Teaching Entrepreneurship

Yong Zhao keeps explaining that the crucial skills we're not teaching are those of entrepreneurs...Well, here's a single MOOC course that tries to be the capstone of the program we're not providing, at Udacity Blog: How to Build a Startup Available With Certificates, Coaching & Project

Taught by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, who founded eight startups, with four that have gone public, this class teaches you the key steps necessary to bring your product from concept to market. With the full course experience, you will talk to customers, build a Business Model Canvas, prototype your product, and pitch to coaches.

After completing a final project, you’ll also earn a certificate verifying your new entrepreneurship skills. Don’t let that next million dollar idea get away.

I don't believe that this has college-course prerequisites; I wonder if it would be a good idea to use its ideas as an implied critique of a high-school curriculum.

Knowledge Maps and Custom Courses

Take a quick look at the Khan Academy Knowledge Map and then think about The Chronicle of Higher Education asking Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead

People now buy songs, not albums. They read articles, not newspapers. So why not mix and match learning “modules” rather than lock into 12-week university courses?

That question is a major theme of a 213-page report released on Monday by a committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology exploring how the 153-year-old engineering powerhouse should innovate to adapt to new technologies and new student expectations.

“The very notion of a ‘class’ may be outdated,” the report argues.

Indeed; a course is an administrative tactic, and we may be moving beyond it. At every level. I posted about the idea a couple of years ago, in Open-Source Learning. Perhaps it's getting somewhere.

Or then again, maybe not. Comments at Slashdot

Disruption

I strongly doubt the "2015" here, but I think "The Futurist" is right to think that the education industry is headed for a multi-faceted disruption of the general sort that he describes: the jobs and careers that will best survive in the 21st century will require skills that we now associate with a college degree, and personality traits which we often signal with a college degree, but they don't actually require a degree of any kind. And that opens us up to changes in education. The Futurist: The Education Disruption : 2015

Google, always leading the way, no longer mandates college degrees as a requirement, and has recently disclosed that about 14% of its employees do not have them. If a few other technology companies follow suit, then the workforce will soon have a pool of people working at very desirable employers, who managed to attain their position without the time and expense of college. If employers in less dynamic sectors still have resistance to this concept, they will find it harder to ignore the growing number of resumes from people who happen to be alumni of Google, despite not having the required degree. As change happens on the margins, it will only take a small percentage of the workforce to be hired by prestigious employers.

...  the ever-increasing variety of technological disruption means that the foremost career of the modern era is that of the serial entrepreneur. If universities are not the place where the foremost career can be learned, then how important are formal degrees from these universities? Since each entrepreneurial venture is different, the individual will have to synthesize a custom solution from available components.

... Udacity, Coursera, MITx, Khan Academy, and Udemy are just a few of the entities enabling low-cost education at all levels. Some are for-profit, some are non-profit. Some address higher education, and some address K-12 education. Some count as credit towards degrees, and some are not intended for degree-granting, but rather for remedial learning. But among all these websites, an innovative pupil can learn a variety of seemingly unrelated subjects and craft an interlocking, holistic education that is specific to his or her goals. ....
(Moody's has already downgraded the outlook of the entire US higher education industry). But most importantly, the most valuable knowledge will become increasingly self-taught from content available to all, and the entire economy will begin the process of adjusting to this new reality.

Parts of this are certainly true.

All that Jazz -- Education Analogy

Alex Tabarrok, economics professor and co-founder of the online Marginal Revolution University, comments on Online Education and Jazz

there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience...It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience... and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.

Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.

I think that's true, but I think that maybe he's missing part of the point of his own work and that of other online services: online teaching environments and live teaching environments both offer opportunities for interaction, and for student improvisation. Online teaching can (and probably will) get better with time, the techniques are reasonably cumulative. The approach of, say, the Berlitz LP records that helped me learn Spanish fifty years ago is still available online -- it is now supplemented, not entirely replaced, with the game-like approach of Rosetta Stone which one of my sons used recently, to help get ready to go to Nicaragua with some old friends from HCS. Live teaching from a great teacher is not cumulative in the same way (I was a worse teacher than most of my teachers, no matter how hard I tried.)

If MOOCs were going to be "everybody watch the same lecture and then take the same exam", that would be of some value, and the use of a great teacher could increase that value greatly...but that's not what's happening. On places like CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings you can learn who is teaching what and how, and how well it worked...you can learn about online courses, yes. But at the same time, when you interact with software like that of the Khan Academy, that software is learning about you. In fact it can pay more individual attention to you than any human teacher can, outside of the traditional 1-1 ideal, and it can eventually improve on that 1-1 ideal because it can try out different approaches on millions of students -- different explanations, different experiences suggested by thousands of different teachers and students. It can note which works for whom -- and it can compare you to more somewhat-similar students than any 1-1 human teacher can ever make notes on.

Will it ever outdo human teaching in every respect? Gee, I dunno. But it can certainly outdo human teaching in many respects.

Or then again, maybe not.

MOOCing money

In more contemporary news of online education, the NYT today reports Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

One tiny revenue stream has begun flowing into the nondescript Silicon Valley office building where Coursera’s 35 employees work to keep up with the demand for their courses: the company is an Amazon affiliate, getting a sliver of the money each time Coursera students click through the site to buy recommended textbooks or any other products on Amazon.
“It’s just a couple thousand, but it’s our first revenue,” Ms. Koller said. “When faculty recommend a textbook and people buy it on Amazon, we get some money. The funny thing is that we’re getting more than twice as much money from things like Texas Rangers jackets as from what the textbooks are bringing in.”
Other possibilities around the edges include charging a subscription fee, after a class is over, to continue the discussion forum as a Web community, or perhaps offering follow-up courses, again for a fee. And advertising sponsorships remain a possibility.

And possibilities like making the course content freely available but charging for tutor services...
Or then again, maybe not.

Focus

A professorial note on MOOCs develops a view of their limits, which is a familiar view but I'm not sure it's correct. The Year of the MOOC? — Crooked Timber

MOOC’s have to be the new frontier of social networking. Some kind of peer-to-peer bootstrapping, with lots of students helping each other help themselves, because there’s no way one instructor (or just a few) can individually help every student, once you scale up past a certain point. But this still requires the students to be mature and self-motivated, as learners, to start with.

This is such a huge number of people – especially globally – that it’s great news, all in all. But it leaves a lot of people behind...(Poor kid, he has to go to Harvard because he’s not ready for Coursera!) College is for students who can’t yet help themselves, don’t know how to study, don’t know enough to know what they want, or what they should want, to learn. They need to be more or less locked into an environment where they will be induced to learn how to learn. Which is, after all, what college is supposed to teach.

That's what (some say) college is supposed to teach...but does it? Take a bunch of kids with comparable SAT scores, high school grades, socio-economic background and so forth as well as comparable "grit" and most of all, comparable ability-to-learn. Now put some of them randomly into college, some into the military, some into jobs. Five years later, six years later...test their ability-to-learn again. Will the ones who went to college stand out, as having learned how to learn? Will they be more mature? More self-motivated? I have no confidence in this claim. I would want to see some data before taking it seriously.

Actually, I'm not at all sure what ability-to-learn is, though I believe it involves being "mature and self-motivated, as learners" just as stated above; I just think that definition's probably pretty much circular. If you focus on what's in front of you then you're going to be described as mature and self-motivated and as having developed the ability to learn (although you might be very slow at it.) Of course learning-how-to-learn also involves the mechanics of taking notes and looking stuff up and trying things out, i.e. experimentation, but that ought to come in elementary school, and if elementary school comes to involve MOOCs then maybe that's all that's required... Your first grade class, or more likely pre-Kindergarten, puts you in a couple of actual physical play-groups with physical friends (some of whom are animals, and some are robots?) and also a couple of virtual groups where you do Google Hangouts (or the equivalent) with virtual friends, some of whom are cartoons and others are kids that you might meet someday. Later you take notes (to send to each other) and you look stuff up (with Google, and Wikipedia!) and you experiment (with a hammer, but preferably not Maxwell's. ) And a situation in which the "bright" kids and the "slow" kids are not waiting for each other, in which each kid has the habit of making progress at his or her own pace...hmmm. It might do.

A large part of self-motivation is habit. Indeed, a large part of maturity is habit. Hey, you know what? Almost everything is habit. William James on Habit

"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night."

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can."

"Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

Or then again, maybe they wouldn't at all, not nohow. And anyway it's much much much too late for me.

Time on MOOCs

From Time Magazine, a sampling of online courses and the way they can leverage what we've learned about learning.... College Is Dead. Long Live College! | TIME.com

Minute 4: Professor Brown asked me a question. “What did the Greeks know?” The video stopped, patiently waiting for me to choose one of the answers, a task that actually required some thought. This happened every three minutes or so, making it difficult for me to check my e-mail or otherwise disengage — even for a minute.
“You got it right!” The satisfaction of correctly answering these questions was surprising. (One MOOC student I met called it “gold-star methadone.”) The questions weren’t easy, either. I got many of them wrong, but I was allowed to keep trying until I got the gold-star fix.
Humans like immediate feedback, which is one reason we like games. Researchers know a lot about how the brain learns, and it’s shocking how rarely that knowledge influences our education system. ...
... Minute 8: Professor Brown explained that Plato had also tried (and failed) to estimate the earth’s circumference. Brown did this by jotting notes on a simple white screen. Like all the other videos in the course, this clip lasted only a few minutes. This too reflects how the brain learns. Studies of college students have shown that they can focus for only 10 to 18 minutes before their minds begin to drift; that’s when their brains need to do something with new information — make a connection or use it to solve a problem.

For any given person, on any given day, as the day goes by the ideal pace of learning changes. No one can predict how that's going to work even for one person, much less make an ideal pace for a group...but maybe self-paced learning (unlike the teaching-machines self-paced learning that I read about in high school, in the 60s) can finally work out.
Or then again, maybe not.

Ericsson -- Future of Learning

I've mentioned TED talks by Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education and Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education; Here's a 20-minute Ericsson-funded documentary, noted by Geekdad at The Future of Learning

Talking with the likes of Sugata Mitra, Daphne Koller, and Jose Ferreira, The Future of Learning examines how the learning process can be adapted to the needs of each child and how the highest quality education is now available for any person who can connect to the internet.

They also have Seth Godin as a speaker -- I've linked in the past to Stop Stealing Dreams -- Seth Godin at Hamilton Central Options. I guess I've heard of Jose Ferreira and of Knewton, his adaptive learning/teaching software platform that will be the basis for Pearson's efforts, but didn't know much about him.
The "highest quality education" claim in the Geekdad summary is not actually what Mitra or Koller or especially Godin are saying; they don't think we can (yet?) provide an online substitute for a good teacher, but they do think that kids with good teachers can do better than they have done with these new resources, and they also think that kids with bad teachers or no teachers can do better than they have done. In the next 30 years, more kids will leave school than have left school in all of human history...
Or then again, maybe not?

CourserA etc, legal limits?

The Chronicle of Higher Education says that Minnesota says online courses have to get local permission for Minnesota residents, but Professor Volokh says they're wrong: The Volokh Conspiracy » The First Amendment and Free Online Courses

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Minnesota has barred Coursera from offering free online courses — including ones that don’t even result in a degree — because it hasn’t properly registered as an educational institution with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, and, presumably, because the universities and colleges that provide classes through Coursera have not gotten approval to use the term “college” or “university” from that Office...
if an entity — whether or not it has “college” or “university” in its name — offers free non-degree-granting courses, it is as shielded by the First Amendment as a newspaper Web site, a site aiming to educate people about some political or scientific issue, Wikipedia, or for that matter a blog.
...I’m not sure whether Coursera is planning to fight the Minnesota rules; but if it does, I think it will easily prevail.

Wikipedia says

Volokh is noted for his scholarship on the First and Second Amendments to the United States Constitution

and has been cited in Supreme Court opinions and all that; maybe all is well.
Or then again, maybe not.

Update: Slate adds Minnesota bans Coursera: State takes bold stand against free education.

Honorable mentions go to New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission for driving out Uber’s online taxi-hailing service and to automobile dealers’ groups in four states for trying to have Tesla dealerships declared illegal. But the grand prize in this week’s unexpectedly heated competition for most creative use of government to stifle innovation has to go to Minnesota.... ... ... ... ...
Hear that, kids? The Internet is no place for learning. You can Facebook and Twitter and play World of Warcraft all you want, but if you want to study Machine Learning, Principles of Macroeconomics, or Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, you’re going to have to take it elsewhere.

And Adam Smith was right...you can't and shouldn't set government to zero, but the more of it you choose, the more representation you get for those who have a seat at the table and want to protect it, at whatever cost to the public.
(Or then again again again, maybe not.)

Higher EdX gets Bigger...Texas Size

It's higher education, but the more MOOC (massive online etc) technology grows at the upper level, the more available it will be at all levels. Anyway, Texas is in; U. of Texas Plans to Join edX | Inside Higher Ed

The University of Texas is planning today to officially join edX, which offers massive open online courses or MOOCs. Because the Texas announcement involves an entire system, it represents a major expansion of edX, which was founded by two universities (Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and was later joined by one other (the University of California at Berkeley). Coursera, another major MOOC provider, has been adding universities at a rapid pace. The Texas system plans to focus on general education and introductory-level courses for its MOOC offerings. Bloomberg reported that the University of Texas is paying $5 million to join edX.

So we link to EdX and incidentally to Coursera and we say: Faster please, this is good.
Or then again, maybe not.

Many to One Education

Economist Arnold Kling provides Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology

The attempt to achieve large scale in college courses is misguided. Instead of trying to come up with a way to extend the same course to tens of thousands of students, educators should be asking the opposite question: How would I teach if I only had one student? Educators with just one student in their class would not teach by lecturing....
To put this another way, I believe that the future of teaching is not one-to-many. Instead, it is many-to-one. By many-to-one, I mean that one student receives personalized instruction that comes from many educators. To make that work, technology must act as an intermediary, taking the information from the educators and customizing it to fit the student's knowledge, ability, and even his or her emotional state.

I'd tentatively say he has a large part of a point here, but...hmm. The MOOC model, whether it's carried out for higher education or K-12, doesn't have to contradict his many-to-one ideal; if there are 100,000 students finishing a MOOC, then they all have something in common (they have passed "Intro to Calculus" or "Designing a Rocket Stove" or "Baroque Music as a Commentary on Galileo" or "Origami Polyhedra" or whatever it is.) That likely means that they have all done reasonably well on a series of (peer-graded + machine-graded) quizzes, exams, and projects. It means they share some kind of assessment. It doesn't mean that they have all gotten there the same way; it doesn't mean that they have all done what Stanford students do.

But I'm not disagreeing with him about what's important; education needs to be more customized, more personalized, not less, and specific MOOC proposals may try to save money by going the wrong way. (And I hereby propose that the "normal" course length should be a quarter, not a semester. Or maybe a week. Break everything into Pieces! Hulk SMASH!). And he's at least two-thirds right about tablets.

Or then again, maybe not.