Where robots fail: Why education can’t just be digital
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
According to this argument, 1500 students from all nations of the earth successfully completing a CS class at Harvard, provided at absolutely no cost to them, is a complete failure.
Meanwhile they don't mention how the schools they represent have programming weeder classes with 900 people enrolled at the start and 100 at the end. This is considered OK since 800 officially dropped the class and the class is supposed to be tough.
Every week, the same argument.
If 90% completed the class the exact same people would write their PR articles claiming that the classes have failed for not being rigorous enough.
No, you are claiming that and saying that that is their standard. It's a straw man, which is a dishonest form of argument. Your arguments here are without merit. If you want to succeed with your tutoring company you need to establish yourself as a reliable and honest person, not someone trotting out absurd self serving arguments attacking other ventures that you incorrectly and very foolishly see as your enemy.
To succeed focus on your product, make it good, and show how it benefits people and is worth paying for. Focusing on these other people instead is a waste of your time and shows that you presently don't understand either what to do to succeed in your own market, or how to run a startup business. You might take what I am saying as criticism, but it is highly targeted and good advice. You should think about it. Ignore it at your own peril.
The enrollment is around 39,000 and I'm sure the completion will be low. People worldwide and of all skill levels are welcome to ignore the prerequisite guidelines and there's no cost to sign up. I bet twenty thousand didn't make it past week one - either discovering how difficult the class is, or losing interest since they only signed up on a whim anyway. This low barrier to entry probably inflates enrollment considerably compared to a traditional school.
There is a human element you did not address in your article. The discussion forum for the class is very active and full of enthusiastic students helping each other, asking questions, sharing resources, posting recordings of their music work, providing suggestions to the Coursera staff about curriculum improvements (many of which have been implemented already.) So it's not all robots.
Being able to do this has been liberating and I suspect many do this.
I dropped one class because I was unimpressed with the professor, although I still want to take the subject.
There are many subjects that I have an interest in, and I might sign up for, but with a low enough threshold of interest I might be inclined to drop unless it is a pretty good class.
In the end I suspect it will help the teachers improve their game, especially if there enough classes that there starts to be some competition.
That said, most people can't even bother to make use of their gym membership, and they are paying hard cash for it.
While Khan Academy might be good today, what I think would help even further is to find the absolute best teachers out there and "capture" the way they teach. Capture all the questions students have and incorporate them into the videos. For example, if there's a video talking about the number PI, the student should be able to pause in the middle of the video and see commonly asked questions and answers about this portion of the video. This also has the great benefit of students being able to go through the material at their own pace. Today teachers have to either leave half the class behind, or spend too much time on the weaker students.
I'm surprised at the negative comments here, I'm guessing there are a lot of education software entrepreneurs who somehow interpreted the article as a swipe at their industry. I thought it was a good counterpoint to the hype around online courses although it was also clearly a plug for another product.
My kids are already growing up with a mix of online and warm-blood teachers. They talk a lot about how they like or dislike this or that teacher and they try very hard to succeed in the classes of the teachers they respect. They use Khan Academy and stuff like that but it's just this thing on the web they can draw on, they have zero emotional connection to it.
Edit: As an example, listen to Feynman talk about anything and everything, and compare that with your average or below average college lecturer. The difference in your understanding is immense. A good teacher helps you build a mental model of the world and gets you excited about it. A bad teacher just regurgitates what the course material says with no real engagement. I wish I could have had Feynman-level lectures on everything from the start, it would have saved me years.
What's the term to describe this logical fallacy whereby you dismiss a valid proposition by quoting something that your opponent has said about something different.
Completion rates and Enrollment numbers are connected but both must be weighed separately when judging online education.
(Also where are the robots :-( )
Then the author cuts MOOCs some slack and says they are hiring TAs and encouraging meetups.
> This is a guest post by Tutorspree CEO Aaron Harris [...]
> a New York-based startup that finds the perfect tutor for every student. > Sal Khan isn’t pushing for his videos to be the final say in teaching.
> They are meant as a gateway to unlock significantly higher rates of
> one-to-one teacher student interaction in the flipped classroom.How's tutorspree any different than sylven?
What was the point of this article again?
Sure, no online educational platform can rival a good teacher in a classroom setting yet, but that's because a good teacher is able to pick up on and respond to a lot more data through a physical interaction (a student's posture, tone, and other social cues) than a computer can online.
That being said, in theory an online education platform should be able to track all that and more. They potentially have access to an incredible amount of data including the exact amount of time a user takes to engage with a lesson, how fast he or she is typing / is able to complete tasks, even the varying levels of difficulty at which different concepts are being learning, etc. This is all stuff that none of the current online education platforms have even tried to do anything with yet.
But to say that an online education platform will never be as good as a teacher in a classroom is like going back to 60s and saying that computer image recognition sucks so we might as well stop trying.
Self promotion doesn't need to attack other good causes. There is a bit in the article about the failing brick & mortar institutions, but that should really be the entire focus. That is the only real story here. Online efforts are scrambling as offline continues to be a clusterfuck.
Enter the MOOC. The content is available, at a level and pace to suit a child. The stay-at-home parent can learn along, providing the child with both guidance and flesh-and-blood encouragement on learning and learning to learn.
I anticipate that MOOC will change the balance in home schooling with a big expansion of the academically motivated aspects.
I would love some more details on this.
A real hacker would think, ok robots don't work yet, how can we make them work.
The title is total bullshit. "Linkbait" is giving it too much credit. "Robots" is a complete head fake, and the article literally says nothing at all about whether or not education can be totally digitally mediated.
The completion-rate issue. First of all, I think we can all agree that completion rate is at least somewhat interesting, and the link to Katy Jordan's piece is useful if you haven't seen it yet. And while I agree it's not a HUGE deal, for the reasons many others have gone over, akharris makes a good point, as follows: The MOOCs opened themselves up to this criticism, because over and over again they post their vanity metrics of enrollments, and compare them to classroom enrollment, and that's crazy. It's like comparing Facebook signups to private plane purchases. If they had been bragging about completion numbers (not ratios, obviously) all along, they'd be fine. Anyway, my point here is that the focus on the completion rates isn't the worst part of this article, it's pretty near the best part.
The next chunk talks about K-12. Obviously most of the MOOCs were never aimed at K-12, so it's an evasion. If you look at the forum conversations or the StackExchange sites or whatever, there are obviously lots of students who are adults from eastern Europe, or Asia (and lots who appear to be middle-class Americans, of course). That's access to education, baby.
The rhetorical deceit here actually enrages me. I might make a perfectly-parallel criticism of Tutorspree: "[Harris's] company states that its mission is connect students with great private tutors. So who is getting those tutors? Certainly not Tamil-speaking children in Sri Lanka." What a stupid argument I just made. Just like akharris's argument, that because 7-year-olds aren't benefiting from Sebastian Thrun's robotics courses, he's therefore not living up to Udacity's lofty mission statement.
And of course, Khan Academy IS improving access to education. Not in some ideal future, but in the present and in the past. Without one-to-one tutoring, which by the way is obviously beyond the budget of, you know, most families (average price for tutors in my Zip: $88/h). So where's your access now? Admittedly Khan requires an internet connection, but $50/month for internet that the whole family can share, plus a $250 computer, sounds better than $88/h to me.
Though it is nice that akharris isn't duplicitous enough to grossly misrepresent Sal Khan's vision for an ideal classroom. Nice work there.
The weird part is that the thesis that he's trying to weave, about the value of human contact and personalized teaching, is kind of a no-brainer. And although I think he overstates the awesomeness of his business, I'm willing to assume it's more part-of-the-solution that part-of-the-problem. So why did he have to stoop to all these dodgy half-truths and misdirections? Maybe he needs to hire a composition tutor.