

Anticipating a Blended Classroom Boom Led by Education Startups - 2arrs2ells
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/31/blended-classroom-boom-education-startups/#

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programminggeek
The trickiest part of making the next generation of education is not the
actual educating part. It's going to be accreditation and/or making the degree
mean something. Anyone can read all the books and do all the exercises to have
the equivalent education to a degree, but that is not the same as having the
"piece of paper" so to speak.

Building and maintaining a reputation of an outstanding education program
takes a long time potentially. However, some lessons could probably be learned
from building something like YCombinator, where it went from basically
nothing, to the "it" startup incubator, to being copied 100 times by every
angel investment/incubator group under the sun. Going from zero credibility to
industry wide credibility likely takes a lot of factors such as luck, timing,
etc.

The next generation of education will need to create some "hits" or
"rockstars" or whatever the right term might be as far as having some
incredibly smart, talented people go through whatever the program is and go on
to achieve some outstanding things.

If the next generation of education startups is going to be just teaching
average skills to average people to fill average jobs, it won't work.

Like, teaching everybody Javascript is a good idea, but if that's the next
generation, it's not going to make a dent in traditional education as an
industry.

