How Laurie got world-class business education for almost free
MBA is a fairly expensive degree around the globe. Many people invest two years and over $100,000 to get an MBA from top tier business schools. Laurie Pickard chose to get the same for less than $1000.
Newly married and preparing to leave for her new job in USAID in Africa, she considered pursuing a business degree. At the same time, hearing about the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from a friend who was taking an online course led her to reconsider her decision.
Laurie will probably be the first person to do the equivalent of a complete MBAusing MOOCs. She’ll take classes from Harvard, Wharton, and Yale, among other top-tier schools and she’ll accomplish this by keeping her full-time job, no forgone earnings and saving the hefty fee of MBA. All of this while living in one of the poorest country in Africa, Rwanda.
Most of America’s prestigious business schools and many from Europe are offering online courses for free which are accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and the desire to learn.
When Laurie began the project, there were only a couple of B-schools offerings MOOCs. It wasn’t long before schools began to aggressively release various courses from foundation to specialisations via MOOC platforms such as Coursera.com, edX.org, Futurelearn, iversity and Udacity.com.
Our perspective
Reach (scale) was the prime determinant of educational delivery – not the quality of content, delivery process or the consistent quality of the individual teaching resources and it remained the Achilles heel of universal quality education. However, the advent of MOOCs, where thousands (and even hundred thousands) of students enrol for courses delivered online by just a few instructors, have disrupted the higher education model by opening up limited world class university education to all, across the globe. Further, most of these courses support wider supervision, assessment and remedial through self, software and peer collaboration, discussion and review.
Now, scale and quality need no trade off; quality, in fact world-class quality education ceases to be exclusive or expensive. Indeed, for the most part, MOOCs are virtually free, except for certification fee, which also seems to be on a downward spiral. For instance, Georgia Tech University (ranked no. 7 among public universities in the US) with AT&T and Udacity offers an online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current offline degree.
Higher education is now modularised and personalised. You learn at your own pace, place and time and chose your own content and instructors. Most potently, higher education need not be a full-time engagement anymore as you can work, learn and supplement online. All aptly suited for need and interest triggered relevant lifelong learning.
Of course, some of us would still take the luxury of time and value ‘world class peership’ enough to take courses on campus – and that would not be out of place in case the peership condition is met. In case, higher education is mostly for ‘degree sake’ (i.e. without passion), on-campus courses will be quite disappointing.
Is there a catch in all this? To be true, a big one – only highly self-motivated, self-learners can make use of the MOOCs; the dropout rates in some MOOCs hovers near 90%! Take the primary responsibility for your children to become self-learners; school’s pedagogy is not meant to even assume that children can be self-learners. It is not a big task, it is, in fact, very basic- getting the language of academics (English for Indians) and conceptual clarity in maths, science and social sciences.
You may also know
Interestingly, it’s the world’s top universities that are the first to join the MOOC revolution. So, does it mean an end of the road for rest of the universities, which today enrol the majority of students? Indeed, as Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University declared that with MOOCs we “were witnessing the end of higher education as we know it”.
Futurist Thomas Grey predicts that by 2030 over 50% of colleges will collapse due to high overhead costs, substandard classes and teachers, higher pricing, inconvenience of time and place, besides an already higher rate of discontentment.
Finland schools are scrapping subjects for topics
Renowned for its successful school education system, and ranked among the top of PISA rankings for reading, maths, and science, Finland is flocked by politicians and educational experts alike from around the world to identify and replicate its success.
Finland is undergoing a radical overhaul in its education system, dropping ‘teaching by subject’ in favour of ‘teaching by phenomenon’, reports The Independent.
Traditional lessons such as English Literature will be replaced by more general topics like the European Union, which will include elements of economics and history, foreign languages and geography.
“We really need a rethinking of education and a redesigning of our system, so that it prepares our children for the future with skills that are needed for today and tomorrow,” Marjo Kyllonen, Helsinki’s education manager (official), told the Independent.
Our perspective
One of the hallmarks of the school-based education system, worldwide, is the organisation of knowledge in discrete silos named subjects. This kind of organisation was imperative for an ‘information-focused’, ‘without reference to outcome/impact’, teacher-centric, syllabus-bound education system that was founded essentially a couple of centuries ago.
However, a lot has changed in the past decade – all the information in the world is only a ‘google away’, the bar of educational outcome is set at 100% – no child left behind and acutely short supply of quality teachers mandates child-led teaching-learning processes and resources. Further, too much of discovery and innovation is happening at the boundaries of subjects compared to fundamentally new discoveries and innovations within subjects. There are various important but complex problems, phenomena and concepts that resist understanding or resolution when approached from single disciplines. The implication is that we must educate for both disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise. Interdisciplinary education must supplement disciplinary teaching and learning so that students can learn how to respond to challenges that transcend disciplines and work in the confluence of multiple disciplines. For instance, the emerging field of quantum information processing is an amalgamation of quantum physics and computer science, bioinformatics combines molecular biology with computer science and sustainable development requires analysis and synthesis across economic, social and environmental spheres.
Indeed, concept-based learning is the way to organise knowledge for exploring subjects, in line with the way knowledge is being used around us. We must also organise our teaching-learning around concepts to ensure high quality academics for all students.
A concept-based education system is necessarily multi-disciplinary, very precise in monitoring outcomes/progress of every child, easier for creating remedials/revision etc. and the best way to ensure outcomes in rigidly hierarchical subjects such as math as well as science. It is also very student friendly – self-learning is easiest when content is divided into concepts.
Teacherless Classrooms are the way of the future
US futurologist Dr Thomas Frey is reimagining the classrooms of the future. He says, “Throughout history, education has been formed around the concept of ‘place.’ Build fancy buildings, attract world-renowned scholars, and you have a college or university. This model works well in a culture based on teaching. Over the coming years, with our hyper-connected world, we will quickly begin shifting to a learning model. And while “place” will still matter, it will matter differently.”
In an interview to News, he envisioned a fundamental shift away from a model with a teacher at the front of a class as the only source of knowledge, to a model where students imbibe the knowledge through self and peer learning and teachers were more like coaches guiding students from point b to c. Education will still require experts, however teacherless education will engage experts to create the learning content, but will not require them for presentation of content.
Technology in education is now ripe with array of promising tools and techniques that can be used and possibilities of such teacherless classroom models are emerging fast. In 1999, Sugata Mitra with his colleagues experimented by digging a hole in a wall at an urban slum in New Delhi. He fitted an Internet enabled computer, and left it there with a hidden camera filming the area. What they saw was kids from the slum playing with the computer, learning how to use it, access internet, and then teaching each other. No teacher was required to teach them the use of tech or even the content (in English) in it.
Dr. Frey emphasises that people are going to have to shift careers more than ever before in all history and teacher centric classrooms will never have adequate number of qualified teachers at all places and time to satisfy our insatiable hunger and need for knowledge. We are severely limiting our learning potential. Teachers become the problem in this equation, not the solution they were intended to be. There would still be areas where teachers will be necessary, but maybe not quite as many as already exist today.
Our perspective
Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!
– Arthur C Clarke in Electronic Tutors (1980)
Indeed, the most critical need of a good school system is ‘every teacher a quality teacher’ – an increasingly impossible specification to achieve. In two years of consecutive neglect of a child or 2 years of teacher with poor content knowledge or delivery in 12 years of school education is enough to make educational journey too difficult (and the probability of such conditions is very high in most countries).
Interestingly, even the best teachers for 12 years cannot ensure the academic excellence of students. We can do a small ‘back of the envelope’ calculation to illustrate this.
Let us explore the science syllabus of Class VIII to specifically understand the ‘capacity limitations’ of schools. The syllabus has 18 chapters and it is presented as under.
Let us, for example, pick out the chapter ‘Sound’ as a model for our calculations.
To start with, we’ll have to make a broad assessment of the volume of measurement and monitoring expected of a Class VIII science teacher. We will assume the teacher attends to 5 sections and each of the section has 25 students (a scenario typically associated with the ‘best of schools’ in terms of teaching load and class size.)
As the next step, let us list the concepts in the chapter titled ‘Sound’; we find 13 concepts embedded in the chapter and are listed as under:
As the next step, let us design the micro-progress report for science for all the students of Class VIII.
Further, assuming equal number of concepts for other subjects as well, the total number of student-concept pairs becomes really unmanageable for teachers and schools.
Expectedly, short of good quality teachers and the explicit expectation of ‘no child left behind’, we have to invent a new school system, and the aforementioned approach is the boldest of all improvisations and innovations in school education system.
To be frank, we find this approach hopeful and promising and we believe that as it evolves we will be able to mainstream this model for the section of society where parents are educated and ready to take upon themselves higher responsibility in the education of their children.
Of course, it must be mentioned that a part of this innovatively bold approach is the unstated role of teachers as ‘caregivers like parents’ and this role can be assigned to ‘non-teachers’ who will be expected to lovingly engage with students in ‘emotionally managing them’ through the routine of the school.
Incidentally, concept-based teaching-learning will be the backbone of this new approach.
With today’s 24×7 connected world and AI, we will shift to a learning model. And while schools will still exist, it will function differently. Teaching requires experts.
Teaching requires experts. Learning will only requires coaches. Once again, the main take away for us all is that we must use technology in education for child-centred learning.
Gazing through the crystal ball
- Education in the 21st century will focus on conceptual clarity as subject boundaries will disappear.
- Technology will and need to be harnessed in a larger way than currently to fulfill the objectives of 21st century education – personalization of self-learning educational resources and processes. However, the overwhelming majority of the technology applications in education are still far from being learner-centric.
- Parents need not set aside the largest share of their investment in children’s education for higher education. The investment will be made upfront in early childhood and probably be less for higher education.
