Wednesday, May 9, 2012

The Coming Tsunami of Innovation in Higher Education

In my April 21 post "Hard times for Higher Ed" I wrote about the problems of Assessment and Accountability, i.e. the lack of data about whether students learn anything in college or which types of institutions (if any) are more effective at producing learning gains. I also mentioned a second issue that has troubled me for many years: the lack of innovation in educational delivery systems. I am optimistic that things are about to change on that front. In the last six months there has been an explosion of experimentation and entrepreneurship focused on providing rigorous college or graduate school courses available in non-traditional ways to non-traditional students.


Perhaps we should start the clock in 2004 when Salman Khan (born and raised in  New Orleans) began to tutor a cousin who was a middle school student in math using the Yahoo Doodle instant messaging service. It didn't hurt that Khan had three degrees from MIT and one from Harvard. Khan's home brew tutorials were so effective that other students wanted to join in.  A colleague suggested he put them on You Tube. In 2006 he went live and the Khan Academy now offers over 3200 videos on line as well as numerous other teaching, learning and assessment aids.  Hundreds of thousands of students have viewed Khan's tutorials and they are integrated in the instructional strategies of a growing number of schools.  Khan has won the backing of some of the biggest names in information technology and venture capital.  Earlier this year he was included in Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world and the accompanying profile of him was written by Bill Gates.

One of the people who was inspired by Sal Khan's experiment was Sebastian Thrun, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford. Thrun taught a very popular artificial intelligence course and posted videos of his lectures and other learning aids on the class web site.  He was encouraged to offer an on-line version of the course to anyone in the world who could access it via the internet.  In October of last year an astonishing 160,000 students from almost 200 countries registered for the course (which did not carry any Stanford credit) and about 23,000 completed the course passing the same exam that was taken by the Stanford students taking the course for credit.  Thrun quickly resigned his tenured position at Stanford and with a few collaborators formed Udacity to offer more such courses.

Thrun's stunning achievement has been a dope slap to the pointy heads that run America's most prestigious universities. Talking about the effect higher education of such technology based distribution, Stanford's president John Hennesy says "There's a tsunami coming." (from this New Yorker article)

Stanford has quickly formed a partnership with Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan to offer a wide range of on-line courses through a new company Coursera. Now Harvard and MIT have rushed into battle with edX--a venture that might have spent a bit more time in the incubator before its clumsy public launch on May 2nd. Perhaps the most elaborate implementation of this tsunami model is the Minerva Project, headed by Ben Nelson, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded Snapfish, the on-line photo printing service.  Minerva aims to create budget priced campus based education with Ivy League standards.  World class faculty would pipe in their courses to classrooms around the world.  Local faculty and tutors would lead discussions, organize group work and presumably have a role in assessment and policing cheating.  Nelson's model is appealing because it offers the advantages of the residential experience that a totally internet based system lacks.  And Nelson has recruited a posse of big names for his advisory board including Larry Summers, former president of Harvard and Secretary of the Treasury.  Although Nelson has plausible responses to most all questions about his plan and has pledges of significant funding, to me he projects a note of arrogance and hype in his promotion of Minerva.  I hope that I am wrong.

I don't think that any of these innovations will put conventional higher education out of business but they will certainly force traditional institutions to raise their game.  And they will make elite level instruction accessible to anyone who has an internet connection.  For me the one important element that is missing from the discussion is the absence of defined curricula.  Most younger students (age 17-21) benefit from preset degree programs rather than the chaotic cafeteria plans offered by many universities. Most such students would also benefit from more discipline and more civic and physical education than they experience in universities today.  For many years I have imagined that such a place would look much like the military academies.  Ben Nelson may have something like that in mind for Minerva.  In a recent article on The Atlantic web site he said "We are creating a civilian West Point. The people who will get into and graduate from Minerva will be, bar none, the best students on the planet."  What he doesn't understand is that West Point does not have the best students in the world.  The students at Stanford would eat them up. (If you have any doubts go here.)  But that is not the point.  What we need are institutions that retain and develop all of their students to the greatest extent possible in mind and body and spirit.

See Charlie Rose interview Salman Khan here.  See him interview Sebastian Thrun here.

See Ben Nelson promote the Minerva Project here.

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