I want to highlight an essay in the Washington Post that discusses one of the less popular subjects in education policy – the responsibility of the student. While policy makers and talking heads would never say that students bear no responsibility in their own education, their focus often is on improving teacher quality and more intelligent resource allocation within districts. Students are treated as the lifeless lump of iron, requiring adequate environmental support and the firm forging hand of the teacher to be shaped into their true potential. The danger with this narrative is it encourages students, and maybe more importantly, parents to shrug off their responsibility in the education process.
Category Archives: Education
Learning as a “Choose-Your-Adventure” Experience
I’ve had the privilege of being a student at the University of Oxford, an institution that has been responsible for education for nearly a millennium (classes were taught as far back as 1096 AD). While I loved the experience for countless reasons, I came away significantly more in love with the “American-style” teaching employed by universities this side of the pond. At least one purpose of every exchange program is to expose students to different pedagogies, and the Oxford experience did exactly that.
Oxford expects more of its students – not in terms of outcomes, but in terms of self-direction. American colleges, meanwhile, prefer to meet students halfway and provide more structure around learning. I think this is a function of age. Education at Oxford hasn’t evolved very much over the centuries. The Junior Common Room (JCR, i.e., undergrads) are treated like grad students in the US; in other words, you’re given enough rope to swing freely or hang yourself.
My Classical Economic Thought class, for example, was shockingly hands-off, compared to any economics class at Dartmouth. The assignments were weekly prompts (like “Reconcile the differing views of comparative advantage in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Ricardo’s Principles”) to which you produced a 5 – 10 page paper. To answer these prompts, you were given, at the start of the term, a reading list of about 20 books and 50 articles and were assured that all the requisite understanding lay somewhere in that recommended reading list. If not, you could refer to another generic reading list on the Econ department’s website (of about another 30 books). Your challenge was to figure out how much time and at what intensity you wished to engage with the material.
Also unexpected was how classes weren’t lecture-based, but rather, just a weekly one-hour tutorial with a grad student advisor. You would submit your paper to the Tutor a day in advance of your tutorial and would then discuss it together for an hour. Most tutorials were one-on-one so you rarely interacted with other students in a formal academic setting.
Credentialing, or Why We Need “Ratings Agencies” for Personal Education
One of the hot topics du jour is “credentialing,” or a universally accepted way to verify that an individual possesses a specific skillset. I am, admittedly, a firm believer in the value of education outside of providing for a professional career. But for the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to completely ignore that side of the issue.
I’m instead focusing on the value of education in terms of employers and hiring. People go to school to 1) learn skills that prepare them for any range of trades that they want to pursue as a career; and 2) to signal to employers that they possess such skills. But the system is imperfect; here’s an example:
At Deutsche Bank, I served as an analyst recruiter and saw firsthand how unfairly focused all bulge bracket banks are on feeder schools. Reviewing a resume from a “non-elite” school would only occur when people inside the bank pulled strings to highlight such specific candidates. Meanwhile, we had clearly structured processes to ensure that everyone who applied from Dartmouth (or Harvard or Duke, etc.) had his or her resume reviewed – and not just by a random set of eyes, but by alums of that school. I knew when a Dartmouth kid took Econ 26, 36, and 46, that he had a real interest in the finance world; I also knew never to ask accounting questions in the interview because Dartmouth just didn’t teach that as a subject. That’s a significantly different experience than being the one guy from Podunk State who happened to get a shot through incredible personal hustle. He got grilled on accounting and was given a much higher bar to clear.
This system may be unfair, which is an issue in and of itself – good schools get the best jobs, but not everyone has the same access to good schools to begin with. The other huge problem with the system is how inefficient it is. The most competitive jobs should go to the most competitive (i.e., qualified) individuals. Those individuals may have attended an Ivy League school; but oftentimes, they didn’t and the current job market has no efficient way of screening for that. In other words, very few firms are hiring very few of the right people.
Indulge Me in a Brief Analogy
Think about the job market as the corporate bond market. Investors cannot possibly know all they need to know about every corporation that’s out there trying to sell them bonds. Yet investors are comfortable investing in XYZ Corp. just as they are investing in General Electric. They may require a higher interest rate to compensate for additional risk, but they’re still willing to commit many hundreds of millions of dollars to XYZ for the promise of payments down the road. Why? Because S&P and Moody’s gave XYZ Corp a BB+ or Baa credit rating. Investors don’t need to fully trust XYZ or MNO or UVW Corp.; they just need to fully trust S&P and Moody’s. Those ratings agencies enable liquidity in the corporate credit market.
The education market has no such equivalent and is, consequently, nowhere near as liquid as it could be. The implications for market inefficiency are truly staggering. Selective investors – in this case, highly desired employers like Google or Goldman Sachs – have no ratings agencies to compare educational qualifications across different institutions. As a result, they choose to invest in – hire from – AAA-rated institutions like the Ivy League. College branding has effectively become the ratings agency for individuals. This isn’t necessarily a problem until you consider that college education is supposed to provide the skills that are being assessed in the first place. In other words, it’s as if every single corporate bond issuer gave themselves their own credit rating instead of Moody’s or S&P.
Pearson Throws Down (the Credentialing Gauntlet)
This past week, at the Summit to Reconnect Learning, education behemoth Pearson announced its new credentialing platform, Acclaim. Pearson’s hope is that Acclaim, built on Mozilla’s Open Badge infrastructure, will serve as a standardized certification system for different skillsets in the new online economy.
My earlier post on Credentialing looked just at one provider of a credentialing service, Coursera. I noted that the most logical institutions out there to assume the mantle are MOOCs. Pearson obviously thinks otherwise and, while it’s too early to provide an outlook on Acclaim, I’m curious to see what they’re able to accomplish here.
(Before discussing Acclaim further, let’s all be thankful that OpenBadges even exists right now. Mozilla isn’t considered an EdTech giant but in terms of expediting the credentialing movement, this is a great way to have an impact.)
Alternative Education in China
As a nation, we’re (rightly) obsessed with our mediocre educational outcomes when stacked up against most other nations of the world. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), we’re 30th in Math, 20th in Reading, and 23rd in Science. Unsurprisingly, we’re losing out to the Chinese, among others. “The math scores of students in Shanghai showed that they are ‘the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.’”
The Humanities: Crucial to Venture Capital (and Everything Else)
The liberal arts have gotten a bad rep. As the joke goes, “What’s the most important question that Philosophy majors need to learn to ask?” Answer: “Would you like fries with that?”. This isn’t the best trend for society.
Conventional wisdom, especially in light of the startup culture that has overtaken the world, is that hard skills like programming and engineering will rule the day. Pres. Obama has been pushing STEM education initiatives and schools are now being evaluated on the quality of their computer science classes. Nowhere is this enthusiasm felt more than in the tech investing world. We prize technical CEOs who can “talk dirty” in the language of code. We want the visionaries who can both spot seismic technology shifts and also understand the underlying science.
So far so good. Yet this blog, ostensibly about the EdTech world, Venture Capital / Private Equity, and the intersection of technology and finance more broadly, goes out of its way to incorporate the humanities. Why do I post thoughts on books that I’ve read? Especially when these books never directly pertain to the tech or finance worlds?
Twitter for EdTech: The Medium is the Message
There were two remarkable events generated in the Twitterverse in the last few years. The first is #BloomsdayBurst, the live tweeting of James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday (June 16) 2011. The second, more recently, is #Beow100, the efforts of a Stanford medievalist, Elaine Treharne, compressing Beowulf into 100 tweets for her course on the various manifestations of the work. The remarkable outputs of both #BloomsdayBurst and #Beow100 offer insight into Twitter’s potential as an educational technology – far, far beyond the view that even the most Twitter-philic teachers have of it as a “cool” way to communicate with students.
Learning Management Systems: What Are They Good For?
Over the last few years, I’ve spent real time digging into the education technology space (“EdTech” is the portmanteau I’ll be using, as “buzzwordy” as it sounds). There are a number of reasons for my interest in it: the promise to make teachers’ lives easier, the promise of improved educational outcomes, the promise of bringing the best education to every person in society, and so on. But the single biggest one is that I’ve always loved learning and anything that encourages learning in any form makes me very excited.
EdInnovation 2013 Reflections
Some observations: predictably, MOOCs permeated the discussion in every way possible. Most directly, there was discussion of MOOCs lowering the cost of colleges. This is something that is highly unlikely, at least until brand name matters less and credentials matter more. Parchment, a credentials exchange, is trying to become the system of record for everyone’s qualifications (transcripts, etc.), but the market is very far from having 1) a standard way to assess knowledge from MOOC courses and 2) corporations comfortable with MOOC certifications when making job offers. No one had a sense for when this would happen but the sense is that it will.
Some Work of Noble Note 