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What Happens When the "Sharing Economy" Meets Higher Education
jyosim writes Professors now make big bucks teaching in educational marketplaces. Sites that let anyone teach courses might just change the way people think about the value of education, about the nature of expertise, and about what teaching is worth. From the article: "When Nick Walter graduated with an information-systems degree, he intended to start his own tech company to create the next big iPhone app, as so many twenty-somethings have tried in recent years. But then something dawned on him: He could make more money teaching. He set up a free account on a site called Udemy, which lets anyone teach online courses and charge for them, and then uploaded a series of lecture videos and exercises showing other people how to make apps. Walter had no experience teaching, no affiliation with a university or accredited educational institution, and—by his own admission—no particular gifts as a computer-science student. But that doesn’t matter to Udemy, or to any of a number of similar platforms that have emerged in recent years."
Big bucks, eh? I guess it depends on what your definition of big bucks is. If you mean barely scraping by with a family of 4, then I guess big bucks it is.
caveat emptor.
But then something dawned on him: He could make more money teaching.
What? You lost me there.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
The summary (though not the article) begins on the assumption that professors make big bucks. That may have been true at one point, but it's certainly not true now. Yes, full-time tenure track faculty average close to six figures annually, but only 27% of university instructors are full-time or tenure-tracked[1]. The remaining 73% or so is made up of adjunct faculty, who typically earn somewhere between $20-25k annually[2]. So, the idea that the sharing economy is going to be able to massively bring down educational costs by putting market pressure on faculty salaries doesn't really hold up. That market pressure was already there, and faculty salaries are already in the toilet. I'm not sure salaries can go down further without those teachers exiting the market entirely.
It's probably also worth mentioning, the vast majority of traditional (and non-traditional) students don't really go to an educational institute just to learn (though, it would be nice if they were to learn too). Students usually go to those institutions for a recognized credential or degree. Even if you're obtaining excellent instruction from the Internet, you're not going to get that degree. The real scarcity isn't teachers at the university level (as demonstrated by super-low wages for adjuncts). The real thing that keeps prices up is the artificial monopoly created by accreditation systems.
And, that might not entirely be a bad thing. Four year universities usually try to create well-rounded students, who learn much more than they'd ever need in their personal career. Students often complain about having to take classes they don't care about, but being broadly educated does seem to make individuals more open minded to solutions to problems that are not necessarily within their usual field of vision. If students could pick and choose their own courses, they'd rarely get that broad-view approach.
In short: this new app might be fine, but it won't revolutionize higher education in any meaningful fashion.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01...
[2] http://www.npr.org/2013/09/22/...
And a great gift for fooling students ?
He could get tenure at most universities
Turns out that producing a product worth thousands (a piece of college-level education) is worth more than producing a random app of worth a couple dollars and which might be a flop.
And good for him. Thanks to his efforts, we're one little step closer to education actually being free to everyone (instead of merely subsidized by taxpayers and limited to people of the correct nationality).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
What is being shared here? Can I just provide any full-time for-profit service, call it "the sharing economy", and land on Slashdot?
I don't know how much he gets paid, but here are the qualifications for the ed2go "Mac, iPhone, and iPad Programming" teacher:
Wallace Wang is the author of more than 40 computer books including Microsoft Office 2010 For Dummies. In addition to writing computer books, he has co-authored Breaking Into Acting for Dummies and has ghostwritten several books about investing in real estate, day trading stocks, and becoming an entrepreneur. His past jobs have included teaching computer science courses at the University of Zimbabwe, performing stand-up comedy, and appearing on a weekly radio show.
(Most programming ed2go teachers are more qualified that that.)
Forty years ago there were people out there, sci-fi writers and others, who envisioned that this was how all education would eventually be done, from elementary school all the way through college. They seemed to sense that the television and computer and telephone would somehow be put together to create a learning environment. The entire idea sounded fantastic to me.
When I got out of high school I joined the Navy and went through avionics school. The school was computer-driven and self-paced, and I loved it. For once I didn't have to be held back in classes that had to be taught to the level of the lowest common denominator. I remember thinking that I wish all education was like this.
Now the technology is here to create these kind of learning environments for nearly everyone, and it's affordable. I think that traditional universities, and even high schools and elementary schools, will eventually go away. We're seeing the beginnings of that now.
If I live long enough, I suppose I will miss college football, but in the long run, this is the best thing for education.
Proverbs 21:19
More than half of my engineering curriculum was taught by prolific researchers who couldn't teach worth a damn. I was a tutor through most of college and found myself "reteaching" a lot of the stuff they would teach to others who came looking for help. Not because I was bright, see I struggled to understand the same topics, but I was able to break the topics down in a way that made more sense. Tying "building block" concepts progressively, until the process showed the complete picture, at which point I could teach them to myself for my own understanding, and then to others. That's when I realized good teachers require the whole package of skills; proficiency in their subject and a mind to educate by facilitating the process of connecting concepts.
Sounds like a good place for a free market to open up. What teaching is worth should lean heavily on a feedback/review framework like Amazon's such that people don't end up paying for a class that sucks, by every student's experience, because the professor can't communicate concepts, or communicate at all. Like the time I spent almost weeks trying to figure out what the foreigner in my Space Systems course meant by "papamaaa". By the way, that's "performance".
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
This sounds like almost every free-lance "music" teacher I've ever come across.
Just because you can play some chords on a guitar doesn't make you qualified to teach music. These folks are either naive about how much work and expertise it actually takes to be a true teacher, or they're charlatans attempting to prey off the naivete of others. I mean, there's a reason why we have education accreditation boards, right?
I have a Ph.D. and am now fully qualified to teach university courses. The funny thing about that is that in the course of getting my Ph.D., I never once had to take a course on how to teach or even teach/TA a course (I was a research assistant the whole time I was in grad school).
I'm an outlier on not having to teach/TA a course in grad school (I did TA an undergrad, though) , but I don't know of any graduate programs that require actual training for teaching.
The person cited in the summary is just as qualified as most Ph.D.s. :)
As for the big bucks, two of my good friends from grad school (both computer scientists) spent their first two years working for free waiting for tenure track positions to open up. They get decent salaries now, but over the course of their careers, it's not what I'd call big bucks.
-Chris
So he pointedly never utters the word "Boolean" or other coding jargon in his video lectures if he can avoid it.
Sounds like you'd become a great programmer after watching his lectures. $199 well spent there.
To be fair, university lectures are equally worthless. The best way to learn programming is from a book as they give you the opportunity to try things out as you go along. You learn very little from sitting in a lecture theatre and listening about programming.
That applies to most other things as well. I always prefer to learn from a book, work at my own pace and try things out myself instead of sitting in a classroom and being lectured at.
I'm married to a tenured prof, and I had the idea about 7 years ago (reserved a domain guerillacampus.org) to "uber" the college classroom. My idea was to use only fully tenured professors at area colleges to teach "on the side", so that students who paid would know they were getting the same generic teaching ingredients. Now I've got twins entering as freshmen, and looking at all the expenses and loans anew. I see Minerva Project is trying something similar, to replicate a "highly selective" competitive environment without the added expense of "campus" largesse.
No doubt there is an opportunity somewhere in MOOCs or Minervas or Uber-professors to provide the teaching with lower expense. However, I found that it was a lot more difficult than having an idea and recruiting the teachers. Vetting students, recruiting, providing a certified brand of diploma, etc. proved fairly significant, and without scale of students one faces very high administrative challenges. He's not the first to have the idea and it's not going to be easy when students drop out or demand transcripts 5 years later, or don't pay their teachers as planned. But I hope he succeeds, if only to send a warning shot over the universities bows, ie that colleges have potential competition if they remain in the "arms race" to build massive capital intensive campuses.
Gently reply
Most people work after graduating, become consultants, and hit the rubber chicken circuit by writing books and doing videos. So someone figured out how to skip working and consulting, went straight to the videos, and made big bucks. Meh... I got a business plan on the back of a napkin that will make zillions. Give me your money.
"Professors now make big bucks teaching"
BWA! HA! HA!
Sorry, couldn't read beyond this. Too damned funny. Or stupid, if you prefer.
Remain calm! All is well!
Salman Khan has done rather well considering he didn't get a degree in 'education'. The ability to teach has little to do with the teaching credentials that our education system demands. It's comunication, coaching and mentoring skills. The whole certification industry only serves to maintain scarcity and keep union teachers' wages and tuitions artificially high.
Have gnu, will travel.
I watched an intriguing documentary about a high school chemistry teacher that lost his job and began dealing drugs...
All of ya'll who have posted so far on your success via online material have said "I wanted to do it and pushed myself through it." One prime reason for the failure, of most online teaching systems that are hands off like this is motivation on the student's part to push through. Pure online doesn't seem to work for the majority (vast majority?) of people. Hybrid models that I've seen, with tutors and teachers in the room or interacting individually somehow, seem to be better.
A relative is taking online classes to get a late in life degree, one class at a time, slowly but surely. It's a degree for his field, classes are self driven through an online school. He can finish classes whenever he wants and start a new one. In the end it turns out slower than traditional college, but works at a distance for him.
"Salman Khan has done rather well..." He produces content. He doesn't teach. Until you can measure what product he provides by some sort of system (that's the concept of accreditation, it's not an evil word), you have no idea if it's effective by itself.
Certification is not evil. The world has to have some way to measure what you've learned and achieved. That's certificates/degrees. Some fields work without it, but few. Otherwise, the world's a mess.
Teachers, especially high school and the adjuncts at community colleges/universities/degree mills are not making lots of money. Far from it. If you think otherwise, show some data to back yourself up.
Yes, I'm union. No, I don't have a teaching degree. MS in Physics.
Problem is, this could go right up next to the "common folks'" belief in "common sense over so-called science", and derision of "experts" of any sort. Degrees and certificates do not necessarily impart wisdom; many without degrees or certificates have wisdom; and neither paperwork nor wisdom are necessarily combined with an ability to instruct others, in either positive or negative correlation. OTOH, the Youtube attitude that "lots of people can make an entertaining performance video" does not mean that all of them are of good quality (either the video or the performance or both), and certainly does not mean that "anybody can make an instructional video too". Most Americans profess to speak English, but an immigrant seeking to learn English would get wildly varying results picking one at random as an instructor.
Well, just as qualified in terms of knowing how to teach, but I would wager that a PhD knows more about their field then some random person who failed at making iPhone apps. Even if the guy is really bright, there is going to be a lot of try, tedious material that he never learned which is going to impact his teaching if he has to stray from 'here is how you use XYZ framework/API/etc'.
I never once had to take a course on how to teach or even teach/TA a course (I was a research assistant the whole time I was in grad school).
You are a textbook example of why many professors in colleges are horrible teachers. They have no experience, and they are more interested in doing their research than teaching.
The person cited in the summary is just as qualified as most Ph.D.s. :)
Not true. He is not as educated or experienced in the topic as someone who has a Ph.D would be, and it would be trivial to stump him with a more advanced question. He is as qualified with respect to experience actually teaching, but he has not been in as many classes to see what hasn't worked by experiencing it. He may have had a good example which he can copy, but it is more likely the Ph.D has had one.
As for the big bucks,
I believe the realization was that he could make more money, which is certainly true for most app developers. The claim that academics make big bucks in any absolute sense is absurd.
Turns out most people aren't good self-motivated learners. You find that if you have the "courseware" kind of model where people can just go and watch lectures and do assignments at their own pace the attrition and failure rate is very high. People just won't do what they need to do. They need a more structured environment to succeed. Now you can get all self superior and say "Well they should just work harder and not suck!" but we have to deal with the real world and that means educating all types of people.
Ah, so the "Idiot's Guide to..." has made its way onto the web. Except for, in this instance, without any editorial or quality control. I bet most of the semi-decent courses are posted there free for promotional purposes, either for anyone who might be interested in attending their educational organisation, e.g. college or university, or for using a particular product, e.g. high-end media production software and/or hardware. There's nothing new here and it simply encourages the typical Silicon Valley business model of make your content producers compete with each other in a race to the bottom and make the real profits for yourself from hosting, administering, and promoting the system... you know, by pushing stories into media outlets about how it's going to revolutionise education. Here's a great video about the history of new media technologies in education, "This Will Revolutionize Education": https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sadly
There are three categories of students in general, who come to study. The top 10% don't need teachers, they learn on their own like in Stanford, MIT etc., the bottom 10% who have no interest in learning go to community college that baby sits them and give them a "bogus" associate degree (I have have taken classes there and verified this) and the majority of students about 80% are average and want to learn and get a degree for betterment of their life. Neither the text books nor the teachers take care of these 80% future tax paying citizens. Text books in general, are written by contract writers who have almost no teaching experience but enough material to cover the course requirement and the best teachers do not want to write to just get 10-15% if they are lucky while the publishers can even deny publishing the books after getting the rights transferred to them. So, where are you going to find the best teachers to teach most of the 80% average students? No where. This is the case not only in US but also in most other countries except Japan. Teaching needs a lot of deep thinking, passion to help the average students, enormous patience and a well paid job. Universities are in general, a den of intellectual corruption – 2nd and 3rd rate professors preventing the first rate to enter their, teach there and get tenure because like politicians, they can not survive if the students compare them to the best. The scene is from elementary school to Universities in the USA. No solution now with electing bogus politicians and people are willing to be cheated by them but do not realize that their chidlren's life is at stake.T
I beleive that Carleton U in Ottawa has a required set of mini courses for masters and PHD students that give them a minimum level of teaching skills
Not only that, but someone with a PhD has had their share of teachers who were great, and those that weren't. I've never had a "teach 'em how to teach" course, but I can read about best practices, emulate the good teachers I've had, and do those things I want done to/for me as a student.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos