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Minerva CEO Details His High-Tech Plan To Disrupt Universities
waderoush (1271548) writes "In April 2012, former Snapfish CEO Ben Nelson provoked both praise and skepticism by announcing that he'd raised $25 million from venture firm Benchmark to start the Minerva Project, a new kind of university where students will live together but all class seminars will take place over a Google Hangouts-style video conferencing system. Two years later, there are answers – or the beginnings of answers – to many of the questions observers have raised about the project, on everything from the way the seminars will be organized to how much tuition the San Francisco-based university will charge and how its gaining accreditation. And in an interview published today, Nelson share more details about how Minerva plans to use technology to improve teaching quality. 'If a student wants football and Greek life and not doing any work for class, they have every single Ivy League university to choose from,' Nelson says. 'That is not what we provide. Similarly, there are faculty who want to do research and get in front of a lecture hall and regurgitate the same lecture they've been giving for 20 years. We have a different model,' based on extensive faculty review of video recordings of the seminars, to make sure students are picking up key concepts. Last month Minerva admitted 45 students to its founding class, and in September it expects to welcome 19 of them to its Nob Hill residence hall."
and now this? can the NCAA and the AAUP form a strong enough political bond to thwart this freedom-thingie?
Yeah, I'm sure that's an accurate portrayal of Ivy League schools, and not some capitalist's attempt at devaluing the competition.
So people can learn real skills in a real work place settings.
Using a wide variety of teaching techniques and evaluating their quality improves education. This is essentially what Minerva is proposing. The video conferencing is incidental.
Simon's Rock College
Because no-one would learn anything in the vast majority of businesses. Big business is too bureacratic to teach apprentices and small business is too pathetic and underfunded.
Because that would require real "work" and they've spent the last 15-20 years telling people that trades and apprenticeships as worthless. That's why there's such a demand for them these days.
Om, nomnomnom...
Umm, have you looked at who runs the schools that are failing to teach minorities to read? In particular you might want to take a close look at the party affiliation of those running the school boards, and the rest of the political machinery of the local government in those place. Further, you might want to look at the history of the political party in question. Then you should ask yourself, if they still held to the political philosophy and beliefs they held in 1860, what would they do differently to better accomplish goals in line with that political philosophy?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Similarly, there are faculty who want to do research and get in front of a lecture hall and regurgitate the same lecture they've been giving for 20 years.
This may sound bad (as Nelson no doubt intended) for subjects that are relatively recent, such as anything IT related, or the more advanced courses. But tell me, how much meaningful changes were there in the past 20 years for introductory subjects like algebra or calculus? Or the introductory to intermediate courses for most physical sciences?
Go read the Feynman Lectures and tell me how much change was needed due to advances since it was given? Except for maybe a mention of Higgs and LHC somewhere?
Education is not entertainment, if the subject matter have not changed, why should a good lecture needs to change for the sake of change? It's not like we are giving the lecture to the same audience 20 times. Except, maybe, due to the decrease in competency of the students?
Oliver.
Lecturing is an ineffective way to teach because most people cannot pay attention to and retain a traditional lecture. Someone who has been giving the same lecture for 20 years was teaching sub-optimally 20 years ago and has not improved. You are correct that they may not have gotten worse either.
Simon's Rock College
You people are no more education experts because you were students than you are dental experts because you've had cavities!
It has little to do with the political parties. The political system is a big factor in today's problems but it is not the parties who are to blame; other than for their contribution to a dysfunctional political process and for their pandering to an ignorant public demanding idiotic things with no basis in reality. Things were better when only 1 party pandered and education was much lower of importance to voters. It became important as everybody wanted their brat to have more earning potential. People don't really want their kid to THINK, they want them to get a high paying career (the nutty sports parents are a good example.)
There is plenty of science on how poor kids are greatly impacted by their lifestyle; it has more impact than the education system; but it is far easier to blame things disconnected from your responsibilities! The conditions under which poor children live are collectively OUR responsibility; and that goes for abused and messed up children who are not poor but who damage the learning environment. We can't demand responsibility from parents or their children for their actions-- that doesn't poll well, so as a result any successful politician of either side picks the best lies to tell the voters.
Doesn't matter if you vote for those who "reform" the system or hire private; they both pitch a set of metrics to sell the parent - and selling is not the goal. Public education didn't put anything into marketing itself in the past; but now public elementary schools budget for marketing (which just reflects a larger societal problem.)
Then you have the matter of trying to succeed 100% with no margin of error. It's a great example of perfect being the enemy of good. You can break a good thing by trying to get that last few % not to mention all the effort and resources that last few % can cost... Yeah, I'm saying it is ok to have an acceptable failure rate. It happened in the past and they got us here to our constant reform mess when we are going down hill trying to perfect it... or more like perfect the perception of it.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Without looking, it seems that, at least in inner urban areas, it would lean Democratic. Which makes it seem like failing to teach minorities to read would be in line with their belief in 1860.
On the other hand, such districts can be poorer. While the suburban schools are wealthier. My state used to have heavy state funding of schools, to even out disparities), but that started to be cut. According to a quick google search, the year it came under heavy attack involved a state congress that leaned Republican.
So depending on your political affiliation, you can blame whatever party you choose!
In many cases what you suggest is sound. In many other cases, it is not.
For instance, you could probably get away with an apprenticeship for computer programming. Yet you would not get away with an apprenticeship for computer science. There is too much background knowledge that must be acquired for that to be viable. Besides, universities are pretty much an apprenticeship for computer scientists once they hit graduate school. (Assuming that the student is going into research, of course.)
Universities also serve many other functions. At least that is the case for students who are going about things in an intelligent manner. Since the goal is learning, rather than training, the student is free to think. You also have opportunities to make contact with other people in the field, may they be your peers or your instructors. This opens up both research and employment opportunities.
That all assumes that the student is doing more than attending lectures, reading books, and completing assignments. It assumes that the student is being more than a student. One of my professors put it best when he said that he isn't the instructor and we aren't his students. Rather, we are all colleagues. Unfortunately, most of the students didn't get that.
I think a major point is wasted. Certain researchers fund their research by teaching. Recently I read some blog, ( I'll try to find it ), where a mathematician asked that if Calculus is replaced by video lectures, how will mathematicians find the money to continue doing their research?
I'm not saying that we should continue to force students to listen to crappy lectures by teachers that only give lectures cause it funds their research. What I am saying is that research is often times important and we need an alternate way of funding it.
My daughter was quite interested in this for a while, but there is one serious problem: they are making a lot of changes at once, and evaluating the results will not be easy, especially with such a small sample of students who, by self-selection, are going to be anything but representative of the rest (for one thing, they are going to be big risk takers). It will take years to see how well this works, considering how difficult it already is to evaluate the quality of the education at various colleges.
I don't know how much these considerations influenced my daughter, but she ended up picking a conventional college, partly because she applied Early Decision and got in. Minerva might have been on her list for a second round. (And yes, she is a risk taker, and not interested in Greek life or football :)
The founders are smart people and what they say makes sense, but I know many smart people who made a lot of sense, and their startups still didn't quite work out.
It strikes me that at some point these coursera type systems will become solid enough that the major universities will begin issuing some sort of real credits for their completion.
The below ignores the other aspects of university such as meeting people, and that many courses do require very hands on interaction such as a chemistry lab. While this is true it there is potentially still many courses that do avail themselves to a pure online experience.
This then presents a few interesting things to ponder:
One is that some kids will start knocking off university credits from prestigious universities. If you have completed some fairly serious stuff from well respected universities then why continue with High School?
How does one assemble a degree if you you complete courses from 12 different universities? Where did you attend? Where do you graduate from?
If you have proven that you can do Stanford level coursework at an A level, does this help you get into Stanford?
If the elite universities start graduating 100,000+ students online what is the value of such an elite degree?
Assuming that you can do all of the above, why would people attend 3rd rate universities?
What will be the cost structure? For some whole degrees physical attendance won't be a requirement (maybe a bonus, but not a requirement) so how do you price those students? Plus if you have 30,000 people attending the course of a single professor and a handfull of his TAs plus no facilities costs then the cost to provide the course should be fairly low.
Even if people are attending a 3rd rate university it will become ever harder to justify having 300 kids attend a lecture on a basic subject when there is a vastly superior lecture series online.
My prognostication is that after all the dust settles that local universities will become adjuncts to larger more respected universities where a portion of the courses are fully remote, group work is done locally, and the stuff that requires full hands on is definitely local. So you will get a degree from 3rd Rate U but now 3rd Rate U will have some of the gravitas from the larger institution that they have chosen to associate themselves with. So the reality is that the local University will reduce the number of lesser professors and increase the number of TAs. But the university will largely remain unchanged with just less crappy lecture time.
But where I see the devastation is in the high schools. Quite simply kids (starting around middle school) will start to do online courses because their local teachers suck. Some of these kids will do Algebra 101 from a fair university, but many will end up with Calculus II or more (plus other university level basics) from a better university well before they finish Highschool. Thus the highschools will very quickly find themselves devoid of any halfway smart students with any ambition or drive. Thus the high schools will begin to become populated with the left-overs which will drive the even vaguely motivated and halfway smart kids out. With the bar lowered so much the remaining kids will become even less motivated and drive away most of the teachers who just can't take whole classes of kid who don't give a single crap.
I can see a very simple argument that any kids who are capable of properly completing first year or better university are going to have to be eligible to attend in some fashion. If one university won't take them then there will be many others that will.
The way I see this evolving is fairly slow. Universities don't really change that quickly. But I suspect that if any of the big universities make a big leap that this will be what drives this hard and fast. I laugh when I see these small universities make these big pronouncements about how they are making big changes. Quite simply they can only make small ripples in a big pond. But if Harvard offered almost any degree tomorrow in an online only format with a nearly 100% acceptance rate (the idea being that you will fail out ins
Academia squanders vast sums on quasi-professional athletics programs, and other activities that basically qualify as student entertainment, but administration is actually where all the big money gets wasted :
https://chronicle.com/article/Administrator-Hiring-Drove-28-/144519/
We absolutely need "start up" universities that disrupt existing universities by minimizing administrative costs, well administration almost never shrinks except by replacing the whole institution, but..
All these new for-profit education projects fail to address those inefficiencies because the whole profit motive differs little from squandering resources on administration.
Minerva CEO Details His High-Tech Plan To Disrupt Univers...
That's pretty amibitious.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
On the other hand, such districts can be poorer. While the suburban schools are wealthier. My state used to have heavy state funding of schools, to even out disparities), but that started to be cut. According to a quick google search, the year it came under heavy attack involved a state congress that leaned Republican.
That would make sense if not for two things. First, those inner city schools were already failing before the state funds were cut. Second, there is no correlation between how much a school district spends per student and its success at teaching those students. A few years back, the Washington, DC school district was spending more per student than any other school district in the country, yet was one of the worst school districts in the country (I have not seen the numbers for a few years, so it may no longer be spending the most per student).
Also, the urban areas don't "lean" Democratic, they are overwhelmingly Democratic. There are occasions when a Republican will win the Mayor's office, but that is rare and the overwhelming majority of other elected offices are controlled by Democrats.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
No, what I actually said was,
Your "host files engine" is a useless, CPU-sucking piece of crap, and I am very far from being the first one to say this. (Furthermore, you actually boast about its horrid performance as if it were something to be desired.) In addition, it overrides the Task Scheduler for no good reason whatsoever. That in my opinion qualifies it as something I would never in a million years permit anywhere near any machine that I use or administer; IOW it is for all intents and purposes malware and no amount of your ranting and raving and trolling and crapflooding is ever going to change this fact.
Are we clear on this? Great! Guess that means you're free to sod off now.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
From my essay discussing excellence vs. elitism & privilege: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post... :-) And maybe with robots to do anything people did not want to do? This is just intended as a humorous example, of course. I'm not suggesting Princeton would run the world of the future or that everyone would really have Princeton faculty ID cards and parking stickers. Still, that's a thought. :-) That motel for scholars, The Institute For Advanced Study, is already a bit like this (no required teaching duties), so it's an even better model. :-)
----
So, the question becomes, how do we go about getting the whole world both accepted into Princeton and also with full tenured Professorships (researchy ones without teaching duties except as desired?
http://www.ias.edu/about/missi...
But you might object, who will run the kitchens, repair the roofs, plant Prospect Garden, and so forth? Essentially, who will be the Morlocks to support and maybe eat the Eloi on staff? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Well, that's where this analogy breaks down, although one could perhaps imagine robots as the Morlocks (maybe without the whole eating PU staff for fuel thing).
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/m...
"A prototype robot capable of hunting down over 100 slugs an hour and using their rotting bodies to generate electricity is being developed by engineers at the University of West England's Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory."
So, for the rest of this essay, I'll assume the "scarcity" world (at least in the USA) currently works more like, say, G. William Domhoff suggests: ... I will try to demonstrate how rule by the wealthy few is possible despite free speech, regular elections, and organized opposition:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whor...
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whor...
"Q: So, who does rule America?
A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire.
* "The rich" coalesce into a social upper class that has developed institutions by which the children of its members are socialized into an upper-class worldview, and newly wealthy people are assimilated.
* Members of this upper class control corporations, which have been the primary mechanisms for generating and holding wealth in the United States for upwards of 150 years now.
* There exists a network of nonprofit organizations through which members of the upper class and hired corporate leaders not yet in the upper class shape policy debates in the United States.
* Members of the upper class, with the help of their high-level employees in profit and nonprofit institutions, are able to dominate the federal government in Washington.
* The rich, and corporate leaders, nonetheless claim to be relatively powerless.
* Working people have less power than in many other
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
And we aren't all "sour grapes" about not getting admitted. Minerva offered free tuition to the first class of 45, which seemed like both a good deal, and appropriate given they were still going through "shakedown" (the interview by skype process was more like a high school play than a Broadway performance). There is no doubt that the model, given the time and attention these 45 kids will get, will provide for a stunning class. As does United World College, another free tuition experiment started by Armand Hammer which relies on subsidy to maintain recruiting excellence.
What remains to be seen is whether it succeeds in creating a sustainable economic model. Yes, the USA's universities have probably overinvested their endowments in a "country club" gyms and campus accouterments. But Minerva is "pure play", the equivalent of penny stock. Will the fact that these 45 students are impressive today cause impressive students to pay tuition tomorrow, and will the lack of accouterments generate savings for the student consumer, or be siphoned into the startup costs of Minerva? Since it will probably take 10 years before any of these graduates have a chance to be recognized, they have to either produce evidence of superior education and training, or continue to make it a high value, or have to compete more seriously with a Stanford/Harvard than they had to a $0 tuition. The fact that free software attracts smart users doesn't prove your software will take significant share from Microsoft, and the fact that you get smart students to enroll in free education doesn't signify the universities charging tuition are doomed.
If the impressive kids come out in 4 years and say the Minerva experience was "not ready for prime time" and that they wish they'd gone to college, will Minerva be able to fix the bugs in the software? By the way, my kid's going to a top Canadian university, $6K per year, and is certain to have a recognized degree in 10 years. The strong arguments Minerva makes about the true value of Harvard speak well for Kings and McGill. Twin goes to UWC, btw.
Gently reply
Sorry UWC was not started by Armand Hammer, though he was one of a few billionaires to suppport it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
Gently reply
I teach Biology at a small prestigious liberal arts college. My students do their real learning in the laboratories associated with each course and in their independent research projects. Their research projects often run for more than a year and include full time summer research experiences - it is an apprenticeship. This is where they learn to be Biologists and where they get the value out of the college. No amount of book learning or seminar participation can prepare them for the challenges of actually doing science. Growing living organisms, troubleshooting experimental protocols, interpreting data, and having to write and talk about their results (which are rarely 'clean') gives them the skills to make discoveries which will drive technology forward.
Just to clarify. Lab experiences = building recombinant DNA constructs, making transgenic organisms, using $500k microscopes, taking advantage of staffed greenhouses and animal facilities. No amount of online simulation can come anywhere close to replicating time spent in a real research lab.
What we need is memory implants. That will make both the ivy league and Minerva obsolete.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Chem lab should be fun. Watch a video and then go mix up some chemicals. No professor present. No adult supervision.
What could possibly go wrong?
You really want to state that there is no correlation between what a school district spends per student and success? Then I propose that you take a school district of your choice and educate them with no money (that means no facilities, no transportation, no teachers, no curriculum, no materials, etc) and I'll take the Washington DC school district. They will go to class every day for their entire K-12 education. Then we'll compare outcomes.
But, as a rule, you can predict how students are doing on a broad scale by looking at the statistics of the communities that they live in. Wealthy areas have students that do well, poorer areas, less so. It takes a lot of money to fix that. Much more than most districts have available.
Now if we fixed the inequalities, then we would have to spend less on schools. But people don't like that form of redistribution. So we use the less effective method of schools.
Wealthy areas have students that do well, poorer areas, less so.
Right the explanation must be the fact that they have more money to spend on schools. It could not possibly be because those who have values that encourage their children to value getting an education are more likely to be wealthy, while those who do not encourage their children to get an education are more likely to be poor. It is not possible that the same factors which cause the parents of children in wealthy neighborhoods to be wealthy are the same factors which cause those parents to raise well-educated children.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Because then companies would have to pay for employees' training and education instead of letting people pay for it themselves. Didn't get overqualified enough for that internship or gain enough relevant skills on your own time and dime? No job for you, we'll just find somebody from India who did.
You should really look before you leap, Smart Guy.
It's *not* "one person's opinion".
I quoted *nine different comments* from *nine different people* who said they tried the product and found that, basically, it didn't work. And I didn't see a single positive comment amongst the entire bunch.
BTW, whether or not *I've* ever written a disk defragmenter has fuck-all to do with the issue of how well *this* disk defragmenter works or doesn't work, so don't even bother with the attempt at misdirection.
And for the last time, you need to take the "spyware" assessment up with Computer Associates, not me. Make sure you discuss it with the folks at CA that actually test software and not with their accountants.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It is beyond me why you waste your time replying to this guy. What he does is just attention-seeking behavior, and you're encouraging it by acknowledging him. Just ignore him; nobody in hell is taking him serious so you don't need to worry about defending your reputation.
I would even go as far as saying that even the sig is unnecessary. Hanging out the dirty laundry of someone who is clearly suffering from mental illness is a bit like beating up a little child for calling you names. Stiff upper lip and all that.
if they still held to the political philosophy and beliefs they held in 1860
I'm not judging the rest of your post, but this here is a silly argument. In multidimensional political space, the one-dimensional Democrat-Republican axis of American politics has turned 180 degrees since 1860. It's like two fencers who were so busy fighting each other they didn't notice they switched position. Which is a nice demonstration of how ridiculous a two-party system is.
Really? Then why do the policies of the Democratic Party, when enacted, have results that look like they were designed by the Democratic Party of 1860?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
... will do what?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."