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Education as an App

by | May 20, 2011 | Business Trends

Thomas Frey Futurist Speaker education as an app
In March of 2007 I posted my original paper on the Future of Education where I talked about a system based on an iTunes-like approach where experts around the world could use a “rapid courseware-builder” to produce bite-sized courses, send them to a global distribution center, and students from around world could plug-in and learn whatever class matched their interests.

When I first presented this approach, the education community was quick to dismiss the idea out of hand, citing the rigors of course design and the vast limitations of online learning.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of working with an inspired leadership team from Maricopa Community College in Phoenix, Arizona (currently boasting over 260,000 students) and the reception couldn’t have been more different. Each of the ideas presented was carefully scrutinized and placed within the context of “how can we adapt this to work within our system.”

So what’s changed? Even though the message was similar, radical shifts in connection speeds and new technology, coupled with ever-tightening fiscal budgets in an increasingly fluid society, have made ideas that once sounded far-fetched just four years ago seem much more doable today.

But here is something I haven’t talked about before. In the midst of our sea-change of attitudes and tectonic shifts in technology comes a fascinating new idea, an idea that has kept me up for the past week with unusual ways of stirring the imagination. And it all has to do with education as an app for mobile devices.

First, some background

Rest assured, I wasn’t the first one to advance this kind of thinking.

  • April 2001 – OpenCourseWare – 10 years ago in April 2001, MIT President Charles Vest made the bold move to make its courses freely available on the Internet. This was the beginning of the OpenCourseWare movement, a movement that has enabled anyone around the world to listen and read what is being taught at MIT. Both Yale and Stanford were quick to follow and even Harvard has entered the fray in the past two years.
  • March 2006 – Open Culture was launched by Dr. Dan Colman and is one of the largest databases of free cultural and educational media in existence. Open Culture is edited by Colman who now runs Stanford’s continuing education program and works on Open Culture in his spare time.
  • September 2006 – The Khan Academy was launched by the visionary Salman Khan with the mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.” Their website now hosts an online collection of some 2,300 micro lectures using video tutorials on YouTube that teach a wide range of topics including mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.
  • May 2007 – iTunes U was first launched as a pilot project between Apple and six colleges that includes Brown University, Duke University, Stanford University, University of Michigan (School of Dentistry), University of Missouri (School of Journalism), and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This is when Apple first made iTunes U available on its iTunes Store, allowing the user community search to publicly available courses. Currently over 250 higher ed institutions participate in what has become the largest collection of courses in the world.
  • October 2007 – UC Berkeley launched its own YouTube channel. According to Benjamin Hubbard the Manager of Webcast at UC Berkeley, the school has had well over 120 million downloads since first sharing videos online, which they first began in 2001.
  • March 2009 – Academic Earth – As a project launched in 2009 by Richard Ludlow, Academic Earth is working its way towards becoming the Hulu of academic videos and courses.
  • September 2009 – P2PU was launched by John Britton, a developer evangelist at Twilio. After forming the company in 2008, they launched 6 peer-based free courses in September 2009. The courses had 15-20 people enrolled for 6 weeks. With each subsequent cycle, the number of courses has nearly doubled. The most recent, 4th cycle had 60 courses with 20 people in each course. They had to turn down nearly 70,000 additional people who applied.
  • April 2010 – Learnable.com – Spawned from work done at SitePoint, founder Leni Mayo formed a team and launched Learnable.com, a company based in Melbourne, Australia. Learnable allows anyone to create and charge for online courses with a simple authoring tool the makes each new course something that is simple and easy to create.
  • May 2010 – udemy – Incubated at the Founder Institute, udemy, billing itself as an “academy of you” was launched by Eren Bali and Gagan Biyani. Udemy’s goal has been to disrupt and democratize the world of education by enabling anyone to teach and learn online. Just as blogging democratized the publishing industry (enabling anyone to instantly become a journalist), Udemy seeks to dramatically change education by empowering millions of experts around the world to teach & share what they know.
  • November 2010 – Skillshare was founded in November 2010 by Michael Karnjanaprakorn and Malcolm Ong as a community marketplace that enables users to learn anything from anyone. It’s a company with a rather unusual starting point. As Michael Karnjanaprakorn explains, “Last year, I played in the 2010 World Series of Poker (yes, completely random) for charity. I donated 100% of my poker winnings and got coached by some of the top professional poker players in the world. When I got back to NYC, my friends asked me to teach a class on what I learned, which is when everything clicked.”  As a result, Skillshare was born.
  • March 2011 – Sophia – Social learning is part of the idea behind Minneapolis-based Sophia, a new online platform launched by founder and CEO Don Smithmier that offers free academic content to everyone. Describing itself as “a mashup of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube,” Sophia lets users to create and share short lessons on specific academic topics. These “learning packets” can be created and uploaded to the site by anyone, using text, images, presentations, video, audio, and more. The quality of the learning packet’s content is evaluated by users within the Sophia community as well as by academic experts.

Rapid Courseware Builder

In 2007 I had predicted that someone would create a rapid courseware builder within the next 2 years and it would instantly generate millions of new courses seemingly overnight. Well, that didn’t happen.

Turns out, creating the user interface of a rapid courseware builder is a very difficult problem to solve. However, the work being done at Learnable.com, udemy, and Skillshare is very encouraging.

The trick is creating a cross-cultural user interface that works equally well for the course-creators as the course-takers.

In addition to solving the problems of authoring a new course, these sites need to develop a rich user experience. This means they need to somehow understand what’s going on inside the head of the student, their interests and preferences, and match them up with a recommendation engine that accounts for prior learning, prerequisites, and the fickle nature of humans.

To make it even more challenging, they need to incorporate some sort of rating system that allows the best courses to rise to the top.

These are very hard problems to solve. And I still think one of these companies, or one similar, will revolutionize the world of education.

However, I would like to suggest an unusual new twist in this strategy – courseware apps.

Education as an App

When it comes to mobile apps, we are experiencing a sea change in attitudes as to how we view the world.

In just a few months, the total number of available apps will exceed 1 million. Sometime next year, the number of available apps will exceed the number of books in print.

Apps are a piece of information that we interact with on a far different basis that a traditional book. They serve many purposes and enter our live from thousands of different angles.

To put this into perspective, it’s easy to visualize…

  1. The app as a source of information
  2. The app as an experiences
  3. The app as a tool
  4. The app as an extension of your business
  5. The app as a source of inspiration
  6. The app as a decision maker
  7. The app as an idea generator
  8. The app as an accomplishment

This last one, “the app as an accomplishment,” is the one that has been keeping me up at night.

Envision, if you will, a group of 20 students entering a classroom sometime in the future. After a brief orientation period and a little time spent getting to know each other, each student is given the option of choosing one from a list of ten possible apps. Each of these apps is a one-time-use course-project oriented around a specific accomplishment.

Over the coming weeks, students will be tasked with completing the assignment they have been given, and once their “accomplishment” has been completed, they can move on to their next course. Their interaction with other students will be on an informal basis, and teachers will serve more as coaches than traditional instructors.

The accomplishments can range from online activities such as building a website with a specific feature set, to launching a blog site with a specified number of entries, to creating a database with designated properties for interaction.

In addition to online activities, the apps can be oriented around off-line tasks such as building a piece of furniture, conducting a survey and tabulating results, or performing an experiment with animal or human subjects.

Whether the work is done online or off-line, human evaluators will be used to assess the results. In some cases it may be possible to build an app around an automated evaluation process, removing teacher bias from the equation.

Wrestling with Credibility

Companies like Learnable.com, udemy, and Skillshare are working hard to overcome the credibility barriers and reach some sort of tipping point.

By working within existing institutions, giving teachers new tools that are a quantum leap forward in both usability and efficiency, this kind of effort has the potential of giving a new startup instant credibility. For the students, this means gaining a known form of status and credits from a recognized institution.

This also may be the baby-step of change needed to unlock the doors of higher learning.

Final Thoughts

In the coming years we will be transitioning from an education system based on teaching to one that is oriented around learning. Teaching requires experts, and as information expands exponentially, we lose our ability to train new experts fast enough. Teachers have become the chokepoint.

Learning, on the other hand, doesn’t require topical experts. Instead, it requires good, competent coaches.

If we are to successfully make the transition from teaching to learning, we will need to focus on new and better tools for coaching.

As a society, we are not able to unlock the true potential of every individual by simply providing better teachers and a more aggressive structure for students. The failure points lie within the system itself. Rather, their true potential can only be realized by unleashing the genius within.

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion.” – – Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862

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