Contributors
jonathan woahn
david blake
Jailbreaking the Degree
I believe that the future of education is more modular than what we see today. My article, "Jailbreaking the Degree" was published by TechCrunch. Catch it here: Jailbreaking the Degree
Education isn’t all-or-nothing. College and its primary credential, the degree, needn’t be either. The benefit of modern, online education is that the burden of logistics and infrastructure are greatly reduced, allowing for the potential of a fluid, lifelong education model. The problem, to date, is that formal, online education is still being packaged in all-or-nothing degree programs, falsely constraining education innovation. The New Republic writes, “Online for-profit colleges haven’t disrupted the industry because while their business methods are different, their product—traditional credentials in the form of a degree—is not.”
Fix standardized testing
Interesting post from the Washington Post last Friday about the shortcomings of standardized tests.
We often forget that there is nothing fixed or natural about “school” but that, like all institutions, it evolves in response to historical circumstances. In the case of standardized testing, the multiple-choice exam has had an impact far beyond the crisis that inspired it, and a reach and application far beyond what its inventor intended.
Institutions of education should be preparing our kids for their future — not for our past. In the Internet age, we are saddled with an educational system that was designed for the industrial age, modeled on mass production and designed for efficiency, not for high standards. We know that bubble tests address only a quarter of the kinds of knowledge students master in schools. For low-income kids, who have limited resources for college costs and thus little reason to think that their test scores matter to their future, the exams can seem irrelevant. For them, low scores can denote not just a possible lack of knowledge but also a possible lack of motivation to concentrate on the exam. Affluent kids, if they pay enough and take enough test-prep courses, can get higher scores. We are not teaching and testing our students for responsible participation in the interactive digital age.We’re facing a crisis in education today, much like Kelly faced in 1914. The U.S. high school completion rate is dropping slightly in real terms, and dramatically relative to other industrialized nations. But even more serious is the rate at which teachers are leaving the profession. Teacher attrition has increased by more than 50 percent in the past decade, and it is often the best teachers who leave first, many citing the demoralizing testing requirements of No Child Left Behind.
Right now, we have teachers, out of self-preservation and to protect their schools and their students, teaching to a test that was designed in the era of the Model T. We are 15 years into the information age. Now is the time to begin to rethink how we assess learning for the challenges of the digital world that lie ahead. It’s not as simple as filling in the bubbles.
Via Washington Post
A cast of believers. Zinch acquired by Chegg.
As you might know, I was a part of the team that helped to build Zinch over the last three years. Today Zinch announced their acquisition to Chegg.
The early days at Zinch are some of the best memories of my life. I joined Zinch in June 2008 after having flown out to Utah unannounced, taking Zinch founders Mick, Brad and Sid to lunch, and pitching them on the fact that they needed financial aid in the Zinch equation. They bit.
The Zinch founders have taught me what it means to be an entrepreneur. They are more than a little crazy, tenacious, scrappy, unrelenting, more than a little crazy, naive, have a vision, believe whatever they set out to do they can achieve, passionate, and more than a little crazy. They are the real deal and will turn whatever they touch into startup gold.
Late 2008 we recruited Anne Dwane to be CEO. Without Anne, Zinch would be a different story. How grateful, I and the many others, are to her in guiding us to our success. Anne taught me what it means to lead. When she took over the reigns of the company, the average age of Zinch employees was like 15. It was a young and passionate group who had yet to earn any stripes. She taught us everything worth knowing and built the company at great personal dedication and sacrifice.
But what startup life has taught me is that in those earliest days it cannot be done without a cast many believers. No entrepreneur has ever succeeded alone.
As the lore goes Cache Merrill was the first person to up and quit their job and bet on Mick's idea for a network connecting students directly with admission officers (that idea seems so natural now but this is in the days when unless you were a college student you didn't know what Facebook was).
Than Hancock has more stories from the earliest days of Zinch than maybe anyone else, as he led the first and largest department of Zinch--sales. They faced selling a new company, in a market that had yet to be proven (social media), to some of the most conservative and hardest to sell-in-to institutions in the world--America's premiere colleges. It was hairy and Than charged through it. Than is a believer and Zinch is in his blood (mixed with some cougar blue).
And at the end of the day, it is Al Wild, who literally built Zinch. It was his code that brought the beast to life. Al is one of those people talented enough to do whatever he wants and Zinch owes Al great thanks for letting that "whatever" be Zinch.
As Mick and Brad have detailed on their blogs there were moments were Zinch was dead and without the faith and belief of many others it couldn't have made it back to fight another day, including our great angel and venture investors as well as industry advocates like Brad Ward and partners like Kevin Ladd and others.
Anne has lived by the adage hire the best people, which we all strive to do, but her differentiating success has been what she does with those people. Anne recruited and empowered the likes of Tom Melcher, Chris McCarthy, Heather Rader, and Jon Assayag whose talents have shaped Zinch into what it is.
For my personal success at Zinch I owe David Parkinson, Marisa Leavitt, Drew Hales, Sean Castillo, Kawai Goodman, Farrah Moore, Mike Bou, and Emily Chien an enormous thank you.
Zinch gave me the privilege of working with these amazing mentors, leaders, and friends. Cheers and congrats to the team!
Still waiting for the Wikipedia University
“I’m just waiting for a Wikipedia University, with high-quality, online, open-source courses provided by a variety of different people. Or the moment when someone like Bill Gates creates Superstar University, finding the best professors for the 200 courses that a good liberal arts college offers, and paying them $25,000 each to put their classes online.”
- Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
via NYTimes.com
Mozilla badges reminiscent of Boy Scouts
How do you incentivize a bunch of young boys to pursue learning about their "civic duties" or "CPR"? Provide them with visible, tangible representations of their individuals merits - a Merit Badge. Mozilla is pushing to develop a more visible badge system to represent knowledge and skills in a similar way, but for tangible, personal skills. Stay tuned for further developments.
For decades badges have represented achievement in children’s and youth associations and in some professions. Religious pilgrims receive badges for their journeys.
Becket-pilgrim-badge open licensed by Wikipedia
Recently computer games have awarded badges for skill and success. Judd Antin and Elizabeth Churchill examine the psychology of the use of badges to encourage interaction in social media in this well-researched and well-written paper: Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective.
Badges reward the knowledge and skill required to demonstrate achievement.
The Mozilla Foundation badge program seeks to open education by replacing the current system of limited admissions, high costs, and sometimes artificial demonstrations of learning with recognition of evidence-based learning open to all learners. The issuing of badges will also be open to organizations of many types. Rigorous criteria and solid evidence will be encouraged. Ultimately employers and established educational institutions will recognize those badges and badge-holders that demonstrate value. The Mozilla Foundation will provide the infrastructure to automate issuing and earning badges. The initial pilot of Mozilla Badges is now in operation with the Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) School of Webcraft. Additional pilots will occur this Fall and the system will go live in 2012.
Chegg finds a competitor for the "whole education lifecycle"
About the "Baked In" series: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg likes to say that social dynamics are going to work their way into every industry, and the companies of the future will be the ones that bake them in from the beginning, rather than slapping them on as an afterthought. This series takes a look at companies that are discovering new opportunities by using social components in the foundations of their businesses. Remember studying for the GMATs? Or AP Biology? Or even English 101 your freshman year? How about poring through those old textbooks and every now and then wishing you had a buddy close by you could ask for help on the parts that befuddled you? BenchPrep is making that happen. The Chicago-based startup, backed by Lightbank (whose founders bankrolled Groupon), has been digitizing test prep materials for the last two years. But it’s not just making your SAT or MCAT textbooks more portable. It’s also adding social features that act as a real-time virtual study groups to get you the help you need when you need it. “We take the flat content and enhance it by adding interaction and social conversations,” cofounder Ashish Rangenkar tells Fast Company. Also in the works: leaderboards for practice tests. The materials BenchPrep provides--which they get from established content providers like McGraw Hill and Wiley--already include interactive quizes that users can take to test their knowledge. Ultimately, BenchPrep plans to make it possible to form groups--whether of your own friends, for example, or everyone at your university--so you can see how you’re doing relative to others. “You might get a 7 out of 10 on a test. But is that good? Or is it bad?” Rangenkar says. “You don’t know unless you know how everyone else is doing.”
Among the features: The ability to ask questions of other people studying the same textbook as you--whether they’re in the library next door or halfway around the world. You can also add notes or even append YouTube videos to various parts of the texts and share your additions with other learners.
via Fast Company
The future of education... 100 years ago
In an article from Ladies Home Journal circa. 1900, headlined, “What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years” author, one John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., lays out his predictions for the American life in the early 21st century.
Here’s what he says on education:
A university education will be free to every man and woman. Several great national universities will have been established. Children will study a simple English grammar adapted to simplified English, and not copied after the Latin. Time will be saved by grouping like studies. Poor students will be given free board, free clothing and free books if ambitious and actually unable to meet their school and college expenses. Medical inspectors regularly visiting the public schools will furnish poor children with free eyeglasses, free dentistry, and free medical attention of every kind. The very poor will, when necessary, get free rides to and from school and free lunches between sessions. In vacation time, poor children will be taken on trips to various parts of the world. Etiquette and housekeeping will be important studies in the public schools.
Debt fears drive US youth away from college
By Hal Weitzman via FT.com
The cost of higher education in the US has soared in recent decades while median incomes have stagnated, pushing college increasingly further from the grasp of many Americans and limiting social mobility. Three-quarters of US repondents to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center said college was now too expensive for most Americans.
In the past decade, tuition rates at public universities have risen 5.6 per cent a year above inflation, while fees at private college have increased by 3 per cent a year, the College Board says.
The faster acceleration in fees at public universities is highly significant for those on median incomes. For students from wealthy backgrounds, college may still be affordable. Moreover, thanks to handsome endowment funds, colleges such as Harvard and Yale can afford to give generous financial aid to able-but-needy students.
However, public universities – many of which have been forced to raise fees in recent years because of dwindling support from cash-strapped states – have much less ability to offer financial assistance, even though they are now starting to charge fees comparable with their private-sector peers.
The increase in fees has not stemmed demand for higher education. Applications rose during the downturn, as more Americans deferred the search for scarce jobs and took the opportunity to get training – with what traditionally has been good reason. College graduates generally receive bigger salaries, on average earning $20,000 more a year than workers without higher education, according to the Census Bureau. That translates into career earnings of $1.4m for a worker with a bachelor’s degree – almost twice the $770,000 a non-college graduate can expect, according to Pew.
But there are signs that part of the equation is changing.
Average starting salaries for college graduates fell sharply in the downturn, from $30,000 in 2006-2008 to $27,000 in 2009-2010, according to Rutgers University research. And the combination of rising graduate debtloads and falling starting pay has renewed a debate in the US about whether college is still worth it.
Laurence Kotlikoff, an economist at Boston College, argues that if you take into consideration the higher income taxes that college graduates pay and the years of earnings they forgo while studying, a university education is less lucrative than it can seem.
The renewed debate has yielded some new initiatives.
The Thiel Foundation, an organisation set up by Peter Thiel, a libertarian venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, the online payments hub, established a fellowship this year that offered 20 teenagers $100,000 each if they dropped out of college and pursued entrepreneurship instead.
One recipient, Dale Stephenson, 19, left university in Arkansas three months ago after becoming frustrated with the over-theoretical nature of his classes. He now lives in San Francisco, is working on a technology start-up and is promoting the social movement “UnCollege”, which is trying to change the notion that college is the only way to prosper. “College shouldn’t be the only path to success,” he says. “There’s a value in university. It teaches you how to follow directions and meet deadlines and work in groups. But it shouldn’t be the only way we learn.”
Jim O’Neill, head of the Thiel Foundation, sees a crisis in the making. “It’s very similar to what happened with housing,” he says. “Over the past 60 years, owning a house became part of the American Dream. People were told: ‘buy a house, don’t worry about the price, you’ll earn it all back later.’ Now it’s the same thing with college.”
