Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
What I'm hearing is that making apps pays worse than teaching people to make apps. By comparison yes, it's a triumph. But to everyone else with a real job...
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
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/...
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."
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
It's the same theory as a gold rush. The guy selling buckets and shovels is going to make more money than 99% of the people that go there to dig up gold.
I absolutely agree. Coming up with the idea is harder than implementing it. Which actually speaks to another interesting thing: He has no way to protect what he is doing... he's first to market, which is why he's making cash hand over fist... but that's going to evaporate in about 2.5 seconds when other people who are equally smart go out and undercut him on price for their own tutorials... and eventually you will get that high quality education for free from YouTube. So hopefully he milks it for as long as he can, because there are plenty of people who are better coders/more charismatic/whatever trait sells... that are willing to take a piece of that pie.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Is he first to market? MOOCs offer app-writing classes for free.
20K every 2-4 month is big bucks.
I guess "sharing" sounds a lot better than "low-priced amateur products."
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
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.
Until Khan and these other shareducators get the ability to issue actual degrees, this won't matter that much. In many career jobs, you have to have a degree. Just knowing your stuff will only get you so far. (Also, it is easy for HR to see if you have a degree or not. It is hard for them to know if you are any good, but no-one has ever been fired for hiring some-one with a degree. So HR departments will prefer to require degrees.)
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
I watched an intriguing documentary about a high school chemistry teacher that lost his job and began dealing drugs...
University is not supposed to teach you how to program. Computer Science teaches you the theory of computing. Computer Engineering teaches you how computers work. MIS teaches you how to manage techies. None of those are specifically supposed to teach you how to program. However, all of them will likely have a class in which programming is used as a tool. There are also classes available in University which do specifically teach programming languages.
However, they true purpose of University is to make you a well-rounded, socially adjusted person, who is teachable and has a good grounding in the concepts with which one would be working in that field. You don't actually learn how to do your job until you are in the field.
Vocational Institutions are very good at teaching specific skills. However, they don't focus on teaching how to learn new skills, just how to be good at one particular one. As a manager, I would hire a developer fresh out of University and showed an understanding of the concepts of programming languages over one from a vocational institution who knew the syntax of a particular language.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
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.
This.
He went to give courses in a gold rush topic at the gold rush time. Don't think you can get anywhere near his success teaching Programming in C++ or Knitting or whatever. I'm not saying you can't make a buck, but the story is about being in the right place at the right time more than about online education.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
20k/day until, like the App Store, the service gets saturated.
Mileage will vary greatly here. I know plenty of tenured professors making making in the 40-60 range which, while not bad, is far from 6 figures. Professors who work for MBA/Law/Tech oriented schools (within a university) tend to be pretty well paid, but the money can be pretty bad outside that band.