Tag: straighterline.com

Quote – Anna Kamenetz

…a video version of the course supplemented with a set number of hours of live teaching support, either delivered remotely by a…grad student, or live and in person from a local instructor, for a charge somewhere between zero and several thousand dollars, with credit awarded by your local institution.  The existence of such an option–call it MIT on Demand–might even enhance the MIT brand, as OCW already has.

A company called StraighterLine already offers and important version of this idea: accredited online college courses for $399 per course, which includes ten hours of one-on-one tutoring.  But the course credit is granted by just four small, unknown, community and for-profit colleges.  This approach is half a step away from really  blowing things up. It would just take a few more prestigious institutions getting on board to change the way people feel about online, on-demand education.

Anna Kamenetz, DIY U (pg 128)

Welcome to Straighterline.com

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:

All you can learn for $99 a month

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.

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