Every actor has to start somewhere, and Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption, and Million Dollar Baby) could have done worse than joining the cast ofThe Electric Company, the PBS children’s television series that aired from 1971 to 1977. The original cast included Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno (not bad company), and the versatile Freeman played a series of characters: “Mel Mounds,” “Vincent the Vegetable Vampire,” and then, of course, Easy Reader. If you’re of my generation, you might recognize his theme song above. Below, we show you Easy Reader (a pun on the 1969 film Easy Rider) in action, teaching kids to read in his effortlessly cool, hipster way. H/T Metafilter
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It’s easy to sell books and other commodities on the web. It’s not easy to deliver a quality education. But two converging trends point toward a future when we will see the traditional university give way to an online alternative — something I wasn’t willing to bank on two years ago. First, Silicon Valley is finally focusing on e‑learning. Udacity, Coursera, Kahn Academy, EdX — they’re all looking to lift e‑learning out of a long period of stagnation. And, second, times are tough, and the traditional university system doesn’t care enough about managing costs, while wrongly assuming that it has a captive audience.
The U.S. has racked up more than $1 trillion in student loans.
Today 94 percent of students earning a bachelor’s degree take out loans — up from 45 percent in 1993.
It’s estimated that the “average debt [per student] in 2011 was $23,300, with 10 percent owing more than $54,000 and 3 percent more than $100,000.”
“Payments are being made on just 38 percent of the balance of federal student loans, down from 46 percent five years ago.”
Finally, state funding of education is going down, and tuition is going up, which means that the figures above will just get worse.
You don’t need me to spell things out. Paying for a college education is getting unsustainable, so much so that many expect a crisis in the college loan market in the coming years. And then you consider this. Many universities seem indifferent to the difficulties students face, if they’re not intentionally exacerbating the problem. At one point in the Times article, E. Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, goes on record saying, “I readily admit it … I didn’t think a lot about costs. I do not think we have given significant thought to the impact of college costs on families.” Now listen to the latest episode of Planet Money, The Real Price of College (audio), which underscores a more galling fact — many colleges think that they gain a competitive advantage if they have a high sticker price. For many schools, lower tuition is a sign of weakness, not strength.
Universities can behave this way because they think they have a captive audience. Because college grads still earn considerably more than high school grads, colleges assume that students will keep enrolling. But what will happen when cash-strapped students are presented with a viable alternative? It may take 10 to 20 years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a new breed of school emerges, schools that throw away the four year model (and the humanities too) and offer students a very targeted online education in “practical” fields — from accounting to coding to nursing to law and business — at a dramatically lower cost. Here, the education cycle gets shortened to perhaps two years, and then students get credentialed (maybe by a trusted third-party provider) and go to work, only to return later in their careers to take more courses in specialized areas. This model will require the right technology platform (something that will get worked out fairly soon) and a change in the expectations of employers and society more broadly (something that will take time to develop, but less time than complacent colleges think).
The new system won’t be better than the current one in many respects. It won’t offer a rounded education. The teaching will be less personal. Long-lasting social bonds won’t be made as easily. (You’ll need to pay the big bucks at a traditional school for that. No, they won’t all go away.) And the teaching jobs created by these universities won’t be terribly fulfilling or lucrative. But the new system will offer a more focused and affordable education to students on a mass scale. And when students graduate mostly debt free, they won’t complain. Nor will they be forced to forego college altogether, as some would now advocate. There’s perhaps something inevitable about this shift. But the insouciance of administrators and faculty inhabiting the current system won’t do anything to delay it. Stick around, and you’ll probably see that I’m right. And if you think my look into the crystal ball is wrong, let me know.
In the meantime, we give you another take on how to solve our world’s educational problems — Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University:
For oodles of free courses, don’t forget to visit our collection of 450 Free Courses from Top Universities.
In this new video from TED Education, teacher and author Jonathan Bergmann uses colorful analogies to help us visualize the scale of the atom and its nucleus. Bergmann is a pioneer of the “Flipped Classroom” teaching method, which inverts the traditional educational model of classroom lectures followed by homework. In a flipped classroom there are no lectures. Instead, teachers assign video lessons like the one above as homework, and devote their classroom time to helping students work their way through problems. To learn more about the flipped classroom method you can read a recent article co-authored by Bergmann in The Daily Riff. And to see more TED Education videos, which come with quizzes and other supplementary teaching materials, visit the TEDEd YouTube channel.
Note: You can now find through the following link a complete list of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), many offering certificates.
In the waning days of 2011, MIT announced MITx, a new e‑learning initiative that will offer certificates (find a list of Free Online Certificate Courses here) to students demonstrating mastery of free MIT courses. The university set a spring launch date for MITx, and they have now opened for enrollment the very first course. Taught by Anant Agarwal, Circuits and Electronics is an online adaption of MIT’s first undergraduate analog design course. According the MITx web site, this prototype course will run — free of charge — for students worldwide from March 5, 2012 through June 8, 2012. And students will have the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the material and earn a certificate from MITx. You can get more information on the course, or simply enroll in Circuits and Electronics, today. Just click here.
Many other engineering and computer science courses can be found in our collection of 400 Free Courses Online.
UPDATE: MIT professor David Pritchard and his education research group, RELATE are offering an online MIT-level course in Introductory Newtonian Mechanics. The course is free and does not require a textbook. Enrollment has just opened (it starts with an optional prerequisites test), and the course runs from March 1 — May 14, 2012. Individuals who complete the course will receive a letter of completion. This MIT course is unrelated to the MITx project mentioned right above.
The Moon is “tidally locked” in its orbit around the Earth, meaning its rotational and orbital periods are exactly synchronized. As a result, we always see the same view of the Moon no matter when or where (on Earth) we look at it. In this interesting video, released last week by NASA, we get a rare glimpse of the Moon’s other side, starting with the north pole and moving toward the heavily cratered south.
The video was captured on January 19 by the “MoonKAM” aboard one of a pair of GRAIL spacecraft that were launched last Fall and began orbiting the Moon on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The primary mission of GRAIL is to study the Moon’s interior structure and to learn more about its thermal evolution.
GRAIL is also the first planetary mission by NASA to carry instruments dedicated solely to education and public outreach. The “KAM” in “MoonKAM” stands for Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students. The program, led by former astronaut Sally Ride, will engage fifth- to eighth-graders from across the country in selecting target areas on the lunar surface to photograph and study. Educators interested in participating can register at the MoonKAM website. To learn more about the video and GRAIL, see the NASA news release.
Before we rush headlong into a new year, it’s worth pausing, ever so briefly, to consider the ground we covered in 2011. What topics resonated with you … and jazzed us? Today, we’re highlighting 10 thematic areas (and 46 posts) that captured the imagination. Chances are you missed a few gems here. So please join us on our brief journey back into time. Tomorrow, we start looking forward again.
1) Universities Offer More Free Courses, Then Start Pushing Toward Certificates: The year started well enough. Yale released another 10 stellar open courses. (Find them on our list of 400 Free Courses). Then other universities started pushing the envelope on the open course format. This fall, Stanford launched a series of free courses that combined video lectures with more dynamic resources — short quizzes; the ability to pose questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance; a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, etc. A new round of free courses will start in January and February. (Get the full list and enroll here.) Finally, keep your eyes peeled for this: In 2012, MIT will offer similar courses, but with one big difference. Students will get an official certificate at the end of the course, all at a very minimal charge. More details here.
3) Books Intelligent People Should Read: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list “8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read” ended up generating far more conversation and controversy than we would have expected. (Users have left 83 comments at last count.) No matter what you think of his rationale for choosing these texts, the books make for essential reading, and they’re freely available online.
4) Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens left us this past month. And, until his last day, Hitchens was the same old Hitch — prolific, incisive, surly and defiant, especially when asked about whether he’d change his position on religion, spirituality and the afterlife. All of this was on display when he spoke at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles last February. We covered his comments in a post called, No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask. And even from the grave, Hitchens did more of the same, forcing us to question the whole modern meaning of Christmas.
On YouTube, the path to education is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge. Left to their own devices, kids have a tendency to veer away from the math tutorials and head straight for the water-skiing squirrels. What’s an educator to do?
Google believes it has the answer with “YouTube for Schools,” a new service that gives teachers and administrators the ability to filter out everything but their own selections from YouTube EDU, a curated collection of educational videos from sources ranging from Sesame Street to Harvard.
“We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classroom, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or a video of a cute cat, or a video that might not be appropriate for students,” writes YouTube Product Manager Brian Truong. “While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.”
To help teachers find the best material with ease, YouTube has organized the educational videos by subject and grade level, with more than 300 playlists to choose from at youtube.com/teachers. To learn more, or to sign up, go to youtube.com/schools.
Also don’t miss our own curated list of Intelligent YouTube Channels, which highlights the best video collections on the Google-owned service.
In late October, Computerworld unearthed a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs originally recorded back in 1995, when Jobs was at NeXT Computer, and still two years away from his triumphant return to Apple. Filmed as part of an oral history project, the wide-ranging interview begins with Jobs’ childhood and his early school days, and it all sets the stage for Jobs to muse on the state of public education in America. He began:
I’d like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible.
Asked what changes he would make, Jobs continued:
I’ve been a very strong believer in that what we need to do in education is to go to the full voucher system. I know this isn’t what the interview was supposed to be about but it is what I care about a great deal.… The problem that we have in this country is that [parents] went away. [They] stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part. What happened was that mothers started working and they didn’t have time to spend at PTA meetings and watching their kids’ school. Schools became much more institutionalized and parents spent less and less and less time involved in their kids’ education. What happens when a customer goes away and a monopoly gets control … is that the service level almost always goes down.
And so the answer. Vouchers, entrepreneurship and market competition:
I’ve suggested as an example, if you go to Stanford Business School, they have a public policy track; they could start a school administrator track. You could get a bunch of people coming out of college tying up with someone out of the business school, they could be starting their own school. You could have twenty-five year old students out of college, very idealistic, full of energy instead of starting a Silicon Valley company, they’d start a school. I believe that they would do far better than any of our public schools would. The third thing you’d see is I believe, is the quality of schools again, just in a competitive marketplace, start to rise. Some of the schools would go broke. A lot of the public schools would go broke. There’s no question about it. It would be rather painful for the first several years.… The biggest complaint of course is that schools would pick off all the good kids and all the bad kids would be left to wallow together in either a private school or remnants of a public school system. To me that’s like saying “Well, all the car manufacturers are going to make BMWs and Mercedes and nobody’s going to make a ten thousand dollar car.” I think the most hotly competitive market right now is the ten thousand dollar car area. You’ve got all the Japanese playing in it. You’ve got General Motors who spent five million dollars subsidizing Saturn to compete in that market. You’ve got Ford which has just introduced two new cars in that market. You’ve got Chrysler with the Neon.…
The full transcript appears here. Or, if you want to watch the interview on video, you can jump to Computerworld, where, rather lamely, you will need to register before watching the actual talk. Bad job by Computerworld.
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