Decentralizing education: how startups are dismantling the university
October 8, 2012 by Dale J. Stephens
(Credit: iStockphoto)
Dale J. Stephens leads UnCollege, the social movement changing the notion that college is the only path to success. His first book, Hacking Your Education, will be published by Penguin in 2013. Also see the three related posts today (below).
Student/teacher interaction
“What about student/teacher interaction? What about building a social and professional network? How can you get a job without a degree? How will you know you’re succeeding without grades?”
Every seasoned supporter of self-directed education has faced questions like this. If you haven’t yet, you will. Trust me. People often have a hard time understanding how certain elements of education can flourish outside of classrooms. Homeschoolers and unschoolers have found creative solutions — cooperative classes for varying subjects, speech and debate leagues, field trip groups — that decentralize and expand the learning experience.
But what about higher education? Can all the benefits that society associates with traditional higher education be provided and even exceeded with non-traditional methods? The purpose of this post is to look at how startups are doing just that.
UnCollege has written posts with an in-depth look at specific startups, such as Udacity, but here we’re going to take a high-level approach and see how the startup community is providing benefits that traditional higher education institutions claim to have a monopoly on. We’ll do this by focusing on their solutions for content delivery, social interaction, professional feedback, and certification.
Content delivery
If you’ve been following trends in higher education at all, the idea that universities don’t have an edge on content delivery won’t be surprising to you. Institutionalized-ed says that students should learn in a way that allows them to successfully regurgitate information via testing and exams.
Decentralized education says let the student learn in a way that allows them to master the information, not just regurgitate it.. The content is the part of the university that has become most decentralized – it started more than 10 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare and has continued from there.
- Code School is all about not just learning but creation.. Students have a chance to learn and then implement their knowledge throughout the course, so that upon completion the student not only has a workable knowledge of the material, but also the tools to apply it in the real world.
- Udacity emphasizes mastery learning to make sure that students have multiple attempts to demonstrate their new knowledge and only move on when they have completely mastered a subject.
While the content exists, one problem that hasn’t yet been solved is curation — when exploring the Internet, how do you find learning content?. And more importantly, what is good and true?. Startups like LearningJar.com or Learnist are starting to make headway in this area but it’s still a very young space.
Building a community
Campus settings give students the benefit of socializing and networking with other students and teachers. Startups take on this challenge in a variety of ways.
- Livemocha is an online language learning platform. Cultivating a community of language-learners is an important part of their model. They provide a stimulating and safe environment for students to practice their skills with native speakers or tutors.
- Meetup.com is an online network of local groups. You can start or find a group in your area with a huge variety of interests — everything from languages to dancing to education to politics, and lots in between. Udacity even has meetup groups in 292 cities where students can interact and supplement their courses.
- The Open University offers 600+ online courses. They have student forums where students can share and discuss any topics of interest to them.
- Hoot.me lets you convert facebook into study mode to connect with students and tutors around the world.
- Openstudy.com is a social learning network where students can ask questions, give help, and connect to other students studying the same subject.
It’s easy to see that startups actually have the potential to connect students to a much wider network than is available on campus. Students are able to communicate with other students and teachers all around the world, and can also access face-to-face groups using meetup.com. However, this space is still very young.. I envision a day where you can pull out your iPhone, open an app, and walk down to your local coffee shop for a class discussion.
Feedback
Feedback in this case is any way for a student to track and interpret his or her progress. Most non-institutional courses don’t involve grades. How can students evaluate their knowledge?
- Livemocha students receive instant feedback through their interaction with native speakers and tutors.
- Udacity has quizzes built into their videos to ensure that you are understanding the material along the way. There are also problem sets but both quizzes and problem sets are optional and are meant to enhance your learning. Also they offer final exams at the end of the course.
- Code Hero has interactive exercises built into their courses that students must successfully complete before moving on. This allows the students to know they’ve mastered the content before moving on.
In reality, the feedback loop in non-traditional courses tends to be much shorter and more meaningful than a traditional grading system. Students are able to keep a much closer track of their progress, and the feedback is generally more effective. Correction from a native speaker is far more beneficial than an A to F grade on a language exam. Review from multiple sources is much more beneficial than a grade from one instructor.
One problem in the feedback system that has not been addressed is the role of mentoring and coaching traditionally provided by a teacher.. Companies like Clarity.fm are starting to work towards a solution on this but are a long ways from ubiquity.
Certification
This is a big one. Most people would argue that taking online courses that don’t confer college credit is not a very smart move. After all, credits lead to degrees. All employers are looking for degrees, right? That discussion is for another time, but startups are providing records and certifications in a variety of ways.
- Smarterer allows you to take tests in order to prove your skills in a wide span of subjects — from facebook to CSS to English for Business. You can share your scores, and recruiters can even evaluate candidates by comparing Smarterer scores.
- Udacity will give students’ resumes to over 20 partner companies. Their course certifications are recognized by major technology companies who are actively recruiting from the Udacity student body.
- edX, a joint venture between MIT and Harvard, is awarding certificates to students who show a mastery of the subject of their course.
- Coursera offers a certificate of completion for some of their courses.
- Code Hero awards badges when a course is completed.
All these certifications can be compiled into an online or hard copy portfolio. This portfolio can function as your education transcript for personal use or to provide to future employers. Alternatively, it is also possible to take free courses and then take an exam to receive college credit in those subjects.
Comments (12)
by Katherine MacLean (old science fiction writer and research fan
Repetition does not work for me. Verbal directions to remember later do not come back in memory when I need them. The way I learned things was by trying to do something I admired other people for doing, following the steps in the action, usually out of sequence and some done wrong, and stubbornly correcting and repeating each step until I got the right results.. I learned slide rule and basic chemistry and followed and assisted a skilled engineer. The routine of doing and producing had me at age 15 doing quality inspection of intake ingredients at a food factory, adjusting the treatment and cooking to standardize the flavor and texture and secure that the sterility is kept total. This is known as quality control and my skill was watched by the rich executives and the workmen at lunch tasted and approved. 13 to 15 years old and it was better than a sports vacation. When did we of America abandon apprenticing as education? Blacksmiths and farmers let kids help and learn. Teaching was hard for them and they charged for their time and room and board for their apprentices.working with fire and heat and molten metal, that is action adventure.
by Bri
I should have read this article before I posted to the others. Not that it diminishes what I wrote, but that it does address some of my own thoughts. As tech moves forward, we will be able to attend virtual classes. Avatars of all manner will congregate in virtual spaces. ( yes that’s a talking lion sitting next to you, and Elvis hasn’t left the building yet!). Virtual field trips are possible, and when strong AI becomes available, an infinite number of one on one teachers can tutor you in any endeavor. This will all be relatively short lived, in reference to jobs. Robots will take them all.
by Dale Ziemianski
I’m thinking that the more experience these online course gain, the more credible they’ll become to potential employer. As a freelancer who is entirely self taught, I can see how a little guidance and consolidation of knowledge can go a long way to educating the general public on practically any subject.
In addition to my artistic skills, I taught myself HTML and CSS using Notepad, I taught myself how to use a spreadsheet to not only keep track of my time (and dollars) but to break up the invoice into individual job totals for my client. I taught myself how to find work online, how to market my skills through target marketing, as well as how to use several image editing/manipulating programs to work in digital illustration, all from youtube videos, PDFs and online forums.
All I had to do was search for the knowledge I needed. If someone were to put together a guidance plan to aim students in the right direction, to show them where to gain the knowledge they need, I think they can do anything. It would certainly have saved me time.
by gary
Accreditation is the issue. Why not administer a written exam at some designated location and then standardize the results by paying graduates from traditional universities to take the same exam simultaneously. The latter have an interest in performing well so that they can assert the value of the academic credentials they’ve received from traditional institutions.
by Fullervision@me.com
I like your wacky idea, kind a like a usage panel as is common for dictionaries.
by Matheus
Fully agreed, Dan. Education is not only about absorbing previously existing knowledge. It´s main purpose (in my opinion) should be to create conditions for students to learn to think, and that cannot be fully replaced by online education. Human contact, discussion, exchange of ideas are as good as any other educational tool available. That being said, descentralized education may indeed play an important role in complementing and diversifying education.
by Joel
“One problem in the feedback system that has not been addressed is the role of mentoring and coaching traditionally provided by a teacher.”
Attending the University of Illinois 10 years ago, i can tell you that not 1 in 100 students utilize this, even if it is available.
by Editor
Joel, in my experience, it’s different when one is taking on online course to actually learn something (not just get a degree), which is why the MITx discussion forums are so popular (http://www.kurzweilai.net/lessons-learned-from-mitxs-prototype-course).
by star0
Several large colleges are taking online education very seriously at the moment; but administrators seem quite confident that it won’t create a major upset to “business as usual” — instead, they see it as an opportunity to expand the reach of universities even further, as well as to provide even better education to existing students. I should know, since I have attended some of these meetings, and am well aware of what they think; there’s not the slightest bit of worry.
One thing I learned from one of these meetings is that online courseware and platforms has been around for some time now (I’m not talking about the kind of online courses that have been around for decades), and that there were several companies spun-off from some major universities (I forget the names of those companies and the universities they were affiliated with — I seem to recall that one of them was Yale, but I could be wrong) that completely failed. The lesson I was told to take away from this was, “Nobody has even a clue what this will look like in 3 years; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
I happen to be a techno-optimist; but I also am someone who is circumspect about what I say to university administrators; and I KNOW that techno-optimism would be viewed as crazy talk (I recently sent around an email about some of Wolfram’s grand visions about the future of Mathematica, and they thought it was the dumbest thing they’d ever heard — imagine what they would think about the prospect of online education seriously challenging the status quo).
by Max Lent
I fully agree with Dan’s post. There is no doubt that some students will benefit from these alternative educational tools. It is, however, a hundred years too early to suggest that traditional educational systems are being dismantled.
What is great about these alternative educational strategies is that they challenge traditional education. Competition is good. Traditional educational systems need to be constantly re-evaluated and best practices executed.
The larger idea is that education should be free. Instead of charging students to go to college, we should be paying them.
by dan
The future seems to be moving towards this; bad idea. Having attended both regular education, and the type described above I can honestly say neither is the solution.
Regular education is hopelessly outdated and poor quality compared to the best science available today. However the new distance learning will not solve this at all; the ONLY predictive measure of a students success remains the relationship to the teacher, and you take precisely that away.
There will be some who do ok, some who do well – but none will do as well as they could, and there’s not going to be any good double-blind study that shows this is the best plan. They may do better than regular education, but that bar is pretty low…
The reason seems to be because the rest of society is so poorly organised they can no longer deal with the numbers; there’s so many students normal education can’t deal with it, so rather than questioning whether there should be plans for more teachers [or god forbid, less people...] the answer seems to be ford-ism – just throw the population on a large factory line and let them watch videos and distance chat with one another. Something that doesn’t solve the problems of a good quality relationship to the teacher, or social skills – as more and more digital age children who just ‘shut off’ online participants in an argument seem to struggle when reaching the face to face world.
by smb12321
I attended an excellent university and can honestly say that my relationship with my teacher or professor was a distant secondary to the data. yes, socialization is great but it should not be the basis of an education. Originally the idea of students gathering with one teacher was to maximize the teacher. It’s exactly why online leaning can be so powerful.