Seeking reliable, objective sources on economics and energy-policy issues
(…) it’s not surprising that textbook publishers have filed the equivalent of the Recording Industry Association of America’s infamous lawsuit against the first MP3 music player. That’s what you do when your rents are threatened: use them to hire good lawyers.
The Minerva Project is sufficiently visionary that it makes me fearful they might fail. Let’s hope not. Ry Ryvard at InsideHigherEd recently profiled the Ben Nelson-founded for-profit elite university startup.
(…snip…) Minerva’s doors won’t open to anything resembling a traditional university: the for-profit startup expects top students will fly across the world to sit in front of computers. Professors could be located anywhere in the world. Now, Minerva will need to make good on its promise to attract some of the world’s most qualified students based on an unproven idea that relies on unfinished software.
The company wants to be a “hybrid university.” Its students would gather in dorms in major cities across the world, and after spending time together in one city, move to another, but take online classes from Minerva professors on the other end of the screen.
Minerva’s founder, former Snapfish executive Ben Nelson, believes powerful software can teach students better than traditional classes. But he also believes students still want to go to a residential college. Minerva plans to charge about half as much as an Ivy League university.
To get there, he will need to raise millions before Minerva can begin teaching its first class. The company also needs to produce one-of-a-kind software good enough to compete with a traditional campus experience, use what Nelson calls “various loopholes” in the accreditation system to get accredited and attract talent to an unproven idea.
(…snip…)
The Minerva Project
Who: Ben Nelson, a former executive at Snapfish, and his team, along with $25 million in venture capital, but with millions more needed.
What: A for-profit university that will have students in residence hall taking online classes from Minerva professors. The software Minerva is working on will monitor student learning and encourage student involvement in ways Nelson does not believe are possible in traditional in-person lectures. The university plans to have four colleges within it and eventually a business school.
Why: Nelson and his team believe some elite students from across the world are ready for something different and that traditional universities have yet to apply 21st century technology to decades of research on student learning.
When: The company expects to run a small group of students through its program in 2014 but offer its first full year of classes to students starting in September 2015.
Where: San Francisco at first, with other campuses in more than a half dozen of the world’s major commercial capitals. None of the campuses are ready yet and Minerva will not own any of the buildings but instead work with private developers who will put up the money while Minerva guarantees the students.
Minerva v. MOOCs and Lectures
When Nelson started thinking about Minerva in 2010, online education had already taken off, with universities nationwide competing to offer online degree programs. But much of the growth of online education was in professional training and the big players weren’t always the colleges attracting top undergraduates. Now, leading universities from across the world are offering free online courses and seem to be moving rapidly to offer them to undergraduates for credit.
Nelson is not the least bit threatened by these massive open online courses, or MOOCs.
Instead, Nelson called MOOCs ”manna from heaven” for Minerva. He said he never wanted Minerva to offer introductory classes to begin with. He expects Minerva students will be good enough to pick up basic things like Econ 101 on their own.
Indeed, he thinks it’s “not O.K. to charge” for Econ 101. So Nelson plans for Minerva’s professors to only teach classes where students are required to debate one another or where the professors can closely track students’ intellectual development using sophisticated software. Those things, he said, “can’t be MOOCed and therefore can’t be given away for free.”
Nelson’s confidence in this direction is born in part of a disdain for lectures. Lectures, the staple of most undergraduate education, “are not proven to work,” he said.
Nelson said MOOCs are victims to the same flaws as lectures and therefore make “absolutely no sense.”
Where, if not classrooms, will Minerva students learn? Well, first of all, in front of a computer. “We will not allow them to congregate” in typical classroom settings, Nelson said. The students will live together in residence halls, first in San Francisco and then in dorms Minerva plans to have in the world’s major commercial capitals. Minerva students will have hall advisors and faculty guides for education excursions, but no in-person classroom professors.
While MOOCs are basically supersized lectures offered to tens of thousands rather than hundreds of students, Minerva wants to use learning analytics to scale up Oxbridge-style tutorials to seminar-size online classes taught by professors who can work remotely from any location in the world.
“We are trying to deliver the world’s highest-touch education experience,” Nelson said. “And we believe that to deliver a truly high-touch delivery experience — we believe that if you tell 20 students to gather in a room that will not happen.”
Unlike MOOCs, which are based on recorded lectures, Minerva classes will be taught live online.
Minerva believes it can develop software to log students and professors’ every move and not only track but encourage participation and learning. This, Nelson says, will avoid the limitation of the in-person lecture — namely that whatever is said just “vanishes into thin air.”
Students in the back of a real class are not very engaged, said Robin Goldberg, Minerva’s chief marketing officer. But Minerva students, who could be in front of a webcam with their keystrokes being logged, will be on their toes. “You can barely blink without everybody knowing it. You can’t get up to get a glass of water without everybody knowing it,” she said.
The faith in the power of the software versus the lecture is at the heart of the company.
The software? It’s not finished yet.
The Faculty
A university also needs faculty and students. Last month, Minerva lured Stephen Kosslyn away from his job as director of Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences.
Kosslyn, who started full-time at Minerva on April 1, will be the new university’s founding dean. He will oversee the School of Arts & Science and its four colleges of natural science, social science, computational science and arts and humanities.
“I need to find distinguished academics who can head those, so if you can mention that in the article that would be great,” Kosslyn said.
(…snip…)
The Minerva momentum seems to be building with Larry Summers signing on to lead the board of advisors, the announcement of the $500,000 Minerva Prize, and the announcement of the Kosslyn hiring: Minerva Project Names Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn As Founding Dean; Former Harvard Dean Will Lead the Academics and Curriculum of the University.
To be continued…
All of the big academic prizes go for research. But among the innovations emerging from the Benchmark Capital-funded Minerva Project is a serious prize to reward the educator who has contributed the most to excellence in education. The press release begins with this:
April 22, 2013 – Minerva Project, which is redefining a top-tier university experience to prepare global leaders and innovators, today announced the launch of the Minerva Academy, a society of educators dedicated to promoting and rewarding innovation and excellence in teaching. Led by Nobel Laureate Roger Kornberg, who will serve as Governor of the new Academy, the group will select and award the Minerva Prize for Advancements in Higher Education. This international honor and $500,000 prize, the largest of its kind, will be bestowed on one distinguished educator each year whose innovations have led to extraordinary student learning experiences. Nominations are open through November 30, 2013 at http://www.minervaproject.com/academy and the first Minerva Prize will be awarded in May 2014.
“While academic research has long been internationally recognized, and rightfully so, communication of the passion that lies behind it has gone largely unnoticed. We seek to enhance the intellectual development of students and inspire their interest, while continuing to support the creation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge within the professoriate,” said Dr. Roger Kornberg, governor of the Minerva Academy. “The new Minerva Academy and Prize are a step toward balancing emphasis and recognition in higher education.”
The Minerva Academy is an honorary institution that will induct the best educational innovators from around the world. Academy members will be identified and invited based on recognized expertise focused on student learning as well as published research. The objective of the Minerva Academy is to promote, recognize and reward extraordinary advancements in teaching excellence by providing a forum for open exchange of new ideas and enhanced practices in higher education instruction.The Academy will recognize achievement through the Minerva Prize for Advancements in Higher Education, to be awarded annually to one faculty member, from any institution worldwide, who has demonstrated extraordinary, innovative teaching and advancements in learning experiences. The Minerva Prize is the largest teaching award of its kind, focusing on significant advancement in student learning in higher education. One $500,000 cash prize will be awarded to the winner, who will be selected through a rigorous nomination and review process.
(…snip…)
Inside Higher Ed has a long article on this remarkable new venture – “based on interviews and documents, including some that the university provided to Inside Higher Ed following an open records request.” There are 22 pages of internal Georgia Tech docs referenced. Example:
“It is an experiment that no other institution of our caliber has embarked on (yet!) but everyone is talking about moving in this direction, so if we want to do it, we should do it right away,” the report, produced in late February, said. “There is an opportunity to be a leader rather than a follower if we act quickly and thoughtfully.”
There is a glimpse of the financial projections as well:
The Georgia Tech program will have four enrollment tracks for students. Enrollment starts in January, though the first year will feature a small test run of several hundred paying students drawn mostly from the military and the corporate world, particularly AT&T.
Georgia Tech and Udacity expect the program to cost about $3.1 million in its first year. With a $2 million one-time sponsorship from AT&T and about $1.3 million in tuition and fees, Georgia Tech and Udacity
expect to split $240,060 in gains at the end of the first year.In the second year, without AT&T’s large subsidy, Georgia Tech and Udacity plan to spend $7.5 million and scrape out gains of just $14,848 for the whole year.
By the third year, when the program is expected to be running at full steam, Georgia Tech and Udacity expect to spend $14.3 million on the program but bring in $19.1 million in revenue — for a total gain of about $4.7 million.
Georgia Tech will receive 60 percent of the revenue and Udacity the rest. The money to Georgia Tech will flow through its research corporation. Professors and the computing college both stand to gain from the effort. A professor will receive $20,000 for creating a course and $10,000 for delivering the content — meaning most professors will receive $30,000 per course. Professors will receive a royalty of $2,500 each time the course is offered again.
The posted Georgia Tech document is a wonderful source of insights into how the new degree program will actually operate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Buy them all!
There is a lovely essay on Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok, who rebuts Mark Edmundson’s criticism of online education. I’m very confident that time will prove Tabarrok right and Edmundson embarrasingly uninformed.
A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and ‘almost sacred’ about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(…)
Read more.
(Via Marginal Revolution.)
Prof. Anthony Finkelstein, proprietor of Prof Serious Engineering posted this commentary 24 Feb. He captured succinctly my intuition about the education-innovation wave. While we cannot predict much of anything about where this is going, nor how fast, I’ll risk speculating that by 2020 the retarded landscapes like the US will look quite different (at least on the coasts). The revolution is likely to start at the tertiary level – simply because it isn’t as institutionally rigid as the state public schools, which are typically under the thumb of the teachers unions. Anthony begins with this:
You might have expected that I would have opined on the e-learning and the MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) phenomenon before now. After all, everybody else in Higher Education has. I feared, that I had nothing further to add, and after reading this you may be tempted to agree. The course of the emerging debate suggests to me however, that some perspective is needed and this is what I would like to provide. I will do so now by way of a preliminary excursion.
A few years ago I was undertaking some research on behalf of a large industrial organisation whose primary business was photography. An organisation that was then, and still is, undergoing a significant and painful transformation in the face of a changed technological environment to which they had failed to adapt. A senior researcher, in confessional mood, reflected: “I became aware of the possibility of digital cameras many years before they became a practical reality … and then my mother had one. I just don’t know what happened in the intermediate period.”
This reflection strikes a familiar personal note, for me at least. Technology can, however far sighted you believe yourself to be, catch you unawares. Indeed, in certain cases at least, the greater your foresight the more likely you are to be surprised by the way trends unfold. Let me illustrate this by way of an example. Again some time ago, perhaps twenty years or more, I was attending a public lecture at the then Institution of Electrical Engineers. The speaker opened with a slide image that I had seen many many times before. I remarked on this to a friend sitting next to me, ‘not again’. The image was sufficiently well known that it had a nickname ‘the MIT rings’ (due to Nicolas Negroponte). It illustrated the potential for ‘digital convergence’: the coming together of communications, computing and content (seen as including data networks, television, telephone). Already the point being made seemed hackneyed and obvious.
Now wind forwards. Digital convergence has arrived. It is not a technical possibility, it is an everyday fact. My children rarely, if ever, watch television but browse video fragments and streams on the computer, I use Skype video calling, and listen to the radio on my ipad, just ordinary life. Unconverged technologies are dead or dying.
So what was I doing in the intermediate period between accepting the inevitability of digital convergence and living with the reality? Truthfully, I am not sure. Regrettably, not investing in Skype, YouTube and so on. The worrying thing is that, despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen, I discounted the consequences. Perhaps I had not fully absorbed the inevitability of the change, perhaps I attributed too much significance to the minor ebbs and currents in business, to the incidental features, to recognise the slow progress of a technological tidal wave that would sweep all before it. Or, maybe I simply lost focus.
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