The Siege of Academe: Silicon Valley's fight to disrupt higher education | Hacker News Reader

The Siege of Academe: Silicon Valley's fight to disrupt higher education

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63 pointsjoshuahedlund46 comments

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.

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.

Do you have any opinions on the "student's desire to learn" factor of online vs offline classes you've taught? I suspect that many online colleges might attract students looking for something "easy" and potentially more likely not to try as hard. I wonder how your experience would compare with one of coursersas math classes, eg stats or probabilistic graphical models, particularly counting only students who attempted to actually finish the class.

Possibly more information than you wanted. I teach at a community college. Typically people think of Stanford or Large State University when they think of higher education. Around 1/3 of all higher education students are community college students. The smaller, regional state universities make up a large portion too.

The last part of your last sentence caught my attention. We don't measure only the students who actually finished the class. Anyone who is registered after the drop/add period is counted in the statistics. A student who drops my class next week (this is the first week of class at my college) is counted as a failure on my part.

Now at my college I'm dealing with a segment of the population that the big universities don't deal with. Two-thirds of our students place into pre-college math classes. Tonight is the first day of class for my elementary algebra class. It's at the 8th - 9th grade level. The class is a blended one. It meets once a week in person and is online the rest of the time.

My experience is that 60% of the students took this class because it doesn't meet as often as the face-to-face sections and therefore they think it is easier. The remaining 40% took it out of time necessity. Their life situation is such that they need more flexibility on when/where they learn. Around 30% of the class will pass with little to no active help on my part. 50% will fail and 20% will pass due partially to my efforts.

I have devised a model for higher education that incorporates MOOCs and retains the need for teachers; though fewer of them. In my talks with the Office of the Chancellor several years ago there was no interest in pursuing my ideas. I do believe higher education is going to evolve but I don't think MOOCs alone are the way to go.

No, that's good info, thanks for writing it up.

Speaking for myself, I did city college then transferred to UC. The difference in the quality of education was minimal, but the difference in the quality of the students was pretty significant. Even then, there were many very intelligent people who could get good grades but seemed to be going through the motions and learning at a pretty superficial level.

I think there are a few things that benefit a society as a whole: roads/power/infrastructure, fire/police depts, arguably healthcare, arguably a standing military, others--I think education is definitely one of those. Education can mean different things to different people, but I tend to think of it as the ability to efficiently obtain the information/expertise necessary to pursue large goals.

For example, if I want to build a new kind of car, there's all kinds of stuff I need to learn. Traditionally, I might go to a university known for doing good car research and I might learn enough to get a degree. The knowledge I've acquired in the pursuit of this degree does not necessarily represent the optimal knowledge mix for achieving my goals. Therefore, I've always viewed 'school' in general as a subpar use of my time--probably why I did so crappy in school. Instead, I've been interested in the minimum viable education needed to achieve my specific goals. This doesn't mean a superficial study of the topics, it means narrowing the focus to the areas that are key for accomplishing specific goals.

MOOCs seem to be a great way to do this--a happy medium between a linear education and random internet research. An additional benefit is that it can bring high quality education to the whole world for little to no marginal cost. Like I said, I think education lifts all boats, and this applies to educating the world as a whole also. The world will still need teachers, but it will be less of them, as you suggest.

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.

There is something about that interaction, boring though it may be, that is better than online courses. Some students will benefit from MOOCs but a large majority of the students won't.

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.

"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".

Turning alberich's observation, I would say that to date online education has provided a poorer experience than live lectures. But I think we are at the point where online can become a richer experience. IIRC Salman Kahn thinks that online should be the rich exploratory experience and live face time should be for tailored help.

I got my undergraduate degree at Harvard. We had some master showmen whose cadence I can still recall 40 years later. We also had graduate student section leaders whose grasp of English and basic teaching were below the minimum for communication.

I think we are at the point, or nearly so, that we can create engaging avatars to communicate effectively with students, and I dont mean just read a script. Sure you could have a lecture about ancient Rome, but wouldnt it be much more effective to have a guided tour?

it does feel boring though when a lecturer is also talking to 30 or more other people at the same time with little to no actual interaction with the class

> 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.

Interesting perspective! I'm not sure I want to agree, but thanks for sharing.

One of my friends, a particular smart one, always said: "Not only is a book a better teacher, it also has more character."

And I generally agree. Very few classes, even at top universities can compete with a well written book.

Its hard for me to tell, how effective a "book only" education would be when I spend most of my life getting degrees, accompanied with lectures. The few home schooled people I know are very knowledgable and smart but I'm not sure if that proofs anything.

Thank you for your response. I strongly disagree with the notion that the book only approach is efficacious. Very, very few people learn through this method. If it was effective I think a lot more people would go this route instead of through university. In 500 years or so of books being cheap they never even once came close to disrupting the lecture format.

I'm not sure that books were so cheap in the last 500 years. Many people didn't even know how to read back then. Or did they? Besides, it is questionable how many of those books of 500 years ago were good books for learning.

One most presume that the books were cheap, analphabetism were very low, and most books were truly good for the common people to understand it. I'm not sure this situation was entirely true :)

Ultimately, I think you hit the nail on the head.

This isn't a problem that can be solved with technology alone. It's a social issue, and one that technology can certainly assist in solving.

I wasn't talking about the format so much as e.g. the rate at which college tuition has risen relative to inflation, and the consequent bloat at universities.

I'm not sure how much of an effect a startup can have in this area, though.

This is much more a political and social issue than technological. Startups like Khan Academy can certainly change the way that people are taught and how they learn, but they aren't equipped to change tuition costs.

If you really want to change that, start a PAC and start pressuring elected officials. That's where change will happen.

They're most likely to do it by creating alternatives to the traditional college degree.

We have private colleges and universities. They are in competition with each other. Market forces should already be in place, driving efficiency and driving down the cost of a college degree.

IMO, the elephant in the room is credentialing. Khan Academy needs accreditation similar to (or identical to) that conferred upon universities. Alternatively, it needs to sponsor or build competency and credentialing standards. Students who earn these credentials, or demonstrate these competencies, can prove themselves to be "college educated" in a given topic.

College is still considered necessary, and often irreplaceable, because many job markets demand it. They need to see some sort of accepted credential on an applicant's resume. If we move away from credentials, and toward demonstrated skills and competencies, we can remove the stigma that the job market still associates with self-teaching and internet learning.

We all know that a credential on a resume is no guarantee that the credential holder is competent. So the side benefit of a move from credentials to competencies would be the burden of proof. People able to prove their competencies would not necessarily need credentials, and people hiding behind credentials would be forced to prove themselves competent.

Maybe the competency proof is the secret sauce for a higher-education disrupting change.

I wonder if the angle to attack this is already starting to show-up, with things like HackerSchool or the LivingSocial-created Hungry Academy training program . . . essentially, those are somewhat grass-roots efforts that could circumvent the default credential process.

Heck, maybe a staffing company could provide employees on a trial basis with some type of satisfaction-guaranteed offer.

In the article, Degreed is one of the companies trying to tackle that. I haven't looked into them, but it's an angle.

I've talked quite a bit with the folks at Degreed and have been impressed. I really REALLY hope what they are aiming for succeeds.

Hi! Teacher from http://devbootcamp.com, here. :)

A startup can have a huge impact in this area, speaking from experience.

Thank you for this clarification. It's hard for me to wrap my head around focusing the latter without focusing on the former. I tend to think bloat will be taken care of through economic pressures. That is, tuition will reach a point where students demand a removal of the bloat. However, at places like community colleges there isn't much bloat.

I do agree that there is room for some disruption but I don't see there being room enough for someone to reach Paypal size. But I'm biased. My own ideas for disruption have not panned out and this possibly clouds my judgment.

EDIT: One thing for people to consider is that Google has mostly made access to knowledge and information free. They haven't mastered how to make learning mostly free but they nailed the information part. As far as I can tell Coursera is Google light plus letting people the pace and sequence of topics. Indeed, isn't this, from an information point of view, essentially what school is? Can the learning part be done with far fewer people (fewer teachers)? I don't know.

Coursea is creating content, Google, with exceptions, isn't.

Is Coursera really creating content or are they being subsidize via either already created content or by the universities that support the professors making the content?

Tailoring the class into 2-5 minute videos and designing interactive questions and programming tasks should count as creation of new content in my opinion.

Besides, when a professor writes a book, based on a lecture they are paid to give, the university does not get a share from the royalties either, as far as I know.

I'm a grad student in English at the University of Arizona, and one thing I've observed is that many if not most of my students probably could learn much of what they learn in my class if they were extremely motivated. But most of us aren't, and class provides a pre-binding incentive structure to actually do something, where the default would probably be to do nothing, or hang out on FB or HN, which is close to nothing.

I've written about this issue in more detail here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/from-the-department... and elsewhere.

People have said that college in its conventional structure will remain essential right up to the point where middle-class families can't afford it any longer, and I have a feeling we're reaching that point. If you'd like to know more about why, check out Why Does College Cost So Much? Tl;dnr: Baumol's Cost Disease combined with student loans (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/01997445...).

I will look at your links when I have time. My initial reaction to what you wrote is to look to history. Before the 20th century college was expensive and rare. It's costs were very much out of the range of the middle class. Perhaps we will revert to the historical mean of university being for the rich, the bright, and the highly motivated.

I'm not sure that a middle class family has ever been able to afford sending their children to college. The vast boom of post-secondary education was created by the government with the enactment of the GI Bill and then continued via the manipulation of student loan interest rates.

Yes. The huge thing that almost all discussions about online education miss or deny is how much of teaching is motivating students. This is true to varying extents across the socioeconomic spectrum. I believe we as humans are hard wired to feel more strongly about people we are physically near on a regular basis. And nothing online can replace that. I am willing to be proven wrong by this, but I would take most seriously those opinions of people who have a lot (a decade or more) of experience teaching both online and in person.

Keep in mind where universities and lectures come from: they are ex cathedra, literally. Gutenberg and Martin Luther are the ones who obviated the need for the "lecture format" and yet Catholicism still stands, only incrementally changed from those many centuries ago.

The lecture format is necessary for reasons that have only indirectly to do with education: it's about power structure and power flow. The more deeply I've looked into education reform, the more strongly I feel that the necessary reform can't be isolated to education. It simply can't be "fixed" without dealing with the weight of centuries attached to it.

When you look at education, you're looking at a societal concept of what a child is. Our concept is that a child is something to be lectured. How could we then not have lectures? (And yes, I am a fan of Montessori.)

I heard basically the same thing yesterday from the former head of Uruguay's Chamber of Commerce (who happens to be from the IT industry)(1).

And that, even though my country is already thought of as progressive (first 100% OLPC deployment, etc...)

I guess the thought is gathering momentum, I hope that startups finally get those barriers to crumble. Education still has a 19th century mindset in several points.

(1) Mr. Arnaldo G. Castro ( http://www.cncs.com.uy/softis/A/cl/2 )

Even if the efforts of Coursera, Kahn Academy, etc "fail" and the incumbent universities are unscathed and continue raising prices, I would still consider them a huge success for as long as they are able to continue operations. School credentials aside, the education itself is very valuable. While education may not be the thing people most want out of school, it's definitely true that these companies are building something that people want... something I want, at least.

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.

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

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.

I'll offer an opposing anecdote. While I was at Georgia Tech (2002-2007) I noticed continuous improvements/investments into the campus and student resources. It was great.

Many of these actions are a consequence of the tax code: non-profit institutions such as universities can borrow for capital projects at the municipal rate and invest at the market rate (the latter is usually higher than the former). Most university have ample endowment for these capital "improvements," but this quirk of the tax code effectively subsidized a bit too much of it.

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.

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

It has significantly than CodeAcademy in general and within the typical workplace it is adequate for HR purposes.

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.

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.

"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.

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