Archive for the 'Education' Category

Udacity and Georgia Tech join to offer a $7,000 M.S. Computer Science online

Published May 16, 2013 Education Leave a Comment
Tags: ,

This very exciting bulletin came up simultaneously on two of our favorite feeds: Tyler Cowen and Sebastian Thrun. Here's Tyler:

The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.

Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.

Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master’s program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.

…The deal started to come together eight months ago in a meeting between Galil and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun.

“Sebastian suggested to do a master’s degree for $1,000 and I immediately told him it’s not possible,” Galil said.

(…)

And here's Sebastian:

Today is my opportunity to give back. Ever since Peter Norvig and I launched AI Class, I have been dreaming of putting an entire computer science degree online, and to make access to the material free of charge, so that everyone can become a proficient computer scientist. With Georgia Tech and AT&T, this is my dream come true. If, as a young student, I had the chance to learn from the best professors in the world, my life might have been different. I have been fortunate. Yet so many potential learners are still denied access. Education has become much more exclusive, and getting into a top-10 computer science department, like Georgia Tech's, is still out of reach for all but a chosen few.

I co-founded Udacity to bring the very best of higher education to everyone worldwide. With Georgia Tech, we have a partner whose computer science program is among the best in the world! And equally importantly, with AT&T, we partner with a Fortune-500 company which is relentlessly innovating in the space of digital access to information. This triumvirate of industry and academia is now teaming up to use 21st Century MOOC technology to level the playing field in computer science education. And while the degree rightfully comes with a tuition fee — after all, to achieve the very best in online education we will provide support services — the bare content will be available free of charge, available for anyone eager to learn. We are also launching non-credit certificates at a much reduced price point, to give a path to those who don't care about Georgia Tech credit or degrees, but still want their learning results certified.

I wish I had been born in the 1990s. Back when I was a college student, the Web did not exist. How many young students are there in the world today as eager to learn as I was? Only time will tell how many young people we'll be able to empower to reach for the stars. If you are a student in our program and come across this blog post, please drop me a line at sebastian@udacity.com. If only a single life can be touched with this program, it will be a success!

I think this is a very big deal – hope I'm right!

Update: here's the Georgia Tech site for OMSCS with FAQ and intro videos. From the FAQ:

How is this degree different from residential Georgia Tech MS CS?

The OMS CS will deliver educational content completely through the massive online format. This means it will differ from the residential MS CS in course structure, for example, but will provide an educational experience no less rigorous than the on-campus format.

How is the OMS CS different from other distance-learning and/or online degree programs that have existed for a long time?

The Georgia Tech OMS CS is the first online degree in computer science from a top-tier university that students can obtain exclusively through the massive-online format.

How much does the degree program cost?

We’re not yet ready to announce a specific program cost, but the plan is to offer the Georgia Tech OMS CS for a total cost of under $7,000—a fraction of the cost of Georgia Tech’s on-campus program and even less than that of comparable private universities.

What evidence do you have of market demand for this program?

At present, around 160,000 master’s degrees are bestowed in the United States every year in computer science and related subject disciplines; the worldwide market is almost certainly much larger, perhaps even an order of magnitude larger. We conjecture that the present structure is vastly underserving the market and will conduct market research in the first year to check these estimates and help target our course offerings.

How long does it take to complete and receive a degree?

We anticipate the typical time for students to complete the OMS CS will be about three years, though we will allow for longer enrollments— up to six years—for those students who need greater flexibility.

How does the student workload compare to a residential degree? How many hours a week will students spend on it?

The total workload is the same as the residential program; the weekly or hourly workload depends on how quickly students wish to complete the program.

Who can take courses?

All OMS CS courses will be available free of charge for anyone, anywhere in the world. Degree-seeking students will be virtually separated from “open” students to ensure degree program rigor.

 

US map: Highest paid public employee in every state is part of the higher education bubble

Published May 14, 2013 Education Leave a Comment

The highest paid public employee in every one of the 50 states is either a college coach at a public university: football (27), basketball (13), hockey (1), or a college administrator at a public university: president (4), medical school dean (4), law school dean (1).


 

What Can Be Done to Improve Struggling High Schools?

Published May 11, 2013 Education Leave a Comment
Tags:

Abstract at AEA:

In spite of decades of well-intentioned efforts targeted at struggling high schools, outcomes today are little improved. A handful of innovative programs have achieved great success on a small scale, but more generally, the economic futures of the students at the bottom of the human capital distribution remain dismal. In our view, expanding access to educational options that focus on life skills and work experience, as opposed to a focus on traditional definitions of academic success, represents the most cost-effective, broadly implementable source of improvements for this group.

This US-centric paper is very readable, by credible authors. The paper is more forthcoming than the cautiously-worded abstract. In particular, one of the most useful findings is that many students would be far better off on a vocational rather than college track. Apprenticeships are not mentioned specifically, but are proven to be a very effective way to realize the goals for “life skills and work experience”.

 

US: effective apprenticeship systems? The Washington Post

Published May 8, 2013 Education Closed
Tags:

Apprenticeships have been nearly ignored in the determination to force everyone through an expensive, heavily-subsidized college-only approach. The Washington Post contrasts the US with countries with well-developed apprenticeships:

(…) The central answer to the mismatch between jobs and employment is a 21st-century apprenticeship program. In Austria, Germany and Switzerland — countries with long histories of guilds and craftwork — 55 to 70 percent of all young people enter apprenticeships. Apprenticeships have grown rapidly in other countries, tripling in Australia since 1996 and jumping tenfold — to more than 500,000 entrants last year — in England since 1990. The Group of 20 ministers of labor, the International Labor Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development strongly recommend expanding apprenticeship programs.

Apprenticeships could help reduce youth unemployment, widen opportunities for young people who do not want to sit in class all day and help ensure that the potential resurgence in manufacturing is not thwarted by a mismatch of skills. With effective apprenticeship systems, highly developed economies sustain jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of jobs in Germany and 16 percent in Switzerland but only 10 percent in the United States.

Although apprenticeships yield significant earnings gains for workers, this country has too few programs, partly because of the massive bias in public spending toward a college-only approach. Government spending on colleges and universities tops $300 billion per year; outlays to apprenticeship programs total less than $40 million annually. A public-private initiative could increase competitiveness and youth employment, upgrade skills and wages, achieve positive returns for employers and workers, and reduce government spending if companies played a larger role in skills development. A well-tested method in other countries involves building apprenticeship training so that it becomes a rewarding alternative for young people who are not bound for a traditional four-year university degree and a recruitment and training method for employers.

Recommended.

 

How good are schools in Guinea-Bisseau?

Published April 23, 2013 Education 1 Comment

Low hanging fruit indeed. Tyler Cowen:

Not that good. Here are some new results from Peter Boone, Ila Fazzio, Kameshwari Jandhyala, Chitra Jayanty, Gangadhar Jayanty, Simon Johnson, Vimala Ramachandrin, Filipa Silva, Zhaoguo Zhan:

We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 children, aged 7-17, tested for literacy and numeracy competency. Only 27% of children were able to add two single digits, and just 19% were able to read and comprehend a simple word. Our unannounced school checks found 72% of enrolled children in grades 1-4 attending their schools, but the schools were poorly equipped. Teachers were present at 86% of schools visited. Despite surveying 351 schools, we found no examples of successful schools where children reached reasonable levels of literacy and numeracy for age. Our evidence suggests that interventions that raise school quality in these villages, rather than those which target enrollment, may be most important to generate very sharp improvements in children’s educational outcomes.

On the bright side here are some true chances for low-hanging fruit.

Source: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/04/how-good-are-schools-in-guinea-bisseau.html

 

Who’s afraid of a MOOC?: on being education-y and course-ish

Published April 22, 2013 Education Closed
Tags: , ,

Here's a very informative post by Greg Downey @GregDowney1 on the Neuroanthropology PLOS Blog. Did you know about all the MOOC developments in Australia? Such as the Open Universities Australia? Well I didn't, but am going to follow their work closely. Greg is one of the prime movers. A sample:

(…) My project was chosen to be the first cab off the rank at Macquarie after I pointed out at a panel discussion last semester during ‘Learning and Teaching Week’ that the technology made opening classrooms electronically inevitable. At the time, I argued that if the University didn’t promote open classroom efforts, the academic staff were going to start opening up our classrooms on our own. Either do it with us, or stand by as it happens without you. Anthropology (as well as a lot of other disciplines) wants to be free, or at the very least we are inexorably leaking onto the internet.

The leaking lecture hall

Web 2.0 opportunities are simply making it too easy and cheap to put teaching materials online. Our universities are often forcing us to tape lectures, generate electronic syllabi and provide access to our students already, so many of us are asking ourselves, why, after we put so much energy into lectures, slides, student readings, and the like for our classes, should we not share these much more widely. We have watched as lecture-like presentations – most notably, TED conference videos, but also iTunes U, Slideshare, and the like – have grown as a genre through podcasting and other avenues. There are copyright issues, and many of us are nervous about what will happen when as these materials become public, but enough of us are ready to dive into the deep end that the process is only likely to accelerate.

More…

 

The Absurd Lies of College Admissions

Published April 12, 2013 Education 2 Comments
Tags:

Why do we force prospective college students to engage in exorbitant exaggeration?

Here’s a fine piece by Megan McArdle on the absurd play that is acted out around elite admissions. Both applicants and admissions officers know this is a sham and a waste of resources. And the criteria obviously favor families with the wealth to supply their children with the “enrichment experiences”. Excerpt:

A high school student [Suzy Lee Weiss, Ed] has penned an open letter to the colleges that rejected her, published in the Wall Street Journal. 

(…) I also probably should have started a fake charity. Providing veterinary services for homeless people’s pets. Collecting donations for the underprivileged chimpanzees of the Congo. Raising awareness for Chapped-Lips-in-the-Winter Syndrome. Fun-runs, dance-a-thons, bake sales—as long as you’re using someone else’s misfortunes to try to propel yourself into the Ivy League, you’re golden.

(…) Then there was summer camp. I should’ve done what I knew was best—go to Africa, scoop up some suffering child, take a few pictures, and write my essays about how spending that afternoon with Kinto changed my life. Because everyone knows that if you don’t have anything difficult going on in your own life, you should just hop on a plane so you’re able to talk about what other people have to deal with.

Or at least hop to an internship. Get a precocious-sounding title to put on your resume. ‘Assistant Director of Mail Services.’ ‘Chairwoman of Coffee Logistics.’ I could have been a gopher in the office of someone I was related to. Work experience!

(…) This entire thing is absurd.  I understand why kids engage in this ridiculous arms race.  What I don’t understand is why admissions officers, who have presumably met some teenagers, and used to be one, actually reward it.  Why not give kids a bonus for showing up to a routine job during high school, like real people, instead of for having wealthy parents who can help you tap their affluent social network for charitable donations?  Why have we conflated ‘excellence’ with affluence, driven parents, and a relentless will to conform on the part of the kids?

Elite colleges would be better off with more kids like Suzy Lee Weiss and fewer kids like Blair Hornstine.  Unfortunately, the admissions system seems to be primarily geared towards fake sincerity and ersatz enrichment.

More.

Overcoming the legacy of prior education

Published March 27, 2013 Education Closed
Tags: ,

Stanford's Keith Devlin is giving his second MOOC. Prof Devlin is a superb source of insights into everything related to the MOOC phenomenon. Here's a fragment from his latest post:

(…) Still, the very wide reach of MOOCs means we are likely to see new kinds of activities emerge, some of them purely commercial. The example I cite above, though right now a very isolated one, may be a sign of big things to come – which is why I mention it. There is, after all, a familiar pattern. The Internet, on which MOOCs live, began as a military and educational network, but now it is a major economic platform. And textbooks grew from being a valuable educational support to the present-day mega-profit industry that has effectively killed US K-12 education.

Talking of which (and this brings me to my main focus in this post), the death – or at least the dearth – of good K-12 mathematics education becomes clear when you look through the forum posts in a MOOC such as mine, which assumes only high school knowledge of mathematics.

Devlin offers important insights into the real world of learning as a process. Another example:

First, many forum posters seem to view education as something done to them, by other people who are in control. This is completely wrong, and is the opposite of what you will find in a good university (and a very small number of excellent K-12 schools). ”To learn” is an active verb. The focus should be creating an environment where the student can learn, wants to learn, and can obtain the support required to do so. There is no other way, and anyone who claims to do anything more than help you to learn is trying to extract money from you.

Second, there is a common view of education as being primarily about getting grades on tests – generally by the most efficient means (which usually means by-passing real learning). In education, tests are metrics to help the student and the instructor gauge progress. That does not prevent tests being used to assess achievement and provide credentials, but that is something you do after an educational experience is completed. Their use within the learning process is different, and everyone involved in education – students, instructors, parents, bureaucrats, and politicians – needs to be aware of the distinction.

Even worse, is the belief that a test grade of less than 90% is an indication of failure, often compounded by the hopeless misconception that activities like mathematics depend mostly on innate talent, rather than the hours of effort that those of us in the business know is the key. (Check out Carol Dweck’s Mindset research or read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. Better still, read both.)

This is compounded by the expectation that a grade of 90% is possible within just a few days of meeting something new. For example, here is one (slightly edited) forum post from a student in my class:

Right now I want to quit this class. I don’t understand ANY of it. Hell I don’t understand anything regarding to math except basic equations and those barely. When asked to give a theorem on why something (let’s say a right angle) is that way my answer always was “it is because it is”). So now I don’t know what to do. I got 14 out of 40 … 14, and the perfectionist in me is saying might as well give up … you gave it a shot … there is no way to catch up now. The person in me who wants to learn is saying to keep trying you never know what will happen. And the pessimist in me says it doesn’t matter – I dumb and will always be dumb and by continuing I am just showing how dumb I am.

In this case, I looked at other posts from this student and as far as I can tell (this is hard when done remotely over the Internet) she is smart and shows every indication she can do fine in mathematics. In which case, I take her comment as an indication of the total, dismal failure of the education system she has hitherto been subjected to. No first-line education system should ever produce a graduate who feels like that.

Certainly, in learning something new and challenging, getting over 30% in the first test, less than a week after meeting it for the first time, is good. In fact, if you are in a course where you get much more than that so quickly, you are clearly in the wrong course – unless you signed up in order to fine-tune something you had already learned. Learning is a long, hard process that involves repeated “failure”. And (to repeat a point I made earlier) anyone who says otherwise is trying to extract money from you.

 

Shout it from the Rooftops! Performance Pay for Teachers in India

Published March 26, 2013 Education Closed

These are really important results, thanks heaps to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution (reposted below). The Indian public schools are so bad that extremely simple interventions can get large benefits. E.g., sending a digital camera to every school so that every day a student can take a photo that proves whether or not the teacher was present for work (mostly not – before the photos).

Several years ago I reported on a very large, randomized experiment (JSTOR) on teacher performance pay in India that showed that even modest incentives could significantly raise student achievement and do so not only in the incentivized subjects but also in other non-incentivized subjects, suggesting positive spillovers. The earlier paper looked at the first two years of the program. One of the authors, Karthik Muralidharan, now has a follow-up paper, showing what happens over 5 years. The results are impressive and important:

Students who had completed their entire five years of primary school education under the program scored 0.54 and 0.35 standard deviations (SD) higher than those in control schools in math and language tests respectively. These are large effects corresponding to approximately 20 and 14 percentile point improvements at the median of a normal distribution, and are larger than the effects found in most other education interventions in developing countries (see Dhaliwal et al. 2011).

Second, the results suggest that these test score gains represent genuine additions to human capital as opposed to reflecting only ‘teaching to the test’. Students in individual teacher incentive schools score significantly better on both non-repeat as well as repeat questions; on both multiple-choice and free-response questions; and on questions designed to test conceptual understanding as well as questions that could be answered through rote learning. Most importantly, these students also perform significantly better on subjects for which there were no incentives – scoring 0.52 SD and 0.30 SD higher than students in control schools on tests in science and social studies (though the bonuses were paid only for gains in math and language). There was also no differential attrition of students across treatment and control groups and no evidence to suggest any adverse consequences of the programs.

…Finally, our estimates suggest that the individual teacher bonus program was 15-20 times more cost effective at raising test scores than the default ‘education quality improvement’ policy of the Government of India, which is reducing class size from 40 to 30 students per teacher (Govt. of India, 2009).

In another important paper, written for the Government of India, Muralidharan summarizes the best research on public schools in developing countries. His conclusion is that there are demonstrably effective and feasible policies that could improve the public schools thereby increasing literacy and numeracy rates and raising the incomes of millions of people.

The generation entering Indian schools today is the largest that has ever, or for the foreseeable future, will ever enter Indian schools so the opportunity to raise educational quality for essentially the entire Indian workforce over the next several generations is truly immense.

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

Meanwhile, families that are by any sensible definition below the “poverty line” find a dollar or more every week to send their children to a neighborhood “private school” – which could simply be a volunteer who in fact does show up for work every day.

India is so broken that it can only be “up from here”.

Under the Staircase: Kickstarter project related to Milton Friedman and teaching economics to young kids

Published March 17, 2013 Economics , Education 3 Comments
Tags:

 

Zowee Batman, I wish our grand kids had the opportunity to read these books by author I. M. Lerner! We don’t how great they will turn out to be when complete – but the project looks very promising. Ms. Lerner begins her Kickstarter project: 

One sunny September morning, many (many) years ago, I walked cautiously into a classroom and slid into an empty seat. I was a junior in high school and I had just signed up for an Econ 101 class. When I left the classroom that day, I was a completely different person. It took a few more classes for me to realize what had happened. And it was really quite simple. The blindfold had been removed and a whole new world opened up.

Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Walter Williams…I read anything and everything I could get my hands on from these and many other writers. And I found myself questioning, for the first time, what I had been spoon-fed during my years in school. I went back to my economics base often during my college years, as a counterweight to what was being advanced (no longer spoon-fed, now shoveled) within the college environment. It was my bulwark.

I started thinking about “crazy” ideas and values like personal responsibility, free enterprise, self-sufficiency, self-determination, individual rights, entrepreneurship, freedom and liberty…well, you get the idea.

As the mother of two young kids, I originally planned to recommend these (and other) great economists to my kids during their teenage years. And yes, that idea was probably doomed to failure. Not only because most teenage kids pretty much run away from anything parents would recommend. No, the reality is that by playing defense until their teenage years, we’re essentially relinquishing the field. We’re abdicating our responsibility to help shape our kids’ values by always staying two steps behind, as these values (and basic common sense) are drilled out of our kids.

It’s time to stop playing defense.

So where to begin?

A book. And more specifically: a book series. An economic adventure series that fosters the values we care so deeply about. Created specifically for our kids, at an age where they soak up everything around them. Incorporating mystery and adventure to engage our young readers, and using examples from our kids’ day-to-day lives – in school, with friends, and in familiar situations – so that they can be armed with logic and a healthy dose of critical thinking skills.

There will be six books in the initial phase.

  • Under the Staircase: Meeting Milton (Milton Friedman) 
  • Under the Staircase: Hello Hayek! (Friedrich Hayek) 
  • Under the Staircase: Talking to Thomas (Thomas Sowell) 
  • Under the Staircase: Waiting for Walter (Walter Williams) 
  • Under the Staircase: Asking Adam (Adam Smith) 
  • Under the Staircase: Adventures with Ayn (Ayn Rand)

Buy them all!

Twitter

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 192 other followers