Continuations: The Web and Education: We Need Scale!
alexgrodd
· 3 months ago
This is absolutely right--there is no other industry where knowledge and content are so tragically disaggregated. This makes it extremely cumbersome for everyone in the ecosystem--teachers, students, parents, admins--to find and share high-quality information and practices. Aggregation is the answer, and the traditional education business models--create a big enterprise product, navigate arcane district sales cycles, and serve a walled-off community of educators and students--will never get us there. The solution lies in an open platform and unprecedented scale.
We've got a long way to go, but we're working hard to get there :)
albert
· 3 months ago
Alex - thanks for the comment. Keep up the great work with BetterLesson!
BillSeitz
· 3 months ago
I'm not sure what this "platform" is offering beyond the web itself? Consistent structured reviews/ratings?
albert
· 3 months ago
That's one of the great mysteries of the Web. What does Craigslist add to the web? We have not yet figured out how to truly distribute some of these things but I don't think we know what aspects of centralization are critical.
kevinprentiss
· 3 months ago
While the basic learner structure could be the same, K-12 and college will have different adoption patterns. My experience is at the college level.
At the college level, Google apps seem to have the best crack at scale already - offering a free version of a utility (email) that is well understood by colleges. They have the student profiles, and they got them with an (expensive and slow) enterprise sale. Google will have a substantial additional challenge, however, introducing any new features that are not well understood - and that would include anything disruptive.
Just getting students to use google reader will be tricky - they essentially have to train/coerce students, faculty, or both. This can be done, Blackboard has been training and pushing for 10 years, but it is an expensive behavioral change.
With our hackedu / college software, we initially launched with a freemium model and found it lacking. After changing to more traditional SaaS, I have a client portfolio that is half paid, at various levels, and half freemium. This simple fact sticks out: the schools that have paid the most have the highest adoption and the greatest organizational change. They are also the happiest customers.
This pattern is similar to students themselves. Where money spent is an expression of motivation and commitment.
There are already wonderful free education resources out there, getting students to use them is expensive.
I completely agree that we have all the technology we need (with a few refinements). Much of it is open source. The technology is not the hard part.
I'm not sure, however, based on my experience, that free is the answer for scale.
I'd be happy to race. Let's just experiment. I'll set up an opensource .org, like wordpress, with my software. The gates foundation can fund a few folks to give it away.
I will continue with my current model and sell a hosted / supported version of my product to the same market. We can just see, in one year, who has more scale.
albert
· 3 months ago
I am not sure about the linkage between payment and engagement. It seems to me that engagement is more a function of the experience itself. Most students for instance hate the Blackboard experience.
kevinprentiss
· 3 months ago
When students pay for a class themselves, they pay more attention.
But they don't pay for Blackboard.
Blackboard's fees simply create institutional engagement. This does not automatically translate into student engagement, but it does translate into student scale. Just like most faculty teach in a manner most efficient for them and the school, not in a way that engages the students.
So for hackedu/ web disruption, the title could be "We need scale and engagement," because they are separate, though very symbiotic. Scale creates network effects that deliver both social and content (whatever-you-are-looking-for) relevancy.Relevancy is an important factor in creating engagement.
Facebook has scale and engagement, just no educational component.
Delicious has high engagement with a comparatively small base, but no scale with college students. It's free and powerfully educational. (An RSS feed of the best content in whatever you care about!) College students just don't know about it or get it when they visit.
Blackboard has scale and educational components. Those components are not learner centered, thus very little engagement, and massive school coercion is needed maintain the scale with faculty and students. (Blackboard is also technically clunky, so we can't dismiss the tech challenge entirely.)
I don't want to replicate the Blackboard experience/ engagement level, just the Blackboard scale.
I want my software positioned like a good professor - paid by the college, scale provided by the college, and then delivered in a student centered manner that creates engagement.
It might not work of course, but so far it's worlds better than my experience with free.
albert
· 3 months ago
You are absolutely right that engagement is critical also. I would argue that no site can achieve the scale that I am talking about if it doesn't have engagement. So in a way engagement is a pre-condition for achieving and definitely for sustaining scale.
phillipbaker
· 3 months ago
Very interesting. On one side, free services attract engaged users through self-selection and there is no limit on scale. On the other, enterprise users are not self-selected and I'd guess only a small percentage are engaged but they are pre-grouped for scale purposes, bound together by educational institutions. In the second case, payment serves as a filter to identify engaged users. Does that sound accurate? I'm trying to get my head around the structural problem.
In a re-imagined world, do you think it would be possible to start by creating a Facebook (free service with self-selected and therefore engaged users) for education that attracts students directly, and then charge colleges to connect or take ownership of their students in some way?
I've been running a group-based social learning site at BYU for the past year and have seen really magic things happen in the different learning groups once members reach 100+. I've realized it's not fancy features that make the site work, it's just convincing enough classes/students to join and participate. Once there's a critical mass, conversations take off.
Like you said, most of the time and money here is spent on buying/building advanced instructional technology -- which seems a waste to me. The most valuable instructional technology I've used at college was a simple mailing list a programming professor setup for us to use. The site I run was built mostly by me (a student researcher) and on open-source technology.
Connections with other students and teachers are what's valuable, not the content. A scalable platform to make that happen on a university and multi-university level would be hugely valuable.
albert
· 3 months ago
That is an awesome quote!
ujjwalg
· 3 months ago
I agree with you completely. Education is still very expensive and there is no technologically scalable solution good for the end users in the market. The barrier to entry is very high, and probably one of the reasons not many startups are trying to disrupt this.
Adrian Ionel
· 3 months ago
Yes, this is an area where enormous value can be created. And scale/openness/ease of use are key.
kidmercury
· 3 months ago
gates foundation makes tons of investments (which they refuse to talk about when questioned) in irresponsible companies, and are part of a larger eugenics agenda.
regarding education on the web, in my opinion the killer app is a bulletin board. ask the SEO community, an entire niche of people educated in an entirely new discipline (that is rapidly evolving and developing sub-disciplines) primarily through bulletin boards. FREE bulletin boards, of course. also proves to be scalable, as i doubt there are more than 10 or 20 SEO bulletin boards that have served to educate many independent search marketers.
albert
· 3 months ago
So I took the time to check out these links and they contain basically no information, only unsubstantiated allegations and retreads of old canards (e.g. about Planned Parenthood). I consider it a shame that these obscure your excellent comment on the role of bulletin boards, which are indeed a key source of online learning.
kidmercury
· 3 months ago
lol, first let me commend you albert for responding to my comment and addressing this controversial issue!
to address your rebuttal:
1. the links i drop are not the only pieces of evidence, but rather convenient ones that tell part of the story. all are encouraged to do their own research into the subject. the eugenics issue in particular requires much research, if we are still living in ignorance of 9/11 it will be hard to get to the truth of eugenics.
2. moreover, you did not address the testimony of the whistleblower in the link to the interview i mentioned. i hope next time you choose to say my comments have "no information" and contain "unsubstantiated allegations" that you will choose to substantiate those allegations of yours, else i will be left with no recourse but to note the hypocrisy.
3. for those wishing to learn the truth about the eugenics agenda, and the involvement of the bill and melinda gates foundation in enabling it, i would strongly recommend watching the movie endgame, directed by alex jones, available for free on google video. internet video is a remarkable educational tool, and has helped the 9/11 truth movement educate millions. something to consider when we ask ourselves how to make education scalable.
4. regarding planned parenthood, that is a front for the eugenics agenda. i know that sounds preposterous to many, but much of this stuff will be hard to believe without other conspiratorial knowledge. 9/11 truth is the simplest gateway. anyway, as just a small piece of evidence regarding planned parenthood, consider the words and nature of margaret sanger, founder of planned parenthood. here are some quotes.
5. the carbon scam is also a part of the eugenics agenda, as an investor in amee this is psychologically impossible for you to accept, so your comments on this matter must be noted as such -- doubly so when you, your colleagues, and the team at amee (a company claiming we are all going to die unless we reduce carbon emissions) refuses to address the numerous points i have raised here, on fred's blog, and in tweets with @agentgav, let alone provide any evidence justifying their acronym on their site.
personally i consider it a shame albert that your business and technological brilliance is obscured by your unwillingness to educate yourself in many of the subjects i've posted (not just this one, which is admittedly harder to accept for those uninitiated in the immense field of hidden knowledge the web is here to give us). perhaps when you consider how to remove this self-imposed barrier which so many, like you, are imposing upon themselves, you will find how to make education scalable. the 9/11 truth movement has already found the solution, so rest assured you will be in good company once you find it.
albert
· 3 months ago
Yup - should have known better than to respond to your first comment!
Nick Oliva
· 3 months ago
I agree that there are huge benefits of operating at scale... when you know enough to be able to discern the value of alternatives, i.e., once you already have an "education".
When I talk to teachers, I don't get a feeling that what they really want is more options or new methods. I'm "old school" in the literal sense... I like simplicity in education until one gets to a particular age. We just began sending our 18-month old to a Montessori school here in Manhattan. From what I understand of the method, I'd be surprised if for the much older kids they're really anxious to integrate anything that comes out of the Web.
My initial reaction to your post was... "Scary!" I love the prospects for the development of "knowledge" among the already "educated". Teachers have a difficult enough job without technologists or philanthropists adding to the governmental usurpers of their responsibilities. As with all technological advances, there's a long period of disruption and pain before the "safety belts" are invented. I would love to see the work in this area proceed slowly from the top of the education chain down instead of at all levels at the same time.
Of course... I don't follow this topic that closely and I may be missing something... or mine could be the typical response of a skeptical parent... the "soccer dad".
albert
· 3 months ago
I think innovation will start outside of the existing school system and then flow back in. Of course Maria Montessori herself is an example of that. Her first implementation was in a school for the poor and then she started her own school instead of trying to influence existing schools. Btw, our youngest went to a Montessori school and loved it!
Nick Oliva
· 3 months ago
Great... my wife gets all the credit for picking the school. I spent a couple of half days there this week as part of the transition and I'm really happy with it.
Geoff
· 3 months ago
Great thoughts! Education is a field whose time is nigh with respect to widespread distribution online. There are some sites going already (Peer2Peer University, AcademicEarth, Open Courseware, iTunesU).
Where I disagree with you is on the missing link. I think the missing link is Accreditation (and/or Designation).
Having the content widely available is awesome! It's fully positive. The downside is that I could take every course MIT has to offer (free online) and I would still have no greater earning power in the job market. In my view, the earning power associated with a degree and with particular schools needs to be considered.
I'm all for learning just for the sake of learning. I'm a self-professed content-hound; however, I also see the REAL effect that some silly piece of paper can have on someone's life. I didn't goto Harvard, therefore I don't work on Wall Street "earning" millions of dollars a year.
albert
· 3 months ago
Agree that's a huge hurdle, but it's changing too. I will write a separate post on how and why I believe that will change -- it has to do with how much easier it is becoming to actually leave a trail of one's capabilities.
Andrei Vorobiev
· 3 months ago
Albert,
Did the Gates people talk to you about the "Lumiar" school concept that is promoted by Brazilian billionaire Ricardo Semler and supported them? There are three such schools in Brazil. It is kind of Montessori on steroids – with staff curators but not teachers, where kinds choose whatever the heck interests them. Turns out they also answer standardized tests better than students from the best traditional schools who are often “taught for the test.”
The Microsoft develops course materials for the school (I presume they are online available) and the scale of course taking there might be a way for them eventually to re-coup the investment, unless they donate it all.
albert
· 3 months ago
No they did not mention it. I have heard of Semler (there is a Harvard Business School case study on him that I used to teach) but not of the schools. Will look them up.
Andrei Vorobiev
· 3 months ago
Albert,
Can you recall, at least in approximate terms, at what point in time (year) that HBS case on Semler ends the story about him and Semco SA? I am kind of curious.
I guess you've been away from Sloan for a while... Because Semler was teaching there several years ago. From what I gather he did it for a couple of semesters while finishing his second book (even better than the first.)
The article is indeed relevant, although as a former university prof I predicted the death of so-so universities since last century (and ended up being wrong.) The richness of experience in residence schools ("fidelity") vs. price & convenience of online ed, dubbed "the fidelity swap" may predict something, but it is hard to know when those predictions will come true. I think the recognition of online colleges/schools will come to the fore when a significant portion of HR officers among most employers will themselves be grads of UofPhoenix, DeVry etc. For, the traditional schools will continue to deny the cheaper and more convenient competition any accreditative legitimacy for a long, long time.
My two cents.
albert
· 3 months ago
Agree that this will be a slow process as it builds up -- much like starting to get news online was initially a slow process. Also agree that accreditation will be the last thing to be widely available online, but when it comes (and it will at least in some fields) the rate of change will still surprise the old schools.
albert
· 3 months ago
Good article -- thanks for the link!
markschroeder
· 3 months ago
Albert, thanks for engaging the community on these extremely important questions. I have had experience teaching at the K-12 level and the university level, have home schooled and road schooled my two daughters, and founded two of the early e-learning companies back in the mid and late 90s. Two quick thoughts: 1) we need to advance the use of technology with the appropriate pedagogy. Online courses today are very similar to what they were ten years ago. 2)Equally important is the human capital aspect of learning -- for good or for bad, most learning is goal directed: it helps one get a job, perform a task, etc. Thus, as noted in the posts, the issue of accreditation is critical, but also the placement of individuals in positions where they can use their skill sets.....
albert
· 3 months ago
Completely agree with the first thought. We are still very much in the stage of copying offline experiences instead of creating native online experiences -- much like early TV was effectively filmed radio. The second thought is one on which I have the biggest worry for now. It seems that the restructuring of the job market (where the opportunities are) is occurring at a far faster pace than what we are telling students they should learn. Ken Robinson makes a great point about that in his much watched TED speech and in his book.
markschroeder
· 3 months ago
Yes, the Ken Robinson speech was great, and humorous to boot! His thoughts synch quite well with Gardner's work on multiple intelligence. While most schools simply do not have the capacity-capability to filter students based on intelligence type, the web does, and indeed this becomes one (though not the only) of the critical search filters in a new pedagogy....
All Comments
We've got a long way to go, but we're working hard to get there :)
At the college level, Google apps seem to have the best crack at scale already - offering a free version of a utility (email) that is well understood by colleges. They have the student profiles, and they got them with an (expensive and slow) enterprise sale. Google will have a substantial additional challenge, however, introducing any new features that are not well understood - and that would include anything disruptive.
Just getting students to use google reader will be tricky - they essentially have to train/coerce students, faculty, or both. This can be done, Blackboard has been training and pushing for 10 years, but it is an expensive behavioral change.
With our hackedu / college software, we initially launched with a freemium model and found it lacking. After changing to more traditional SaaS, I have a client portfolio that is half paid, at various levels, and half freemium. This simple fact sticks out: the schools that have paid the most have the highest adoption and the greatest organizational change. They are also the happiest customers.
This pattern is similar to students themselves. Where money spent is an expression of motivation and commitment.
There are already wonderful free education resources out there, getting students to use them is expensive.
I completely agree that we have all the technology we need (with a few refinements). Much of it is open source. The technology is not the hard part.
I'm not sure, however, based on my experience, that free is the answer for scale.
I'd be happy to race. Let's just experiment. I'll set up an opensource .org, like wordpress, with my software. The gates foundation can fund a few folks to give it away.
I will continue with my current model and sell a hosted / supported version of my product to the same market. We can just see, in one year, who has more scale.
But they don't pay for Blackboard.
Blackboard's fees simply create institutional engagement. This does not automatically translate into student engagement, but it does translate into student scale. Just like most faculty teach in a manner most efficient for them and the school, not in a way that engages the students.
So for hackedu/ web disruption, the title could be "We need scale and engagement," because they are separate, though very symbiotic. Scale creates network effects that deliver both social and content (whatever-you-are-looking-for) relevancy.Relevancy is an important factor in creating engagement.
Facebook has scale and engagement, just no educational component.
Delicious has high engagement with a comparatively small base, but no scale with college students. It's free and powerfully educational. (An RSS feed of the best content in whatever you care about!) College students just don't know about it or get it when they visit.
Blackboard has scale and educational components. Those components are not learner centered, thus very little engagement, and massive school coercion is needed maintain the scale with faculty and students. (Blackboard is also technically clunky, so we can't dismiss the tech challenge entirely.)
I don't want to replicate the Blackboard experience/ engagement level, just the Blackboard scale.
I want my software positioned like a good professor - paid by the college, scale provided by the college, and then delivered in a student centered manner that creates engagement.
It might not work of course, but so far it's worlds better than my experience with free.
In a re-imagined world, do you think it would be possible to start by creating a Facebook (free service with self-selected and therefore engaged users) for education that attracts students directly, and then charge colleges to connect or take ownership of their students in some way?
I've been running a group-based social learning site at BYU for the past year and have seen really magic things happen in the different learning groups once members reach 100+. I've realized it's not fancy features that make the site work, it's just convincing enough classes/students to join and participate. Once there's a critical mass, conversations take off.
Like you said, most of the time and money here is spent on buying/building advanced instructional technology -- which seems a waste to me. The most valuable instructional technology I've used at college was a simple mailing list a programming professor setup for us to use. The site I run was built mostly by me (a student researcher) and on open-source technology.
Connections with other students and teachers are what's valuable, not the content. A scalable platform to make that happen on a university and multi-university level would be hugely valuable.
http://www.truth-it.net/gates_foundation_fundin...
whistleblower who worked for gates foundation goes public: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=alex+jone...
regarding education on the web, in my opinion the killer app is a bulletin board. ask the SEO community, an entire niche of people educated in an entirely new discipline (that is rapidly evolving and developing sub-disciplines) primarily through bulletin boards. FREE bulletin boards, of course. also proves to be scalable, as i doubt there are more than 10 or 20 SEO bulletin boards that have served to educate many independent search marketers.
to address your rebuttal:
1. the links i drop are not the only pieces of evidence, but rather convenient ones that tell part of the story. all are encouraged to do their own research into the subject. the eugenics issue in particular requires much research, if we are still living in ignorance of 9/11 it will be hard to get to the truth of eugenics.
2. moreover, you did not address the testimony of the whistleblower in the link to the interview i mentioned. i hope next time you choose to say my comments have "no information" and contain "unsubstantiated allegations" that you will choose to substantiate those allegations of yours, else i will be left with no recourse but to note the hypocrisy.
3. for those wishing to learn the truth about the eugenics agenda, and the involvement of the bill and melinda gates foundation in enabling it, i would strongly recommend watching the movie endgame, directed by alex jones, available for free on google video. internet video is a remarkable educational tool, and has helped the 9/11 truth movement educate millions. something to consider when we ask ourselves how to make education scalable.
4. regarding planned parenthood, that is a front for the eugenics agenda. i know that sounds preposterous to many, but much of this stuff will be hard to believe without other conspiratorial knowledge. 9/11 truth is the simplest gateway. anyway, as just a small piece of evidence regarding planned parenthood, consider the words and nature of margaret sanger, founder of planned parenthood. here are some quotes.
5. the carbon scam is also a part of the eugenics agenda, as an investor in amee this is psychologically impossible for you to accept, so your comments on this matter must be noted as such -- doubly so when you, your colleagues, and the team at amee (a company claiming we are all going to die unless we reduce carbon emissions) refuses to address the numerous points i have raised here, on fred's blog, and in tweets with @agentgav, let alone provide any evidence justifying their acronym on their site.
personally i consider it a shame albert that your business and technological brilliance is obscured by your unwillingness to educate yourself in many of the subjects i've posted (not just this one, which is admittedly harder to accept for those uninitiated in the immense field of hidden knowledge the web is here to give us). perhaps when you consider how to remove this self-imposed barrier which so many, like you, are imposing upon themselves, you will find how to make education scalable. the 9/11 truth movement has already found the solution, so rest assured you will be in good company once you find it.
When I talk to teachers, I don't get a feeling that what they really want is more options or new methods. I'm "old school" in the literal sense... I like simplicity in education until one gets to a particular age. We just began sending our 18-month old to a Montessori school here in Manhattan. From what I understand of the method, I'd be surprised if for the much older kids they're really anxious to integrate anything that comes out of the Web.
My initial reaction to your post was... "Scary!" I love the prospects for the development of "knowledge" among the already "educated". Teachers have a difficult enough job without technologists or philanthropists adding to the governmental usurpers of their responsibilities. As with all technological advances, there's a long period of disruption and pain before the "safety belts" are invented. I would love to see the work in this area proceed slowly from the top of the education chain down instead of at all levels at the same time.
Of course... I don't follow this topic that closely and I may be missing something... or mine could be the typical response of a skeptical parent... the "soccer dad".
Where I disagree with you is on the missing link. I think the missing link is Accreditation (and/or Designation).
Having the content widely available is awesome! It's fully positive. The downside is that I could take every course MIT has to offer (free online) and I would still have no greater earning power in the job market. In my view, the earning power associated with a degree and with particular schools needs to be considered.
I'm all for learning just for the sake of learning. I'm a self-professed content-hound; however, I also see the REAL effect that some silly piece of paper can have on someone's life. I didn't goto Harvard, therefore I don't work on Wall Street "earning" millions of dollars a year.
Did the Gates people talk to you about the "Lumiar" school concept that is promoted by Brazilian billionaire Ricardo Semler and supported them? There are three such schools in Brazil. It is kind of Montessori on steroids – with staff curators but not teachers, where kinds choose whatever the heck interests them. Turns out they also answer standardized tests better than students from the best traditional schools who are often “taught for the test.”
The Microsoft develops course materials for the school (I presume they are online available) and the scale of course taking there might be a way for them eventually to re-coup the investment, unless they donate it all.
Can you recall, at least in approximate terms, at what point in time (year) that HBS case on Semler ends the story about him and Semco SA? I am kind of curious.
On his Lumiar school, Semler's own video presentation about it is available here.
http://leighbureau.com/speaker_documents.asp?vi...
And one of the YouTube clips below even shows it. Sorry, I forgot which one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJkOPxJCN1w;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXXpTDl_65M&feat...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU.
I guess you've been away from Sloan for a while... Because Semler was teaching there several years ago. From what I gather he did it for a couple of semesters while finishing his second book (even better than the first.)
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/...
The article is indeed relevant, although as a former university prof I predicted the death of so-so universities since last century (and ended up being wrong.) The richness of experience in residence schools ("fidelity") vs. price & convenience of online ed, dubbed "the fidelity swap" may predict something, but it is hard to know when those predictions will come true. I think the recognition of online colleges/schools will come to the fore when a significant portion of HR officers among most employers will themselves be grads of UofPhoenix, DeVry etc. For, the traditional schools will continue to deny the cheaper and more convenient competition any accreditative legitimacy for a long, long time.
My two cents.
synch quite well with Gardner's work on multiple intelligence. While most schools simply do not have the capacity-capability to filter students based on intelligence type,
the web does, and indeed this becomes one (though not the only) of the critical search filters in a new pedagogy....