SeekerBlog

Another terrific essay from Clay on pushback by the academy. Excerpts:

(…) Bustillos’ answers seem to be that in the world of higher education, things are going fine, mostly, and that the parts that aren’t going fine can largely be fixed with tax dollars. (Because if there’s one group you’d pin your hopes for an American renaissance on, it would be state legislators.) I have a different answer: School is broken and everyone knows it.

(…) If you want to know what college is actually like in this country, forget Swarthmore, with 1500 students. Think Houston Community College, with 63,000. Think rolling admissions. Think commuter school. Think older. Think poorer. Think child-rearing, part-time, night class. Think 50% dropout rates. Think two-year degree. (Except don’t call it that, because most graduates take longer than two years to complete it. If they complete it.)

(…) In the academy, we’re fine with anything that lowers the cost of education. We love those kinds of changes. But when someone threatens to lower the price, well, then we start behaving like Teamsters in tweed.

* * *

I’ve been thinking about the effects of the internet for a couple of decades now. I’ve watched industry after industry forced to renegotiate their methods and models, in the face of a medium that allows for perfect copying, global distribution, zero incremental cost, ridiculously easy group-forming: The music business. Newspapers. Travel agents. Publishers. Hotel owners. And while watching, I’ve always wondered what I’d do when my turn came.

And now here it is. And it turns out my job is to tell you not to trust us when we claim that there’s something sacred and irreplaceable about what we academics do. What we do is run institutions whose only rationale—whose only excuse for existing—is to make people smarter.

Sometimes we try to make ourselves smarter. We call that research. Sometimes we try to make our peers smarter. We call that publishing. Sometimes we try to make our students smarter. We call that teaching. And that’s it. That’s all there is. These are important jobs for sure, and they are hard jobs at times, but they’re not magic. And neither are we.

(…) For all our good will, college in the U.S. has gotten worse for nearly everyone who relies on us. For some students—millions of them—the institutions in which they enroll are more reliable producers of debt than education. This has happened on our watch.

The competition from upstart organizations will make things worse for many of us. (I like the experiments we’ve got going at NYU, but I don’t fantasize that we’ll be unscathed.) After two decades of watching, though, I also know that that’s how these changes go. No industry has ever organized an orderly sharing of power with newcomers, no matter how interesting or valuable their ideas are, unless under mortal threat.

Instead, like every threatened profession, I see my peers arguing that we, uniquely, deserve a permanent bulwark against insurgents, that we must be left in charge of our destiny, or society will suffer the consequences. Even the record store clerks tried that argument, back in the day. In the academy, we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of practice at making people smarter, but it’s not obvious that we have the best ideas, and it is obvious that we don’t have all the ideas. For us to behave as if we have—or should have—a monopoly on educating adults is just ridiculous.

I guess the concept of online learning has arrived – the NY Times has a feature dated Nov 2, 2012. It is a useful survey of the landscape of the MOOC startups. Here’s a fragment on Udacity, job placement: 

(…) Udacity has stuck close to its math and computer science roots and emphasizes applied learning, like “How to Build a Blog” or “Building a Web Browser.” Job placement is part of the Udacity package. “The type of skills taught in computer science, even at elite universities, can be very theoretical,” Dr. Stavens explains.

Udacity courses are designed and produced in-house or with companies like Google and Microsoft. In a poke at its university-based competition, Dr. Stavens says they pick instructors not because of their academic research, as universities do, but because of how they teach. “We reject about 98 percent of faculty who want to teach with us,” he says. “Just because a person is the world’s most famous economist doesn’t mean they are the best person to teach the subject.” Dr. Stavens sees a day when MOOCs will disrupt how faculty are attracted, trained and paid, with the most popular “compensated like a TV actor or a movie actor.” He adds that “students will want to learn from whoever is the best teacher.”

That means you don’t need a Ph.D. While there are traditional academics like David Evans of the University of Virginia, “Landmarks in Physics,” a first-year college-level course, is taught by Andy Brown, a 2009 M.I.T. graduate with a B.S. in physics. “We think the future of education is guys like Andy Brown who produce the most fun,” Dr. Stavens says. Mr. Brown’s course is an indie version of “Bill Nye the Science Guy” — filmed in Italy, the Netherlands and England, with opening credits for “director of photography” and “second camera and editor.”

Whether explaining what the ancients believed about the shape of the earth or, in Dr. Thrun’s statistics course, why you are unpopular, statistically speaking, voice-overs are as nonthreatening as a grade school teacher.

“You feel like you are sitting next to someone and they are tutoring you,” says Jacqueline Spiegel, a mother of three from New Rochelle, N.Y., with a master’s in computer science from Columbia who has enrolled in MOOCs from Udacity and Coursera. While taking “Artificial Intelligence,” she discovered she liked puzzling through assignments in online study groups.

Student feedback through brief, frequent quizzes depends upon an ability to assess the student responses. Correct answers on a math quiz are easier to verify than principals testing in say political economy. This is just one of the many innovation zones:

EdX’s M.I.T. roots show in its staff’s geeky passion for building and testing online tools. They collect your clicks. Feedback from the MOOC taught last spring by Dr. Agarwal (who, students learn, is obsessed with chain saws) revealed that participants would rather watch a hand writing an equation or sentence on paper than stare at the same paper with writing already on it.

The focus is on making education logical. “Someone who is consuming the course should know it is not serendipity that the course is chunked in a certain way, but that there is intentionality to sequencing video,” says Howard A. Lurie, vice president for content development.

With mini-notebook in hand, he has been leading the “daily stand-up” meeting (so called because attendees lean against walls) to keep course development on schedule. After one meeting, Lyla Fischer, a 2011 M.I.T. graduate and edX fellow, sat at her computer, a tag still dangling from the chair, and edited the answers for problem sets in Dr. Agarwal’s course. Last spring, students could download PDFs with brief answers. Now, she says, “there is a full explanation of how to do it, here are the steps,” right on the site.

“We are trying to use the magic of all the tool sets we have,” Mr. Lurie says. Students control how fast they watch lectures. Some like to go at nearly double the speed; others want to slow down and replay. Coming: If you get a wrong answer, the software figures out where you went wrong and offers a correction.

WORKING OUT THE KINKS

Assignments that can’t be scored by an automated grader are pushing MOOC providers to get creative, especially in courses that involve writing and analysis. Coursera uses peer grading: submit an assignment and five people grade it; in turn, you grade five assignments.

Check it out – the price is right! 

This is a possible end-run around the traditional credentialing monopoly. E.g., if Google finds that the student data available through Udacity or Coursera is very predictive of employee performance, then that is the basis for a happy partnership between employer and educator. Udacity in particular is focused upon innovating ways to improve the acquisition of true competence in each subject they offer (not just demonstrating the ability to cram for finals to earn the typical university diploma).

(…) On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. 

(…) Udacity’s founder, Sebastian Thrun, said in an interview that 350 partner companies had signed up for its job program. While Mr. Thrun would not say how much employers pay, he characterized the fee as “significantly less than you’d pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you’d pay for access to LinkedIn,” a popular social network for job hunters.

“We’re more like a headhunter,” said Mr. Thrun. “We go through our database and find people that seem to be good matches for the openings from these companies.” Udacity says companies using its job-matching program include Google, Amazon, Facebook, and several tech start-ups.

In the case of one computer-science course offered through Udacity, the online students took the same quizzes and tests as a group of students enrolled at Stanford University at the same time. The top 411 students all came from the thousands of students who took the course online, with the strongest-performing Stanford student ranking 412th in the final standings, said Mr. Thrun. (That Stanford student earned a 98-percent score in the course.)

“There are a huge number of people out there who are extremely skilled but happen not to have the Stanford degree,” said Mr. Thrun.

(…) One Udacity student, Tamir Duberstein, said that company’s job program had helped him land a gig at Square, a trendy company that lets consumers submit credit-card payments using smartphones and tablet computers. He was living in Toronto, working at a job he didn’t enjoy, when he took a series of computer-programming courses from Udacity, spending nearly all of his free time on them. “I got the best possible result in a few of them,” he said.

One day this past summer, Udacity sent him an e-mail asking whether he’d be interested in sending in his résumé as part of its job service. “Once your résumé is received, it will be prescreened and possibly shared with a few selected employers with your permission,” the message said.

He sent his in, but didn’t expect much. “I was like, What the hell, sure, why not?,” he remembers.

A few weeks later, he heard first from one tech company and then from Square.

Mr. Duberstein said that the job-interview process included plenty of technical questions asking him to prove he had the skills that he had learned in the Udacity courses. “The point here is not credentialing,” he said. “They quizzed me. They really were assessing what I know for themselves.”

Both Coursera and Udacity show employers more than just student grades. They also highlight students who frequently help others in discussion forums.

Mr. Thrun, of Udacity, said those “softer skills” are often more useful to employers than raw academic performance.

“Problems are never solved in isolation in the real world,” he said. He said that Udacity might share with an employer someone who has helped 90 to 100 people in discussion forums. “That specific skill has been a better predictor of placement success than academic performance,” he added.

Mr. Ng, of Coursera, reported a similar trend. And frequently the top-performing students also post the most valuable comments in student forums, as counted by how many students “vote up” a comment, or signal that it was helpful by clicking a thumbs-up button. “Students in the top 10 percent had twice as many up-voted posts in the student forums as the students not in the top 10 percent,” he said.

(…) 

I think we are going to see ferocious competition, and hence innovation, in the MOOC universe. Education has never experienced anything like the rate of innovation that is just beginning. 

BTW, looks like Coursera is going after one of the obvious monetization channels – fees for completion certificates. I.e., the education can be free, but the credentials will cost. I have not problem at all with that model — the marginal cost of delivering high quality learning is so much lower for the MOOCs that the certificate fees should be totally a bargain compared to Stanford tuition, fees, etc.

Mr. Ng said that the largest source of revenue will probably come from selling certificates, rather than such matching. So far the company has not charged for certificates, but it plans to start doing so in the coming months.

The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.

In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail. Even when it’s true. Especially when it’s true. 

Clay Shirky recently published a wide-angle perspective on the disruption of higher education by MOOCs: Napster, Udacity, and the Academy. To set the stage, Shirky cites the recent history of the music industry:

“our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.”

If you’ve not been studying the rapid evolution of free online education, then Shirky offers an excellent introduction. If you have been following MOOCs closely, then I suggest you go straight to the Shirky blog — Clay has some angles that you may not have thought of.

One area that needs a lot more discussion is how credentialing is going to work, and the acceptance thereof by employers. Personally, I think the learning part of higher education is going to benefit enormously from the blossoming of efforts like Coursera and Udacity. This is true even for the lucky few who can afford to give up four+ productive income-earning years while they borrow or spend $250,000+ to attend Stanford, MIT or Oxford. That’s because the MOOCs offer a very effective laboratory for learning about learning while experimenting with new learning modalities. If you spend a bit of time reading the Kahn Academy and Udacity blogs you’ll see that they have an intense focus on learning how students learn and what facilitators are effective.

But the most important payoff will not be collected until Google or Rand Corp. accept and respect demonstrated competence from successful MOOC students. Udacity is advancing on this front. E.g., they are partnering with Pearson on testing. Further, Udacity is channeling high-accomplishment students to employers. Both for fees. Education is free if you work at it. The benefits of what you have learned will cost a little bit. And employers will pay their share.

I’m optimistic that demonstrated competence will gain stature relative to elite school degrees. Just thinking about the tech industry, the vast majority of the thousands of new engineers needed are going to have to come from the median college – not just the elite schools.

Those that forecast MOOCs diminishing the power  of the elites are likely to be proven wrong. The elite schools will continue to deliver the signaling and peer grouping benefits. For those with the bucks — the elite schools will continue to be a shortcut to the yellow brick road. But what really matters to the economy and to the next generation, is how the median college performs — how much competence a college graduate buys for their investment.

I also recognize that education methods have not fundamentally changed in hundreds—possibly even thousands—of years. The core learning structure has always been and remains one teacher and a limited number of students. This structure reduces learning opportunities for much of the world’s population (even in first-world countries) and limits the impact of the best educators to no more than a few dozen lucky individuals a year.

But it doesn’t have to continue like this. From a business perspective, this is a supply and demand problem in that the demand for quality education is not being met by an adequate supply of learning opportunities. From a technology perspective, this is a problem that can now be solved with software. From a societal perspective, there should be alarm bells going off for everyone that this is an issue that requires our boldest ideas and brightest minds.

And that’s why we’re so excited to announce our investment in Udacity, a team and company that we’re absolutely convinced will change the world. We believe the next big disruptive trend in software will focus on education and we feel that this is the team that will lead the way.

Let’s start with what Udacity does. By leveraging the economics of the Internet, Udacity aims to democratize education by delivering world-class coursework to hundreds of thousands of students everywhere. There’s no doubt that online learning will radically shift the economics of education.  Udacity has the magic formula because they are combining their platform with their content to make learning highly interactive, targeted and instantly available to students around the world.

….

Read the whole thing.

Sal Kahn’s 2012 comment address at Rice University was memorable — and not just because we are both Rice grads. You will not the regret seventeen minutes of your time to see what he had to say. The Rice University news has a brief summary of Kahn’s remarks. Excerpts: 

Commencement speaker Salman Khan’s address to the graduates focused on contributions of a different kind: He urged the students to do everything they can to “increase the net happiness in the world.”

(…) Khan offered an example of how a Rice grad had made a difference in his own life. In 2009, he quit his job as a hedge fund analyst to devote his energy to building Khan Academy online. For months, he struggled to find support until Ann Doerr ’75, a Rice alumna, gave him the financial backing he needed to get Khan Academy up and running.

Doerr, an environmental activist, and her husband, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Rice alum John Doerr ’73, have made generous contributions to Rice, as well. A $15 million gift from their Beneficus Foundation in 2010 established the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, and John Doerr was the university’s commencement speaker in 2007.

Ann Doerr’s belief in Khan – and her willingness to show her support – was crucial, Khan said.

“Obviously the money was a good deal,” he said. “But the real power of what Ann did was that act of empowerment, that act of validation.”

His advice for the graduates was to do the same thing – to support and validate others who do good things, even in small ways.

“Don’t just sit by and observe it,” Khan said. “Recognize it. When you do that, all sorts of things are going to start percolating in the universe.”

(…) Fifty years from now, Khan told the graduates, they’ll have regrets – “we’ll all have them.” He urged them to try “a little thought experiment”: Imagine, he said, that 50 years from now a genie gives you a chance to go back in time, take you “right here, to May 2012.” He urged the graduates to live now as if it were their “second pass” through life.

“I am truly honored and humbled to be here,” Khan told the Class of 2012, “just completely excited by what you all are going to do in your ‘second pass.’”

(…) 

It is challenging just to keep up with the pace of education innovation. The number of players keeps increasing too: Kahn Academy, Udacity, now take a look at Showme.com who have developed an easy-to-use iPad app so you can create your own “Sal Kahn like” video+audio+whiteboard segments.

Learning and teaching made simple

ShowMe is an open learning community where you can teach or learn anything. Watch great lessons for free, or create your own with the iPad app.

The free iPad app and free website are beta, but seem to work fine in my testing. The website is an essential part of the solution – that is where you host your library of Showmes!