Education Policy

For the last six months we’ve been working on something at eduFire that I’m very excited to be able to announce for the first time. It’s called eduFire SuperPass and it’s my personal (and far from complete!) answer to the question: How can we change education?

As anyone who reads Stingy Scholar likely knows, education has all sorts of problems. The cost of education is increasing rapidly the total cost of a year of college at many schools now is about $50K/year) and recent evidence suggests that higher education might, for the first time ever, provide a negative ROI.

Education is a raw deal for many teachers too. Most teachers take home a small fraction of the revenue that is generated every time they teach. I saw this first-hand when I worked for Kaplan and took home about $15 in pay for every $100 in revenue that Kaplan generated from my teaching services.

What we’ve built and are taking live today is eduFire SuperPass and here’s how it works. For $29/month people can receive unlimited access to any SuperPass class on eduFire. Right now there are over 150 SuperPass classes on eduFire and we expect that number to increase greatly in upcoming weeks. These are live classes with actual instructors, not simply self-paced, computer-generated classes.

For us, it’s not really about the money though. $29/month helps us create a sustainable company and helps our teachers make a living doing what they’re most passionate about. In our view, education is the foundation upon which the rest of society is built. And, as we’ve written about on the eduFire blog numerous times before (e.g., here, here, here & here) we think there’s a real (and massive) opportunity afoot to completely revolutionize how people around the world learn. We’re far from the only ones who are working on this. There’s a great group of companies and organizations out there who are seeing a world that doesn’t exist and asking, in the words of George Bernhard Shaw, “Why not?”

So I’ll encourage you to give SuperPass a try (we’re offering a 7 day trial for only $1 to allow for easily sampling). Or if SuperPass isn’t right for you do me a *huge* favor and drop me a line (jon at edufire dot com) and tell me what would make SuperPass something you would sign up for. We’re just getting started here and your feedback will be invaluable in helping us create something that thousands (and ultimately millions) of people someday use and get a ton of value from.

It’s our vision that world-class education should be available to everyone. And not just canned classes. Actual live teachers teaching students around the globe. We’re excited about that vision and hope to have your help in the Revolution.

Source: Jon Bischke

Yesterday, while I was posting on how words could be transcended by presentation, there was an ongoing twitfest on words that have become overused and, consequently, meaningless. It started when Jane Bozarth asked what ‘instructionally sound’ meant, then Cammy Bean chimed in with ‘rich’, Steve Sorden added ‘robust’, and it went downhill from there.

I responded to Jane’s initial query that instructionally sound cynically meant following the ID cookie cutter, but ideally meant following what’s known about how people learn. I similarly tried to distinguish the hyped version of engaging (gratuitous media use) from a more principled one (challenging, contextualized, meaningful, etc). (I had to do the latter, given I’ve got the word engaging in my book title.)

Other overused words mentioned include: adaptive, brain-based. game-like, comprehensive, interactive, compelling, & robust. Yet, behind most of these are important concepts (ok, game-like is hype, and Daniel Willingham’s put a bucket of cold water on brain-based). I should’ve added ‘personalized’ when a demo of an elearning authoring suite I sat through yesterday could capture the learner’s name and use it to print a ‘personalized’ certificate at the end.

And that’s the problem: important concepts are co-opted for marketing by using the most trivially qualifying meaning of the word to justify touting it as an instance. Similarly, clicking to move on is, apparently, interactive. Ahem. It’s like the marketers don’t want to give us any credit for having a brain. (Though, sadly, from what I see, there does seem to be some lack of awareness of the deeper principles behind learning.) I invoke the Cluetrain, and ask elearning vendors to get on board.

So, before you listen to the next pitch from a vendor, get your Official eLearning Buzzword Bingo™ card, make sure you know what the words mean, and challenge them to ensure that they a) really understand the concept, and b) really have the capability. You win when you catch them out; a smarter market is a better market. Ok, let’s play!

Source: Clark

(No, I’m not talking about weapons, or anthropological determination, sorry :).

Organizations have to be nimble; the environment we face is more like sitting in the ocean waiting to ride the ever-changing waves than it is striding down a concrete road. Increasingly, in these chaotic times, changes are unpredictable. There are changing tides, swells, weather, and the resulting waves. You’d rather ride them than be tossed by them, but what do you do? When it comes to waves, how do surfers cope, and what are the implications?

Beginning surfers typically have a board, a solution for riding waves. And that’s ok, because there’re a limited number of wave conditions they should go out in. Sometimes they get a good board for general small wave conditions, but sometimes for a variety of mistaken reasons they get something like a gun. A gun is a board specifically for big fast waves. It’s a board if you’re surfing on the North Shore of Oahu in winter. Not for beginners.

More experienced surfers start accumulating a quiver of boards for different conditions. Short boards, long boards, and a gun, etc. Depending on their budget, storage space, and commitment to surfing, they could have two to as many as 8. The pros have quivers in the teens, but they get them free and on-demand. They’ll check the conditions, and then choose the appropriate board.

The analogy is that when you’re moving from just beginning to being able to adapt to a changing environment, you need to have a suite of tools that provide the flexibility you need. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, just as there isn’t the perfect board. There are boards that suit a wide variety of conditions, and if you’re small, cash-strapped, or whatever you may have to make do with one tool with most of the necessary capabilities, but when you’re serious, you need industrial-strength tools.

With my TogetherLearn colleagues, we’ve been evaluating tools for a while, and we’re not happy with any one. Consequently, we’ve a quiver of tools we use for different purposes, and we’re continually scanning for one that feature either better integration, or a more elegant delivery of capabilities.

There’s more, of course. Experienced surfers sit and watch the waves for a while, choose a board, and then when they’re out they’re scanning the horizon for swells, and moving to get optimal position. Once they’re riding, they’re watching how the wave changes and making spontaneous decisions. Sometimes they come in and pick a different board before going back out.

And that’s before you figure out how to choose tools that suit your organization, proactively adapt your culture, and align with your business goals. Surfers who want to get better get out in the water more, get more experience, and experiment. Surfers who want to get better quickly get coaching.

I reckon the business environment is going to get more turbulent, and organizations are going to have to be more flexible, more nimble, be able to adapt and move faster. That requires faster and more effective problem-solving. We know that innovation isn’t the product of one person, but of collaboration and ongoing work, by people who are motivated and supported. You need the right culture and the right infrastructure to support that collaboration. What’s your strategy?

Source: Clark

I’m finding it hard today to be positive after listening to a couple of well-reasoned analyses of our economic crisis. One analyzes the current economic crisis, explaining the complex economic structures created and unregulated (admittedly a US perspective). The other is an “Inconvenient Truth” on the larger economic picture here in the US. If you have to watch one, however, I’ll recommend the latter as more important. Our childrens’, and our country’s future are at stake. So let’s see if I can spin some gold out of this mess.

I’ve already talked about investing in culture, and I want to reiterate and elaborate on that message. I listened to a free webinar the other day via the Institute for Corporate Productivity, where they’d done a survey on companies and asked about their culture. There was good news in their results: there was a significant correlation between the assessment of cultural elements surveyed and the success of the company. And bad: not many companies scored highly on all eight. A couple of factors stood out; areas for improvement included: generating trust among employees, encouraging innovation, nimbleness of the organization, and empowering workers to do their best.

Actually, I take it as good news; first that culture matters, as it’s an area a learning person can have a role in, and second that there is room for improvement, so you can have an impact. The important issue is to become aware that culture matters, and take positive steps to improve the situation.

And there are concrete steps you can take. You need to identify what your culture should be, and currently is, and address the delta. In this post about making an innovative ecosystem (part of a performance ecosystem; pointed to on Twitter, btw I’m @Quinnovator), there are a number of prescriptions. Diversity is to be supported, small experiments are valuable, nimbleness rules. In support of that you need people to feel safe to experiment, collaborate to success (innovations typically are not the output of an individual but of a group, as Keith Sawyer tells us), etc.

So, organizations that focus on positive cultures succeed better. I reckon that’s going to be even more true in truly rough times. What are you doing to increase your contribution to organizational success?

Source: Clark

Today I stumbled across two interesting articles. Both talk about some relevant research on learning, and coincidentally, both are by folks I know.

An alumni bulletin mentioned research done by Hal Pashler (who was a new professor while I was a grad student; I was a teaching assistant for him, and he let me give my first lecture in his class), and talks about the intervals necessary for successful learning. Will Thalheimer has done a great job publicizing how we need to space learning out, and this research was interesting for the the length of time recommended.

The study provided obscure information (true but unusual), with an initial study, subsequent re-study, and then a test, with varying intervals between the study periods, and between the second study and the test (up to a year). The article implied the results for studying (no new news: cramming doesn’t work), but the implications for organizational learning. The interesting result is the potential length of time between studying and performance.

“If you want to remember information for just a week, it is probably best if study sessions are spaced out over a day or two. On the other hand, if you want to remember information for a year, it is best for learning to be spaced out over about a month.”

Extrapolating from the results, he added, “it seems plausible that whenever the goal is for someone to remember information over a lifetime, it is probably best for them to be re-exposed to it over a number of years.”

“The results imply,” said Pashler, “that instruction that packs a lot of learning into a short period is likely to be extremely inefficient, at least for remembering factual information.”

This latter isn’t new information, but does fly in the face of much formal training conducted on behalf of organizations. We’ve got to stop massing our information in single event workshops, and starting preparing, reactivating, and reactivating again for anything that isn’t performed daily.

Moving from learning to thinking and doing (it’s not about learning after all), the second one concerns research done by Jonathan Schooler (who was a new faculty member where I was doing my post-doc; we published some work we did together with one of his PhD students). Schooler’s work has been looking at day-dreaming, and found that it’s not a unitary thing, but actually has a couple of different modes, which differ in whether you’re not aware you’re daydreaming or are, instead, mindful of it. The latter is to be preferred.

In the one where you’re aware you are daydreaming, you can mentally simulate situations and plan what might happen and how to respond, or review what did happen and consider alternatives. This works for social situations as well as other forms of interactions. And the results are beneficial: “people who engage in more daydreaming score higher on experimental measures of creativity, which require people to make a set of unusual connections.”

This is what I mean when I talk about reflection, and in the coming times of increasing change and decreasing knowledge half-life, the ability to be creative will increasingly be a competitive advantage. So, as I’ve said before, do try to make time for reflection. It works!