Yesterday, Delaine Eastin officially announced her candidacy for governor. In an era of short-term thinking, her candidacy is more important than ever.
Why? Because as the first President Bush once said “Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.” And Delaine is the only candidate to see that the problems of today, which are real, can only be solved through long-term thinking, which focuses on education.
I ran into two articles this morning about education from the Washington Post that on the surface seem very different, yet truly dovetail into each other. The first is the fact that education in the United States is not providing the skills to the population that will be needed for the 21st century, even though it is in vogue to say things are “21st Century Skills”. One only needs to look to the fact that Common Core requires teaching imaginary numbers but never mentions binary to see we have a problem. The other article was about how we screw up learning in school so often, and how instructional fads that are said to be absolutely true at the time, are often not. Along the same lines, it is worth considering what has happened when kids have just gotten to use a computer, and how much they learned on their own.
Recently, the Economist had an excellent article about the importance of reproducibility in science, and a new academic journal dedicated to reproducing medical studies. I believe that reproducibility is critical, and that our institutions of higher education could support this, as I wrote in the following comment:
It would be good for many universities to have Masters students to have the option of repeating a previously published study as part of their graduation requirements. This would help prepare these students to do better original research as part of their doctorate, as well as contribute to the field in a meaningful manner.
Yesterday, I posted about the concept of Virtual Onshoring, and how I believe that a university from a developing nation could use this concept to serve the U.S. market, which could lead to significant economic gains for the developing nation. But how can they do this, and what is stopping them right now? The following is a summary of what I see would be necessary to succeed.
I first coined the term Virtual Onshoring in an Open Letter I wrote to Paul Kagame of Rwanda, in 2008. The idea is simply that with power of the Internet, we are now a “global village”, and anyone who has intellectual goods or services in a developing nation, can sell them to customers in more developed nations, in a manner that would be no different than if they were actually located in the developed nation. This could be very lucrative in the online higher education market, since the University of Phoenix alone makes over a 1/2 billion dollars per year in profit!
A few weeks back, The Economist had an excellent article talking about students going to college in other countries, and it surprised me that they didn’t talk about the idea of virtual onshoring (which I will be posting a series of articles about starting tomorrow. Here are the comments I posted to their article:
It still seems amazing to me that there hasn’t been more “virtual onshoring” of online universities to lucrative markets, such as the United States. For instance, while the University of South Africa offers relative high quality doctoral programs at a fraction of the cost of U.S. universities, it has not done many of the relatively basic things (such as gaining U.S. accreditation) that would allow it to be much more successful, and potentially earn millions of dollars. Thus, I believe that whichever developing nation realizes that they could dramatically improve their economy through the virtual onshoring of education, they have a chance to dominate this niche.
In technology, backward compatibility is a common issue. Some software companies like Microsoft have tried to keep most of what they created being backward compatible, so that files created in older versions will still work on newer versions. Even if this causes contortions to arise to be able to do new features, and makes the software less “elegant” and simple.
But, software that isn’t sufficiently backward compatible can have some big problems with getting people to adopt it. For example, the Python programming language is still having troubles getting programmers to switch from version 2.x to 3.x. Even though there are relatively few changes between the two, they are profound enough to make it very difficult in switching. This same problem faces attempts at education reform.
I wrote recently about my thoughts on whether MOOCs have been a failure. Udacity is showing that they are not, and is an example of where the potential of technology to “disrupt” a market is finally entering the realm of education. And it has now put its “money where its mouth is”, by doing something no college (that I know of) has done: guarantee its graduates a job. But what is the catch (if there is one)?
With the hype about Powerball, I am reminded of a quote, that the lottery is a tax on those who can’t do math. Further, the meme that is going around Facebook that if we divide the current Powerball pot by the population of the U.S. we all would get $4.3 million, also shows a lack of math ability. (Although the counter meme is grammatically wrong, and many posting the original meme are doing it as a ruse). What is worth looking at deeper is the lack of understanding of big numbers and probabilistic thinking in the U.S., which our education system has not yet solved.
There is a paradox: Humanity’s most developed organizations and systems are based upon what is learned in our education systems; yet, the field of education lags behind nearly all others. One such area I have seen, is how feature-poor Student Information Systems (SIS) are. Despite such systems being case studies in many database books, most of these systems do not use any data science methods to improve operations. Specifically, I have usually not seen active security, predictive analytics, nor even resource optimization as features. Here is why these are important to have, and my invitation for SIS providers to come into the 21st century.