September 3, 2014 • 44 mins
Could a start-up company challenge the university system? We look at why higher education is so expensive and the goals of the Minerva Project.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, and Welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
looks at the future and says schools out forever. I'm
John in Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. So we were
(00:23):
talking about what we were going to record this week,
or you know, we like to brainstorm different ideas about
stuff about the future that'd be kind of cooled. And
then I noticed that, you know, we needed one. I
talked about maybe another future of education episode, and I
had just read an article in The Atlantic which we
will be referring to numerous times in this podcast called
(00:45):
the Future of College question Mark, and it was the
author Graham would It was Wood's experience trying out something
called the Minerva Project. And so we wanted to talk
about what the Minerva Project is, how it contrasts with
(01:08):
the standard university experience as well as other alternatives to
universities as far as higher learning goes. So in order
to do that, first thing, one of the premisees that
the Minerva Project is based upon is that there's something
wrong with the university system, right. That's like, that's like,
(01:29):
that's one of the that's one of the first reasons
for its supposed to you know, one of the first
supposed reasons for its existence. How could you say that
you anti intellectual? Uh? Well, I mean, I'm just reporting
what has been said. But but if I had to
wager a guess, I would say that, And actually I
don't have to because this is all laid out in
(01:50):
the article. It's largely about the problem of cost. When
it comes to pursuing a degree from from a college university,
they can be pretty expensive. And yes, cost has always
been one barrier to access to higher education, but it's
gotten particularly bad in recent years, hasn't it. Yeah, so, Joe,
(02:15):
you found this article in Bloomberg about the increase in
costs in uh in college tuition, and according to that article,
the tuition costs have increased by five hundred thirty eight
percent since n The article itself was written in two
thousand and thirteen, so those numbers are probably even a
little different today. I guess that's for US higher education. Yes, yeah,
(02:36):
specifically the United States. In fact, a lot of what
we're going to talk about today is going to focus
on the United States. That's where we live, so that
tends to be our frame of reference, and it's where
the Manerva project is based as well. Yes, currently there
will be other locations for the Minerva Project, assuming everything
goes well and that it doesn't collapse in on itself.
(02:57):
So let's say you're a person who looks this whole situation,
all the great things about college and university and the
mess that it's in right now. Also, so you see
it as a trade off. You see, well, obviously college
and university in America is one of the most culturally
and economically and intellectually important things I can do with
(03:18):
my life. But at the same time, you see that
is so much money, and I might not be getting
the value that I want out of this investment, and
lots of other concerns to me, Maybe I can't necessarily
get into the college I want to go to the most. Well,
on top of that, there's just the cultural pressure of
attending college in the first place. And there may be
(03:40):
people who don't necessarily want to go to college, but
there is an intense social pressure to go into college,
even if that's not what you would prefer. So it
may be that there might be a different pathway after
high school that would suit you better. Maybe you want
to go into a trade rather than going to a college,
(04:01):
but because of social pressures, you feel the need to
actually go into this other uh area. And that one
increases demand because now you've got people who don't even
necessarily really want to be there pursuing those those limited slots,
and to it means that this person's life gets put
on hold for however long they're in college, and and
(04:24):
in the meantime they may be you know, accruing debt. Sure,
And it's an industry pressure as well, because, especially as
more job application happens online and more algorithms are sorting
through people's resumes, not having a college degree to check
off can get you automatically filtered out of a lot
of potential jobs. Yeah, even if you might be best
(04:46):
suited for that job, and someone who has a degree,
maybe they might be fine at it, but maybe they
didn't wouldn't have done the job as well as you
would have had. Then that doesn't matter if that algorithm
just you know, just because yeah, yeah, you're you go
into the trash pile because you didn't have this one
box checked. Okay, Well, now that we've discussed the problem,
I think we should look at this idea of the
(05:07):
Minerva Project and see how that compares to what the
other options are today. I mean, so we obviously have
traditional college or traditional university, and then we also have
other sort of strange alternative options like massive open online courses,
which we've talked about on this podcast before. And then
there's this new thing, the Minerva Project. How does it
(05:29):
stack up? What is it and does it really compare? Uh,
it's an odd duck. It's it's a startup company and
what it's meant to do is to take the place
of an IVY League education. Now IVY League for those
who are not in the United States, IVY League refers
to a group of eight different colleges in the northeastern
(05:52):
United States that are known for being incredibly selective, prestigious.
They're they're considered to be uh, you know, a degree
from one of these institutions is considered to be a
very high achievement. Uh. When I say very selective, I'm
talking about sometimes they're they're uh accepting that the only
accept six percent, like some of the one of the
(06:14):
colleges in particular, six percent is how many out of
all the people who apply they get they get Uh, accepted.
Can you guess which one it is? Hey, you got
it in one. Harvard has a six percent rate of
accepting new students, meaning percent of people who apply do
not get in. So there's there's obviously a demand for
(06:36):
this level of education. There's also a lack of supply
for that education, which means that this education gets really expensive.
So a fellow by the name of Ben Nelson came
up with this idea for the Minerva Project and thought,
what if we were to create a new institution that
could give an Ivy League level education to students for
(06:57):
far less money than what it would cost to attend
one of these colleges. Uh. Not all of the issues
are solved. For example, the issue about a limited number
of slots is very much not solved by the Minerva
Project because they limit their entire class to thirty people,
Which I mean, that's it thirty that's that's thirty slots
(07:19):
for the entire project, Like graduating class. Yeah, you're graduating
class is thirty people. So if we're talking about the
pros and cons of the idea of the Minerva Project,
is the future of education? Really we're talking about it's
sort of model, not its specific right, because because it
is technically a single private college that is very very small, Yes,
(07:42):
extremely exclusive as it turns out, UM. And also yeah,
it's not scalable by its very nature. What the Minerva
Project is cannot scale larger. Based upon the approach they're
wanting to take with a teacher to student relationships, well,
they are hoping to gale it up to hire enough
teachers to be able to provide for more students. But
(08:04):
when you've got a when you've got a class limits
size of nineteen, you cannot have more than nineteen people
enrolled in a single class. You rapidly reach a point where,
unless you have grown to gargantuan levels, you're not going
to have enough faculty to support the number of students
that would be needed to fill out you know, you know,
a class of a hundred thousand or something that you
(08:25):
might see in an enormous university. UM. But at any rate,
Minerva Project, the model is what we really need to
focus on. Okay, but let's hear the story. What's the
story of the Minerva Project. So Nelson, he comes up
with this idea. He, by the way, had come from
an interesting background. He had been the president of a uh,
(08:47):
a company called Snapfish. Have you heard of it? Online
photo sharing? Yeah? So he was president of that, uh.
And then that company got bought by another little company
called HP good Packard. Yeah so uh. He fresh with cash,
had thought about this for a while, about the idea
of creating a private, for profit company that essentially sells
(09:12):
an ivy League level education, meaning that you would actually,
you know, you would as a student have to do
the work. It's not like they're selling a degree. It's
not a it's not some sort of diploma factory. It's
not like that, but that it would take the place
of what he thought of as an antiquated system. And
we have more to say about that a little bit
later too. So uh. At any rate, the he had
(09:37):
a round of venture funding held back in two thousand twelve,
raised about twenty five million dollars to really develop this
idea and partnered with the Keck Graduate Institute kg I
to actually develop the curriculum and structure this institution, which
is very small right now, I mean with thirty incoming
(09:58):
class members. Keep in mind this is for two fourteen,
So for the year of two thousand fourteen, there will
only be thirty people kind of running through it. Think
of it like a pilot program. Uh, they're given a
free ride for this particular project, a four year, four
year free scholarship for the thirty people that would in
(10:20):
exchange for kind of being a psych experiment. Yeah yeah,
I mean, you know, the considering that I think only
two of their actual degrees are accredited right now. Uh,
it might be a bit of a gamble. I mean,
unless you're majoring in one of those two, in which
case you're like suck as um because you're like, I've
already got my degree accredited, I just have to earn
(10:40):
it now. Uh. But at any rate, it's it's definitely
going to be an interesting experiment. Now, normally it would
cost ten thousand dollars a year to attend this particular school,
which is much much lower than one of the Ivy
League college certainly at that that that rivals. And I
went to college ten years ago, my my public school education.
(11:03):
So yeah, see when I went to college, it cost
you a song and a sandwich. That's how long ago
it was. Now it was significantly expensive at any rate. Uh,
Like if you wanted to go seriously, how much did
you pay in shekels? Actually it was these giant stone
coins that took forty men to roll down, and that's
(11:27):
why Athens streets are in such bad repair these days.
People paying for their No, no, that was the year
before me. At any rate, UM, so ten thousand dollars
a year is significantly less expensive than say, if you
were going to Harvard. Harvard, by the way, UH in
two thousand fourteen, a year at Harvard costs just tuition
(11:48):
alone cost forty three thousand dollars ninety three thousand nine
or thirty eight dollars. Then you have to tack on
another fourteen thousand, six d sixty nine dollars for room
and board, which ends up for one year being fifty
eight thousand, six hundred seven dollars. That's one year at Harvard.
So a ten thousand dollar versus fifty eight thousand dollars,
you can easily see the difference. But um then you know,
(12:12):
getting back to the story of the Minerva project. UH.
Once he had made this decision and the and partnered
with k g I and they got this this funding,
they started looking around to find the people who would
be in charge of developing the actual courses that students
would take and right now. It's it's pretty much an
elite group of of uh, you know, talk about celebrity faculty.
(12:35):
You've got some celebrities on this one. So the dean
of the faculty is Stephen Kostlin, who is the the
former dean or a a former dean at Harvard University.
Um specialty is in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Then you
have other people like Diane F. Halpern, who's Dean of
Social Studies and as a former president of the American
(12:55):
Psychological Association a p A YEP, Eric Bonnabo, who is
Dean of Computational Sciences and founder of Ico System Corporation,
which does really complicated problem solving stuff using math to
a point that's uncomfortable for me. And then you have
James D. Sterling, who's Dean of Natural Sciences and a
(13:18):
founding member of the Keck Graduate Institute. Then you've got
Daniel Levitton, who is Dean of Arts and Humanities and
the director of the Laboratory for Music, Perception, Cognition and
Expertise at McGill University. And they do, like you said, Lauren,
they plan on hiring more faculty in the next couple
of years. To bless out that group. But this is
(13:40):
already a pretty you know, rock star kind of ensemble
that they've got together. I'm imagine that's where a lot
of that twenty million dollars is going to right now. Um,
although probably not a huge amount of that because there
are other costs that you have to associate with this.
Unlike a massive open online course, there is actually a
physical location associated with this particular college, right right, there's
(14:05):
a couple of physical locations I believe, or they're working
towards that. There is a dorm which the students live in,
which is however, right, However, there's not a campus. No,
there's no library, there's no gem, there's no dining hall. Well,
I'm sure that's one way to save money. Yeah, yeah,
that that would be a reason, one of the reasons
why you would have a much lower buy in to
(14:26):
get into the Minerva project. Yeah. So I'm interested by
this because on one hand, it's not like they're going
for a super cheap option. I mean, there are colleges
you can go to I'm sure that are cheaper than this, certainly,
but they're trying to get a higher ratio of extremely
high instructor profile and quality to uh to a tuition
(14:50):
that is very low for what you're getting. Yeah, it's
kind of it's a perception of increased value, you know,
the idea that you are spending far less than you
would at a place like Harvard, but getting an education that,
at least they argue, is comparable to what you would
get if you were to go to someplace like Harvard. Now,
(15:11):
whether or not the rest of the world views it
that way is another question, right, I mean this we
haven't even gotten into what their their plan is for
their their teaching style, but it's there's a huge question
mark here, which is that even after this experiment has
run its course of the first the first class goes
all the way through and graduates, will those degrees actually
(15:32):
be valued by outside sources? You know, if you're if
you're a hiring manager at a company and you have
someone who has on their resume a degree from Harvard
and as someone who and someone who has a degree
from the Nerva Project, are you really going to consider
those two things to be weighed equally? And that's a
question that we can't answer yet because it hasn't happened.
(15:53):
Of course, the more intangible aspect is what sort of
personal value does it provide to the student? How does
it figure into your own feelings of intellectual development? But
that's a that's a harder thing to quantify, and I
guess the public sphere absolutely to go back to the
actual value of that degree. Like we mentioned earlier, accreditation
(16:13):
is a key point in that and tech stuff. Did
I believe an episode on the accreditation process we talked
a little bit about it because we've we've covered online
education before and accreditation is one of those things that
is it's it's an interesting concept. In the United States,
the way it's done is that we have private uh
accreditation organizations, all right, they are not part of the government.
(16:37):
They're privately operated. They are regional though they can't Yes,
they are regional, depending upon which one it is that
may have a regional scope or even a national scope.
The United States government does maintain a list of these
different organizations that it considers to be yeah, or at
least accredited. Yeah. The accreditation services that are considered to
(16:58):
be quality right there, they're considered to be capable of
of scrutinizing an institution's offering and saying whether or not
it actually has value. That's fascinating. It sounds kind of
like credit reporting agencies. It kind of is. I mean,
it's quality assurance, is what it comes down to. It's
like a private uh entity that's providing this major public service,
(17:22):
right right, and well, I don't know if you call
it service, but it's turns out to be that thing
because you know, this is where some of those small
online private colleges have wound up scamming students because they'll
enroll a student for you know, a relatively small amount
of tuition, but by the time the kid gets the degree,
they realize that no one accepts that degree. Yeah, and
(17:45):
that's that's one of the reasons why the Minerva Project
is actually I mean, they are going through this process
because while the people at the Minerva Project have a
lot of critical things to say with the way universities
are run in general and the way that class is
our run in particular, they do at least acknowledge that
there is value to this accreditation, or at least that
(18:07):
the rest of the world places value in it. So
you have to play the game, right. If you don't
play the game, then it doesn't really matter how well
you you do the Uh, the course work. It doesn't
matter how well you design it or how well you
implement it, because if no one else values it, then
you your customers. Your students are right where they were
(18:28):
before they enrolled, and that actually there. Depending upon whether
or not they had to pay, they may be poorer
for it out. Yeah, now, the like I said that
first group, since they get a free ride, we'll be
able to really Uh, you know, the biggest risk they
have is that they're they're wasting their time. They're dedicating
time to it, and you know, there's no I don't
(18:50):
think there's any argument that the students are you know,
about whether or not the students are gonna learn while
they're there. I think that they certainly will learn while
they are there, especially considering that they've got some of
the leading thinkers in various fields as their teachers. Uh,
they will, I think very much benefit from that experience.
(19:10):
So the question is whether or not they can leverage
the degree, which is kind of crazy when you get
down to it, Like we're getting to a point now
where we're thinking, yeah, it doesn't matter if you learn
anything or not. Why do you do you have a
piece of paper? Well, maybe we need to re examine this,
which I think is part of the point. But uh,
it's it's certainly one of those circular problems like how
(19:31):
do you how do you qualify what someone's education is
without that piece of paper, that's the problem. So you've
got Minerva getting accreditation and it's various programs. Like I said,
I think two of them right now have been accredited
and the other ones are still in the process. Um,
and they have a presence in San Francisco. That's where
their first non campus location is. That's they have a
(19:53):
headquarter office there and a dorm. Yeah, so the students
actually do live in San Francisco, and part of the
Minerva project plan is not just to have classes, but
also to do things like field trips to take students
to different areas around where the housing is. And uh,
they plan on having locations and other cities like Buenos
(20:14):
Aires and Berlin are two of the ones that they
plan on opening within the next couple of years, and
then further ones in New York, London, I think Mumbai
is one of them, and then having the students visit
for certain periods of time, perhaps a semester, perhaps a year,
different cities where these dorms exist so that they can
get that international education that a lot a lot of
(20:35):
universities really do promise the opportunity for but don't always
follow through with for all students. Yeah, I mean it's
it's hard to do. I mean, you've got a university
that has a physical location, and maybe you get a
chance to study abroad with a partnership program or something,
but it's not like you have enough money to apply
for a study abroad program or if you're lucky enough
to get a grant for it. Right, Okay, So I
(20:56):
want to drill down and focus on the difference this
would make in the actual classroom experience. Imagine I'm somebody
who enrolls in the Minerva Project and I go into
the class on a regular class day. What is that
like and how does it compare to a class in
traditional higher education? All Right, So here's where we get
into some compare and contrast with mooks. Because if you're
(21:19):
enrolled in a mook, then use a computer to log
into an online course and you can do that from
wherever in the world you happen to be, right, Well,
in this case, they have an online platform, but you
have to be at their San Francisco location. But there's
no necessary there's not necessarily a physical classroom you're going into.
You log in because the professors can be wherever they live.
(21:42):
The professors get the freedom of logging in from wherever
they happen to have their home base. They are probably
not in San Francisco. Probably not. And so what you
do is you log into the classroom along with your
fellow classmates, up to nineteen of you. There are no
more than that are allowed in a single class, and
everything is using webcams. Uh, there's a they have a
(22:02):
proprietary online platform that allows for the class to take place.
It gives the professor lots of like little bells and
whistles to control the classroom experience. And you had to
buy a MacBook in order to be a student, was
one of the sus. Yeah, yeah you can't. Yeah you can't.
You don't get one to supply to you. You do
have to bring your own. And the way it works
(22:22):
is that you would log in, you log in through
the software, and you you're in the classroom. Class begins
and uh. The description in Wood's article was pretty interesting.
It's very different from a typical college experience. For like
a a freshman level class at least. All right, so
imagine that you log in and you're having a discussion about, um,
(22:47):
some let's say Shakespeare. Let's just say Shakespeare, because that
was my my focus when I was in college. Shakespeare
with you? You know, where's your love for Ben Johnson? Oh?
I have? Would you prefer Milton? All right, let's talk
about Milton. It's let's say that you're focusing on Milton,
and so you're you're having a big discussion about Paradise Lost,
(23:09):
and the very beginning of the class starts with a
pop quiz. You you've already read the material. You know,
there's no time wasted in class about that you've read it.
You're expected to already have uh familiarity based upon whatever
the parameters were. So they ask who's the coolest demon?
And you know, obviously it's mammon. At any rate, Uh,
the pop quiz happens. The teacher can then start a
(23:31):
discussion based upon people's answers, because you are immediately requested
to give an answer within you know, it pops up
on your screen and you have to answer it within
a certain amount of time. UM, and those answers propagated
in real time on the professor's screen, and the professor
can then say, all right, well we have And if
it's a question that's a matter of opinion, the professor
(23:52):
might divide up the class based upon the opinions presented
and say, all right, well this team all represents this
one opinion. This other team represents this other opinion. We're
going to have a discussion where you have to be
able to assert your point and defend criticisms of your point,
and then it may begin to become an interactive discussion.
Because the class size is so small, you don't fade
(24:13):
into the background, right, So it's not like a class
in a big lecture hall where you might be sitting
forty rows back in a big theater and you just
you're your one, your one dot in a sea of
dots to the professor. No, and in this case, you're
both your professor and your fellow classmates are looking at
a screen of everyone else who's participating in the class. Yeah,
(24:36):
if you're texting, Yeah, it gets it gets really according
to to would really intense and fast paced and I
quote here vaguely fascistic. Yes, so it's um, you know,
and the argument that the Minerva Project folks make is
that this this type of teaching forces student is to engage.
(25:01):
It forces them to actually work on comprehending the matter
subject matter, not just absorbing or being able to recite
my route, what is going on. They're supposedly going to
have a greater understanding and appreciation for the course material
and actually learn how to think, which ultimately is what
(25:21):
education is about, all right, and also learn how to
engage with their fellow students. Um For for example, if
someone was breaking out that class into into two different groups,
the teacher might ask them to have kind of a
little pow wow off to the side, and and the
software can handle that. It can it can handle a
certain group of kids going off and having a discussion
(25:42):
on the side and then circling back for a larger discussion, right,
which is pretty useful, right. I mean, if we've we've
all been in classrooms where they've divided people up into
groups in order to have and you all kind of
shuffle around and move your desks and dirty. It usually
takes like ten minutes just to get the room rees
settled and then you have the discussion. It's very time
consuming and the idea for the software is to facilitate
(26:07):
that kind of stuff so that it's all automated, where
you know, you can create these little virtual groups that
only the people within the virtual group can see and
hear each other for the duration of however long you're
you're allowing the discussion to go on and then reforming
into an overall group and then having a full discussion. Uh.
The idea is that this way you can have the
(26:29):
benefit of all of that without the time consuming constraints
that you would have in a real space and the
price of the physical presence. Yeah yeah, yeah, So again
we're getting to the cost to the student as well
as whether or not what's the most efficient way to
get this information across now. Uh. One interesting thing about
(26:51):
this is that the approach they've had, they seem supremely
confident that it is the superior method to teach and uh,
which may or may not be true, right. I guess
I'd have to experience it though. I Mean, it's hard
to judge just based on a description, but I do
most definitely think that intensely interactive education is the most
(27:14):
valuable form of education, like because it's often a neglected
aspect of education that when we're learning, people are kind
of like, I need to be learning stuff. I need
to be learning content, like I'm memorizing factual information about
the subject matter that we're talking about. But that's only
a small part of what education is. I think one
(27:35):
of the most significant parts of education is learning how
to be part of a particular type of discourse. You know,
all different field scientific and in the humanities, whatever they
are sort of have their own language, they have their
own mode of discourse. And if you're going to become
educated in those fields, one of the most important things
(27:55):
is to learn how to talk this kind of talk well, yeah,
and and be a passive observer in a lecture hall.
Requires a lot of self discipline if you want to
get a lot out of it, right, because it's very
easy for you to check out, Well, it depends on
the type of learner that you are. Yeah, yeah, that's
also true. And that's that's another good point, Lauren, is
(28:16):
the idea that Minerva projects so gung ho on this
particular approach, which for some people may be absolutely the
best way to learn, but for others perhaps not. It
might be too intimidating, It might be it might be
too off putting, in which case you end up realizing
you've made a ten mistake. Yeah. I personally, when I
(28:36):
was reading the description of how this goes, it sounds
like my own circle of hell, Like I would not
I would not do this, and is it the circle
ruled by Mammon? I should have picked a different Okay?
Also great? Okay, you know what, despite your demonic predisposition, Joe,
(29:00):
I'm going to continue on with this podcast. Um No,
the the I agree entirely that that this could very
well be an experience that is uh, fundamentally unsound for
some types of people who have different styles of learning.
And in fact, one of the things I think is
really interesting is the concept of adaptive learning, which is
(29:21):
where you've built in a kind of computer software that
can detect the best ways to teach any particular student
based upon his or her answers to tests and their
ability to progress through course material, and that the software
itself will end up in being able to infer what's
(29:41):
the best approach, take the course material that exists, and
then attempt to adapt it so that it matches the
students learning style the best. That is one other approach
that we may see education take in the future, particularly
in uh, you know, like elementary and high school level.
But there's no reason why I wouldn't continue on to
(30:04):
the higher education levels too. So certainly, and that's also
not to say that something like Minerva Project couldn't incorporate
that kind of software eventually into what they're doing. Yeah,
it would just be it would be a very different
approach than that sort of extremely intense like interactive model
that they've they've set up. And keep in mind, this
was one test course that would took. It doesn't necessarily
(30:27):
mean that every single course is exactly like that one, right,
And his course was was specifically about a deductive reasoning.
That was the the test course he took. UM. Meanwhile,
to go back to the massive open online courses, uh,
they are very very different from Minerva Project. Right. They are, uh,
(30:48):
first of all massive, so instead of having a class
capt at thirty, you may have as many as a
hundred thousand or more fellow students enrolled in any particular class.
So it's not only that you shouldn't get this idea
of the Minerva Project mixed up with moos, but they're
almost the opposite kind of thing that are opposite ends
(31:08):
of the scale, with traditional education being somewhere more in
the middle. Right, And we did do a whole episode
about them back in June of which is a whole
year ago, y'all. So so yeah, so yeah, let's continue refreshing.
Right a year, how much has changed? Wait? No, nothing's
changed now. Um. One of the things that is the
(31:31):
big difference, I mean, mouke, really when you look at
Muka Minerva Project, the one thing that really remains central
to both is the idea that the computer is your
method of accessing the classwork. Otherwise they are very different.
So Minerva Project you go to one whichever location your
class has been assigned to for that given time. For
(31:52):
a Mook, you log in from wherever you happen to be. Uh.
Minerva Project, the class has kept at a very small
number ninety people. The move. There's no nest, there might
not be any capital. Uh. Minerva Project is a is
an attempt to create, like I said that Ivy League
education in a new format. Whereas a mook may not
(32:14):
have any kind of college credit associated with it whatsoever. Right,
it might just be for sort of personal edification. Yeah,
there are plenty of mook courses that are actually part
of a paid education course like you could you could
end up essentially auditing a class that is given to
actual paying students at some college. But the difference is
(32:36):
the college students are going to get credit for passing
that course. You are just going to have the experience
of being able to see the class and maybe even
participate in the work that's being done, unless in some
cases the college allows you to pay an extra fee
in order to receive Yeah, there are some experimental prototype
(32:58):
classes that are doing that, where you either pay to
enroll in the mooke or more more commonly, you go
through the whole experience. Uh. You take whatever the equivalent
exams are, you get those graded, and then you pay
to have that translated into college credit, which you might
(33:18):
then be able to transfer. If you wanted to go to,
say a brick and mortar school, you could transfer the
credits you had already accrued through this process and have
a leg up rather than going in as a freshman
with no credit whatsoever, which in the end could be
a way for you to save money, because in general
(33:38):
this process is far less expensive than taking that course
by enrolling in the school. Right, even if you're having
to pay to get that credit validated at the end.
Usually that amount is much less money than it would
be if you had to attend as a student. So
there's that, and you know it's again they tend to
(34:01):
not be as interactive, although they often will have an
interactive forum set up as part of the class experience,
and depending on the class and the people involved in it,
those can be very enriching. But you but it's entirely
self based. You have to be motivated to take to
take advantage of those opportunities, right, And you know, you
(34:22):
realize that when you're talking about a class where there
may be as many as a hundred thousand or more
people enrolled in it, you are not going to get
personal attention. It's not a possibility. Right. You're talking about
the population of a sizeable town taking a course. One
teacher and a couple of incredibly stressed out teaching aids
(34:43):
are not going to be able to handle that kind
of load. So it's a very different experience. Wouldn't that
be a cool town to live in? This is microbiology
one O one town. I'm pretty sure they did that show.
It was called Eureka. I never saw it. No, you're
not talking about Eureka's Castle now, I'm talking. I'm talking
(35:04):
about the show Eureka with Colin Ferguson. It was cute
and it's it's it's a cute show, or it was
a cute show. So is Eureka's Castle. That's true, It's true.
Both valid points. Joe, thank you. Um, but yeah, this
was so so moving on now we've talked about, you know,
what moos are and how they are different from what
the Minerva Project is trying to be. What do you
(35:26):
guys think about the Minerva Project? Do you think that
this is, in fact, as the title of the article suggests,
the future of college question mark I. I'm really curious
to see where it goes. I am kind of holding
off an official opinion for right now. I am slightly
dubious based on just this this article in The Atlantic
(35:48):
and what I've read about it myself, because I don't
know it's I'm really glad that that Woods article brought
the Minerva Project to light, and and I'm so fascinated
by everything that these are saying, because they're clearly very
passionate about the state of education right now and where
it's going in the future, and that's awesome. Like more
people being excited about this and trying new things is
(36:10):
rad um, if you know, you'll excuse my colloquial parlance
of our times. But he says things like, we have
no evidence that lectures are a good way to teach.
I'm pretty sure that people do research into ways to
teach and whether or not they're good and who they
work for continually. Um, So I don't think that's really accurate. Uh.
(36:31):
He also says that the biggest innovation in universities in
the past thirty years was to double its costs and
hire more administrators at higher salaries. I feel like technology
has done a couple of things in the past thirty
years in universities, So you know, there's just I kind
of wish that he had taken a deeper consideration of
(36:54):
the field that the scientific field of evaluating education. I
think a lot of it probably also comes from his
conversations with the people behind the Minervo project, who have
a vested interest obviously in promoting that. And of course,
uh Nelson the founder has not been shy about stirring
controversy and sturing that pot and saying, you know, hey,
(37:18):
we're gonna we're gonna be right there, side by side
with you, and then later saying we're going to reform
all of the university level of education. We're gonna change
the world, and his his job is to be incendiary.
That's wonderful. It's it's it's important for the project to
move forward. It's important for them to get the funding
they need in rage for this this experiment to happen.
(37:38):
I'm not criticizing it at all, but I do think
that that's probably a large part of why Wood's article
reflects that, because that's the message that's being given. And
and I'm not even suggesting that they're insincere at all.
I feel like they sincerely believe that this is the
superior method to uh in party education, to people like
(38:01):
to teach people and to have them actually learn and
have that be effective. Whether or not it's true is
a totally different matter. Right, it may be, but it
may not be. So. Yeah, I can see where you're
coming from there. Uh. Personally, I would love to see
this project succeed. However, I don't think it's like especially
(38:22):
using the teaching model that was was illustrated in the article,
It's really hard for it to be a scalable thing
because again, you your faculty would have to balloon to
massive numbers in order to have a huge class. So, uh,
either you have to have two hundred competing startup companies
(38:42):
that are all doing the same thing that the Minerva
projects doing, all with different prices. Essentially becomes a new
university landscape. Yeah. So it's one of those things where
I think it could easily become part of the future
of education. I don't think it's going to supplant it well,
(39:03):
I mean, I think it certainly isn't going to become
the widespread future of education, especially because what they're trying
to do is provide an IVY League level of education,
which I mean that's just not even well suited to everyone.
That's not even what everyone wants. And even if even
if it were, you would be limited by the number
of resources you could get who would actually be able
(39:26):
to provide an IVY League level depending upon depending upon
how you're defining IVY League level. I mean, obviously there's
other colleges that are not in the IVY League that
have some phenomenal leading thinkers in various fields, but that's
specifically the the focus of the Minerva project is you know,
they took the Ivy League as the the pinnacle, the
(39:47):
example that they wanted to live up to, which is
understandable in the United States. Um. Well, yeah, I would
say in favor, I would just echo again the comments
already made that that I do think having lots of
direct conversation and interaction between experts in the field and
students is one of the fastest ways to get students
(40:08):
acclimatized to the discourse of a technical or you know,
or of whatever field. Yeah, and whatever, the community, whatever
it is. Uh, And that's something that you can see
students struggling with. I mean, I've actually taught at the
college level, and there's there's a disconnect they're that goes
on for many years with a lot of students while
(40:30):
they're they're trying to get used to the way people
talk when they're when they're working in a certain type
of discourse. H I experienced it just in literature. I'm
sure it's even more difficult when you're talking about one
of the sciences. Well, jargon everywhere, But yeah, I think
the future of education, the future of higher learning in particular,
(40:52):
is heavily dependent upon again how we view that socially
and culturally, and whether or not we continue to consider
college education as being uh, you know, like if you
are capable of pursuing it, then you should pursue it.
As long as that message is the the kind of
unofficial message that's given to everybody, we're going to continue
(41:16):
having this supply demand problem. And uh, Meanwhile, if that
is also happening in in sync with a economic depression
where jobs are getting harder and harder to find, people
are holding onto them longer, they're retiring later, and you
have this this issue with jobs, then that that raises
(41:37):
like all sorts of questions about the value of education,
whether or not it makes sense to go into it
in the first place. So I think really a lot
of the factors that are going to determine the future
of education have nothing to do with teaching at all
and has everything to do with culture, uh and with economy,
and that is really going to be the big impact.
(41:57):
And these other argue it's at the moment are hard
in the pun academic, I can't believe I said all
that just to set up the pun. Is that really
why you said all of that? You gotta wind him
up before you knock them down. No, I really do
(42:17):
believe that though. I really do think that that that cultural,
cultural pressures, and economic realities are going to be what
really shapes the future of the college the university UM,
at least in the near term. Long term, who knows.
Long term, we may see things like the Minerva Project
become more common and perhaps be a real competitor to
(42:41):
the traditional university experience, right, I mean, I guess the
big question is not whether they will whether this kind
of model will completely take over education in America as
we've discussed. It's more like, will this remain a steady
and reliable, small subset of higher education or will be
maybe a hundred people in the world who can say
(43:03):
I got a degree from the Nerva project before it
went under. We don't know. We'll have to wait and see.
So I'm very curious to see how this plays out.
And uh, I wish them all the best because I
think that they're intentions are are really interesting and I
really hope that that it works out. UM. But we'll see.
Because this is it's you're talking about an institution. It's
(43:27):
not just something that's been around for a little while.
So um, the future will tell us just I guess
what we're all about here forward thinking. So, for you
guys out there who have suggestions about things that we
should cover in future episodes of Forward Thinking, let us
know drops the line on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus
are handled all three as FW thinking. We look at
(43:49):
all of the suggestions, we appreciate them, keep them coming,
and we will talk to you again, really soon. More
on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, and Welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast that
looks at the future and says schools out forever. I'm
John in Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. So we were
(00:23):
talking about what we were going to record this week,
or you know, we like to brainstorm different ideas about
stuff about the future that'd be kind of cooled. And
then I noticed that, you know, we needed one. I
talked about maybe another future of education episode, and I
had just read an article in The Atlantic which we
will be referring to numerous times in this podcast called
(00:45):
the Future of College question Mark, and it was the
author Graham would It was Wood's experience trying out something
called the Minerva Project. And so we wanted to talk
about what the Minerva Project is, how it contrasts with
(01:08):
the standard university experience as well as other alternatives to
universities as far as higher learning goes. So in order
to do that, first thing, one of the premisees that
the Minerva Project is based upon is that there's something
wrong with the university system, right. That's like, that's like,
(01:29):
that's one of the that's one of the first reasons
for its supposed to you know, one of the first
supposed reasons for its existence. How could you say that
you anti intellectual? Uh? Well, I mean, I'm just reporting
what has been said. But but if I had to
wager a guess, I would say that, And actually I
don't have to because this is all laid out in
(01:50):
the article. It's largely about the problem of cost. When
it comes to pursuing a degree from from a college university,
they can be pretty expensive. And yes, cost has always
been one barrier to access to higher education, but it's
gotten particularly bad in recent years, hasn't it. Yeah, so, Joe,
(02:15):
you found this article in Bloomberg about the increase in
costs in uh in college tuition, and according to that article,
the tuition costs have increased by five hundred thirty eight
percent since n The article itself was written in two
thousand and thirteen, so those numbers are probably even a
little different today. I guess that's for US higher education. Yes, yeah,
(02:36):
specifically the United States. In fact, a lot of what
we're going to talk about today is going to focus
on the United States. That's where we live, so that
tends to be our frame of reference, and it's where
the Manerva project is based as well. Yes, currently there
will be other locations for the Minerva Project, assuming everything
goes well and that it doesn't collapse in on itself.
(02:57):
So let's say you're a person who looks this whole situation,
all the great things about college and university and the
mess that it's in right now. Also, so you see
it as a trade off. You see, well, obviously college
and university in America is one of the most culturally
and economically and intellectually important things I can do with
(03:18):
my life. But at the same time, you see that
is so much money, and I might not be getting
the value that I want out of this investment, and
lots of other concerns to me, Maybe I can't necessarily
get into the college I want to go to the most. Well,
on top of that, there's just the cultural pressure of
attending college in the first place. And there may be
(03:40):
people who don't necessarily want to go to college, but
there is an intense social pressure to go into college,
even if that's not what you would prefer. So it
may be that there might be a different pathway after
high school that would suit you better. Maybe you want
to go into a trade rather than going to a college,
(04:01):
but because of social pressures, you feel the need to
actually go into this other uh area. And that one
increases demand because now you've got people who don't even
necessarily really want to be there pursuing those those limited slots,
and to it means that this person's life gets put
on hold for however long they're in college, and and
(04:24):
in the meantime they may be you know, accruing debt. Sure,
And it's an industry pressure as well, because, especially as
more job application happens online and more algorithms are sorting
through people's resumes, not having a college degree to check
off can get you automatically filtered out of a lot
of potential jobs. Yeah, even if you might be best
(04:46):
suited for that job, and someone who has a degree,
maybe they might be fine at it, but maybe they
didn't wouldn't have done the job as well as you
would have had. Then that doesn't matter if that algorithm
just you know, just because yeah, yeah, you're you go
into the trash pile because you didn't have this one
box checked. Okay, Well, now that we've discussed the problem,
I think we should look at this idea of the
(05:07):
Minerva Project and see how that compares to what the
other options are today. I mean, so we obviously have
traditional college or traditional university, and then we also have
other sort of strange alternative options like massive open online courses,
which we've talked about on this podcast before. And then
there's this new thing, the Minerva Project. How does it
(05:29):
stack up? What is it and does it really compare? Uh,
it's an odd duck. It's it's a startup company and
what it's meant to do is to take the place
of an IVY League education. Now IVY League for those
who are not in the United States, IVY League refers
to a group of eight different colleges in the northeastern
(05:52):
United States that are known for being incredibly selective, prestigious.
They're they're considered to be uh, you know, a degree
from one of these institutions is considered to be a
very high achievement. Uh. When I say very selective, I'm
talking about sometimes they're they're uh accepting that the only
accept six percent, like some of the one of the
(06:14):
colleges in particular, six percent is how many out of
all the people who apply they get they get Uh, accepted.
Can you guess which one it is? Hey, you got
it in one. Harvard has a six percent rate of
accepting new students, meaning percent of people who apply do
not get in. So there's there's obviously a demand for
(06:36):
this level of education. There's also a lack of supply
for that education, which means that this education gets really expensive.
So a fellow by the name of Ben Nelson came
up with this idea for the Minerva Project and thought,
what if we were to create a new institution that
could give an Ivy League level education to students for
(06:57):
far less money than what it would cost to attend
one of these colleges. Uh. Not all of the issues
are solved. For example, the issue about a limited number
of slots is very much not solved by the Minerva
Project because they limit their entire class to thirty people,
Which I mean, that's it thirty that's that's thirty slots
(07:19):
for the entire project, Like graduating class. Yeah, you're graduating
class is thirty people. So if we're talking about the
pros and cons of the idea of the Minerva Project,
is the future of education? Really we're talking about it's
sort of model, not its specific right, because because it
is technically a single private college that is very very small, Yes,
(07:42):
extremely exclusive as it turns out, UM. And also yeah,
it's not scalable by its very nature. What the Minerva
Project is cannot scale larger. Based upon the approach they're
wanting to take with a teacher to student relationships, well,
they are hoping to gale it up to hire enough
teachers to be able to provide for more students. But
(08:04):
when you've got a when you've got a class limits
size of nineteen, you cannot have more than nineteen people
enrolled in a single class. You rapidly reach a point where,
unless you have grown to gargantuan levels, you're not going
to have enough faculty to support the number of students
that would be needed to fill out you know, you know,
a class of a hundred thousand or something that you
(08:25):
might see in an enormous university. UM. But at any rate,
Minerva Project, the model is what we really need to
focus on. Okay, but let's hear the story. What's the
story of the Minerva Project. So Nelson, he comes up
with this idea. He, by the way, had come from
an interesting background. He had been the president of a uh,
(08:47):
a company called Snapfish. Have you heard of it? Online
photo sharing? Yeah? So he was president of that, uh.
And then that company got bought by another little company
called HP good Packard. Yeah so uh. He fresh with cash,
had thought about this for a while, about the idea
of creating a private, for profit company that essentially sells
(09:12):
an ivy League level education, meaning that you would actually,
you know, you would as a student have to do
the work. It's not like they're selling a degree. It's
not a it's not some sort of diploma factory. It's
not like that, but that it would take the place
of what he thought of as an antiquated system. And
we have more to say about that a little bit
later too. So uh. At any rate, the he had
(09:37):
a round of venture funding held back in two thousand twelve,
raised about twenty five million dollars to really develop this
idea and partnered with the Keck Graduate Institute kg I
to actually develop the curriculum and structure this institution, which
is very small right now, I mean with thirty incoming
(09:58):
class members. Keep in mind this is for two fourteen,
So for the year of two thousand fourteen, there will
only be thirty people kind of running through it. Think
of it like a pilot program. Uh, they're given a
free ride for this particular project, a four year, four
year free scholarship for the thirty people that would in
(10:20):
exchange for kind of being a psych experiment. Yeah yeah,
I mean, you know, the considering that I think only
two of their actual degrees are accredited right now. Uh,
it might be a bit of a gamble. I mean,
unless you're majoring in one of those two, in which
case you're like suck as um because you're like, I've
already got my degree accredited, I just have to earn
(10:40):
it now. Uh. But at any rate, it's it's definitely
going to be an interesting experiment. Now, normally it would
cost ten thousand dollars a year to attend this particular school,
which is much much lower than one of the Ivy
League college certainly at that that that rivals. And I
went to college ten years ago, my my public school education.
(11:03):
So yeah, see when I went to college, it cost
you a song and a sandwich. That's how long ago
it was. Now it was significantly expensive at any rate. Uh,
Like if you wanted to go seriously, how much did
you pay in shekels? Actually it was these giant stone
coins that took forty men to roll down, and that's
(11:27):
why Athens streets are in such bad repair these days.
People paying for their No, no, that was the year
before me. At any rate, UM, so ten thousand dollars
a year is significantly less expensive than say, if you
were going to Harvard. Harvard, by the way, UH in
two thousand fourteen, a year at Harvard costs just tuition
(11:48):
alone cost forty three thousand dollars ninety three thousand nine
or thirty eight dollars. Then you have to tack on
another fourteen thousand, six d sixty nine dollars for room
and board, which ends up for one year being fifty
eight thousand, six hundred seven dollars. That's one year at Harvard.
So a ten thousand dollar versus fifty eight thousand dollars,
you can easily see the difference. But um then you know,
(12:12):
getting back to the story of the Minerva project. UH.
Once he had made this decision and the and partnered
with k g I and they got this this funding,
they started looking around to find the people who would
be in charge of developing the actual courses that students
would take and right now. It's it's pretty much an
elite group of of uh, you know, talk about celebrity faculty.
(12:35):
You've got some celebrities on this one. So the dean
of the faculty is Stephen Kostlin, who is the the
former dean or a a former dean at Harvard University.
Um specialty is in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Then you
have other people like Diane F. Halpern, who's Dean of
Social Studies and as a former president of the American
(12:55):
Psychological Association a p A YEP, Eric Bonnabo, who is
Dean of Computational Sciences and founder of Ico System Corporation,
which does really complicated problem solving stuff using math to
a point that's uncomfortable for me. And then you have
James D. Sterling, who's Dean of Natural Sciences and a
(13:18):
founding member of the Keck Graduate Institute. Then you've got
Daniel Levitton, who is Dean of Arts and Humanities and
the director of the Laboratory for Music, Perception, Cognition and
Expertise at McGill University. And they do, like you said, Lauren,
they plan on hiring more faculty in the next couple
of years. To bless out that group. But this is
(13:40):
already a pretty you know, rock star kind of ensemble
that they've got together. I'm imagine that's where a lot
of that twenty million dollars is going to right now. Um,
although probably not a huge amount of that because there
are other costs that you have to associate with this.
Unlike a massive open online course, there is actually a
physical location associated with this particular college, right right, there's
(14:05):
a couple of physical locations I believe, or they're working
towards that. There is a dorm which the students live in,
which is however, right, However, there's not a campus. No,
there's no library, there's no gem, there's no dining hall. Well,
I'm sure that's one way to save money. Yeah, yeah,
that that would be a reason, one of the reasons
why you would have a much lower buy in to
(14:26):
get into the Minerva project. Yeah. So I'm interested by
this because on one hand, it's not like they're going
for a super cheap option. I mean, there are colleges
you can go to I'm sure that are cheaper than this, certainly,
but they're trying to get a higher ratio of extremely
high instructor profile and quality to uh to a tuition
(14:50):
that is very low for what you're getting. Yeah, it's
kind of it's a perception of increased value, you know,
the idea that you are spending far less than you
would at a place like Harvard, but getting an education that,
at least they argue, is comparable to what you would
get if you were to go to someplace like Harvard. Now,
(15:11):
whether or not the rest of the world views it
that way is another question, right, I mean this we
haven't even gotten into what their their plan is for
their their teaching style, but it's there's a huge question
mark here, which is that even after this experiment has
run its course of the first the first class goes
all the way through and graduates, will those degrees actually
(15:32):
be valued by outside sources? You know, if you're if
you're a hiring manager at a company and you have
someone who has on their resume a degree from Harvard
and as someone who and someone who has a degree
from the Nerva Project, are you really going to consider
those two things to be weighed equally? And that's a
question that we can't answer yet because it hasn't happened.
(15:53):
Of course, the more intangible aspect is what sort of
personal value does it provide to the student? How does
it figure into your own feelings of intellectual development? But
that's a that's a harder thing to quantify, and I
guess the public sphere absolutely to go back to the
actual value of that degree. Like we mentioned earlier, accreditation
(16:13):
is a key point in that and tech stuff. Did
I believe an episode on the accreditation process we talked
a little bit about it because we've we've covered online
education before and accreditation is one of those things that
is it's it's an interesting concept. In the United States,
the way it's done is that we have private uh
accreditation organizations, all right, they are not part of the government.
(16:37):
They're privately operated. They are regional though they can't Yes,
they are regional, depending upon which one it is that
may have a regional scope or even a national scope.
The United States government does maintain a list of these
different organizations that it considers to be yeah, or at
least accredited. Yeah. The accreditation services that are considered to
(16:58):
be quality right there, they're considered to be capable of
of scrutinizing an institution's offering and saying whether or not
it actually has value. That's fascinating. It sounds kind of
like credit reporting agencies. It kind of is. I mean,
it's quality assurance, is what it comes down to. It's
like a private uh entity that's providing this major public service,
(17:22):
right right, and well, I don't know if you call
it service, but it's turns out to be that thing
because you know, this is where some of those small
online private colleges have wound up scamming students because they'll
enroll a student for you know, a relatively small amount
of tuition, but by the time the kid gets the degree,
they realize that no one accepts that degree. Yeah, and
(17:45):
that's that's one of the reasons why the Minerva Project
is actually I mean, they are going through this process
because while the people at the Minerva Project have a
lot of critical things to say with the way universities
are run in general and the way that class is
our run in particular, they do at least acknowledge that
there is value to this accreditation, or at least that
(18:07):
the rest of the world places value in it. So
you have to play the game, right. If you don't
play the game, then it doesn't really matter how well
you you do the Uh, the course work. It doesn't
matter how well you design it or how well you
implement it, because if no one else values it, then
you your customers. Your students are right where they were
(18:28):
before they enrolled, and that actually there. Depending upon whether
or not they had to pay, they may be poorer
for it out. Yeah, now, the like I said that
first group, since they get a free ride, we'll be
able to really Uh, you know, the biggest risk they
have is that they're they're wasting their time. They're dedicating
time to it, and you know, there's no I don't
(18:50):
think there's any argument that the students are you know,
about whether or not the students are gonna learn while
they're there. I think that they certainly will learn while
they are there, especially considering that they've got some of
the leading thinkers in various fields as their teachers. Uh,
they will, I think very much benefit from that experience.
(19:10):
So the question is whether or not they can leverage
the degree, which is kind of crazy when you get
down to it, Like we're getting to a point now
where we're thinking, yeah, it doesn't matter if you learn
anything or not. Why do you do you have a
piece of paper? Well, maybe we need to re examine this,
which I think is part of the point. But uh,
it's it's certainly one of those circular problems like how
(19:31):
do you how do you qualify what someone's education is
without that piece of paper, that's the problem. So you've
got Minerva getting accreditation and it's various programs. Like I said,
I think two of them right now have been accredited
and the other ones are still in the process. Um,
and they have a presence in San Francisco. That's where
their first non campus location is. That's they have a
(19:53):
headquarter office there and a dorm. Yeah, so the students
actually do live in San Francisco, and part of the
Minerva project plan is not just to have classes, but
also to do things like field trips to take students
to different areas around where the housing is. And uh,
they plan on having locations and other cities like Buenos
(20:14):
Aires and Berlin are two of the ones that they
plan on opening within the next couple of years, and
then further ones in New York, London, I think Mumbai
is one of them, and then having the students visit
for certain periods of time, perhaps a semester, perhaps a year,
different cities where these dorms exist so that they can
get that international education that a lot a lot of
(20:35):
universities really do promise the opportunity for but don't always
follow through with for all students. Yeah, I mean it's
it's hard to do. I mean, you've got a university
that has a physical location, and maybe you get a
chance to study abroad with a partnership program or something,
but it's not like you have enough money to apply
for a study abroad program or if you're lucky enough
to get a grant for it. Right, Okay, So I
(20:56):
want to drill down and focus on the difference this
would make in the actual classroom experience. Imagine I'm somebody
who enrolls in the Minerva Project and I go into
the class on a regular class day. What is that
like and how does it compare to a class in
traditional higher education? All Right, So here's where we get
into some compare and contrast with mooks. Because if you're
(21:19):
enrolled in a mook, then use a computer to log
into an online course and you can do that from
wherever in the world you happen to be, right, Well,
in this case, they have an online platform, but you
have to be at their San Francisco location. But there's
no necessary there's not necessarily a physical classroom you're going into.
You log in because the professors can be wherever they live.
(21:42):
The professors get the freedom of logging in from wherever
they happen to have their home base. They are probably
not in San Francisco. Probably not. And so what you
do is you log into the classroom along with your
fellow classmates, up to nineteen of you. There are no
more than that are allowed in a single class, and
everything is using webcams. Uh, there's a they have a
(22:02):
proprietary online platform that allows for the class to take place.
It gives the professor lots of like little bells and
whistles to control the classroom experience. And you had to
buy a MacBook in order to be a student, was
one of the sus. Yeah, yeah you can't. Yeah you can't.
You don't get one to supply to you. You do
have to bring your own. And the way it works
(22:22):
is that you would log in, you log in through
the software, and you you're in the classroom. Class begins
and uh. The description in Wood's article was pretty interesting.
It's very different from a typical college experience. For like
a a freshman level class at least. All right, so
imagine that you log in and you're having a discussion about, um,
(22:47):
some let's say Shakespeare. Let's just say Shakespeare, because that
was my my focus when I was in college. Shakespeare
with you? You know, where's your love for Ben Johnson? Oh?
I have? Would you prefer Milton? All right, let's talk
about Milton. It's let's say that you're focusing on Milton,
and so you're you're having a big discussion about Paradise Lost,
(23:09):
and the very beginning of the class starts with a
pop quiz. You you've already read the material. You know,
there's no time wasted in class about that you've read it.
You're expected to already have uh familiarity based upon whatever
the parameters were. So they ask who's the coolest demon?
And you know, obviously it's mammon. At any rate, Uh,
the pop quiz happens. The teacher can then start a
(23:31):
discussion based upon people's answers, because you are immediately requested
to give an answer within you know, it pops up
on your screen and you have to answer it within
a certain amount of time. UM, and those answers propagated
in real time on the professor's screen, and the professor
can then say, all right, well we have And if
it's a question that's a matter of opinion, the professor
(23:52):
might divide up the class based upon the opinions presented
and say, all right, well this team all represents this
one opinion. This other team represents this other opinion. We're
going to have a discussion where you have to be
able to assert your point and defend criticisms of your point,
and then it may begin to become an interactive discussion.
Because the class size is so small, you don't fade
(24:13):
into the background, right, So it's not like a class
in a big lecture hall where you might be sitting
forty rows back in a big theater and you just
you're your one, your one dot in a sea of
dots to the professor. No, and in this case, you're
both your professor and your fellow classmates are looking at
a screen of everyone else who's participating in the class. Yeah,
(24:36):
if you're texting, Yeah, it gets it gets really according
to to would really intense and fast paced and I
quote here vaguely fascistic. Yes, so it's um, you know,
and the argument that the Minerva Project folks make is
that this this type of teaching forces student is to engage.
(25:01):
It forces them to actually work on comprehending the matter
subject matter, not just absorbing or being able to recite
my route, what is going on. They're supposedly going to
have a greater understanding and appreciation for the course material
and actually learn how to think, which ultimately is what
(25:21):
education is about, all right, and also learn how to
engage with their fellow students. Um For for example, if
someone was breaking out that class into into two different groups,
the teacher might ask them to have kind of a
little pow wow off to the side, and and the
software can handle that. It can it can handle a
certain group of kids going off and having a discussion
(25:42):
on the side and then circling back for a larger discussion, right,
which is pretty useful, right. I mean, if we've we've
all been in classrooms where they've divided people up into
groups in order to have and you all kind of
shuffle around and move your desks and dirty. It usually
takes like ten minutes just to get the room rees
settled and then you have the discussion. It's very time
consuming and the idea for the software is to facilitate
(26:07):
that kind of stuff so that it's all automated, where
you know, you can create these little virtual groups that
only the people within the virtual group can see and
hear each other for the duration of however long you're
you're allowing the discussion to go on and then reforming
into an overall group and then having a full discussion. Uh.
The idea is that this way you can have the
(26:29):
benefit of all of that without the time consuming constraints
that you would have in a real space and the
price of the physical presence. Yeah yeah, yeah, So again
we're getting to the cost to the student as well
as whether or not what's the most efficient way to
get this information across now. Uh. One interesting thing about
(26:51):
this is that the approach they've had, they seem supremely
confident that it is the superior method to teach and uh,
which may or may not be true, right. I guess
I'd have to experience it though. I Mean, it's hard
to judge just based on a description, but I do
most definitely think that intensely interactive education is the most
(27:14):
valuable form of education, like because it's often a neglected
aspect of education that when we're learning, people are kind
of like, I need to be learning stuff. I need
to be learning content, like I'm memorizing factual information about
the subject matter that we're talking about. But that's only
a small part of what education is. I think one
(27:35):
of the most significant parts of education is learning how
to be part of a particular type of discourse. You know,
all different field scientific and in the humanities, whatever they
are sort of have their own language, they have their
own mode of discourse. And if you're going to become
educated in those fields, one of the most important things
(27:55):
is to learn how to talk this kind of talk well, yeah,
and and be a passive observer in a lecture hall.
Requires a lot of self discipline if you want to
get a lot out of it, right, because it's very
easy for you to check out, Well, it depends on
the type of learner that you are. Yeah, yeah, that's
also true. And that's that's another good point, Lauren, is
(28:16):
the idea that Minerva projects so gung ho on this
particular approach, which for some people may be absolutely the
best way to learn, but for others perhaps not. It
might be too intimidating, It might be it might be
too off putting, in which case you end up realizing
you've made a ten mistake. Yeah. I personally, when I
(28:36):
was reading the description of how this goes, it sounds
like my own circle of hell, Like I would not
I would not do this, and is it the circle
ruled by Mammon? I should have picked a different Okay?
Also great? Okay, you know what, despite your demonic predisposition, Joe,
(29:00):
I'm going to continue on with this podcast. Um No,
the the I agree entirely that that this could very
well be an experience that is uh, fundamentally unsound for
some types of people who have different styles of learning.
And in fact, one of the things I think is
really interesting is the concept of adaptive learning, which is
(29:21):
where you've built in a kind of computer software that
can detect the best ways to teach any particular student
based upon his or her answers to tests and their
ability to progress through course material, and that the software
itself will end up in being able to infer what's
(29:41):
the best approach, take the course material that exists, and
then attempt to adapt it so that it matches the
students learning style the best. That is one other approach
that we may see education take in the future, particularly
in uh, you know, like elementary and high school level.
But there's no reason why I wouldn't continue on to
(30:04):
the higher education levels too. So certainly, and that's also
not to say that something like Minerva Project couldn't incorporate
that kind of software eventually into what they're doing. Yeah,
it would just be it would be a very different
approach than that sort of extremely intense like interactive model
that they've they've set up. And keep in mind, this
was one test course that would took. It doesn't necessarily
(30:27):
mean that every single course is exactly like that one, right,
And his course was was specifically about a deductive reasoning.
That was the the test course he took. UM. Meanwhile,
to go back to the massive open online courses, uh,
they are very very different from Minerva Project. Right. They are, uh,
(30:48):
first of all massive, so instead of having a class
capt at thirty, you may have as many as a
hundred thousand or more fellow students enrolled in any particular class.
So it's not only that you shouldn't get this idea
of the Minerva Project mixed up with moos, but they're
almost the opposite kind of thing that are opposite ends
(31:08):
of the scale, with traditional education being somewhere more in
the middle. Right, And we did do a whole episode
about them back in June of which is a whole
year ago, y'all. So so yeah, so yeah, let's continue refreshing.
Right a year, how much has changed? Wait? No, nothing's
changed now. Um. One of the things that is the
(31:31):
big difference, I mean, mouke, really when you look at
Muka Minerva Project, the one thing that really remains central
to both is the idea that the computer is your
method of accessing the classwork. Otherwise they are very different.
So Minerva Project you go to one whichever location your
class has been assigned to for that given time. For
(31:52):
a Mook, you log in from wherever you happen to be. Uh.
Minerva Project, the class has kept at a very small
number ninety people. The move. There's no nest, there might
not be any capital. Uh. Minerva Project is a is
an attempt to create, like I said that Ivy League
education in a new format. Whereas a mook may not
(32:14):
have any kind of college credit associated with it whatsoever. Right,
it might just be for sort of personal edification. Yeah,
there are plenty of mook courses that are actually part
of a paid education course like you could you could
end up essentially auditing a class that is given to
actual paying students at some college. But the difference is
(32:36):
the college students are going to get credit for passing
that course. You are just going to have the experience
of being able to see the class and maybe even
participate in the work that's being done, unless in some
cases the college allows you to pay an extra fee
in order to receive Yeah, there are some experimental prototype
(32:58):
classes that are doing that, where you either pay to
enroll in the mooke or more more commonly, you go
through the whole experience. Uh. You take whatever the equivalent
exams are, you get those graded, and then you pay
to have that translated into college credit, which you might
(33:18):
then be able to transfer. If you wanted to go to,
say a brick and mortar school, you could transfer the
credits you had already accrued through this process and have
a leg up rather than going in as a freshman
with no credit whatsoever, which in the end could be
a way for you to save money, because in general
(33:38):
this process is far less expensive than taking that course
by enrolling in the school. Right, even if you're having
to pay to get that credit validated at the end.
Usually that amount is much less money than it would
be if you had to attend as a student. So
there's that, and you know it's again they tend to
(34:01):
not be as interactive, although they often will have an
interactive forum set up as part of the class experience,
and depending on the class and the people involved in it,
those can be very enriching. But you but it's entirely
self based. You have to be motivated to take to
take advantage of those opportunities, right, And you know, you
(34:22):
realize that when you're talking about a class where there
may be as many as a hundred thousand or more
people enrolled in it, you are not going to get
personal attention. It's not a possibility. Right. You're talking about
the population of a sizeable town taking a course. One
teacher and a couple of incredibly stressed out teaching aids
(34:43):
are not going to be able to handle that kind
of load. So it's a very different experience. Wouldn't that
be a cool town to live in? This is microbiology
one O one town. I'm pretty sure they did that show.
It was called Eureka. I never saw it. No, you're
not talking about Eureka's Castle now, I'm talking. I'm talking
(35:04):
about the show Eureka with Colin Ferguson. It was cute
and it's it's it's a cute show, or it was
a cute show. So is Eureka's Castle. That's true, It's true.
Both valid points. Joe, thank you. Um, but yeah, this
was so so moving on now we've talked about, you know,
what moos are and how they are different from what
the Minerva Project is trying to be. What do you
(35:26):
guys think about the Minerva Project? Do you think that
this is, in fact, as the title of the article suggests,
the future of college question mark I. I'm really curious
to see where it goes. I am kind of holding
off an official opinion for right now. I am slightly
dubious based on just this this article in The Atlantic
(35:48):
and what I've read about it myself, because I don't
know it's I'm really glad that that Woods article brought
the Minerva Project to light, and and I'm so fascinated
by everything that these are saying, because they're clearly very
passionate about the state of education right now and where
it's going in the future, and that's awesome. Like more
people being excited about this and trying new things is
(36:10):
rad um, if you know, you'll excuse my colloquial parlance
of our times. But he says things like, we have
no evidence that lectures are a good way to teach.
I'm pretty sure that people do research into ways to
teach and whether or not they're good and who they
work for continually. Um, So I don't think that's really accurate. Uh.
(36:31):
He also says that the biggest innovation in universities in
the past thirty years was to double its costs and
hire more administrators at higher salaries. I feel like technology
has done a couple of things in the past thirty
years in universities, So you know, there's just I kind
of wish that he had taken a deeper consideration of
(36:54):
the field that the scientific field of evaluating education. I
think a lot of it probably also comes from his
conversations with the people behind the Minervo project, who have
a vested interest obviously in promoting that. And of course,
uh Nelson the founder has not been shy about stirring
controversy and sturing that pot and saying, you know, hey,
(37:18):
we're gonna we're gonna be right there, side by side
with you, and then later saying we're going to reform
all of the university level of education. We're gonna change
the world, and his his job is to be incendiary.
That's wonderful. It's it's it's important for the project to
move forward. It's important for them to get the funding
they need in rage for this this experiment to happen.
(37:38):
I'm not criticizing it at all, but I do think
that that's probably a large part of why Wood's article
reflects that, because that's the message that's being given. And
and I'm not even suggesting that they're insincere at all.
I feel like they sincerely believe that this is the
superior method to uh in party education, to people like
(38:01):
to teach people and to have them actually learn and
have that be effective. Whether or not it's true is
a totally different matter. Right, it may be, but it
may not be. So. Yeah, I can see where you're
coming from there. Uh. Personally, I would love to see
this project succeed. However, I don't think it's like especially
(38:22):
using the teaching model that was was illustrated in the article,
It's really hard for it to be a scalable thing
because again, you your faculty would have to balloon to
massive numbers in order to have a huge class. So, uh,
either you have to have two hundred competing startup companies
(38:42):
that are all doing the same thing that the Minerva
projects doing, all with different prices. Essentially becomes a new
university landscape. Yeah. So it's one of those things where
I think it could easily become part of the future
of education. I don't think it's going to supplant it well,
(39:03):
I mean, I think it certainly isn't going to become
the widespread future of education, especially because what they're trying
to do is provide an IVY League level of education,
which I mean that's just not even well suited to everyone.
That's not even what everyone wants. And even if even
if it were, you would be limited by the number
of resources you could get who would actually be able
(39:26):
to provide an IVY League level depending upon depending upon
how you're defining IVY League level. I mean, obviously there's
other colleges that are not in the IVY League that
have some phenomenal leading thinkers in various fields, but that's
specifically the the focus of the Minerva project is you know,
they took the Ivy League as the the pinnacle, the
(39:47):
example that they wanted to live up to, which is
understandable in the United States. Um. Well, yeah, I would
say in favor, I would just echo again the comments
already made that that I do think having lots of
direct conversation and interaction between experts in the field and
students is one of the fastest ways to get students
(40:08):
acclimatized to the discourse of a technical or you know,
or of whatever field. Yeah, and whatever, the community, whatever
it is. Uh, And that's something that you can see
students struggling with. I mean, I've actually taught at the
college level, and there's there's a disconnect they're that goes
on for many years with a lot of students while
(40:30):
they're they're trying to get used to the way people
talk when they're when they're working in a certain type
of discourse. H I experienced it just in literature. I'm
sure it's even more difficult when you're talking about one
of the sciences. Well, jargon everywhere, But yeah, I think
the future of education, the future of higher learning in particular,
(40:52):
is heavily dependent upon again how we view that socially
and culturally, and whether or not we continue to consider
college education as being uh, you know, like if you
are capable of pursuing it, then you should pursue it.
As long as that message is the the kind of
unofficial message that's given to everybody, we're going to continue
(41:16):
having this supply demand problem. And uh, Meanwhile, if that
is also happening in in sync with a economic depression
where jobs are getting harder and harder to find, people
are holding onto them longer, they're retiring later, and you
have this this issue with jobs, then that that raises
(41:37):
like all sorts of questions about the value of education,
whether or not it makes sense to go into it
in the first place. So I think really a lot
of the factors that are going to determine the future
of education have nothing to do with teaching at all
and has everything to do with culture, uh and with economy,
and that is really going to be the big impact.
(41:57):
And these other argue it's at the moment are hard
in the pun academic, I can't believe I said all
that just to set up the pun. Is that really
why you said all of that? You gotta wind him
up before you knock them down. No, I really do
(42:17):
believe that though. I really do think that that that cultural,
cultural pressures, and economic realities are going to be what
really shapes the future of the college the university UM,
at least in the near term. Long term, who knows.
Long term, we may see things like the Minerva Project
become more common and perhaps be a real competitor to
(42:41):
the traditional university experience, right, I mean, I guess the
big question is not whether they will whether this kind
of model will completely take over education in America as
we've discussed. It's more like, will this remain a steady
and reliable, small subset of higher education or will be
maybe a hundred people in the world who can say
(43:03):
I got a degree from the Nerva project before it
went under. We don't know. We'll have to wait and see.
So I'm very curious to see how this plays out.
And uh, I wish them all the best because I
think that they're intentions are are really interesting and I
really hope that that it works out. UM. But we'll see.
Because this is it's you're talking about an institution. It's
(43:27):
not just something that's been around for a little while.
So um, the future will tell us just I guess
what we're all about here forward thinking. So, for you
guys out there who have suggestions about things that we
should cover in future episodes of Forward Thinking, let us
know drops the line on Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus
are handled all three as FW thinking. We look at
(43:49):
all of the suggestions, we appreciate them, keep them coming,
and we will talk to you again, really soon. More
on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,
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Joe McCormick
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