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."

Comments

first the college athletes want to form a Union...

[turkeydance]

and now this? can the NCAA and the AAUP form a strong enough political bond to thwart this freedom-thingie?

Ivy League Schools

[brit74]

'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.

Yeah, I'm sure that's an accurate portrayal of Ivy League schools, and not some capitalist's attempt at devaluing the competition.

Re:Ivy League Schools

[ShieldW0lf]

The Ivy League was basically a formal gentleman's agreement (you know, back from the good old days where they banned women and blacks from campus and had strict quotas on Jews) that they would mutually agree to be terrible at sports in order to maintain high academic standards.

Everyone who attends an Ivy League school to play sports is someone who would have been a serious consideration for admission without their athletic ability.

Of course they're going to be terrible at sports. They don't have any black people on their team!

Re:Ivy League Schools

[HiThere]

The Republicans who were responsible for emancipation (as an act of war against the rebellious South) is only vaguely related to the current Republican party. The Democrats have a closer link, and again, the civil rights movement was a political attack against the Dixiecrats, who pretended to be Democrats, but actually had an independent agenda.

P.S.: Given what the Federal Govt. has become, are you so sure states' rights was a bad idea? You can trace the current Federal Govt. back to the centralization imposed (by both sides!) during the Civil War.

P.P.S.: Under privitization, prisons have become defacto sources of slave labor. So don't claim that slavery has been eliminated. It's nature has been changed, but it isn't gone.

Re:Ivy League Schools

[Anonymous Coward]

Similarly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed with stronger Republican support in Congress (80%) than Dem (60-70%).

And the only Senator in living memory to have been a Klansman was Robert Byrd (D).

Re:Ivy League Schools

[schnell]

Similarly, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed with stronger Republican support in Congress (80%) than Dem (60-70%).

True, but that is an artifact of the unusual configuration of the Democratic Party from the 1880s to the 1980s, and is not reflective of the two parties' identities today. For many decades, the South was dominated politically by "Dixiecrats" - Democrats in name (because the Republican Party was so identified with the North) but much closer to modern Republican values in terms of social and fiscal conservatism, hawkish defense views, religious issues, etc. Dixiecrats were something of a historical anachronism, and they defected en masse to the Republican Party in the '80s as the Democrats moved too far to the Left and the Republicans under Reagan embraced the ex-Dixiecrats.

So basically the Democrats from the South who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act would be Republicans today, and that % number you cite above would be neatly flipped in the opposite direction.

Re:Ivy League Schools

[matthewv789]

In theory, but most of the people from those states don't really know anything about their state government's problems. And they seem to be happy to let the federal government grab every bit of power and money from the states, until suddenly they wake up wondering why their state government is so useless and on the brink of collapse, and the federal government is such an all-powerful bully.

why not just go the trades / apprenticeship system

[Joe_Dragon]

So people can learn real skills in a real work place settings.

Technology does not improve education

[students]

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.

Re:why not just go the trades / apprenticeship sys

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:why not just go the trades / apprenticeship sys

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:This Republican scam to destroy education...

[Attila Dimedici]

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 same lecture for 20 years, so what?

[khchung]

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?

It is not the timelyness, it is the format.

[students]

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.

Re:It is not the timelyness, it is the format.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

However, watching a video taped lecture may be a very good way of learning. You can always pause the lecture and go back.

Re:It is not the timelyness, it is the format.

[students]

Perhaps you enjoyed them, but it is highly unlikely you remember them. Physiological measures of attention, such as heart rate, show students do not pay as much attention to lectures past the first few minutes.

Re:It is not the timelyness, it is the format.

[dbIII]

Not as good as a real lecture where you can ask questions at the end if there's something you can't pick up from the lecture. Watching the same thing you don't understand twenty times is not going give you the same missing piece that a lecturer can give you by explaining something in a different way.

Re:It is not the timelyness, it is the format.

[khchung]

Lecturing is an ineffective way to teach because most people cannot pay attention to and retain a traditional lecture.

That's why students are told to take notes. That's why students are told to study outside lectures; tutorials and — where appropriate for the course — practical sessions in labs reinforce the lecture. You don't learn by just listening to someone, but it is part of how you learn.

THIS. Students that have problem learning from lectures most likely are treating the lecture as a movie (as the article alluded to), they expected to be passively entertained (a.k.a. spoon fed), instead of making an effort to learn actively. Then they wonder why they didn't learn anything and complained the lectures are too boring (i.e. not entertaining).

Clueless.

[bussdriver]

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.

Re:why not just go the trades / apprenticeship sys

[MacTO]

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.

Research.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

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.

too risky

[semenzato]

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.

My RSS feed had me worried

[wonkey_monkey]

Minerva CEO Details His High-Tech Plan To Disrupt Univers...

That's pretty amibitious.

My kid applied for one of 45 spots

[retroworks]

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.

No lab courses - no meaningful science education

[GAATTC]

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.

Re:No lab courses - no meaningful science educatio

[GAATTC]

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.

Memory implants

[flyingfsck]

What we need is memory implants. That will make both the ivy league and Minerva obsolete.