Amazing tech Advances in Education, (College for 1200 dollars a year).

[stephendare]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZYRcvanDyrU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/ZYRcvanDyrU</a>
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/technology-brings-new-life-education

There are some amazing technological innovations in education right now, and of course the education establishment is doing their darndest to obstruct them in any way they can. (Remember the newspaper industry?)

This is just one fascinating example, and the story's too complex to excerpt - go read the rest: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php?page=5

    Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

    Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

    [...]The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.

    And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.

And then there's Flatworld Knowledge, a company offering free online college textbooks (and customized textbooks for a low fee). Anyone who's gone to college (or paid for their kid) knows how expensive textbooks are:

http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003790/flat-world-knowledge-a-disruptive-business-model/
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

    Flat World Knowledge is the brainchild of two industry veterans who, back in 2007, decided to reinvent their industry from the bottom up. Co-founder Eric Frank explained to me how the company’s model works. “We still produce books in the traditional way, i.e., we approach top scholars, conduct peer review, and integrate all of the elements (photos, charts, graphs) into a high-quality textbook. But then we flip the model on its head.”

    As opposed to publishing a paper edition under copyright, the company applies a creative commons open source license. It then publishes each title online, where every single book in its catalog can be read for free. (They are also presently free on iPhones, though I suspect that will eventually have to change.) There also are a number of paid options available to the professors and students who sign up with the company:

    * A black-and-white soft cover edition will be printed on-demand and delivered within five days for $29.95.
    * A color edition produced in the same manner costs $59.95.
    * An audio book, in mp3 file format is available for $39.95. (Individual chapters cost $2.99 each.)
    * A PDF costs $19.95. (Chapters are priced at $1.99 each.)
    * Study aids that include sample quizzes and other helpful material can be purchased for $9.95. (Chapter study aids are priced at $1.99.)

    So how is this model working out to date? “Our data indicate that 65 percent of the students choose to buy at least one of our products, with 35 percent choosing the free option,” says Frank. “The average amount spent by a student is about $30 a semester, or factoring in the free use, $20 per student per class per semester.”

The important thing is that consumers should get to have choices. All other things being equal, if these products are as good as the ones offered in a standard academic setting, the establishment is only delaying the inevitable by fighting them.

[JagFan07]

It's a shame that public schools do not follow this mode. Think about it, for less than we pay for textbooks we could assign each student a netbook, with free dial-up access for those who do not have internet connections, and put all textbooks in ebook format.

You could also increase student accountability requiring all teachers to put there gradebooks online. Give the parents instant access to see how little Johnny is really doing. As it is now the parents receive a progress report 5 weeks into a 9 week semester. By then it is usually too late and the damage has been done. You could also tie in attendance records. Maybe a text message when little Johnny is not in class. 

[stephendare]

totally agree jagfan.

Especially in this economy.

How many millions of dollars could the school board save by modernizing and not having to purchase hundreds of thousands of text books every year?

What would that do, just in terms of space usage and disposal?

[JagFan07]

Actually there is a model in place now, Florida Virtual School http://flvs.net. I have used it for several classes while homeschooling both my boys.

[stephendare]

Thats funny Jagfan, when I was reading the article, I was thinking that this format would be amazing for homeschoolers

I had the privilege 15 years back of attending classes at Harvard, and even then they were web wired.  The lecture halls all had laptops that were hardwired directly into the vast harvard libraries (which were already searchable and indexed) as well as the library of congress.

Because all the information was available via a couple of key strokes the classroom discussion (always the central part of higher education, imo) no class time was wasted looking up references or imperfect paraphrasing.  When you were wrong, someone called you on it, almost immediately. 

Almost no one brought books to class, and the process of reasoning through and exploring an idea became not just central but pretty magical as well.

Considering the cost differences, and the transformative nature of going bookless and being fact checkable, its simply astounding that our public schools havent even adopted the advances that were pioneered so long ago.

What could we spend millions of dollars on, if we no longer had to buy textbooks?

[JagFan07]

We decided to homeschool both boys from 7th to 9th grade. Our issue was finding curriculum that was not religious based (nothing against religion). FLVS was able to fill our needs. We tested our children at Sylvan each year to see how they stood against the norms for their grade level. My oldest son the first year was reading at an 8th grade level. Not bad for a 7th grader. Before he went back into the public school system in the 10th grade we had him tested again at Sylvan and he was reading at College Sophomore level. I credit the fact that he wasn't being spoon-fed information but had to learn to pull information from varying sources and determine the legitimacy of those sources. 

[Fallen Buckeye]

DCPS is now doing all grades using an online program called Oncourse. Starting in November parents will be able to view a breakdown of their child's grades using an internet portal at any time.

As far as netbooks replacing textbooks, I see a couple ups and downs to this idea. For one thing, netbooks wouldn't work for teaching younger kids unless you had a very durable device. Also, how would you hold students accountable for lost or stolen netbooks? The average textbook in my experience is roughly $50 give or take, so if you lose it it isn't such a hit to replace it. Also, consider that many families do not have internet access at home. So unless it has the e-book loaded in there already it would be harder for students to bring work home. In college it isn't such a big deal to dole out netbooks because these students are paying for their own education and they are adults who you can hold accountable in ways you can't hold children accountable.

Now granted you would save on paper and space which is good for the environment I'm sure, but those netbooks need power from somewhere to work. Think about how we usually generate power in this country. Also, when we finally need to dispose of the netbooks when they become obsolete, the components are not biodegradable like paper. Not so green after all.

One more point about the netbooks and then I'm done. In order to hook in these netbooks to the school's internet as was suggested on here, you need to have a server capable of handling that much data. Sadly many of our schools do not have the technology infrastructure that it would require to make that a reality. In fact, the state of Florida introduced a new online reading diagnostic test this year which was plagued by failures because there is not adequate technology infrastructure in Tallahassee or in the schools where the tests are being taken.

Bottom line for technology in the classroom: we should only use technology when it helps us do something better or allows us to do something we could not otherwise do without the technology.

[stephendare]

Great points, which is why the new readers (like kindle) are so awesome
The brand names retail for between 2 and three hundred, but can be purchased en masse for significantly cheaper.

Trust me, if you are buying 200 thousand kindles, you will pick them up for around 50 bucks apeice.  And you could easily leverage that for the marketing rights that a Kindle would have to market the concept to other districts.

So, one kid = 5 textbooks @ 50 bucks a peice = 250 bucks per student.  One Kindle = 50-60 bucks leaving 150-200 bucks per student to pump into infrastructure.

Once you have a network model that works for a school, you simply repeat the identical network.

On kindle the textbooks are preloaded, so they would be accessible even in an unwired home.

The uses of the space being made available in a school cannot be underestimated.

Plus there is an entire beaurocracy involved with the tracking of textbooks that would become obsolete.

When kids destroy their books now, they still have to be replaced.

[JagFan07]

Awesome suggestion Stephen. I hadn't thought of using a Kindle type device.

DCPS is now doing all grades using an online program called Oncourse. Starting in November parents will be able to view a breakdown of their child's grades using an internet portal at any time.

Buckeye, I didn't know Duval County was moving forward with a project like this. That is awesome. I have long complained of the breakdown of parent teacher communication in our schools. This should help to bridge the gap. I am a firm believer that the more a parent is involved in a students education the more successful they will be.

[Fallen Buckeye]

Awesome suggestion Stephen. I hadn't thought of using a Kindle type device.
Buckeye, I didn't know Duval County was moving forward with a project like this. That is awesome. I have long complained of the breakdown of parent teacher communication in our schools. This should help to bridge the gap. I am a firm believer that the more a parent is involved in a students education the more successful they will be.

Absolutely true. And I think you're spot on about the kindle idea. I understand that some other companies are coming out with similar e-book devices, too, so I wonder what they would have to offer. If you couldn't tell I'm a teacher, and that said I would love to be able to have just one device to mess with rather than have five textbooks.

One obstacle I've seen to innovation is training veteran staff on how to use new technologies effectively. Case in point, I know a teacher that has an electronic whiteboard in her room that is being used more like a bulletin board. There's just charts taped up there. I wonder how this teacher would react to getting a class set of kindles. lol.

[urbanlibertarian]

From the article "Education for Profit" by Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason.com:

"But in recent years, the University of Phoenix has become the poster child for everything the mainstream academic establishment thinks is wrong about for-profit higher education. The school's aggressive recruiting practices and high dropout rates have drawn fire from The Chronicle of Higher Education, where a college admissions specialist in 2004 called Phoenix's approach "an affront to the principles that have been developing in college admissions over the last three decades." The head of the major accreditation body for business schools, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, last year accused Phoenix of using "a lot of come-and-go faculty." The U.S. Department of Education has punished the school for insufficient hours spent in the classroom and illegal recruiting practices, exacting two settlements during the last decade totaling $15.8 million. "Their business degree," Henry M. Levin, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, told The New York Times last year, "is an MBA Lite."

Many of the criticisms are technically accurate. The school does have aggressive recruiters and skimpy class hours. The faculty is nearly all part time. Graduation rates are low, and the level of instruction can be too.

But much of what academic traditionalists see as problems, Phoenix advertises proudly as solutions. The university aims to meet underserved demand for post-secondary education, tailor-made to fit the individual circumstances of harried adults. Like other for-profit schools such as DeVry and ITT, Phoenix offers the educational equivalent of a subprime mortgage: not the best product the industry has to offer, but a potentially valuable option for people who might not otherwise get into a desired market."

Whole article: http://reason.com/archives/2008/07/03/education-for-profit

[stephendare]

Leave it to the for profit institutions to forge the new way in technology.

They are truly like the porn industry when it comes to setting the tech standard for their general industry.

If they like the way something pays off and works, then it quickly catches on in the mainstream.