Virtually Educated

Starting this fall, some Chicago kids will be able to go to school without leaving home.

The virtual school provides all the supplies, including a computer. Students study from real books, do real projects and complete about 20 percent of their work online.

"If they finish early, we can move them into the next level in that curriculum,” said Virtual School principal Sharon Hayes.
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And if they have trouble somewhere, you can spend more time on the troublesome part. And if different children respond better to different instructional methods, different children can have different instructional methods.

Now what do the Critics say? Critics are those collections of names that reporters keep in their contact lists. Given any plan, a reporter can find a collection of people who will oppose it. Sometimes the reporter may actually contact these people.

Here, critics will insist that the children need to go to a real school or they will be denied the opportunity for socialization. I always wonder, when I hear such arguments, why the reporter does not ask whether being bullied (another favorite news item) is a useful part of socialization.

Critics will also complain that you don’t know how well the children are learning. Of course, those are the same critics who object to standardized tests in the classroom. And insist that the standardized tests don’t really tell you how well the children are learning.

Another problem that will arise is that the main service provided by the schools is to keep the children occupied while the parents work. That may be an essential function for some families, but it could be provided a lower cost and with less travel by unbundling the supervision from the teaching. Say, neighborhood facilities staffed by competent teacher's assistants. The computer does the teaching and the assistants provide the supervision.

Will that happen? Not until after the fight. Those critics have a vested interest in the status quo. Somebody wants to move their cheese and they don’t know any other cheese source.

Homework for Parents

The researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the Leibniz Institute for Science Education in Kiel, and Humboldt University in Berlin, wanted to understand why homework often becomes a "battlefield" for students, parents, and teachers.

The study's findings, said a researcher, suggest parents and teachers could help improve students' homework effort by
improving students' beliefs that they can do well,
increasing their interest in the subject and
providing a sense that the assignments are useful.

So there it is right there. The answer is not 42. It is doing those three simple things. Now I offer a simple test for anyone who wants to understand some of the problems with homework. Take these three simple steps as your homework assignment.

Do you believe you could do well at implementing these simple steps? What would it take to improve your belief that you can do well at implementing these simple steps?

Has reading these steps increased your interest in the subject of improving student’s homework effort? What would it take to increase your interest in the subject?

Do you have a sense that this assignment (understanding and implementing these steps) is useful? What would it take to give you a sense that this assignment is useful?

So how did I do on this homework assignment? Well I don’t believe I could do well at implementing these simple steps. There are all abstract statements describing desired outcomes. What I need is plans to reach those outcomes. Furthermore, I don’ even know what it means to “do well” on these tasks. So I also need a way to measure progress in doing well. That is what it would take to improve my belief I can do well at these tasks.

Was this assignment useful? Only in the sense that it provided an illustration of how to sound knowledgeable while saying nothing worth knowing. Does that ever happen in homework? You be the judge.

Market Comes to School

Teachers prepare instructional content. Lesson plans. Lectures. Projects. And other kinds of things listed in this link. Teachers need instructional content. The same kind of stuff I just mentioned. That is supply and demand. Now somebody is trying to match this supply with this demand. Efficiently. With a website: Teachers pay Teachers.

The site allows teachers to offer their instructional products for sale. Other teachers can buy the products. There is a small membership fee. And some evaluation of the content producer. There is also an arrangement for rating of content and producers by buyers, so the arrangement is somewhat like e-Bay. The content can include documents and most kinds of audio-visual materials.

This is a promising start. The main problem a buyer will have is efficiently evaluating the content. It is of no use to know that there are thousands of documents available that could be what you want. A buyer needs to have appropriate materials presented as a small, refined set that can be examined in a short time.

Possibly the matching technology being used by Stumbleupon may be useful here. It seems to provide web pages to match the user’s interest. Each user rates whatever items he or she chooses to rate. The ratings are used to guide future presentations to that user. (Incentive to rate, incentive to return.) The ratings are also used to guide the selection of content for other users with similar interests and (probably) similar ratings. Thus the system could develop clusters of similar users whose ratings would improve the results for all in the cluster.

I have tried it and been surprised at the high quality of browsing results. I suspect that something like this technology, combined with the original plan in the website, could be the innovation that destabilizes the educational system. In my blog of 6-21-06, I suggested that we needed to understand what job(s) the customers want done by the school system. The teachers-pay-teachers website could offer a generic solution: Parents could make their own determination of want they want (as buyers do on e-Bay). Then they could search this market for products that satisfy their wants. I assume that these products would be homework help initially. But many such products can be delivered over the web and would be suitable for individual of group study. At that point the schools might just provide facilities and supervision. The unbundling of education.

Homework for Babies

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Former Walt Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner has announced plans to buy a company that makes educational DVDs that teach math and spelling concepts to preschoolers using imagery from college athletics.

The company is Team Baby Entertainment. The business idea is to introduce the child to its parents' favorite athletic team. They offer half-hour DVDs tied to various college sports at name colleges. Each DVD shows video of the featured school's sports teams, interspersed with video clips of campus attractions, traditions, stadiums and mascots and kids playing with a variety of school-specific products. The idea is that preschoolers learn counting and spelling by using words, numbers and images related to the school.

The educational part sounds plausible. It would presumably draw on the methods of Sesame street and Children’s Television Workshop. The DVD’s are currently offered for prices of $13 to $20. That’s a bit pricy. But not for a gift, which might be the main market.

The question in my mind is: Why is there a market at all? Why aren’t the universities already offering this kind of thing to their alumni? Free. Or they could use the meaning of Free as redefined by public television (Free with your gift of $180). After all, these DVD’s are really half-hour infomercials for the schools. And the schools have all the resources they need to do this:
A direct mailing list to the market.
A school of business with students who could work out the business plan a class project.
A school of education that could advise on the educational aspects.
Departments or schools that teach marketing, TV production, and related skills.
The teams and the related rights for commercialization.
Servers and plenty of bandwidth to the internet. They would not have to spend money making DVD’s. They would just offer it for download. Of course, for that $180 contribution the school’s general fund, you would get a DVD in a beautiful gift package.

Looks to me as if some enterprising, entrepreneurial university could come in, undercut, and pull the market out form under his business. Is Michael Eisner worried about competition from enterprising, entrepreneurial universities? I guess not.