I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.
Thomas Friedman, Too Many Hamburgers? in the NYTimes
A few months ago (Sept 09, “All you can learn for 99 bucks a month”) I wrote about Straighterline.com after reading about them in the Washington Monthly. I was floored by the concept (floored=positive). It was everything I thought about higher education rolled up into a company. A working, growing business. On a whim, I wrote the CEO and basically said,
Hi, I really love your company and believe that you’re what’s next in higher education. I don’t care if it’s mopping or sweeping, I think that I should be working for/with you. Let me know if we can work something out.
Cheers,
Joe
And that’s the short version of how I found myself newly employed at Straighterline.com as course manager. Am I stoked? You have no idea.
To borrow from my previous post, the win here is “efficiency + quality + freedom = a better way for motivated learners to get degrees“. Having looked through the courses already I can attest to the quality (and guarantee that the quality is going to improve based on student feedback and will be updated as we grow as a company). Additionally the LMS integration with tutoring and a real course advisor leaves very small chance that a learner will feel isolated online. Paired with real feedback on assignments submission (writing) and instant feedback from tests it creates a very efficient learning environment for the student.
Here’s some recent coverage we got by a local DC news outlet:
The LA Times had a great piece about the formation of the Internet (the one Al Gore built, that is, the DARPA funded initiative). Tomorrow, October 29th, 2009 the Internet turns 40 (my how it’s matured in the last few years). The article is a quick and easy read about how a few (much younger then) professors and researchers at Stanford and UCLA first sent packets of info from LA to Palo Alto through an “Interface Message Processor”. One of the protagonists was Leonard Kleinrock (who taught CS at UCLA and still does).
Their goal was to login remotely from one computer to the other. Even in failure was their first success:
What happened in that big moment? All we wanted to do was log in to the second host computer at SRI, 400 miles to the north, to see if one machine could talk to another. You have to type “L-O-G” and then the remote machine types “I-N.” We typed the L and [called SRI and] said, did you get the L? Yep, got the L. Get the O? Yep, got the O. Typed the G and craaaaash. But the message couldn’t have been shorter or more prophetic: LO, lo and behold. You can’t beat that. (LA Times, “Net worker”)
He also recounts the first time he and his crew ever came across spam. Their response to the culprit? “You can’t do that. Bad. Stop. Horrible”. Then they sent so much email back to the spammer that it marked the first denial of service and crashed their networks.
So much changes just to stay the same.
Here’s to you, Internet. May you grow and grow but never become self-aware.
I’ve often said I hated Tim Tebow. I really don’t. It’s just that he’s too good. When he took that hit against Kentucky I was initially happy (not that he was suffering from a concussion) that he might not be the only person college football analysts talked about the following week. But, I’m wrong.
I think they got over the severe concussion a little too fast. I mean, the guy was puking his brains out and had to be rushed off the field. If that had happened to me “on the job”, I still might not be at work (I certainly wouldn’t be having much fun reading a bright computer screen all day). It seemed that most people just were hoping that the two weeks off were enough time for him to get back on his feet and back to “Superman” status (honestly, there was a headline in FL after the LSU game that read “Superman Returns”).
This past weekend I watched a bunch of football games, in all of them there were nasty collisions that encouraged cheers from the crowd and celebrations by the players. In a couple of games it was obvious that a player had been knocked out (as they lay prone on the ground, sometimes still clutching the ball or holding their limbs out, as if they were frozen). Don’t get me wrong, I love football. I find it fascinating to watch and enjoyable to talk about. But the number of injuries and the increasing reports of head trauma reported by former players really makes me uneasy about the sport. In a recent New Yorker magazine article, Malcolm Gladwell goes to far as to draw an analogy between dog fighting and football: he says that players are hand picked for their ability to put the team and the team’s goals above their own personal well-being (loyalty to the team = desire to win = ability to sacrifice personal health).
Taking or delivering a great hit is part of the game (one of Gladwell’s strongest critiques of the sport). But the level at which these collisions occurs is insane. For example, hits on the football field (at the college level) can equate to a 45 mile an hour car collision! But it’s not as if the players are getting in one collision a game, in fact, they’re in dozens of collisions every practice.
…In an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage. (Gladwell, “Offensive Play” The New Yorker 2009 p.5)
And what do these collisions and concussions cause? Dementia and other memory loss afflictions.
I am part of a family dealing with the hardship that dementia and Alzheimer’s can cause. I can tell you only one thing: if it’s preventable, do whatever you can to stave it off.
“We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us” – Jay Keasling C.E.O. of the Department of Energy’s new Joint BioEnergy Institute (from The New Yorker Magazine article “A Life of It’s Own” by Michael Specter)
In regards to the manufacturing of biological entities in order to advance human industrial, commercial and biological ends.
Put a helmet on before he blows your mind. Read the full article (mind you it’s a tad long, but that’s why the New Yorker is great) here.
Buffet-style education? Heck yeah. The company is probably one you’ve never heard of (I hadn’t) but I already see it’s value and foundation: efficiency + quality + freedom = a better way for motivated learners to get degrees. The company is StraigtherLine (based in DC) and it provides a carte blanche approach to education for a low monthly fee. Partnering with colleges around the US for accreditation, it can eschew the rigors of meeting an accreditation but also provide credits as part of the monthly fee (I’m guessing that they assume students will average a certain number of days per course, ensuring their ability to cover course credit costs per student per course passed).
This model has its detractors and rightly so. This is a major shakeup of the status-quo in American style (which in a sense is the global standard) higher education. It’s a bet that 100s of millions–perhaps billions–of dollars are caught up in the system, an inefficiency brought forth by the “college amenity package” which currently consists of A/C dorms, game rooms, student centers, weekend trips, free internet, student clubs and activities, research grants, etc. The whole shebang which constitutes the contemporary college experience.
That being said, I have to agree with the Washington Monthly‘s take on the so-called ‘education bubble’ (see a few earlier posts about this as well);
It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows. (Washington Monthly – “College for $99 a Month” pg 1)
It makes perfect sense that the arrival of ubiquitous, free information paired with easier to access internet connectivity means that costs will be driven down (what doesn’t make sense is that, until now, colleges have largely bucked the trend, charging what they want and increasing those charges at higher than justifiable rates):
Colleges charge students exorbitant sums partly because they can, but partly because they have to. Traditional universities are complex and expensive, providing a range of services from scientific research and graduate training to mass entertainment via loosely affiliated professional sports franchises. To fund these things, universities tap numerous streams of revenue: tuition, government funding, research grants, alumni and charitable donations. But the biggest cash cow is lower-division undergraduate education. (pg 3)
So what happens when that bottom falls out? If Straighterline.com is marginally successful then there’ll be rivals partnering with as many accredited colleges offering the same programs. Those colleges might even court several low cost providers to hedge their bets. The unaccredited low-cost providers will cut out an entire swath of inefficiency (freshman lectures) leaving a gaping whole in university and college enrollments (cause those students will just pay the couple of hundred bucks and transfer in the max credits). Where a university or college might have garnered $9000 from a student before (for 3 classes let’s say) the student now pays a few 100 and gets a jump start for him/herself and a bonus in his/her checkbook. Colleges and universities will become leaner. They’ll be forced to realize their competitive advantage and adopt a laser like focus to milk as much dough as they can from it (this is a positive in my humble opinion).
Honestly, this already exists for a lot of states that are smart about tiering their education: California is perhaps my favorite example. As a “freshman” I can go to Community College (Santa Barbara has a particularly beautiful and esteemed on), I can finish 2 years of college (60 credits+!) and use them at any UC school in the state. The total cost? 1200 bucks plus student fees (which includes a bus pass). That being said, SBCC is hugely subsidized by the state. So really, if a private company can do it profitably is that so wrong when a state can only do it by losing money? Remember that CA just struggled to figure out a 44 billion dollar deficit. Maybe outsourcing these courses to Straighterline (instead of subsidizing them) could have saved some time, effort and money.
Related posts:
Newly Ancient (a web idol of mine) posted recently about a WIRED article concerned with Craigslist. I tried to comment over there but it seems the form is not working properly.
Here’s Morgante’s original post:
Wired has published an in-depth article about Craigslist that exposes the peculiar personality of the site, and its founder. I have never been a fan of Craigslist — its usability is terrible. The Craiglist management has a somewhat hypocritical stance. Supposedly, the site is simple because business growth isn’t a priority; it’s all about the users. Yet those same users (or potential ones) complain about how backwards the site is, with extremely poor technology running it. Worst yet, Craigslist actively discourages innovation by not offering any kind of API to external clients. Hopefully, just as newspaper classifieds were defeated by newer media, Craiglist will eventually fall to companies willing to innovate.
Here’s what I wanted to say:
I gotta disagree. In the current state of our economy I think it’s great that a little company with lots of users and specific ideals doesn’t just want to squeeze it’s users for money.
The draw of CL is that it’s free and it’s owners consider it a public/community asset, not an ATM for planes and cars and houses. Instead of innovating their focusing on providing consistent, quality service (so what if the site looks dumpy, I’ve found and sold many a material good, roommate, apartment–and the same can be said for any level of user).
I don’t think another company will come and knock CL off, and I think that’s a positive. Newmark will go down as one of the most influential web-men of the 20th and 21st centuries because of these little quirks that people misconstrue as weaknesses. I think it’s great that he is content with what he’s created and applies his waking hours to help it grow, interact with it’s users and, in his opinion, make the world a better place.
It flies in the face of conventional business thinking, that’s for sure. But the CL mantra and way of doing business, perhaps, is an important lesson in this day and age of government bailouts.
I’m a big fan of the reforms happening in DC. I like it for a lot of reasons (it’s cutting edge, it’s gutsy, it’s far reaching implications, etc.) but mostly because Michelle Rhee has vision (and the cajones) to bring her ideas to fruition.
The Wapo recently wrote an article about how Rhee expects to measure teacher success, which is by and large the biggest obstacle of the reform. It’s easy to say that the best teachers will be retained and the worst kicked to the curb or rehabilitated through professional development, harder to actually say which teachers are which and why.
Rhee’s new report/plan, which apparently is 200 pages (put together in part by an educational consulting firm from the District–note the copy I found online is only 50 pages…), outlines how teacher success will be measured. It touches on several aspects of the evaluation:
I perused the copy I found online and found the insights and directives incredibly easy to follow (honestly, from reading the document I think ANYONE could be a better teacher). It’s succinct, easy to digest and reads like a “how to” instead of a “do this or else”. In fact, the document clearly outlines expectations, how one might accomplish them and “what excellence looks like”. What else could a teacher ask for?
But if I were just getting my info. from the Wapo article and I were a DC teacher I might be shaking in my booties. It doesn’t paint a very favorable (in my opinion) picture of the reforms that will affect measuring teacher success. It’s more of a punch list of changes, including the fact that the number of students is increasing at the same time these new criteria are being imposed.
The situation in DC is a challenge in the simplest sense of the word. That being said, I would also be thinking to myself that measuring these new criteria is a MONUMENTAL task: possibly involving huge amounts of qualitative observation and coding (just like the kind I did as a student in Graduate School at Syracuse University) in order to get a handle on whether or not the teachers are meeting expectations.
I’ll be watching this unfold in interest.
“D.C. Public Schools Teaching and Learning Framework,”
Aside from the assessment of teacher quality and effectiveness, I think that some really great changes were also highlighted by the Wapo and these come in the form of disciplinary revisions. At least some of the anecdotal evidence of educational reform concedes that setting up the right culture for learning can have a positive influence on student achievement (and maybe even teacher effectiveness), just look at KIPP. The revisions specifically target for what and when students can be suspended for.
BEFORE: students could be suspended for simple dress code violations
AFTER: students can only be suspended for situations like cheating, bullying and other such violations
The old code permitted suspension for such an array of offenses that the punishment lost any real meaning, officials said. Principals were allowed to send students home for dress code violations, which is not permitted under the new rules.
According to the most recent available data, suspensions grew from 1,303 in 2006 to 2,245 in 2008 — a 72 percent increase. School officials say that removing students from school only puts them behind in class and can lead to truancy and trouble with the justice system. (from page 2)
Let’s hope that the superficial, cultural changes like that above can make a huge difference so that districts aren’t forced to hire observers to code their every classroom activity/action.
Ok, so the USPS is failing with a deficit of about 7 billion dollars according to the Times. That’s on a total budget of around 70-80 billion (estimating based on a Heritage.org article with data from 2002). It could be way more but the data isn’t easy to track down/root out.
That being said, the recession is kicking the Post Office’s ass, and it has been beaten to a pulp over the last decades with the advent and ubiquitous use of email as an alternative to sending letters. So less stamps are being sold, but the routes and delivery methods and post office numbers remain the same.
In an effort to alleviate their troubles the Post Office was asked to suggest some reforms to their programs in order to save money. The results were: close branches and cut back on Saturday delivery/pickup of mail. And even though that would not even meet the 7 billion, it was flatly denied by the congressional leader overseeing the reforms because it “affected his constituents” (this is paraphrased by the Morning Edition report on NPR which included an update on the USPS situation).
So the problem is declining revenue (already projected deficit), lots of liabilities (payroll and benefits) and even with the cuts proposed,
It takes a lot of people, equipment and trucks to move 20 billion pieces. If the mail volume doesn’t recover, and the trends don’t look promising for that to happen, there’ll be a lot of excess capacity at the postal service. (NPR)
The Times continues,
“We have too many people, too many buildings, less revenue and less mail,” said Darleen Reid-DeMeo, a Postal Service spokeswoman for New York City. “We’ve got to become more efficient.”
The problem, as I see it, is that no one is really looking at the problem with a fresh outlook. If we view the USPS in terms of current economics, most entrepreneurs would see the issue right away: their freemium model is backwards. Literally, as in they are giving away and charging for the wrong services.
Sure they needed to offer free mail delivery a long time ago in order to create their market, who doesn’t try to give something away these days? But nowadays there’s no way to justify ANY free delivery on ANY day. They want to cut Saturday. I say cut free mail delivery and pickup every day unless the end user opts to pay a monthly subscription fee for the service.
And instead of charging for PO Boxes, offer them for free. This way people are attracted to the Post Office as a destination and can still receive mail at no cost (besides stamps). My suggestion would have several effects:
Now, any congressperson would say that their constituents would balk at this. Obviously, the USPS affects all districts, states, residents and therefore every constituent and interest. Mail is a serious business even if no one is bothering with it anymore.
This isn’t my last post on the USPS situation. It really grinds my gears that they aren’t taking a more serious look at totally revamping the system. GRRR!!!
There’s a lot of talk about how the cost of education is decreasing year over year because of the advances in technology. Free courses, free text
books, free content available from the most prestigious universities in the world, all online, accessible all the time to anyone anywhere.
Josh Catone of Mashable wrote a quick article about how those three forces (free text books, free courses, free course ware) are trending the cost of “education” in the traditional sense towards zero. It makes some sense. But I don’t fully buy it.
There are major advantages to the University structure that contribute to many areas of society other than the preparation of individuals for jobs or civic involvement: economic development, organization of dissenting views/opinions, creation of new technology, centers for investment in research, maintaining thriving university-centered communities, etc. etc.
But mostly I don’t buy it because education has been “free” (as in free speech, not free beer) forever. Honestly, probably the best invention to make learning free was the book (because you didn’t need a storyteller to educate you anymore); then the library made the books freely available to those who wanted them (not that the industrious didn’t find ways to borrow them prior to that). The Mashable article was basically saying that the internet was bring the cost to zero. Um, no. The internet is changing education, but only in efficiency and reach (not necessarily in accessibility).
The fact of the matter is that for advanced nations, the content is reaching new people, while not-as-advanced countries are struggling to get internet (accessibility is still hampered). Not only that but near 100% of the content is in English (another barrier for the least “educated”). It’d be nice to have totally free education and even free college degrees for those that want to pursue them. In some sense that’s already happening and has been happening for 100s of years. Before there were standards and accreditation, men were self-made and educated for free.
Ben Franklin did it as an indentured servant to his brother, reading in his spare moments and writing and practicing using borrowed books. He didn’t go to college but turned out pretty highly regarded. And if you’re thinking, “but that’s just Benjamin Franklin…” then I say this, other less well known men have done the same for generations and made their mark in history with FREE educations (and many more because we so often enforce a price on traditional educational systems, barring them from entry to their own benefit).
Now, I do believe education is much too expensive and increasing unjustly in price year after year. But if you truly want to learn, the options and content are, and always have been, available to you.
Related: if you’re interested in Benjamin Franklin and his life, check out the free ebook from Dailylit.com.