Now that’s about to change. The cost of education has gotten so high, student achievement has become so disappointing, and the technology and computerized pedagogy are now sufficiently developed and ubiquitous that the long-awaited revolution in education is about to begin.
It’s not just me who thinks so. Just last week, at a digital run-up to the G-8 summit meeting in France, Rupert Murdoch announced that his News Corp. would be getting into the business of developing digital learning content and systems “in a big way.” There is now an entire ecosystem of venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs, angel investors and philanthropists eager to provide risk capital for technology-based education startups. A blue-ribbon advocacy group, the Digital Learning Council, was launched last fall by former governors Jeb Bush of Florida and Bob Wise of West Virginia. And, naturally, there’s even a new blog devoted to the subject, EdSurge, launched by my former Washington Post colleague Betsy Corcoran.
The person who has emerged as the pied piper of this movement, however, is Salman Khan, a former math geek and young hedge fund analyst who five years ago began making 10-minute videos to help his struggling nieces with their math homework. For convenience sake, he posted them on YouTube and found to his surprise that other people liked them, as well.
Today, the Khan Academy Web site boasts 2,300 separate math tutorials, from simple addition to vector calculus, that have been viewed more than 50 million times by more than 2 million students and are in active use in more than a thousand classrooms across the country.
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What is even more exciting — or threatening, depending on your point of view — is what the Khan Academy model might do to the rest of the educational establishment.
Think about it for a minute. If education moves to a teaching model in which students learn through online tutorials, exercises and evaluations created by a handful of the best educators in the world, then how many teachers will we need preparing lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading quizzes and tests? Surely we’ll need some for one-on-one tutoring, or to run small group discussions, or teach things that can’t or shouldn’t be taught online. Despite assurances to the contrary, however, there’s likely to be fewer than we have now — fewer but better-paid with more interesting jobs — just as has happened in nearly every other industry that has gone through a similar transformation.
The disruption doesn’t stop there. If students are allowed to progress through each subject at their own pace, they won’t be second-graders or sixth-graders any longer, since at any time they are likely to be at different grades in different subjects. Indeed, the whole notion of a 45-minute “class,” or the six-hour “school day,” or even the August through June school “calendar” — the entire framework of the educational experience — will become somewhat irrelevant. And as Khan loves to point out, grading will suddenly become simple: Everyone gets an A in every course, with the only question being how long it takes each student to earn it.
Given these implications, you can understand why the education establishment has been in no hurry to embrace a digital future. The battles over standardized testing and adoption of common national standards were just the warm-up. Now that the opposition to them has been largely overcome, capital and creative talent will pour in to develop both the hardware and the software of the new education technology.
Over the next decade, look for teaching to be transformed from an art into something much closer to a science, look for learning to become highly individualized, and look for education to go from being a cottage industry to one that takes full advantage of the economies of scale and scope. And as in every other industry, look for quality to go up and cost to go down.
Sal Khan, of course, had none of that in mind when he set out to help his niece Nadia with her seventh-grade math homework. But the fact that he and his “academy” have drawn so much support and attention is a pretty good indication that this revolution is finally about to begin.
Instead of Student Loans, Investing in Futures
Sneider’s dream was to attend college so he could become a nurse and serve his community. To do so, he needed $8,500 — a sum that is close to the average annual income in Colombia. The problem is that financial aid and student loans are far less abundant in Colombia than they are in the United States. Sneider, who was unable to provide collateral or a cosigner, had little hope of getting a loan from a traditional lender.
Here’s the deal that Lumni struck with him: In exchange for $8,530 in financing, Sneider agreed to repay 14 percent of his salary for 118 months after he graduated. At that point, regardless of how much he has paid, his obligation terminates. Although this might sound similar to a loan, an “income contingent” repayment plan like this is far less risky for a low-income student like Sneider. If he has trouble finding a job or switches careers and earns a lower salary than expected — very distinct possibilities — his payments will drop automatically. The terms are, in fact, determined based on his expected earnings. If he ends up earning the average salary for nurses in Colombia, he will end up paying the equivalent of an interest rate of 17 percent, which is the average rate in the country for a student loan. And if he ends up doing better, he will pay more, and Lumni will share in his success.
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