
The Siege of Academe: Silicon Valley's fight to disrupt higher education - joshuahedlund
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2012/features/_its_three_oclock_in039373.php?page=all
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It's still hard to predict how well these efforts will work, but I've rarely
seen a domain more ripe for reform than undergraduate education.

If there's a riper one, it would be K-12 education. That's the really big
prize, measured both by how much room there is for improvement and the forces
arrayed against you. But if you're feeling heroic here's the place to go:
<http://imaginek12.com>.

~~~
yequalsx
In some sense Gutenberg ought to have obviated the need for the lecture format
in college but it didn't. Radio didn't, television didn't and I suspect the
internet won't either. At least not for the majority of students.

I've been teaching online math classes for 7 years now and those classes
almost always perform much worse than face-to-face classes. I suspect that the
reform that will come will be more in the form of enhancing face-to-face
classes and not replacing them. Maybe more flipped classroom style reform. For
all of it's perceived badness the lecture format is remarkably resilient in
that it's better for the average student than any of the current proposals
that I've seen or experimented with.

Disclaimer: I'm an average teacher (below average?) and much of my opinion
comes from personal, anecdotal experience.

~~~
alberich
Maybe that is because face-to-face classes offer a richer experience for the
students. Also, it doesn't feel so boring when someone is talking to you (e.g.
watching a video on the computer screen is not the same as a person talking to
you). Although you can record live lectures and replay it afterwards for
online classes, I feel it requires a higher level of motivation for the
students to watch it and actually pay attention to it.

Of course highly motivated students can fill the gaps alone and don't need
this extra motivation from a dedicated instructor in the room. For the rest, I
guess face-to-face classes will be the best for a long time.

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danteembermage
I think the silver bullet will be when you can sit down with your own personal
Watson have it socratic method you. A really good teacher can find the
boundary of understanding and push students to think at near maximum capacity
by carefully asking questions just out of their intellectual reach. I think
that's the power of lecture and I don't think we're too far from replicating
it (50 years maybe?)

Clearly when we have human level AI you can just use those, but depending on
energy efficiency and cost of power that may take much longer to be cost
effective, even after we have them.

~~~
jerf
"sit down with your own personal Watson"... "I think that's the power of
lecture"

This does not follow. The virtue of a lecture can not be that you are getting
personalized optimal Socratic dialog. Only a couple of people in the audience
can be getting that at a time.

Optimal Socratic teaching will probably never disappear, but I'm still not
hearing a lot of defenses of lectures _qua_ lectures that still don't
generally boil down to "It was good enough for me, it's good enough for them".

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stephengillie
A week after I graduated, I was walking across campus. I watched as my tuition
dollars (and others) paid for a team of workers to hoist an entire 60-year-old
house, drop it onto a large frame, drive it about 200 feet, and plop the house
onto an empty lawn. Just so another building could be built at the old
location.

In the 3 years since I graduated, I've watched my university move 2 buildings,
demolish and replace 5 dorm buildings (half of the university's dorm
capacity), and massively expand their stadium.

I watched as the school's president approved all of these expenditures, then
watched him leave to head the NCAA as students rallied about the cost of
tuition, which has doubled in the past 3 years.

~~~
tymekpavel
To be fair, capital improvement projects usually don't come from student
tuition. But I get where you're coming from.

~~~
adestefan
This is one of those times I wouldn't hesitate to use the word "never." These
projects are done either by dedicated funds that wealthy donors direct the
money to, via government grants that can only be used for that purpose, or out
of their endowment that comes from the combination of the above.

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brudgers
University of Phoenix already disrupted higher education. Half a billion in
net income last year, the ability to raise money on Wall Street, and full
accreditation give it significant clout. 300,000 students doesn't hurt,
either.

It's not the technology that's the barrier to entry. UoP primarily uses NNTP
for it's classes. Pull technology allows for 24 hour delivery and flexible
schedules for adjunct its largely faculty.

In my opinion, the big competition in online higher education could come from
institutions able to outsource faculty positions to the same parts of the
world to which call centers are often outsourced.

~~~
jff
A University of Phoenix degree isn't worth much, though.

~~~
patmcguire
Right. I get annoyed by articles like this because they get so excited by the
technology and the product itself that they ignore the basic issue with Higher
Ed - it's not in the business of education, it's in the business of signaling.

I did undergrad at Columbia, a supposedly "elite" institution, and it was a
joke. Classes weren't what I would describe as educational - a better image
would be some big corporate bureaucratic job where the solution to every
problem is obvious but you have to spend a lot of time time figuring out just
how, precisely, to flatter your superiors. Maybe if you're being cynical you
could say that's the best education you can get, but I wasn't impressed.

What Columbia does give, and what apparently holds a lot of water, is an semi-
official grant of being Better Than Everyone Else. It's ridiculous that kids
who learned nothing are rented out by consulting firms for a quarter million a
year to come into a company they have no familiarity with and have all the
answers to everything, but they get away with it because they're Better Than
Everyone Else. Of course a piece of paper doesn't make you competent, and the
compiler doesn't care where you went to school, but there are so many times
you rely on someone else's positive appraisal of you (hiring, funding) that
brand name has a massive impact. It's turtles all the way down, too. The
University of Illinois is more prestigious than Illinois State, but who
actually knows which is better at teaching?

The current problem with higher ed is that for most purposes in the current
economy it just functions as a class system. You're the kind of person who
went to an Ivy League schol, you get this kind of job. You're the kind of
person who went to flagship state school? You can't get that job, but you can
get another that's no so bad. You went to University of Phoenix? Let me tell
you about this one weird trick housewives are using to make money from home.

Education is a secondary concern right now.

~~~
shurane
The courses you took in a University hold merit in the system. Other people in
University can evaluate you better by knowing which classes you pass or fail,
because they know the difficulty of said classes. It works well in a closed
system. But if you ask someone who hasn't even been to the school to evaluate
a student, how are they. supposed do it? Yet so many people do when they hire
out of college.

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fscof
"While the [Minerva] courses will be conducted primarily online, students will
live together in shared housing units in cities around the world. They’ll
start in their home country and then rotate to different cities in later
years, finishing with a capstone project in their chosen major."

I'm a huge fan of this approach. A clear advantage of university education is
the network of awesome people you meet while attending. I've learned way more
from working and conversing with smart people than I ever did in classes.

Excited to see how their experiment turns out.

