hacking education

eCampus news reports on Yale researchers examine online accreditation: Yale's partnership with tuition-free University of the People will document the hurdles that web-based education must overcome

“Online learning is a relatively new thing for lawmakers, so all countries don't know how to deal with it yet," said Shai Reshef, founder and president of the University of the People, which has 179 students enrolled in its two fields so far: computer science and business administration. "We want to … determine the barriers that we need to overcome to operate." Accreditation for online schools, Reshef added, "is a big issue right now."

Reshef would not say whether University of the People is seeking accreditation through its partnership with Yale's ISP.

The project, he said, would benefit web-based schools worldwide that have struggled to gain acceptance from local and national education officials and legislators.

"Some countries have no problem with it whatsoever," Reshef said, adding that some international education policies require local accreditation before the institution is recognized as a legitimate school. "We want to answer the question: How is online [learning] regulated in other countries? … And who can study [that] better than Yale Law School?"

Inside Higher Ed published this article on how more aid has not yielded more graduates. From the article:

After years of stagnation, the U.S. government has significantly increased its spending on need-based financial aid and is poised to pour billions of dollars more into the Pell Grant Program. The aid is seen both as removing a major hurdle that keeps many students from low-income families out of college and as potentially helping more students stay in college and on track to graduation.

A new study being released today examines the impact that a government's significant infusion of need-based aid had on college enrollment, persistence and graduation of citizens from low-income families. It suggests that the money bolstered access to college and improved students' persistence, but did not increase the proportion of students who graduated within four years.

In the past I have written about how financial aid provides immediate access to higher ed for a select few, in time in expands the demand for higher ed and thus raises the tuition ceiling that universities are able to charge and still find an audience for.  More aid is not the answer (this coming from an scholarship administrator—it still feels good to help the individual, even if it is making the problem worse in time—which is the root of the problem). 

(download)

Click here to download:

More_Aid_More_Graduates.zip (396 KB)

From WSJ Digits:

Students are testing out Amazon.com’s Kindle DX e-book reader device as part of a pilot-program taking place at seven campuses nationwide this fall. But already, some students are expressing their discomfort with the gadgets.

Administrators and professors also say the jury is still out on the device’s academic applications.

Students at Reed College in Portland, Ore., have also had about four weeks to spend with the Kindles. Now some of them have come up with a list of about 10 improvements for the device, including the need for page numbers and easier way for note taking and highlighting, said Martin Ringle, Reed’s chief technology officer.

From an earlier WSJ article:

Proponents tout e-books’ potential to do things that old-fashioned textbooks can’t. Since e-books aren’t printed and don’t need to be sold through physical distributors, they should theoretically be less expensive than regular books and can save students and schools money. What’s more, e-textbooks are environmentally friendly, can lighten backpacks and keep learning materials current.

But the transition has sparked controversy among some educators. They say that digital reading comes with drawbacks, including an expensive starting price for e-book readers and surprisingly high prices for digital textbooks. Also, publishers make e-texts difficult to share and print, and it is unclear how well students will adapt to reading textbooks on a screen, some say. The earliest versions of these devices lack highlighting, note-taking and sharing capabilities, and one leading provider’s e-books expire after several months, meaning they can’t be kept for future reference.

From The Daily Princetonian:

“When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.”

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” [Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy] explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Taken from “The American Scholar” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Books are the for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.  But when the intervals of darkness come, as come they must—when the sun is hid and the stars withdraw their shining—we repair to the lamps which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is.”

“Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading.  Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office—to teach elements. But they can only serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.  Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.  Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.”

A vision I fear we threaten to prove prophetic but hope we yet avail as a precaution headed safely keeping us on our journey to fix the American education.

As a freshman on campus in the Fall of 2002 I stayed awake at night dreaming about how different college could be.  One B. Sc. degree, a two-year service mission, three internships, one corporate job, and two startups later I cannot say how excited it makes me to see headlines like this one: "Yahoo! U".

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.

This article did a good job at distilling down the forces behind this coming change in education, though I don't agree with everything said.

In the future, a handful of Soc. 101 lectures will be videotaped and taught across the United States, and online faculty will administer classes with many students but relatively little individual contact...

The typical 2030 faculty will likely be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments, using recycled syllabi and administering multiple-choice tests from afar.

I believe hacking edu means hacking three things: the professor, the textbook, and the classroom. This is where this article falls shortsided.

• The Textbook. The explosion of ebook readers and online textbooks was actually not even mentioned in this article--fine.
• The Professor.  "The typical 2030 faculty will... be a collection of adjuncts alone in their apartments" and "online faculty will administer classes with many students but relatively little individual contact."  I think that many see things this way--that the emergence of the dominance of online education will bring the student-to-teacher ratio into the tens of thousands and that videotape will kill the radio star.
• The Classroom. Though it doesn't say it outright, this article, like all others, hint at social media being the new classroom.  I think this will both happen and that it is a good thing, but I don't think that it will be the most successful classroom of the future. 

This article correctly identifies that education 2.0 will separate the "class from the college".  It foresees the aggregation of online content that will bring education efficiently to the masses at low costs.  It also correctly identifies that learning is not the only end goal of college and that the role of certification and degrees are at the core of the college's product offering.

Not all colleges will be similarly affected. My bet would be that the more endowed a school and the more its name carries a cultural value independent of its ability to offer a degree, the less likely it is to change. Like the New York Times, the elite schools play a unique role in our society, and so can probably persist with elements of their old revenue model longer than their lesser-known competitors.

This article even correctly identifies that the Harvards of the world play a special role and have a third core product offering--"a cultural value". But where this and other articles are short sided is that they assume students want to learn and that they want a degree and that education 2.0 will revolutionize those two things. This article states that because of the ivys special third product offering--the cultural value--that they will survive longer than most.

Education 2.0 will bring revolution to both learning and certification, but what this article fails to foresee, is the revolution that will come to that third product offering--the cultural value.  That intangible element of networking and social interaction amongst elite sets of peers under the tutelage of pipe-smoking, sweater-vested professors--these articles all seem to think that innovation and the future will come at the cost of that third element. 

But why should it.  People don't really want degrees--they want what degrees yield and what they mean. They yield jobs and they mean status.  They are, for now, a differentiator.  Many entrepreneurs will profit in this revolution that will make a B.A. a commodity open to the masses and online learning the norm, but the real winner is he who can replace and innovate, not inundate, on what the Harvards of the world offer--that third product of higher education--the cultural value.

And that will never happen with adjunct professors alone in their apartments, with little interaction amongst their students.