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If the government was serious about cutting budget deficits, it would immediately discontinue the purchase of textbooks, switch to ereaders (there's a company i
by Tycho 14y ago
If the government was serious about cutting budget deficits, it would immediately discontinue the purchase of textbooks, switch to ereaders (there's a company in Europe selling basic eInk readers for £8), make use of out-of-copyright reading material, abandon the practice of lecturers performing the exact same lecture term after term when a recording will do, partner with companies like Coursera to provide curriculums, move towards homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand... And generally just run education in a way that reflects the technology we have at our disposal.
- aaronblohowiak 14y agoCalifornia is taking the lead in this, yet again.. http://www.clrn.org/fdti/ http://www.clrn.org/fdti/
- mangler 14y agoThank you Terminator!!! We knew you'd do a great job!...
- scarmig 14y agoAll of those ideas are certainly good things. But even if they managed to decrease the eduction budget to $0, that wouldn't make a dent in government deficits (in the USA, at least, and I suspect elsewhere). They're driven primarily by unfunded entitlement spending and to a lesser extent by the military budget.
- dkokelley 14y agoI think you are confusing the federal and state governments. The federal government spends most of its budget on defense and entitlements. Only a smaller portion goes on to education (usually in the form of grants and subsidies to the state). Education happens at the state level. For example, California's proposed budget for 2012-2013 (http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/SummaryC...) spends $50 of the $141 billion total budget on education (k-12 and higher education). Compare that to the < 2% ($72 billion) that the US federal budget will spend in the department of education. (Note: Consider that California alone spends 5/7ths of what the federal government will spend on the department of education this year). The parent's ideas for reforms are most applicable to state governments, since that's where most education spending happens. California is also in a pretty bad spot economically, so if it were possible to drastically reduce the cost of education (without impacting the level of service), it would significantly help our state's finances. [Disclaimer: California is the largest state economy, and the relative education budget will vary between states.]
- yummyfajitas 14y agoAs of 2010, we spent $1,038B on health care, $955B on pensions, $898B on education and $848 on defense. The deficit was $1,293B, so education spending was a big chunk of it. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/piechart_2010_US_total
- peterhajas 14y agoWhich company is making e-Ink readers for that cheap?
- Tycho 14y agotxtr http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/txtr-beagle-8-kindle-rival-174316464.html http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/txtr-beagle-8-kindle-rival-... Not sure about all the details but the gist is you can make these things cheaper by stripping out some of the features that the Kindle has: built-in battery, wifi, 3G, lots of controls on the device.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoI'd love to get my hands on e-ink displays for < £8; I'd put them to great use. A replacement screen for Kindle costed me around $45 two months ago.
- asdfs 14y agoSame. It's unfortunate that there's seemingly no way to obtain e-ink displays directly from the manufacturers. I don't know how txtr is managing to obtain such a low price point, though. 4GB of flash, a CPU, RAM, the display, the case, manufacturing costs, a bluetooth radio, and two AAA batteries seems extremely difficult to obtain for < $13. This is not including the price of manufacturing and shipping. EDIT: Ah, I see. They've got their own book store, so they're hoping to recoup costs on that.
- polshaw 14y agoNo one ..start of 2013 you will be able to get it with a mobile contract in the UK.. so not 8gbp and who knows why they banded about that figure then. Future looks bright, though. FTA; "The catch You won’t be able to get the txtr beagle as a standalone product just yet. Instead the plan is to distribute it as an accessory on smartphone mobile phone contracts. I can understand why txtr is taking this approach, after all it's reliant on a smartphone for transfers, but I'm still disappointed that txtr isn't brave enough to launch the product on its own. Txtr hope to bring the product to the UK at the beginning of next year but were unable to comment on which mobile phone operators were in the pipeline to offer the device with their contracts."
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> move towards homework and exams that can be marked by a computer rather than by hand... Pretty much all of current homeworks and exams can be. It's called standarized tests, and I'd argue it's one of the reasons education sucks as much as it does. Except from that one, where I think a move in opposite direction is desirable, I'd love for all the changes you mentioned to happen.
- Tycho 14y agoMultiple choice is not ideal... but at the very least we shouldn't be employing teachers to tick these papers by hand when a computer could mark the pupils' answers instantaneously . To be honest I don't think anything can be done to the 'education system' that will drastically improve the results. The bottleneck lies with the children (and their parents) and their thirst for knowledge (or lack thereof), which is a reflection of the culture and values they grow up with. But what we can do is save a boatload of money on costs.
- munin 14y agowe already do this. there's software that almost every higher ed university uses in their lower division courses to administer homework electronically. it grades the homework for the instructor and populates a gradebook. it's pretty hands off. as far as I know, they have packages like this for every lower division STEM class. I used this software as late as multivariable calculus.
- Tycho 14y agowhat about in highschool and earlier?
- DanBC 14y agorecordings instead of lecturers? I'm not sure that's a great idea.
- astrieanna 14y ago
- tzs 14y agoWhat about advanced courses? Almost nothing in an advanced math course, for instance, can be computer graded by current technology, or even technology reasonably on the horizon. For instance, in a number theory course, how would you handle grading a problem like "Prove that every prime number has a primitive root"? Would you dumb down the course to match the limits of grading technology?
- Tycho 14y agoNo need to impose these ideas unilaterally. The ideal situation is to have hands-on, qualitative (for lack of a better word) tuition where there is no technological alternative.
- rubidium 14y agoBefore you rage against the machine, a simple question wasn't answered in the article. Could Coursera just apply to offer their services in the state of Minnesota? I mean, unless it is a terribly difficult process, I don't see the big deal here.
- ef4 14y ago> I mean, unless it is a terribly difficult process, I don't see the big deal here. It quickly becomes a big deal as soon as other jurisdictions start doing the same thing. If I was Coursera I would definitely not want to go down that path. It takes away the key benefit of being on the web, which is the elimination of geographic barriers. Better to just be transparent and let your users see the absurdity for themselves. Keep in mind that there's absolutely zero evidence that this regulation has any benefit. Clearly many other states are not enforcing this kind of law, and yet they're not demonstrably any worse off. This looks to me like a classic licensing scam: it probably got passed with the support of incumbents who wanted a higher barrier to entry.
- darkarmani 14y agoWhy? They just solved the problem with a ToS update. Now it is in the hands of the voters.
- ig1 14y agoThat's a terrible idea. You want to cut educational standards to save money ? You'll save money in the short-term but in the long term you'll destroy your economy as you won't have the highly educated workforce that will be required to be a competitive economy in the future. We should focus on high quality education first, whether that uses technology or not.
- kiba 14y agoWhat about GP's post that implies cutting down educational standards?
- Steko 14y agoRecorded lectures instead of live people who can answer questions?
- Tycho 14y agoRecorded lectures are better. Students/pupils can rewind things they missed or didn't immediately understand, can pause to refer to source material or look things up, watch the whole thing again, even rewatch previous lectures. They can still submit questions (forum, classroom, whatever) except now they wont be holding up the whole lecture. And logistically, what happens with 'live people' is that some people ask their own questions, which the lecturer will make some attempt to answer. It's not like a lecture format somehow provides the interactive benefits of a 1-to-1 tutorial for every student in the audience simultaneously.
- Steko 14y ago"Recorded lectures are better." Cite? You can't just base this huge claim on some hand waving about how you can rewind and pause things. You need a study showing how wildly successful a school based on recorded lectures is compared to traditional lectures before you start leading all of society down these paths.
- ig1 14y ago
- saraid216 14y agoUniversities are not part of the government, fyi. They take money from the government, but the government's leverage consists of conditions on funding, standards for accreditation, and well... laws like this. If the changes you propose were written in law..., I think most people would agree that's a bad thing for many reasons.
- barry-cotter 14y agoA distinction without a difference. I would be stunned to find out that more than 5% of US universities got a minority of their funding from the government , and who pays the piper calls the tune. For my purposes state guaranteed and subsidised student loans count as they wouldn't happen without it and the restrictions placed upon which institutions' students are eligible are another example of government power over universities.
- saraid216 14y ago> For my purposes state guaranteed and subsidised student loans count as they wouldn't happen without it and the restrictions placed upon which institutions' students are eligible are another example of government power over universities. "Power" is being used in such a wonderfully nebulous way here. The relevant power under discussion is decisions about infrastructure adoption and teaching methodologies. If you can point me to an instance where the government denied a university of students in order to keep them from adopting distance learning, I'll cede your point.
- barry-cotter 14y agoNebulous? Sure. To be more explicit; I assume absent extremely syrong evidence that people and institutions rarely follow a pattern of pissing off those upon whom their livelihoods depend. There's a great Upton Sinclair quote to that effect but I'm on my phone. Again, who pays the piper calls the tune. Not saying there's a cabal deciding all this but ideologies need not be explicit to have power. On an unrelated note, I don't expect to change your mind and while I'd be glad if you were to “cede the point” I do not argue with that aim in mind. Expecting to change your interlocutor's mind when you argue on the internet is the mark of a fool. This isn't lesswrong; most commenters aim to win arguments, not mote closely approach the truth. Arguing on the internet is for the rraders, the audience. tokenadult will not be convinced by yummyfajitas that the US education system is excellent but every time he disses it yummyfajitas brings up the same excellent argument and tokenadult refuses to engage with it and makes ad hominem attacks and appeals to authority. To some people this does not seem like someone with the facts on his side.
- wpietri 14y agoQuick tip that took me years to learn: If it looks like a bunch of apparently smart people are behaving like total idiots, A) I could be a genius, my brain overflowing with incredible insight into the nature of the universe, or B) I could have a too-simple understanding of what they get up to, and therefore be acting like an arrogant, know-it-all jackass. State A does happen to me occasionally, but most of the time I think I'm in state A I'm actually in state B. I've now learned to keep my mouth shut for entire minutes at a time, which helps me reduce the frequency with which people realize I'm in state B.
- Tycho 14y agoor C) there are massive, incumbent pressure groups obstructing changes in government spending practices
- lambda 14y agoBut more than that, there are laws, that were written perhaps in part due to pressures from these groups, but in part from all kinds of other pressures, which provide a lot of inertia for the way things are done. Whenever there's some kind of education reform, it's usually to add stricter standards, because we're always falling behind in education and feel that stricter standards will help make sure that we don't. This means that textbooks need to meet stricter standards. Which mean that there needs to be some kind of review. Which means that someone needs to pay for that review. Which generally falls on the textbook publishers, or some overworked underpaid government committee. Which means that only a limited number of textbooks go through that review, locking out anything else which might be suitable but hasn't been reviewed to determine if it meets that standard. The standards wind up changing every few years, so the textbooks need to be updated to match.
- narrator 14y agoState A does not mean you're a genius. It just means that you've made an error in determining what variable the actors in a sociological phenomenon are actually trying to optimize. Find the thing that the sociological phenomenon is most effectively optimizing and work back from there to get to B. In the case of higher education it's optimizing the benefits to all those who are benefiting from the current system and not optimizing trying to educate the most people at the lowest cost which was your meta "too-simple" understanding of your understanding.
- redthrowaway 14y ago> it would immediately discontinue the purchase of textbooks, switch to ereaders Please no. I've found that eReaders are only good for novels, where there is a linear progression from start to finish. The inability to flip back and forth through the book, have two pages open at once, and the like is a serious downside when it comes to reading reference materials on an eReader. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it is one that the current generation of eReaders quite frankly suck at.
- tangue 14y agoI second this one. I've bought lot of technical materials (Pickaxe, some CSS3 books) on my eReader (a Sony PRS T2) and eventually bought paper editions because it was more efficient. Was I conditioned by my previous learning experiences ? Maybe, but I found that eReaders are great for looking for a specific reference of something you've already seen, but for the process of learning, there is a king of serendipity that paper provides and eReader can't. IMHO even the web is a better learning medium than ebooks for this reason.
- krichman 14y agoThirded. I've been trying to read technical papers on my Kindle and wow is it uncomfortable. Reading a novel is an absolute delight, though.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]