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Request for Education Startups
101–110 of 171 posts
Re: Request for Education Startups
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is absolutely right and you can already see the tides shifting with the meteoric rise of "coding boot camps" and similar alternative educational models.
The coding boot camps are closing en masse. I can't speak for the other alternative educational models, but there has been quite a bit of discussion around the boot camps closing. Here is a recent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/coding-boot-ca...
Didn't know. I see them advertising like crazy on my facebook feed lol
Re: Request for Education Startups
#103Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…
Ycombinator doesn't care about credentials? Sam Alton - Stanford Drew Houston - mit Collision brothers - mit/harvard Airbnb guys - RISD We could go on, so let's do... Please tell me honestly if you think google Facebook Amazon Microsoft would be where they were without the "traditional credentials" of their founders? Stanford, harvard, Princeton, harvard, respectively. At this point all these SV demigods like Ravikan…
I'd argue that you could have locked zuckerberg, gates and the rest of them in a closet for 5 years with a computer and they would have still gone on to do amazing stuff. Is it harvard, yale etc that made these people great or was it something that was already in them? Their drive to innovate and passion for exploration is what made them successful, not harvard.
Re: Request for Education Startups
#104PLEASE have someone with an education background on your team. (Preferably classroom experience.) Don't assume what teachers want and need. Don't just survey teachers. Get them on your team and have them help steer your product development.
This is the most important comment in the thread. As a teacher, I've been pitched/required to use too many tools that were obvious designed by someone with little to no knowledge of what I actually do on the day-to-day. It will save you major headaches.
What subject/age-group do you teach? What's been the most useful bit of technology you've used in your job?
Re: Request for Education Startups
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is absolutely right and you can already see the tides shifting with the meteoric rise of "coding boot camps" and similar alternative educational models.
The coding boot camps are closing en masse. I can't speak for the other alternative educational models, but there has been quite a bit of discussion around the boot camps closing. Here is a recent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/24/technology/coding-boot-ca...
Nah, two of the 100 closed, the industry is fine. One is going to start up again in the same place with the same people and a different name. The other was purchased by Kaplan, which is as close as you can get to a death knell. Most are making grundles of money.
We’re not really a code bootcamp but we get thousands of applications per month and have employers incredibly hungry for our grads.
Re: Request for Education Startups
#106It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…
Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy thinks we should flip the classroom [1]. Students watch high quality lectures at home given by the best instructors on the topic, then do "homework" in class, with the teacher being there for assistance.
Sounds like a worthy approach to me. The problem is, how can you get a school board to adopt something like this? Who leads the effort? How can you implement changes to such an entrenched system?
[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rei...
Re: Request for Education Startups
#107It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…
> own "industrial revolution / doesn't seem to scale well / it's inefficient / improvements are [..] cost prohibitive / that parent pay for / can't we reward the best / We need tech / scale the classroom / deliver it cheaply / separation of concerns
I'm not disagreeing that it's a good idea to always look for ways to improve schools. But i'd like to point out that you're framing these issues in almost exclusively economic terms.
I fear a future where we've reduced schools to one or two easy-to-measure metrics. In fact that's almost exactly what No Child Left Behind's obsession with standardised testing has already done: measuring each teachers' and schools' individual performance and incentivising "high performers". Those tests are even standardised across regions, or even nation-wide, just as you're asking for.
I also don't think the problems you point are real, or new, or relevant: yes, a good teacher doesn't usually "scale". But why does everything have to scale? Good teachers create a connection to their students that usually cannot be carried over TCP/IP, and i have never seen technology used in schools that came close to the effect of an outstanding teacher.
The only realistic path to "scaling" their skills is by understanding the factors that allowed them to become role models inspiring their students, and trying to replicate them.
Re: Request for Education Startups
#108It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…
Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy thinks we should flip the classroom [1]. Students watch high quality lectures at home given by the best instructors on the topic, then do "homework" in class, with the teacher being there for assistance. Sounds like a worthy approach to me. The problem is, how can you get a school board to adopt something like this? Who leads the effort? How can you implement changes to such an en…
There's a lot of buzzwords like classroom flipping floating around in education.
Part of the issue is the subject matter experts (teachers and instructors) are not up to speed on the capabilities of technology, some even fear being replaced, when the real goal is having the same teachers reach more students more effectively.
Education budgets rarely increase.
Re: Request for Education Startups
#109It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instr…
It's kinda crazy that assessment has been coupled with instruction for so long, it pretty obviously creates a warped incentive model that stands on some real shaky ground. I think the model also doesn't scale well for assessment, which prompts the creation of few, ineffective, but highly scalable assessments upon which the functioning of the entire system rest, which in turn prompts practices like teaching to the tes…
Assessing Competency and Outcomes is one thing when done in a learning environment and quite another in the real world.
If students need to be prepared for the real world, this will need to increasingly become reflected in the amount of time spent in real-world learning vs in-classroom.
The question becomes - how will real world learning get to the classroom to reach the student, and how can the classroom meaningfully be with the student when they are with the real-world?
Re: Request for Education Startups
#110Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $…
He is absolutely right and you can already see the tides shifting with the meteoric rise of "coding boot camps" and similar alternative educational models.
Coding bootcamps serve a very niche, often already well off (relative to the other 6 billion people) people.
The basics of education are not being delivered well enough to empower the other 9 out of every 10 children who don't even have access to the basics.