71–80 of 148 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is Duolingo actually making money?
Is uber actually making money? Is Twitter actually making money?
> The average, middle class person thinks about education as an expenditure, not an investment. The way I remember it, middle class folks in Kansas City suburbs really, really care about the quality of their schools and levy property and sales taxes to fund it. Rural Ohio townships where dual earners are making 17k less than the national median for such households may not have a lot of middle class to speak of. Cost…
"1:1 tutoring is the gold standard for educational outcomes." Is it? I'd be interested to see some data to support or refute this. I'd always assumed that students benefit somewhat from other students being around (due to observing how others learn, being pushed to be better etc.), so perhaps the ideal ratio would be in the 1:2 to 1:4 range. If people have really figured out that 1:1 is better than 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4,…
If we are interested in how many students are required to support peer to peer learning, you might enjoy the following articles (popular and academic) about how Harvard physics professor, Dr. Eric Mazur has embraced and studied peer-to-peer instruction. This should provide a partial answer to your questions.
1) Eric's Harvard Profile https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/mazur) 2) A good story/video about the development of his peer-to-peer, active learning methods (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI). 3) One of Harvard's articles about his educational work. (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lect... 4) A list of Dr. Mazur's publications (https://academictree.org/physics/publications.php?pid=66072) 5) Eric's 2015 papers on peer learning a) 2015 - Dowd JE, Araujo I, Mazur E. Making sense of confusion: Relating performance, confidence, and self-efficacy to expressions of confusion in an introductory physics class. Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. 11. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010107
b) 2015 - Miller K, Schell J, Ho A, Lukoff B, Mazur E. Response switching and self-efficacy in Peer Instruction classrooms Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. 11. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010104
Googling for "ideal group size for peer to peer learning physics" brings up articles from Vanderbilt University and those mention groups of 2-4 or 5-7.
As there are many different models of peer learning, this article does a nice job of discussing practice and the theory behind peer to peer instruction (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29128431)
My personal beliefs and experience is that people tend to like groups of 6 or fewer and the groups which speak the most among themselves range from 2-5 people. The limitations are that at least 1 person in the group must be advanced enough to help the others learn.
Last, if we look at apprenticeship models of learning, we are back to the 1:1 ratio (expert : learner). However, any single student can also have multiple 1:1 "teachers" and apprenticeships/internships usually include a peer group which engages after the 1:1 instruction. We see this in music and sports with individual sessions with a variety of experts followed by group work or performances with varied sized groups.
I hope you enjoy!
I've told this story before: Back when I was in college, I had a summer internship at a place that was a service center for the K-12 schools in a large county. Microcomputers were the big new thing. We had a facility with one of each kind of computer (Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, etc.) and all the software we could lay their hands on. Teachers could come in and try things out. My impression was that the "educationa…
One could say that his degree was entirely a waste of time, yet in order to qualify for a job in investment banking you need to go to a prestigious school and excel.
I see many spaces where education is largely irrelevant and functions only as a filter to reduce the supply of people who are qualified for a job.
I've told this story before: Back when I was in college, I had a summer internship at a place that was a service center for the K-12 schools in a large county. Microcomputers were the big new thing. We had a facility with one of each kind of computer (Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, etc.) and all the software we could lay their hands on. Teachers could come in and try things out. My impression was that the "educationa…
There exists interesting interactive technical software (not just glorified flash cards). For instance I can remember playing some puzzle game about optics circa 2000, and another about mechanical devices. I’ve never heard of such software being used in a math class though. The one bit of very nice software that does get used some places is interactive constructive geometry tools like Geometer’s Sketchpad (1995), Geo…
This tool taught me a lot about optics: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ray-optics-simulat...
If online education got people cushy jobs the way university degrees get people cushy jobs - online education would be massively profitable.
That's not the case. There's nothing else to it.
Regarding online education in general:
Universities/colleges should have to post their full curriculum, lecture notes and all textbooks and chapters used for each class - that's enough.
There's no need for businesses here - just tell us what you're teaching your class, and anyone interested can go read the textbook. Make video lectures available as a bonus for a little bit of money, that's it! A lot of students already don't attend classes and just read the lecture notes and chapters needed.
These online education start-ups remind me of companies that take Craigslist and start adding unnecessary bells and whistles to justify their existence. We already have craigslist and it works folks. Stop trying to make a buck by being so incredibly boring.
The article correctly identifies consumer-facing education businesses as being incredibly difficult. I used to work in education and Chegg is the only consumer-facing company I can think of in the industry. Most other education companies have either sold or partnered with schools (Neverware, Clever, Jamf, etc). One of the interesting things with the market is that it's difficult to start penetrating districts since s…
I'd add Texas Instruments, with their graphing calculators. They have an extremely low tech product whose prevalence actually detracts from kids learning to make effective use of computation. But they've established a monopoly position by understanding what real problems they're actually solving: 1) Moderating development to within a pace that teachers and the curriculum / testing industry can keep up with. 2) Keepin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"1:1 tutoring is the gold standard for educational outcomes." Is it? I'd be interested to see some data to support or refute this. I'd always assumed that students benefit somewhat from other students being around (due to observing how others learn, being pushed to be better etc.), so perhaps the ideal ratio would be in the 1:2 to 1:4 range. If people have really figured out that 1:1 is better than 1:2, 1:3 and 1:4,…
I worked in a high school for 5 years teaching English as a foreign language. I was not a great teacher because being a teacher is really hard, but I learned a lot in those 5 years. I will let you in on a secret. Education is not what the teacher does: it's what the student does. Most people think that the job of a teacher is to organise information and explain it to students to make it "easy to understand". This is…
1. Cost. When you deal with school districts, you usually sell for X number of devices. So for example, all devices for 5th-7th grade, something like that. When you sell alot, schools will usually ask for volume licensing. Schools don't want to see prices above $5. This goes for devices for the quality of the devices they purchase. Often, the student device is cheap, low-powered, and in the case of Windows devices, packed to the brim with all sorts of software running in the background: web filters, virus-scanners, and some educational apps. Top that off with apps that students install like Spotify and games, it slows the machine down to a crawl or causes problems that might interfere with your software solution.
2. Different school districts have different needs. Although our software solution was initially meant to be for general use by all schools, we kept running into school district that needed very specific needs to that school or district. That lead to developing new features that only a small handful of school district would use, sometimes confusing users who did not need such features, or didn't even know we had the feature.
3. If your software solution works with student information systems data, it can often be a nightmare getting school districts to create that data.
4. School IT teams are...pretty terrible. Or rather, they're swamped with so many issues from so many products and devices, that they care very little as to learn how to deploy your product properly. Have documentation? Trust me, they probably won't read it. You will most likely get an e-mail asking how to deploy.
5. Trials, trials, trials. Schools aren't going to pay up just because they see a video demo of your product. They're going to want a trial at minimum for half the school year, maybe more. Then...
6. ...Politics. Decision to purchase needs to be approved by some board.
I've told this story before: Back when I was in college, I had a summer internship at a place that was a service center for the K-12 schools in a large county. Microcomputers were the big new thing. We had a facility with one of each kind of computer (Commodore, Apple, Radio Shack, etc.) and all the software we could lay their hands on. Teachers could come in and try things out. My impression was that the "educationa…
> We've played with Jupyter/Python. My son is learning solid modeling using some free app. Have you seen OpenSCAD? It's open source constructive solid geometry modeling software, and I use it in my math classes. If your son enjoys Python, he might really enjoy this approach to modeling. http://www.openscad.org/
The limiting thing about OpenSCAD is its inability to import svg; for complex shapes it makes much more sense to draw them in a graphic software, import into modeling software and extrude them there. How do you go around this problem?