How can we use technology to create an effective alternative to the current, traditional...

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McKayla Kennedy


Let's start with something relatively simple: textbooks.

Quality college textbooks have long been the backbone of higher education, but they cost an arm and a leg and need constant updating. I once needed a psychology textbook that cost me $212 used-- a new copy from the bookstore was $279. At $104 per book on average, a college student can easily expect to spend over $1000 per year just on course reading materials. That's a huge barrier to higher education.

The big textbooks corporations (Pearson, McMillan, and McGraw-Hill) are finally making the move to digital media-- which sounds great for students who want to study in non-traditional settings. Digital textbooks are, on average, half the cost of the identical paper versions, are easier to obtain and carry around, and sometimes offer interactive features like hi-lighting, searchable content, and optional reading quizzes or notes.

However, digital forms of textbooks still have problems:

• They cost an average of $50 per e-book for a single semester rental.
• Because the majority of e-textbooks are rentals, students cannot resell, lend, or reuse books.
• E-texts usually only work on 1-2 operating systems (perhaps through an iPad app and a laptop browser, but not on a Kindle or an Android tablet)

If we want more students to freely engage with all of this information, we need to expand free digital libraries. Public libraries will probably not get government funding to do this, so organizations like the Gates Foundation have already spend almost 20 years and millions of dollars helping to provide internet access and e-books to underfunded libraries around the world. Multiple websites have started to collect free textbooks in PDF, EPUB, and ZIP files. Even if it's not feasible for all textbooks to always be free, we can probably achieve free quality textbooks in all major subject areas in the near future.

Method of Mass Distribution

OK, now we have materials, but how do we get people from all walks of life to engage with our awesome materials? The simple answer is MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). MOOCs are open-enrollment college courses offered for free (or a small fee) by some of the world's top universities. Most follow a similar structure: recorded lectures by a professor, guided discussions or assignments, and frequent quizzes to measure progress. Over 1.5 million people participated in one or more of these courses between 2008 and 2012, and the number is only going up. Of course, MOOCs come with their own sets of problems:

• Only 5-25% of students who enroll in a MOOC actually complete it, according to a 2013 Stanford study. With enrollments of over 10,000 students per course, it's possible that as few as 500 will complete all lectures and assignments.
• The credit that students earn usually cannot be transferred or applied to a degree, at least not without a hefty fee and formal assessment test.
• Students must self-regulate their own engagement and progress with little feedback or encouragement

Instructors of MOOCs are working on ways to keep students engaged. They often break up the thousands of students into smaller study groups and message boards. Teaching assistants may be assigned to monitor and assess learning. Some courses take a non-traditional approach, making learning collaborative and cooperative rather than consumptive-- that is, the students take the lead in creating and experimenting, rather than than passively accepting from the instructor.

Motivation

Now that we have the materials and the method of distribution, let's talk about the driving force behind any achievement: motivation.

This is where I have a somewhat unique perspective-- I was homeschooled for most of my life, which in my case means that I've been in change of my own education since I was 9 years old. I didn't have grades or quizzes or tests, and I didn't have a teacher looking over my shoulder. My parents gave me a bunch of grade level material and assigned how much I needed to do per week-- but it was up to me when and how I did it.

MOOCs can provide the virtual classroom, but students need to create their own "class." From my experience and my fellow homeschooler's experiences (thanks guys!), I've come to recognize a few things that individually motivate people to learn:

• Personal interest/engagement with the topic-- if a 8 year old decides that they like frogs, they can absorb frog information like sponges.
• Feeling of accomplishment-- the best moment in learning is where you suddenly realize that you understand something you couldn't before.
• Success and rewards-- not just "if I do x I get y," but truly feeling that your education has been useful in making you a better person.

MOOCs are great, but they are impersonal. People need to gain personal satisfaction through their education, and they need it to mean something beyond just having completed a no-credit course.

Putting it all together

As crazy as it sounds, I think that collaborative courses are the future of higher education. Instructors will still act as models and guides, but the sheer number of students that desire to participate will limit how directly the instructor can teach. Successfully engaged students learn by applying their learning to real life problem, whether they challenge each other in a chat group or apply their lessons through in the field jobs. The truest assessment of learning is doing. If we want people to stay engaged in these free (or relatively cheap) learning opportunities, we need to make sure the courses have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. Students need to be able to apply their learning. Employers need to encourage MOOCs as a form of continuing education. Universities and MOOC administrators need to keep the curriculum rigorous but flexible.

What I would like to see in the future is reachable higher education. Viral content like TED videos and educational TV shows can whet the appetite for knowledge, but they cannot feed it on their own. I want to see mobile games that engage people in biology. I want to see more apps that allow people to freely engage with experienced experts (like Quora!). I want to see worldwide access to technology, increased digital literacy, and opportunities for advancement with education.

If the desire for higher education is there, the technology will follow.



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Patrick Mathieson


The biggest hurdle we need to overcome is cultural, not technological: We need to extinguish the belief that 4-year degrees are always beneficial and worthwhile independent of cost (both financial & opportunity).

There has been so much myth-making about the "American (or wherever you live) dream" and the notion that education is priceless / that education is its own reward, leading to a price bubble (tuition rises at something like 9% annually) and way, way, way too little price sensitivity around higher ed. This is how we get to people spending 4 years at No-Name State University and graduating with $180,000 in debt and either no job or a job that pays $35,000 per year.

Note that I'm not saying there's anything wrong with attending No-Name State University, but the argument for graduating Princeton with $180k in debt is much, much, much stronger than the argument for graduating with the same amount of debt from a university that won't provide you with anywhere near the same level of job prospects. We need to take a collective step back and start asking ourselves "what value am I getting in exchange for the cost of tuition and the opportunity cost of my time?" And then start having conversations about college selection that are a little more ROI-motivated than they are currently. (Not that education is all about financial ROI, but there's also emotional ROI -- it's hard to fully self-actualize when you're sweating under a mountain of debt throughout your twenties and thirties... particularly when this is easily avoidable.)

So I'm in favor of anything that severs the link between high school graduation and college enrollment. Even if temporarily. Even if merely to grant us some time to pause and consider the full breadth of our options -- to extinguish the notion that it would be inconceivable (or -- the mark of a "loser") to do anything except commence freshman year of college 3 months after your high school graduation. If the student decides to pursue a 4-year degree after this break, that's awesome; if not, that's also awesome. The point is to make our education choices more intentional and less reflexive.

Some ideas for possible experiences:

• Gap year
• Internship
• A temporary craftsperson apprenticeship
• Extended travel overseas
• Volunteer experience
• Entrepreneurship
• Service industry work combined with an immersive artistic practice (e.g. Starbucks barista by day, burgeoning playwright by night)
• Online or group vocational training (Coursera, Udemy, coding bootcamps, Scott Young's MIT Challenge, etc)
• Athletic pursuit
• A combination of a few of these things

We already have an incredibly powerful technology for facilitating most of these activities.... it's called "The Internet". So far that seems to be coming along pretty nicely.

We also have another forcing function -- the continued increase in the cost of higher education, which is expected to continue for at least the next 5-10 years or so. I'm actually grateful for this in the same way that I'm grateful for higher gas prices -- the most punitive the cost, the more people will be compelled to find alternatives. Gap year is the new fluorescent lightbulb.

Anyhow, I recognize that this is only partways answering your question... I don't really have an opinion on how to execute this from a technology perspective, though Yuval Ariav's and McKayla Kennedy's answers seem pretty darned good and touch on the various things that need to be encoded into online education for it to be a viable alternative to traditional higher ed (accountability, credentialing, routine, community, corpus of educational materials, etc). My angle on this is that building up the alternative education technologies is only half the battle -- we also need to erode the edifice of traditional higher ed so that people become more open-minded about the various alternatives that exist. Not to mention more cost-conscious overall.



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Stan Hanks


The first thing is that we need to acknowledge the REAL function of higher education: it's not about information transfer. It's about giving young people a chance to actually grow up.

Seriously.

You leave home, head off to college, and all of a sudden you are now completely, 100% responsible for yourself, for the first time in your life.

Want to sleep in? No problem. Oh. Yeah. That missing class thing? It's gonna come back to bite you later, for sure.

Don't feel like doing your homework? No problem. Until it's a problem, because you either can't do the work on tests or you lose a giant chunk of your grade due to this accumulation of zeros.

Want to spend you tuition money on a great set of speakers for your apartment? No problem. Um. Well, OK, that is a problem. And you'd better hope you figure that out before the return period is up.

Want to do drugs? Drink? Have orgiastic sex with random strangers? Hey, it's not like your parents are here, so go for it?

And over time - for some, quickly; for some, slowly - there is learning. About who you are. About what matters to you. About what really speaks to you, what you'd pay to do (because in fact, you are doing that) versus being paid to do.

You get EXPERIENCE. My thesis advisor used to say "Experience is what you get when you don't have any". Never is this more observable than in an incoming freshman class.

One of my best friends and long term business partners has a degree in biology. You'd never guess that in a million years from his track record as a technology executive and innovator. I asked him about that one day.

His dad was a professor of English as a major university. Mid-way through the first semester of his second year he came home, flummoxed because he needed to file a degree plan. He asked his dad for help.

His dad (who was a great guy, and also a friend of mine) said "Well, when you graduate, do you want to get a job, or have an education?"

My friend pondered, and said "Have an education". His dad nodded, and said "then take whatever the hell you want to take, it'll all sort itself out over time".

That's still very true. I love to see young people come in all fired up about "I"m gonna get a degree in X because then I can Y" only to discover that the stuff that really goes into X blows chunks for them, and that there's this really much more interesting thing going on over in this other department.

The problem is - and the reason that we're having discussions like this broadly - is that employers have outsized expectations about what a college degree should mean. Particularly in technology, where many interpret a degree in Computer Science as meaning "ready to and capable of solving any deterministic problem in the programming language of my choice in what I think is a reasonable amount of time" as opposed to the much more realistic "capable of doing some programming, fairly familiar with the underlying theory that makes it possible and its application in a few cases touched on in class".

See that disconnect? It's pervasive. It's toxic. To the companies that hold that view, to the students in a panic trying to make sure that it doesn't apply to them, and to the educational process.

Anyway, you want alternatives, I'll give you an alternative. This isn't even my idea. Unfortunately, I can't recall the author, although I believe it was Alan Dean Foster in his book Cyber Way.

Stop treating school as an educational medium. Recognize that it's a life-skills and socialization institution. Move the "information transfer" portion to on-line, augmented by social group discussion of the concepts and potentially broader applications.

The role of professors shifts - it's about facilitating collaborative work in social groups to discuss what all this stuff means, rather than pounding data into people's heads. If they don't self-pound the data in, there's nothing for them to discuss, and they get excluded until they demonstrate otherwise.

But make the higher education experience about learning life lessons - the value of showing up and participating, getting along with people you've never met and might not like while doing projects, managing your time, managing your money. And along the way, make available a vast array of information, delivered using on-line technology, in bite-sized chunks, with frequent stop-and-check quizes, amplified by social groups for discussion and experimentation.

You'll wind up with much more well rounded individuals, much more capable of coping with life after college, who along the way learned much more than they do in the current regime because the feedback changes from grades on homework (which still happens, on-line) to real-time in discussions with their peers, and mentors.



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Ian Smyth


I think I have the solution.

I really think I do.

And I'm going to share it here, not because I'm afraid somebody is going to steal it, but because I'm afraid I won't be able to implement it soon enough.

If somebody reads this, and knows they have the resources to implement it right now, contact me and I will work with you for no cost, in order to properly do it.

Ready?

Education is Inherently a Sharing Platform

I'm curious about something, so I want to learn about it.

Once I learn about it, I quickly decided whether I actually enjoy it or not.

If I enjoy it, then I want to practice it.

If I practice it, then I will remember it.

If I remember it, then I can teach it to someone else.

If someone wants to learn it, then I can teach them.

The cycle continues...

Learning is an emergent phenomenon. It's the result of doing something new that you find very enjoyable.

I can now do that with an online course, which is awesome. But, there are lots of little problems:

• I'm probably alone when I'm learning it
• For a lot of things, I won't have the chance to practice it meaningfully
• I won't have anybody to correct and guide me through the process (a teacher)
• People might not take it seriously
• It's not very likely to actually help me get placed into a location where I could meet somebody who would give me money to provide them with that value I learned (a job)

My model solves all that.

Everyone has a supercomputer in their pockets now. Great!

I have a program that's free to download. Let's call it "TeachMe". You can access it on the web, too, so you don't have to go mobile. But mobile is what makes this tick, as you'll see:

I want to learn something, so I tell the app:

"I want to learn about algorithms."

I live in a town of 100, 000 people. I'm going to guess that, at 5:14pm on a Thursday night, in a town of 100, 000 people, there's someone here who can teach me about algorithms.

The app identifies that person. There are probably many people. It will ask the most optimal one first:

"Can you teach Ian Smyth about algorithms?"

If that person says yes, then bam. The app then connects us to a physical location, such as a library study room, for a specific time, for an hour.

The details in there can be worked out: maybe I set a time when I ask ("I want to learn about algorithms in an hour") And, depending on your location preferences, an even wider range of people could be asked.

Here's where my model really shines:

It costs $20 for one hour. Consider it "tutoring". The teacher makes $15, and we make $5.

The class, however, is open to other students. Up to 20 students, specifically.

The class is pushed out to people who might be interested. They have until 30 minutes before class starts to confirm whether they're going or not.

If all 5 people attend in total, then each person pays $4.

If 10 people attend, each person pays $2.

If 20 people attend, that class on algorithms for one hour costs one buck.

When it's over, students rate the teacher, like how an Uber driver is given stars. The higher the rating, the more push notifications that teacher is going to get. The lower the rating, the less they'll get. At some point, their rating will be so low that they won't get any notifications asking them to teach.

Then, they don't teach. And bad teachers are eliminated.

They could always ask to be taught how to teach, however. Guaranteed somebody can help them out with that.

The beauty of this is that, no matter what you're looking to learn, someone has got to be able to help you out. Whether that's an introduction to algorithms, knitting, advice, mechanics, playing the guitar, there's going to be someone to help.

We also build in a function that tracks your progress in classes. It "builds" disciplines of knowledge, like stacking blocks.

"Intro to Algorithms" is stacked as a one hour block. This serves as your resume. If you make it public, any employer can see it. In fact, we can connect employers to relevant profiles automatically.

That means you don't want to worry about investing heavily in one, singular, four year subject that might be irrelevant by the time you graduate from it.

You simply learn things you want to know more about.

We connect you to someone who can teach it, for $15 an hour (and we take the other $5).

Others are sent a notification, and the price is split between those who are going. The location is adjusted accordingly.

You gain personalized learning from someone who can actually teach, or else they wouldn't have been asked to help.

The class you took is added on as a block to your profile.

You can jump right in to a topic:

"I want to learn about General Relativity."

Without having to do all the math first.

If you really like it, then you can start to work backwards.

"I want to learn about Calculus."

We close ourselves off to an infinite number of possibilities because we "choose" a college program, which serves us information on a platter. Ew.

How will I know I like Physics once I get past mechanics!? Why would I "pick" any program if I didn't know whether I'd actually like it or not 4 years later!?

We're always changing. Just like children.

Children don't say:

"Mother, father. I'm going to spend four years doing math now, and only math. I've decided, this is who I am going to be."

What the hell?

But that's what 18 year olds actually do!

Children!

They. Are. Children.

I am a child! I am 20! I have the UNIVERSE to explore!

One curiosity will lead to an interest. Which will lead to a thousand more.

My model ensures that you can explore all those interests, get help from people who can actually teach, engage with others who also want to learn the same thing, get accredited for learning it by having blocks on your profile, and network with others who could potentially pay you for the value you're learning!

My model is all about adaptability. The world is changing more than ever now. We need people who are adaptable.

We don't need more engineers. We don't need more artists. We don't need more scientists.

We need more people who will follow their curiosities, practice their interests, and connect fields that others wouldn't have even thought to connect.

We need those people to feel secure in that what they're learning is recognized by others (unlike online courses).

We need those people to be able to learn with others, and have someone who can actually teach help them out.

We need to take the segregation of learning and throw it down a hole to Hell.

I don't care if I'm taught a class by a 12 year old, because if he/she actually knows what they're talking about, then I will actually learn!

I'm working on this model right now. I know there are difficulties in the infrastructure. Specifically, how do we connect to rooms? We need a way to automatically book them.

Ideally, I would take the $5 revenue and build our own centres. People would be connected there. The rooms could move automatically to accommodate a class that grows in size over the hour.

We could include other rooms aimed at providing space and resource so people can practice.

We could have cafe's so people could go eat, talk, and laugh with one another after hour long classes.

I think that if this system is implemented properly, education would become totally democratic. Nobody would care if you have a degree. All they'd care about is whether you have knowledge, and skills in applying that knowledge, so you can do certain jobs. Those jobs will change and fluctuate due to supply and demand, and so can the types of things you learn.

I have ways to make it free, too. We could implement 360 degree cameras in all the lecture rooms, and anyone could access the lecture as an "online" course. Therefore, you're only really paying for the additional benefit of learning in person, if you do go. I know 20 people will go for something.

You could access those real time lectures through VR/AR. Smart contact lenses. Anything!

If AI got smart enough, we could even link people to lecture rooms taught by holographic, computer generated "teachers" whose algorithms could determine the optimal way to teach specific people, as we all learn completely differently.

My model lowers the risk of getting an education tremendously. It opens it up to anybody with an internet connection, and $1 - $20 to spend.

If it took off, universities would die. Thankfully.

Or, perhaps they would become "research" centres. That's already what they are.

Isn't it insane that a researcher takes the position of a teacher? What kind of logic is that?

Someone who can teach should take the position of a teacher. Someone who wants to conduct research should be conducting research.

This is really straightforward stuff. That's what I love about it, it's just really straightforward.

For all those who would say:

"But what about homework?"

"What about assignments?"

"How do we measure their learning?"

You DON'T! Stop thinking that's something you should be doing.

If someone loves something, they will do it and practice it. When they feel confident enough to do it as work for someone else, then they will interview for that position. Or, that employer will reach out to them.

For one person, learning calculus might take 5 months. For someone else, it might take four weeks.

Everyone. Is. Different.

We can work in ways to have assignments and projects for classes. AI can help us optimally find the best way to do that too. In fact, based on your ability, AI could determine the most optimal way to have you move forward with your learning via an assignment or project.

Honestly, this model just really excites me.

It's something that I want to see exist.

I want to go learn about algorithms right now.

I want to just jump in, and test the waters.

I want to see if I'd love it.

I'll know fairly quickly whether I will or not.

I don't want to spend $500 to find out.

And that doesn't mean I want a degree in it.

TeachMe. That's my model.



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Neal Lathia


I just finished the Coursera Machine Learning course. It was fantastic, and is one of the hallmarks of online courses. However, like traditional systems of higher education (at least, the one I went through), it is based on showing up (i.e., keeping up with the week-by-week curriculum), watching lectures, doing assignments, and taking quizes.

This largely mimics a push model, where educators decide on a curriculum and then put cohorts of students onto the conveyor belt that takes them through it. Students are expected to be in the same place and learn on the same time-scale.

How could technology make this better?

• Automated Tutors. Currently, assignments/exercises are done offline and submitted for a score. This is a very different experience than having a human tutor sit beside you while you work through a problem. Could a bot mimic this? An ideal bot could navigate you through a problem, perhaps nudging you in the right direction when you're stuck. It could answer basic questions, ask questions to assess your understanding, point back to the course's content, and connect you with other humans at the right time.
• Better Social Engagment. The interaction between students is "limited" to the online forums, which are not very social places to hang out, and are mostly question-response interaction. Some students organized Slack/WhatsApp groups to further engage with one another -- I didn't use these. Remote interaction is very different from being able to meet and learn from other students. Meetup is already connecting many like-minded people: perhaps the sharing economy can turn places into de facto libraries where students can socialize?
• Personalized Curriculums. Students of online courses have different backgrounds (I was re-learning a lot of the material, I'm sure that others were completely new to the subject). It therefore seems that students shouldn't all have to spend the same amount of time on particular topics. Future courses could use personalization to improve learning outcomes; for example, a system could have pushed me to learn more about my 'weakest' topics, or tailored the questions in my 'strongest' topics to be harder. There would still be a common baseline--everyone completing an online course would have achieved a particular level--but students could be challenged to improve where they need to and go further where they can.
• (Semi-) Interactive Lectures. The content delivery on Coursera was via videos. They were often short and focused, which I found very useful. There were also break-points in the videos for quiz questions. However, other than the title of the lecture, there was no way to know what content was coming, and if I encountered a topic/word I was unfamiliar with it was up to me to pause the video and start Googling. Future lectures could use augmented video or annotated video, to point me in the right direction for more information and even let me navigate the content in a non-linear way (rewatching, skipping, jumping to a slower/more detailed explanation, etc.).
• Learning Between Sessions. My experience of online courses is that they are still very "session" oriented- I need to sit down at a desk with my laptop (and, often, pen & paper) to go through the lectures. This is not very different from traditional education. The mobile app that I downloaded was basically a smartphone interface for the same content: I found it very difficult to get the same out of a lecture if I watched it on-the-go on my smartphone instead of sitting down in a quiet place. This feels like a missed opportunity: the mobile app could have guided me through content with much smaller steps of progressive disclosure, and with methods that are more suitable for a smartphone- perhaps an educational game for assessment, and bite-sized content that mimics a social feed like Twitter or Instagram.

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Bonnie Foley-Wong


I'm the daughter of immigrant parents whose reason for existence seemed to be to give their children access to better education and to give us the chance of getting a good job. Having endured hardship, risk, and challenges in their own young lives, my parents' primary lens was one of safety and security.

I grew up during a time when public education was easily accessible and free and post-secondary education was reasonably affordable - reasonably in the sense that my father worked the graveyard shift and overtime to save enough money to afford university tuition for his two children. Fortunately, my older sister and I are five years apart in age, so my parents never had to pay two sets of tuition at one time.

It's been almost 20 years since I graduated from university and boy have things changed. I endeavour to prepare my young daughter much differently for the future (she'll be of the age for post-secondary education in about 16-17 years). I still believe in education, but no longer do I believe in "getting a good job" as being the answer for a safe and secure future. I think even the assumption of a safe and secure future is up for grabs.

With that context, I find the question above to be a big one. There are several elements in the original question that could benefit from elaboration, context setting, or laying out assumptions.

• What is meant by "effective alternative"?
• What is meant by "traditional education"?
• What is great about traditional education such that we'd want to replicate its outcomes? What is not so good about traditional education such that we want better outcomes? What kind of outcomes?
• What is meant by engagement? With whom? With teachers, peers, content, subject matter, or broader economic and societal issues around us (for which education should be informing or preparing students)?
• The original question mentions higher education, which I interpret to mean post-secondary education and beyond. Which part of higher education are we talking about? A basic foundation? Marketable skills? Specialist subjects? Social skills? Self-motivation, taking initiative, problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and working in teams, and advocating for one's self?

I was remarking to my husband the other day that I can't remember two-thirds of the stuff I studied at university. I don't remember how to apply the Calculus, Algebra or Combinatorics I studied. I study systems, but I certainly don't remember any of the theory from my systems design course. I do know how to read financial statements. I do make investment decisions, but I've never had to apply the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model, even though I remember getting top marks for explaining it to my 3rd or 4th year corporate finance classmates.

I learned a lot more "on the job". I learned technical skills like information gathering for the purposes of decision-making (aka due diligence). I also learned "how to navigate the complexity of work and life" skills such as negotiating (in real life situations, not the stuff taught in workshops or books, although some of that might have prepared me a little), communication (including communicating technical information, stories, marketing, and bad news), dealing with conflict, making connections, listening and problem solving, decision-making, and leadership. Somewhere along the lines I learned how to improve my curiosity back to childlike levels, risk-taking, evaluating people and situations, self-reflection, communication, financial understanding, economics, how to teach someone to alpine ski, civic engagement, and resource management.

I don't necessarily expect anyone to learn all this at a post-secondary institution, but I've also been a student of and advocate of learning how to learn (also mentioned by Jonathan Brodsky in his answer to this question.) And maybe that is what higher education needs to be - a place to learn some specific, technical, and basic things, combined with learning how to learn. My husband, who didn't benefit from attending post-secondary education, shared with me that he feels university or college is an opportunity for exploration (nod to Stan Hanks' answer), rather than learn something with the sole purpose of turning that education into an income-generating endeavour to pay off the student debt required to learn it in the first place. In our late teens, some people don't yet know what they want to do in the near future, let alone for the rest of their life. Higher education doesn't have to be for the rest of one's life (unless it's learning to learn). Higher education is a time for self-discovery, trial and error, and making friends. On that note, I also realized in recent years, that an important key to success (if you're seeking perhaps more than safety and security, if you're seeking growth), is building your network, making connections, and finding early sponsors and mentors.

Back to the question: How can we use technology to create an effective alternative to the current, traditional system of higher education?

Use technology to:

• break down barriers so that people can find each other, start conversations, build relationships, and learn from each other on a social and academic level. This means helping people find like-minds (their tribe), as well as exposing people to ideas and opinions that are opposing and challenging. Connecting mentors and sponsors to students is critical (in some ways, that is essentially the value of organized post-secondary education today - to connect to people and an education brand that says something about you and the benefits you bring to a collaboration).
• model behaviour. I've done three online/virtual courses (in my life... or that I can remember). One was awful and the other two were amazing (the latter two were taken in the past year. I still refer to them and recommend them to others). The two amazing ones were good not so much because of the technology or delivery (one was an email course, the other was webinar plus ebook for later reference), but rather because of the quality of the content and the expertise of the course provider. But I phrase this as modelling behaviour. The course format and the providers modelled the kind of behaviour they intended to teach (both were marketing courses, now that I think about it).
• evoke emotion. I know that emotion drives decisions (see Antonio Damasio's research), so I hypothesize that emotion also influences how and what we learn.
• enable the learning that happens outside the lecture hall. I think of Knelf (it's fresh on my mind, someone just introduced it to me recently), which helps teams work better together - not because it is a technology that improves efficiency or productivity, but rather it improves understanding, empathy, and connection amongst team members (or at least that's the sense of it I get).

I'm not entirely sure how technology could have helped me learn how to negotiate, teach alpine skiing, expand the forms of communication I was capable of and versed in, and manage conflict. All these and more were learned by doing. All involved being with other people - in person.

I did, however, successfully learn marketing - something that I was allergic to and inept at (or so I thought) - through virtual, technology-enabled means.


I started jotting down the following notes, which ended up not really being relevant in the body of my answer. I thought I'd include them here out of interest and for reference.

What is out there now

There is a startup I'm familiar with that aims to improve engagement. It's a dialogue management system that plugs into learning management systems, called Prollster.

I also thought it would be helpful to note what popular online education solutions exist. They are varied and it speaks to the wide range of higher learning that happens:

• MOOCs offered by accredited institutions such as on edX or Coursera.
• There is open courseware like that offered by my alma mater, University of Waterloo.
• There is skills building for anyone by anyone such as Udemy, Lynda, Khan Academy, and early versions such as School of Everything. I include these because some people may choose not to go to university or college for their post-secondary education. Many people are experiencing changes mid-career.
• And then there is the myriad of personal and professional development workshops such as Art of Leadership, Pursuit of Excellence, and The School of Life.
• Workshops offered by trade or business associations (such as Women's Enterprise Centre of BC - through which I took one of the amazing marketing webinars).
• Courses offered directly by individuals as part of their marketing strategy such as Productized Consulting - the other amazing marketing course I took (it was offered for free as an email course originally).

Thanks for the A2A Sabrina.



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Daniel Tunkelang


Online education needs to deliver a signal of employability.

When we talk about education, we really mean two things: learning and certification.

Much of our high-minded talk about education emphasizes learning, and promotes innovative forms of content delivery as ways to improve learning. It's great that we can now consume content on all of our devices and in some cases interact with that content through tutorials, games, and social platforms.

But for most people education is a means to and end -- and that end is a better career. For them, the emphasis is less on learning and more on certification. The right degree from the right school allows a person to get a better job -- possibly to get a job at all.

Today's online education fall short as a signal of employability.

Despite the efforts of companies like Coursera and Udacity, alternatives to traditional higher education have not yet succeeded in replacing university degrees as signals of employability. Until they do, these alternatives will have limited value.

Having a university degree is a check box for most knowledge work. Yes, the job requirement often allows for "equivalent experience", but having a standard credential is an easier path than convincing an employer that you have equivalent experience.

Employers need to be convinced that the online coursework is comparable to the curriculum they're familiar with, as well as that passing an online course is a meaningful and honest accomplishment. Finally, it takes a lot of time to build a brand, and MOOCs are hundreds of years behind their traditional counterparts.

Pure-play online certification could disrupt traditional education.

Compared to creating and delivering content, certification is far less expensive. I'd love to see someone establish a certification process that is as meaningful a signal to employers as a degree from an accredited university. Doing so would require significant R&D and marketing investment, but it's a much more tractable problem than replacing the learning function of the university.

An inexpensive but equally valuable alternative to a university degree would be highly disruptive. And it would motivate an ecosystem to deliver learning more efficiently to help people prepare to obtain that certification.

The way technology can disrupt traditional education is to unbundle certification from learning, deliver certification more efficiently, and let a marketplace focus on better learning.

Given the wildly escalating costs of traditional education and the positional arms race around degrees, I hope this disruption happens soon.

ps. Much as I believe unbundling is the best approach, it's not the only one. I'm particularly impressed with Duolingo, which has demonstrated its effectiveness through an independently conducted case study. Language education is an area where learning may be more valued than certification, and Duolingo has demonstrated the ability to deliver learning effectively and cost-effectively -- so much so that their massively popular product is free. That said, they do have an English language certification product as part of their monetization strategy -- since that certification can help people get jobs.



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Balaji Viswanathan


The concept of a lecture is rooted in the Christian idea of a sermon and the early universities were just that - giving sermons to aspiring monks. It is a fairly unnatural idea that we have tried to take beyond religion and impose upon every endeavor of learning - from kindergarten all the way to corporate training.

Imagine how innovation and knowledge transfer happened in the earlier eras - when the Sumerians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Persians, Greeks were all bringing new ways in agriculture, art, science, religion etc. Did that knowledge transfer happen through this concept of lecturing? Did the early Sumerian innovators say - "boys here is how you have to cultivate wheat" and proceed on a 4 year lecturing marathon?

In the modern days, when we think of education, we think of that lecture hall with a podium where the preacher, oops teacher, stands and a row of benches where obedient, attentive students listen to the sermon without question.

What did the online education companies do? They "revolutionized" the whole process by recording the lectures & putting the podium on the Internet. Phew, problem solved. They copied a broken, outdated, expensive system without any thought to changing the process or format. No wonder their engagement and graduation rates are so low.


Traditionally, humans learned through three activities: 1) Observing, 2) Doing and 3) Talking. Imagine an early human learning pottery. He would seen a potting master do the art. After observing that he would try to get his hands on and then converse with the master and the other folks doing the same. Eventually, he will master pottery by observing, doing and talking - finetuning along the way.

A class completely run on WhatsApp

I have done a number of experiments in teaching both online and offline in the past and one of the most promising experiments for me was to teach almost completely on Whatsapp with Trello as the content sharing tool. I conducted two of these classes early last year - Jan and Fed that each went over a month long.

I organized a class of about 40 into a central Whatsapp group and then also had 6 more groups of 6-7 people each. They were in 3 different continents and hardly anyone knew other before. The goal was to build the learning purely by observations, doing and talking.

The students were given exercises everyday and have to complete, demonstrate and talk about it. Others observe, learn and then fine-tune.


These classes were the most engaging of anything I have seen and it was hard as an instructor to keep up with the mindboggling variety of ideas of the students. This is just a starting point.

Online education has to go way beyond lectures and have these for less than 10% of the activities. While it is tempting to records hours and hours of lectures & distribute it, the effectiveness is even lesser than it is in a classroom.

The tools should primarily focus on strongly facilitating interactions in real time, building more competition, emphasis a lot on students sharing what they did & and other students observing/commenting what other students did. That is how we learned for most of history - observe, do, talk.



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John Langford


My short answer is here: Home Page - Decision Service .

Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning focused on finding good policies to optimize long-term outcomes. There are two corners of reinforcement learning which work well, giving consistently good results with relatively few samples. They are:

1. Imitation learning approaches. The idea here is that a teacher demonstrates how to do things, with that demonstration used by the learning algorithm to greatly reduce the difficulty of learning. In an extreme case, a teacher demonstrating how to unlock a combination lock can reduce the number of samples required over random search exponentially. Drew Bagnell's monograph https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files... and the ICML tutorial Learning to search with Hal Daume are good references. The closest thing to a platform for imitation learning is the learning to search implementation in Vowpal Wabbit (Fast Learning), but there remain a number of challenges associated with making this deployable. Most people do something custom for imitation learning.
2. Contextual Bandit approaches. The idea here is that the algorithm uses smart exploration over alternatives to see what works and exploits that to effectively do good things. It's well-known in our corner of the universe that these approaches are exponentially more efficient than clinical trials for the purpose of creating personalized decisions. See the NIPS tutorial http://hunch.net/~jl/interact.pdf for details. The Decision Service mentioned above is the only platform yet created for solving such problems. We haven't yet applied it to education, but it has been applied to personalized news recommendation and these approaches have been used for personalized health. See http://dept.stat.lsa.umich.edu/~tewaria/research/klasnja15microrandomized.pdf .

Effectively using (1) and (2) seems like the best-practices approach towards optimizing which and how content is taught to people so as to optimize their long term happiness. This could happen both on short time scales (did people learn a particular concept?) and on long time scales (did people get a good job)? With the limiting factor being the number of events that you can learn with.



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David Brin


I am sure we'll see many answers to this question that propose we "unleash" student imaginations and ambitions from cookie-cutter mass education methods used in the industrializing 20th Century... and I don't disagree, in principle. Encouraging more individuality and creativity is, of course, a desirable end, whether achieved with new technologies or experimental schools or mentoring programs or robotics leagues...

Alas, we have been hearing the same thing for decades without ever discussing the underlying context: the fact THAT this is the reflex among education reformers in the West, and especially in the USA and Canada. Always seek ways to emphasize individuality and creative independence.

Stop and ponder. We flagellate ourselves over the fact that US students do less-well than Asian and European ones in standardized tests that measure memorized skills and knowledge... then we cry out that the answer is anything BUT memorization!

Oh, sure, there was some increase in emphasis on memorized core subjects, under No Child and Common Core, but you'll hear no support for that approach from passionate education reformers... including those who have responded to this question.

Now ponder this fact: every year, the education ministries in Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi and so on send out scads of functionaries who try hard to retrain teachers to run their classes "in a more American manner." With less rote memorization. Less hammering of drills. More classroom discussion and encouragement of free argument. Now why could that be?

Could it have to do with the fact that the US still has eighty of the hundred best universities on the planet? Or that most Asian manufacturing titans maintain their top design centers in California?

American students already have a worldwide reputation for free-thinking, argumentation, creativity... and then more argumentativeness. Mere facts are things that you go get from the Internet; what matters is rambunctious eagerness and expressive creativeness. Traits that we extol, culturally and that our education reformers - almost instinctively - demand that we strive toward, even harder. Moreover, I agree! Sure, that's doubling down on our strengths...

...and yet we have to ask: what about the 2/3 or so of American students who will never be rambunctiously creative and have no desire to be? Are we, with good intentions, laying a burden upon them, while denying them the basic skills they might have gained with a more - say - "asian" approach? That was the logic behind No Child and Common Core.

A side note during this weird election year: have you observed how a substantial fraction of US citizens think that "facts" are entirely subjective and can be overcome with self-centered vehemence?

The question we have to ask is: can we have our cake and eat it too? A win-win? The teaching games and self-adjusting curricula that others are talking about in this thread/contest are steps that should all be tried! But we need to keep in mind the context. Things we are already doing well. Those we blatantly fail at.



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