[ExI] Game Changer- Free Online Education for All

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2011-12-29 09:50, John Grigg wrote:
> What do you think?  I hope this does shake things up for the
> for-profit online schools...
>
>
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2011/12/21/m-i-t-game-changer-free-online-education-for-all/


Education is - ideally - a training process where you 1) get exposed to 
information in a structured form (since just random exposure is going to 
be very inefficient with your time), 2) you work with the information to 
solve problems (that generalize outside the education setting), and 3) 
you learn skills and knowledge through this process.

In addition, there might be elements of validation (did you learn X well 
enough to prove it?), social networking, growth of critical thinking and 
other desirable socio-mental abilities, exposure to new things and 
ideas, status signalling, and so on.

Information exposure is easy, properly structured information exposure 
slightly harder: we often do not know ourselves what we ought to know 
(how many people would voluntarily do linear algebra early?) This is 
where course designers can do a lot of useful design. Free education 
means that the threshold of joining *and* dropping out are low, so 
people are likely to flee less delectable topics unless there are 
incentive structures in place that make them pursue the boring but 
useful parts.

Getting people work on solving problems (and again, not just the fun 
problems but the useful ones too) requires not just incentives but ways 
of testing their answers so they can get feedback, performance evaluated 
and incentives gated. That is easy in some domains, but pretty tough in 
others - especially since it has to be automated for free education, 
since teacher assistant time costs too much. The wrong kind of testing 
produces mis-incentives (I shudder at the use of multiple-choice 
questions), but designing good tests does require teaching skill and 
brainpower - which has a cost. Free education will always have some 
cost, and it is important to consider who will bear it and how.

The third aspect, gaining skills, is the trickiest even in normal 
education. A lot of education systems are bad at achieving it in general 
or particular, for a variety of reasons. It might simply be that we are 
not good in general at education. This might be where the new free 
education is most important: it allows us to experiment with new 
approaches (since it is not too beholden to existing institutional 
systems), and we might be able to use new forms of monitoring and data 
mining on the students (follow up surveys, built-in longitudinal 
studies?) But we should not expect it to automatically be extremely good.

In fact, a lot of free education might just be social signalling from 
institutions that they want to do good for society rather than actual 
doing good. So we better start early on to critique, measure and 
formulate incentives in order to reward institutions that actually 
achieve good things.

It is all about sufficiently correct feedback: to students, to teachers 
and to universities.

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University