle class. Perhaps we will revert to the historical mean of university being for the rich, the bright, and the highly motivated.
  - adestefan 14y ago
    I'm not sure that a middle class family has ever been able to afford sending their children to college. The vast boom of post-secondary education was created by the government with the enactment of the GI Bill and then continued via the manipulation of student loan interest rates.
  - sopooneo 14y ago
    Yes. The huge thing that almost all discussions about online education miss or deny is how much of teaching is motivating students. This is true to varying extents across the socioeconomic spectrum. I believe we as humans are hard wired to feel more strongly about people we are physically near on a regular basis. And nothing online can replace that. I am willing to be proven wrong by this, but I would take most seriously those opinions of people who have a lot (a decade or more) of experience teaching both online and in person.
- saraid216 14y ago
  > In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. Keep in mind where universities and lectures come from: they are ex cathedra, literally. Gutenberg and Martin Luther are the ones who obviated the need for the "lecture format" and yet Catholicism still stands, only incrementally changed from those many centuries ago. The lecture format is necessary for reasons that have only indirectly to do with education: it's about power structure and power flow. The more deeply I've looked into education reform, the more strongly I feel that the necessary reform can't be isolated to education. It simply can't be "fixed" without dealing with the weight of centuries attached to it. When you look at education, you're looking at a societal concept of what a child is. Our concept is that a child is something to be lectured. How could we then not have lectures? (And yes, I am a fan of Montessori.)
GFischer 14y ago
I heard basically the same thing yesterday from the former head of Uruguay's Chamber of Commerce (who happens to be from the IT industry)(1). And that, even though my country is already thought of as progressive (first 100% OLPC deployment, etc...) I guess the thought is gathering momentum, I hope that startups finally get those barriers to crumble. Education still has a 19th century mindset in several points. (1) Mr. Arnaldo G. Castro ( http://www.cncs.com.uy/softis/A/cl/2 http://www.cncs.com.uy/softis/A/cl/2 )
xiaoma 14y ago
Even if the efforts of Coursera, Kahn Academy, etc "fail" and the incumbent universities are unscathed and continue raising prices, I would still consider them a huge success for as long as they are able to continue operations. School credentials aside, the education itself is very valuable. While education may not be the thing people most want out of school, it's definitely true that these companies are building something that people want... something I want, at least.

by pg 14y ago

yequalsx 14y ago

In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. I've been teaching online math classes for 7 years now and those classes almost always perform much worse than face-to-face classes. I suspect that the reform that will come will be more in the form of enhancing face-to-face classes and not replacing them. Maybe more flipped classroom style reform. For all of it's perceived badness the lecture format is remarkably resilient in that it's better for the average student than any of the current proposals that I've seen or experimented with. Disclaimer: I'm an average teacher (below average?) and much of my opinion comes from personal, anecdotal experience.

dave_sullivan 14y ago
Do you have any opinions on the "student's desire to learn" factor of online vs offline classes you've taught? I suspect that many online colleges might attract students looking for something "easy" and potentially more likely not to try as hard. I wonder how your experience would compare with one of coursersas math classes, eg stats or probabilistic graphical models, particularly counting only students who attempted to actually finish the class.
- yequalsx 14y ago
  Possibly more information than you wanted. I teach at a community college. Typically people think of Stanford or Large State University when they think of higher education. Around 1/3 of all higher education students are community college students. The smaller, regional state universities make up a large portion too. The last part of your last sentence caught my attention. We don't measure only the students who actually finished the class. Anyone who is registered after the drop/add period is counted in the statistics. A student who drops my class next week (this is the first week of class at my college) is counted as a failure on my part. Now at my college I'm dealing with a segment of the population that the big universities don't deal with. Two-thirds of our students place into pre-college math classes. Tonight is the first day of class for my elementary algebra class. It's at the 8th - 9th grade level. The class is a blended one. It meets once a week in person and is online the rest of the time. My experience is that 60% of the students took this class because it doesn't meet as often as the face-to-face sections and therefore they think it is easier. The remaining 40% took it out of time necessity. Their life situation is such that they need more flexibility on when/where they learn. Around 30% of the class will pass with little to no active help on my part. 50% will fail and 20% will pass due partially to my efforts. I have devised a model for higher education that incorporates MOOCs and retains the need for teachers; though fewer of them. In my talks with the Office of the Chancellor several years ago there was no interest in pursuing my ideas. I do believe higher education is going to evolve but I don't think MOOCs alone are the way to go.
  - dave_sullivan 14y ago
    No, that's good info, thanks for writing it up. Speaking for myself, I did city college then transferred to UC. The difference in the quality of education was minimal, but the difference in the quality of the students was pretty significant. Even then, there were many very intelligent people who could get good grades but seemed to be going through the motions and learning at a pretty superficial level. I think there are a few things that benefit a society as a whole: roads/power/infrastructure, fire/police depts, arguably healthcare, arguably a standing military, others--I think education is definitely one of those. Education can mean different things to different people, but I tend to think of it as the ability to efficiently obtain the information/expertise necessary to pursue large goals. For example, if I want to build a new kind of car, there's all kinds of stuff I need to learn. Traditionally, I might go to a university known for doing good car research and I might learn enough to get a degree. The knowledge I've acquired in the pursuit of this degree does not necessarily represent the optimal knowledge mix for achieving my goals. Therefore, I've always viewed 'school' in general as a subpar use of my time--probably why I did so crappy in school. Instead, I've been interested in the minimum viable education needed to achieve my specific goals. This doesn't mean a superficial study of the topics, it means narrowing the focus to the areas that are key for accomplishing specific goals. MOOCs seem to be a great way to do this--a happy medium between a linear education and random internet research. An additional benefit is that it can bring high quality education to the whole world for little to no marginal cost. Like I said, I think education lifts all boats, and this applies to educating the world as a whole also. The world will still need teachers, but it will be less of them, as you suggest.
alberich 14y ago
Maybe that is because face-to-face classes offer a richer experience for the students. Also, it doesn't feel so boring when someone is talking to you (e.g. watching a video on the computer screen is not the same as a person talking to you). Although you can record live lectures and replay it afterwards for online classes, I feel it requires a higher level of motivation for the students to watch it and actually pay attention to it. Of course highly motivated students can fill the gaps alone and don't need this extra motivation from a dedicated instructor in the room. For the rest, I guess face-to-face classes will be the best for a long time.
- yequalsx 14y ago
  There is something about that interaction, boring though it may be, that is better than online courses. Some students will benefit from MOOCs but a large majority of the students won't.
- danteembermage 14y ago
  I think the silver bullet will be when you can sit down with your own personal Watson have it socratic method you. A really good teacher can find the boundary of understanding and push students to think at near maximum capacity by carefully asking questions just out of their intellectual reach. I think that's the power of lecture and I don't think we're too far from replicating it (50 years maybe?) Clearly when we have human level AI you can just use those, but depending on energy efficiency and cost of power that may take much longer to be cost effective, even after we have them.
  - jerf 14y ago
    "sit down with your own personal Watson"... "I think that's the power of lecture" This does not follow. The virtue of a lecture can not be that you are getting personalized optimal Socratic dialog. Only a couple of people in the audience can be getting that at a time. Optimal Socratic teaching will probably never disappear, but I'm still not hearing a lot of defenses of lectures qua lectures that still don't generally boil down to "It was good enough for me, it's good enough for them".
- 14y ago
FrojoS 14y ago
> In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. Interesting perspective! I'm not sure I want to agree, but thanks for sharing. One of my friends, a particular smart one, always said: "Not only is a book a better teacher, it also has more character." And I generally agree. Very few classes, even at top universities can compete with a well written book. Its hard for me to tell, how effective a "book only" education would be when I spend most of my life getting degrees, accompanied with lectures. The few home schooled people I know are very knowledgable and smart but I'm not sure if that proofs anything.
- yequalsx 14y ago
  Thank you for your response. I strongly disagree with the notion that the book only approach is efficacious. Very, very few people learn through this method. If it was effective I think a lot more people would go this route instead of through university. In 500 years or so of books being cheap they never even once came close to disrupting the lecture format.
  - alberich 14y ago
    I'm not sure that books were so cheap in the last 500 years. Many people didn't even know how to read back then. Or did they? Besides, it is questionable how many of those books of 500 years ago were good books for learning. One most presume that the books were cheap, analphabetism were very low, and most books were truly good for the common people to understand it. I'm not sure this situation was entirely true :)
cube13 14y ago
> In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. Ultimately, I think you hit the nail on the head. This isn't a problem that can be solved with technology alone. It's a social issue, and one that technology can certainly assist in solving.
pg 14y ago
I wasn't talking about the format so much as e.g. the rate at which college tuition has risen relative to inflation, and the consequent bloat at universities.
- cube13 14y ago
  I'm not sure how much of an effect a startup can have in this area, though. This is much more a political and social issue than technological. Startups like Khan Academy can certainly change the way that people are taught and how they learn, but they aren't equipped to change tuition costs. If you really want to change that, start a PAC and start pressuring elected officials. That's where change will happen.
  - pg 14y ago
    They're most likely to do it by creating alternatives to the traditional college degree.
    - muzz 14y ago
      We have private colleges and universities. They are in competition with each other. Market forces should already be in place, driving efficiency and driving down the cost of a college degree.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - jonnathanson 14y ago
    IMO, the elephant in the room is credentialing. Khan Academy needs accreditation similar to (or identical to) that conferred upon universities. Alternatively, it needs to sponsor or build competency and credentialing standards. Students who earn these credentials, or demonstrate these competencies, can prove themselves to be "college educated" in a given topic. College is still considered necessary, and often irreplaceable, because many job markets demand it. They need to see some sort of accepted credential on an applicant's resume. If we move away from credentials, and toward demonstrated skills and competencies, we can remove the stigma that the job market still associates with self-teaching and internet learning. We all know that a credential on a resume is no guarantee that the credential holder is competent. So the side benefit of a move from credentials to competencies would be the burden of proof. People able to prove their competencies would not necessarily need credentials, and people hiding behind credentials would be forced to prove themselves competent.
jseliger 14y ago
I'm a grad student in English at the University of Arizona, and one thing I've observed is that many if not most of my students probably could learn much of what they learn in my class if they were extremely motivated. But most of us aren't, and class provides a pre-binding incentive structure to actually do something, where the default would probably be to do nothing, or hang out on FB or HN, which is close to nothing. I've written about this issue in more detail here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-department-of-no-shit-technology-and-computers-are-not-a-silver-bullets-for-education-2/ http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-department... and elsewhere. People have said that college in its conventional structure will remain essential right up to the point where middle-class families can't afford it any longer, and I have a feeling we're reaching that point. If you'd like to know more about why, check out Why Does College Cost So Much? Tl;dnr: Baumol's Cost Disease combined with student loans (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/0199744505/?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957 http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/01997445...).
- yequalsx 14y ago
  I will look at your links when I have time. My initial reaction to what you wrote is to look to history. Before the 20th century college was expensive and rare. It's costs were very much out of the range of the middle class. Perhaps we will revert to the historical mean of university being for the rich, the bright, and the highly motivated.
- adestefan 14y ago
  I'm not sure that a middle class family has ever been able to afford sending their children to college. The vast boom of post-secondary education was created by the government with the enactment of the GI Bill and then continued via the manipulation of student loan interest rates.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  Yes. The huge thing that almost all discussions about online education miss or deny is how much of teaching is motivating students. This is true to varying extents across the socioeconomic spectrum. I believe we as humans are hard wired to feel more strongly about people we are physically near on a regular basis. And nothing online can replace that. I am willing to be proven wrong by this, but I would take most seriously those opinions of people who have a lot (a decade or more) of experience teaching both online and in person.
saraid216 14y ago
> In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students. Keep in mind where universities and lectures come from: they are ex cathedra, literally. Gutenberg and Martin Luther are the ones who obviated the need for the "lecture format" and yet Catholicism still stands, only incrementally changed from those many centuries ago. The lecture format is necessary for reasons that have only indirectly to do with education: it's about power structure and power flow. The more deeply I've looked into education reform, the more strongly I feel that the necessary reform can't be isolated to education. It simply can't be "fixed" without dealing with the weight of centuries attached to it. When you look at education, you're looking at a societal concept of what a child is. Our concept is that a child is something to be lectured. How could we then not have lectures? (And yes, I am a fan of Montessori.)

GFischer 14y ago

I heard basically the same thing yesterday from the former head of Uruguay's Chamber of Commerce (who happens to be from the IT industry)(1). And that, even though my country is already thought of as progressive (first 100% OLPC deployment, etc...) I guess the thought is gathering momentum, I hope that startups finally get those barriers to crumble. Education still has a 19th century mindset in several points. (1) Mr. Arnaldo G. Castro ( http://www.cncs.com.uy/softis/A/cl/2 http://www.cncs.com.uy/softis/A/cl/2 )

xiaoma 14y ago

Even if the efforts of Coursera, Kahn Academy, etc "fail" and the incumbent universities are unscathed and continue raising prices, I would still consider them a huge success for as long as they are able to continue operations. School credentials aside, the education itself is very valuable. While education may not be the thing people most want out of school, it's definitely true that these companies are building something that people want... something I want, at least.