UltraCourses The coronavirus’s silveriest lining?

 Years ago, I wrote about a clearly superior form of online education that the editors at TIME, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post deemed worth of publication. But it never got implemented. Amid the coronavirus, online education is suddenly the norm, K-20 and so perhaps the timing is better now. I lay out the case in my Psychology Today article today.

Education Reinvented: Could this actually make education live up to its promise?

 My Time.com article today takes on the bold task of offering a blueprint for truly reinventing education. As always, your comments are welcome.

Dream Homework

What word comes to mind when you see the word, "homework?"

 For me, it's "Ugh!" I suspect I'm not alone.

I recall my school days: I was an active (okay, hyperactive) kid forced to sit still from 8:30 to 3...and unable to. If I had gone to school after Ritalin became the kid drug of choice, my teachers would have slammed a Ritalin leash on me faster than I leaped to my feet when she finally said, "Recess!"

Yet among all the calls for education reform, I've yet to hear a call to reinvent homework, that reviled after-school torture: Yet more sitting still?! "Do this worksheet." "Read the chapter and answer the questions at the end." Do problems 1-47, the odds."

Is it any surprise that parents lose hair trying to get kiddie to comply? Is it any surprise that kiddie blows-off homework anyway?

Especially for subjects that many students find difficult, for example math, why not replace problems 1-47 with visual-rich lecturettes by the world's most effective, transformational teachers? I remember not getting Algebra 1. Seymour Schwimmer (That really was his name) would cover the board with formulas and rapid-fire not-explain them with the clarity expected of a math teacher. He usually ended the class period with "Do problems 1-47." I left class sad or scared. I got home, looked at those problems with no more clue on how to do them than when I had left class, usually threw the worksheet back into my (messy) notebook binder, and ran out to play basketball.

Now imagine that instead of that, I turned on my computer or smartphone and watched a YouTube video of The Amazing One: that rare teacher who makes complicated stuff simple, even fun. True, I'd still have to sit still but wouldn't I be more likely to learn from that? To enjoy that? To grow from that? Maybe even to like math, that supposed gateway to all sorts of careers?

I am self-funding a pilot program of that very thing. I call it Dream Homework. At a diverse California public high school, on August 20-25, the first week of actual instruction, the Algebra I teachers will assign half their sections the regular homework while the other sections will instead, watch visual-rich lecturettes covering the same material by Luis Anthony Ast, the math instructor that Pearson Learning, Casio, and Texas Instruments picked to create their video algebra lessons. I'm also hiring WestEd, a top third-party evaluator, to see if the kids in the Dream Homework group do indeed learn more algebra and enjoy it. Stay tuned.

I need your help: Any ideas on how to get my ideas implemented?

I am frustrated that my ideas have not been implemented, for example, my ideas on how to improve education, a field in which I have solid bonafides.

For years now, I've done everything I can think of to get those ideas implemented. I have presented them in my columns and articles in The Atlantic and Washington Post as well as on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I'm spoken about them in public forums, including at The Commonwealth Club, at my alma mater U.C. Berkeley, and on my NPR-San Francisco radio show.  I've sent them to many people with the power to implement them--for example, the biggies at the U.S. Office of Education.. I've written about them in my new book, What's the Big Idea? 39 Reinventions for a Better America.

I believe these ideas have greater potential for improving education than the traditionally proposed reduce class size, increase expectations, etc.:

• Having teachers replace some homework with dream-team-taught online courses. No traction.
• Requiring each college to post substantive consumer information about itself on its home page as a condition for receiving federal funds. No traction.
• Replacing colleges' arcana-larded general education with courses more likely to abet students' lives.  No traction.

Are my ideas simply unworthy? If not, do you have any suggestions as to how I might do a better job of getting them implemented?

GeneralEd.Org: General Ed Reinvented

Think of all the minutes you spent in undergraduate classes. Add the homework and study time. Add the travel time. Now be honest with yourself: Do you believe you derived sufficient useful learning to justify all that time and money? Might that time and money have been better spent?

Perhaps these statistics will startle you into realizing how little most people gain from their undergraduate classes:

• A study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.
• The Spellings Report, released by a federal commission on higher education, found that: "Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined...Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today's workplaces."
  

Perhaps Saturday Night Live's Father Guido Sarducci was only half joking when he proposed a five-minute bachelor's degree: It would teach only what students remembered a year after they graduated.

If you're like many people, you say, "Perhaps I didn't learn enough of enduring value from my $100K and 4-6 years of classes but I needed the bachelor's degree to get a job or get into graduate school." True, today, more than ever, employers are demanding a degree.

But there has to be a better bachelors degree, a way you can learn more of greater value at less less cost. That shouldn't be too difficult. After all, colleges continue to teach virtually as they did 2,000 years ago minus the toga and plus Powerpoint: a sage on the stage plus discussion.

Here, I propose a better way--a much superior kind of online bachelor degree. I call it Utopia U. Of course, online degree programs are already available but as you will see below, Utopia U promises to indeed be clearly superior.

I would gladly give away the concept to entities willing to run with it but if I'm forced to proceed myself, I will try to get it funded by tuition fees and housing it on Google.com, and/or with grants from the U.S. Office of Education (where it might be called U.S. U) one or more universities or foundations (e.g., Gates or Kauffman,) and/or investments from corporations, for example, Apple or Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

Central to each course are these features:

• The core screening criterion for course content: Is that content central to the life well-led? The primary focus of each course will be to maximize the probability that the students will incorporate each course's core skills and knowledge into the way they function professionally and personally.
• Most courses should make heavy use of of immersive simulations plus lecturettes with options to click on links to explanatory text, video, etc.Each instructor would develop the course in collaboration with a top instructional designer and a specially selected computer programmer.
• The instructors, selected from within and outside academia, will be selected on: demonstrated ability to explain complicated concepts so average students understand them fully, motivate students to love learning, and be transformational: help students grow in important ways beyond learning the course material. I will likely reach out to winners of state and national professor of the year awards.
• There will be student-to-student online interaction: discussions about lecturettes, group immersive projects, forums to address problems (as on most website help sections), etc.
• Iris or fingerprint recognition technology and open-book exams will reduce cheating to levels below that at traditional universities.
  

All of the following courses are required and there are no electives.

All students will graduate with a Bachelor of Professional Studies. For a version of this document that includs the courses and modules, click HERE.

As I mentioned, my preference is to give the idea of Utopia U away to a person or entity motivated to run with it. I'd be pleased to serve as a consultant. Anyone interested? Contact me at mnemko@comcast.net or 510-655-2777.

A Blueprint for Reinventing Education

I've just written an article, A Blueprint for Reinventing Education. It will appear as a cover story in the August issue of Mensa's national magazine. I thought you might enjoy an advance look: Click HERE.

There's still time for me to change it, so I welcome your comments.

A Blueprint for Reinventing Education

A Blueprint for Reinventing Education

Notes for a presentation to the Marin Philosophical Society, May 17, 2010 by Marty Nemko

Here are the blueprint's core components:

SuperTeachers. Nation's-best teachers would, in collaboration with an expert on online education, create highly immersive, interactive courses, to be available online. An inferior approach for improving the status quo: live teachers trained by master K-12 teachers rather than by professors who are rarely master K-12 teachers.

Criticality-selected curriculum. We should ensure that kids graduate with the knowledge needed by most before we try to teach them knowledge needed by few. Examples of proposed substitutions: risk/reward analysis would replace geometry, learning how to design experiments and critique research designs would replace algebra, practical one-on-one and group conflict prevention and resolution would replace detailed study of historical events, scientific method would replace chemical reaction analysis, ethical entrepreneurship would replace foreign-language study.

More big projects. Students are minimally motivated by assignments such as worksheets, book chapters, and doing the math problems 24-96, the evens--or the odds. Students are far more likely to be motivated to read, write, think, and collaborate when participating in a play to be performed for the entire school, to create a student newspaper, build a robot for an interschool competition, etc.

Ability-grouped classes. Logic and metaevaluations indicate that mixed-ability, nondifferentiated classes are a vivid manifestation of politics trumping pedagogy. For a balanced review of the metaanalyses, see: http://www.sharingsuccess.org/code/bv/abilitygrouping.pdf. But the logic, which must be given primacy when so many covariates exist, incontrovertibly favors the heavy use of ability-grouped classes.

A high-quality non-college-bound path for students who are not academically oriented. Contrary to the trend to one-size-fits-all, everyone-to-college education, there should be high-quality junior high school and high school paths for those not academically oriented. Such students are far more likely to derive personal and career success in a path preparing them for a good career straight out of high school (e.g., robotics repair) than being one of the 200,000 students each year who graduated in the bottom 40% of their high school class who go to so-called four-year colleges. Of those, 3/4 of those never graduate, even if given 8 1/2 years. Yesterday's New York Times reports similar findings.

Mentor-centric curriculum.Transformative change is most likely to occur one-on-one. Students, K-20, would be given far greater opportunities for peer and adult mentoring (e.g., a MentorMatch website.)

Use scaled-down high school campuses: only for extracurricular activities. Most academic work would be done at home, with interactivity provided by videoconferencing software, bulletin boards, and email exchanges with students and local tutors. Teachers' homes would be used for some instruction.

A College Report Card: All colleges would be required to prominently post on their website: four- and five-year graduation rates, and average freshman-to-senior growth in critical thinking, reading, mathematical reasoning, writing, public speaking, etc. These would be disaggregated by high school grades and SAT scores.

To make college affordable: a minimal campus. Courses would usually be taught online or in professors' homes. Major recreation facilities (e.g., gyms, pools) would be shared with community facilities. Administration would be minimal. No country-club-like lush-lawn-filled campuses. Substance not shrubs.

A separate track for teaching faculty, with a separate sub-track for instructors of pre-professional courses. All teaching faculty would be required to complete a teaching boot camp followed by peer observations, video reviews, and master-teacher evaluations. Teaching faculty would be hired and promoted on the quality of their teaching not their research.

How realistic is this blueprint? I believe that the relentlessly politically correct media and even the intelligensia fearing even unfounded charges of racism will ensure that politics will always trump pedagogy.

Would it make a big difference? I'm not sure. We have not seen evidence that any educational intervention, no matter how extensive or long-lasting, is a game-changer.