On the other hand, there is a growing widespread recognition that our educational system needs a huge upgrade in quality accompanied by a lowering of costs. And thanks to the internet, we can do just that.
The potential of low cost, high quality online learning is offering us a brand new world which could provide equal educational opportunities for one and all.
Now that great news is something worth pursuing, perhaps even for government bureaucrats, school administrators and teachers unions.
We simply have to embrace the possible, experiment, learn, adapt and thereby create the world class educational system of the future. It's there for the doing, and the U.S. is positioned to do it."
In this new world of education, we won't send students to a local physical school each day for face to face instruction with local teachers. Instead we'll be able to plug in remotely to the world's best teachers. A commute or transit time of virtually zero. And we can provide everyone with that equal educational opportunity which has for so long been elusive. All students will have equal access to the best and the brightest instructors in any particular subject.
Come the Revolution is a most interesting editorial by Thomas Friedman. I hope you find it as thought provoking as I did. In any event, I'm convinced that our education problems are totally soluble if we're willing to try new approaches, learn from them, continuously modify our approach, try again, and so forth. That's nothing more than the scientific method at work.
Here's Friedman:
"Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and
he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive
online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to
revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the
world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be
graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to
get a better job or gain admission to a better school.
“I normally teach 400 students,” Ng explained, but last semester he
taught 100,000 in an online course on machine learning. “To reach that
many students before,” he said, “I would have had to teach my normal
Stanford class for 250 years.”
Welcome to the college education revolution. Big breakthroughs happen
when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. The
costs of getting a college degree have been rising faster than those of
health care, so the need to provide low-cost, quality higher education
is more acute than ever. At the same time, in a knowledge economy,
getting a higher-education degree is more vital than ever. And thanks to
the spread of high-speed wireless technology, high-speed
Internet,
smartphones, Facebook, the cloud and tablet computers, the world has
gone from connected to hyperconnected in just seven years. Finally, a
generation that has grown up on these technologies is increasingly
comfortable learning and interacting with professors through online
platforms.
The combination of all these factors gave birth to Coursera.org, which
launched on April 18, with the backing of Silicon Valley venture funds,
as my colleague John Markoff first reported.
Private companies, like Phoenix, have been offering online degrees for a
fee for years. And schools like M.I.T. and Stanford have been offering
lectures for free online. Coursera is the next step: building an
interactive platform that will allow the best schools in the world to
not only offer a wide range of free course lectures online, but also a
system of testing, grading, student-to-student help and awarding
certificates of completion of a course for under $100. (Sounds like a
good deal. Tuition at the real-life Stanford is over $40,000 a year.)
Coursera is starting with 40 courses online — from computing to the
humanities — offered by professors from Stanford, Princeton, Michigan
and the University of Pennsylvania.
“The universities produce and own the content, and we are the platform
that hosts and streams it,” explained Daphne Koller, a Stanford computer
science professor who founded Coursera with Ng after seeing tens of
thousands of students following their free Stanford lectures online. “We
will also be working with employers to connect students — only with
their consent — with job opportunities that are appropriate to their
newly acquired skills. So, for instance, a biomedical company looking
for someone with programming and computational biology skills might ask
us for students who did well in our courses on cloud computing and
genomics. It is great for employers and employees — and it enables
someone with a less traditional education to get the credentials to open
up these opportunities.”
M.I.T., Harvard and private companies, like Udacity, are creating
similar platforms. In five years this will be a huge industry.
While the lectures are in English, students have been forming study
groups in their own countries to help one another. The biggest
enrollments are from the United States, Britain, Russia, India and
Brazil. “One Iranian student e-mailed to say he found a way to download
the class videos and was burning them onto CDs and circulating them,” Ng
said last Thursday. “We just broke a million enrollments.”
To make learning easier, Coursera chops up its lectures into short
segments and offers online quizzes, which can be auto-graded, to cover
each new idea. It operates on the honor system but is building tools to
reduce cheating.
In each course, students post questions in an online forum for all to
see and then vote questions and answers up and down. “So the most
helpful questions bubble to the top and the bad ones get voted down,” Ng
said. “With 100,000 students, you can log every single question. It is a
huge data mine.”
Also, if a student has a question about that day’s
lecture and it’s morning in Cairo but 3 a.m. at Stanford, no problem.
“There is always someone up somewhere to answer your question” after you
post it, he said. The median response time is 22 minutes.
These top-quality learning platforms could enable budget-strained
community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms. That is,
download the world’s best lecturers on any subject and let their own
professors concentrate on working face-to-face with students. Says
Koller: “It will allow people who lack access to world-class learning —
because of financial, geographic or time constraints — to have an
opportunity to make a better life for themselves and their families.”
When you consider how many problems around the world are attributable to
the lack of education, that is very good news. Let the revolution
begin."
Summing Up
We have the technological wherewithal to quickly revolutionize the educational system in America, top to bottom. From kindergarten through graduate school.
We have the desperate need to do so as well.
And we can do this with a cost reduction of 50% to 75% of current all-in costs.
BUT (There's always a BUT.)
But we have the special interests and government bureaucrats standing squarely in our way.
And the teachers unions, too.
They'll first say no and then they'll say not yet. They'll want to slow play it to the hilt.
However, the future prosperity and success of future American generations is too important to be limited by these parochial interests. Thus, the fight against the status quo is definitely one worth having.
My view is that it's going to be a most interesting and wonderful time to be a student the next few decades.
As the editorial says, "Let the revolution begin."
Thanks. Bob.
