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Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

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Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#11

Post by ender7 »

Here is the crux of the matter:

In the book, Mr. Khan also advocates for a separation of universities’ teaching and credentialing roles, arguing that if students could take internationally recognized assessments to prove themselves, the playing field would be leveled between students pursuing different forms of higher education.

Removing our heavy reliance on higher ed credentialling seems central to his idea, and yet the proposed solution is simply "internationally recognized assessments", which sounds suspiciously like "standardized tests" to me.

Sadly, many professions are not well-evaluated by standardized testing. This is not for lack of trying -- we already have the GRT and all of its related subject tests, plus the entire raft of tech-related certifications that aren't worth the paper they're printed on (remember "A+ certification"?). Grad schools look at GRT results, but usually only to make sure you didn't completely bomb the test.

This is the hard part, and will require a lot of careful though to untangle.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#12

Post by gridaphobe »

edtechdev wrote: post #8
aaronharnly wrote: post #2

I like the suggestion to separate instruction from credentialing, allowing excellent students anywhere to prove themselves as such. However, I strongly object to the business idolatry expressed: trading Nobel laureates for "entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives." Why not both?

Separating instruction and credentialing (and a third item - learner support) has been suggested by others before ( http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/768/1414 ), and I do think it is a good idea in theory. But look at where it has already been done before, like Microsoft or IT certifications. They are okay, but don't really have a whole lot of value because it is too easy to 'cram for the exam' - th…

How much material is covered by any single MS certificate? A semester's worth? If an entire 4-year curriculum were covered by the certification exam, it would be near impossible IMO to cram.

Of course, having your entire college record decided by a single exam is quite a scary prospect..

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#13

Post by vph »

>“Traditional universities proudly list the Nobel laureates they have on campus (most of whom have little to no interaction with students),” he writes. “Our university would list the great entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives serving as student advisers and mentors.”

Why would "great" entrepreneurs, inventors and executives have more time than Nobel laureates would to spend mentoring students?

Mr. Khan's model can work as one-of-a-kind college, but to scale it up to the mass, it will probably fail miserably.

The best model for future higher education is probably being done at MIT and Harvard through their joined venture EdX, where students are being educated and trained on and off line. In other words, these finest educators are taking advantage of both latest technologies and traditional methods to educate their students. Hopefully, in a few years, lessons will be learned and we can all benefit.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#14

Post by frankc »

ender7 wrote: post #11

Here is the crux of the matter: In the book, Mr. Khan also advocates for a separation of universities’ teaching and credentialing roles, arguing that if students could take internationally recognized assessments to prove themselves, the playing field would be leveled between students pursuing different forms of higher education. Removing our heavy reliance on higher ed credentialling seems central to his idea, and ye…

Standardized tests don't have to be multiple-choice tests from a question bank, though. You can have practical sections, like in the CCIE. You can have long-form scenarios you have to analyze like on part 3 of the CFA. You can have the exams only given on specific dates at specific times of the years, as is done on several exams, so that the questions are always secret and not reused.

The highest quality certifications comnbine more than one of the above techniques. For instance, you might make phase 1 be just a multiple choice test. This mainly acts as a filter so that not too many resources are wasted scoring the more comprehensive sections for test takers who aren't really serious. Then phase 2 testers might take a more open-ended test with essays, etc. Finally, people who pass phase 2 might have some kind of practical, similar to medical boards or the network building in the CCIE.

This kind of process might not be cheap, either. A lot of people's time are involved in creating, administering and grading of this kind of rigorous testing process, but it even if it costs $2000 - $3000, it is still much cheaper than a university. It is still much more egalitarian as it is not open only to the chosen few.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#15

Post by pfortuny »

frankphilips wrote: post #7

It's about time we see some disruption in education. The old school methods of schooling will not work in this day and age. For example in the tech sector, more companies are looking for graduates that have experience rather then just a CS degree. There are free resources to learn how to code like Codeacademy, Udacity, Coursera, Mozilla’s P2PU, Google Code University, and MIT Open Courseware. There are also more and…

Do not confuse old with crappy. The fact that most lecture-based schools are crappy does not diminish the value of a lecture (cf. Oxford etc.). The problem is not necessary the method but the numbers.

Of course, a "lecture" on Perl is probably as useless as a "practical with computers" on Metaphysics.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#16

Post by Osmium »

mvc wrote: post #9
Osmium wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the great successes of the university I attended were several weekly hour-long two-on-one sessions (two students, one supervisor) with either a professor or a grad student, talking about that week's lectures. The regularity and length of them allowed a relationship to be built up over the course of the semester, and you could be damn sure you'd learn a lot more from that dialogue than you ever would from sitti…

I've heard that's what you get at Oxford. Seems great but as a mere mortal who attended a slightly less prestigious institution, I had to make do with tutorial groups where 18-20 people would cram into a room designed for 12.

You get it at a few places. It has its downsides though: expensive for the university, and a big time suck for the supervisors, but honestly it's a really successful system. I'd go as far to say that if there's any one thing an institution can do to improve the abilities of their students, it would be to adopt a system like that.

I'm not sure how students can be expected to learn from a one-sided teaching system. We're not photocopiers. There's so much value from a meaningful, extended dialogue between a student and a "mentor." Unfortunately, a lot of people have to wait until postgraduate programs to get that, and even then may not.

A lot of US institutions have office hours which could offer much of the same if students knew to take advantage of them in the right way.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#17

Post by michaelochurch »

Education intersects with two problem areas that have historically been correlated:

1. Knowledge sharing. Books no longer take three months of a person's time to copy, but 2. "Social". This includes credentialing, social networking, and creation of an environment (in college, a mostly parentally funded and artificial one) conducive to rapid learning.

The second of these is much harder, because people still believe that exclusivity is necessary to preserve quality (and, sadly, they are not entirely wrong). I've said before that there are two sub-problems in social. One is documenting existing relationships. That's lucrative but does little real good for the world. The second is to expand the social graph. That does a lot of good but it's also risky and rarely remunerative because some people (and the vast majority of the powerful) like exclusivity. The problem with "disruption" is that it assumes the disrupted are old fogeys who won't fight back, and that's never true.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#18

Post by shadowfiend »

And the pendulum swings back.

While there are differences, fundamentally the proposition of mentors, internship-based learning, and living on site is not that different from apprenticeships. There's a wider exposure to ideas, perhaps (because maybe you jump between internships instead of staying with one), but at its most basic level the proposed idea is training people to do jobs instead of trying to expand their thinking minds. Yes, there's lip service given to seminars, but it's evident in the quote (“Traditional universities… list the Nobel laureates… ours… would list the… entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives”) that academics are held in a certain amount of contempt.

Let me be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with this vision. This approach would probably be a success. It may be needed. The problem is this: somehow we mutated universities into a place where everyone goes in order to get a job. I think we benefit from having more people being educated at a university level, but that benefit is not purely practical. I don't think the point of getting higher education is getting a job. I think it's an extension of the same reason we go to school: because an educated population drives knowledge further. Because when a large part of the population gets a Bachelors of some sort, they can reason better. And because when there are more people at that knowledge level, a larger part than before gets a Ph.D. And that helps society and humanity move forward faster.

There's a tension right now between the university as a place to expand your mind and learn for the sake of learning and the university as a place where you prepare for a job. I think it's a good idea to play with that tension and that balance, and see what balance leads to better results in what way. But I think there is absolutely a place for universities as they are today, and I think their existence is part of what has driven us forward at the frenetic pace that we have seen the last several decades.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#19

Post by sridhar_vembu »

In a chapter titled “What College Could Be Like,” Mr. Khan conjures an image of a new campus in Silicon Valley where students would spend their days working on internships and projects with mentors, and would continue their education with self-paced learning similar to that of Khan Academy. The students would attend ungraded seminars at night on art and literature, and the faculty would consist of professionals the students would work with as well as traditional professors. --

This is what we do in what we call "Zoho University" within our company. We hire students out of high school, and they go through a program that has a mix of classroom instruction focused on extensive programming exercises with a heavy dose of interaction with people building products. Basically education combined with context - why should I learn this? Why is this relevant?

This comes from my own personal experience doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Princeton. I would rate my PhD as idle mathematical game playing. That would have been OK as a hobby, I just wish I had not gifted 4 years of life to its pursuit. And I definitely take issue with the fact that this was tax-payer-funded pursuit - in fact, tax-payer-funding has something to do with how abstract and detached from reality these things get. So I ended up repudiating the whole thing. Zoho University is my atonement.

I passionately believe that the vast majority of students (myself included) would get far more value from this type of a "contextual education" program.

Re: Khan Academy Founder Proposes a New Type of College

#20

Post by ontheinternets »

edtechdev wrote: post #8
aaronharnly wrote: post #2

I like the suggestion to separate instruction from credentialing, allowing excellent students anywhere to prove themselves as such. However, I strongly object to the business idolatry expressed: trading Nobel laureates for "entrepreneurs, inventors, and executives." Why not both?

Separating instruction and credentialing (and a third item - learner support) has been suggested by others before ( http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/768/1414 ), and I do think it is a good idea in theory. But look at where it has already been done before, like Microsoft or IT certifications. They are okay, but don't really have a whole lot of value because it is too easy to 'cram for the exam' - th…

All lawyers take the bar exam. No law firm or government organization asks for a lawyer's score on the bar. They only thing that matters is your GPA, given to you by your own university. Law GPAs are heavily curved; most students can only receive A's or B's. Everyone knows that law schools regularly adjust their curves to give their students higher GPAs and therefore an advantage in the hiring market. Still, nothing changes in legal education. If anything, legal education changes less than other forms.
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