In 2014 I participated at entrepreneurship bootcamp called Exosphere. This was a life change experience that I recommend. Bellow you can check one of their articles about education. Checkout their website to see what's
new!
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Education is finally succumbing to the same forces that have upended countless industries from retail to recreation.
The digital education revolution is commoditizing most forms of learning, as well it should. The Internet is far more efficient and effective at delivering mathematics and coding lessons than a classroom lecture environment, and it is far less personnel intensive. These kinds of modular curriculum can be developed once and delivered millions of times at a marginal cost of $0, meaning that the price to the end use approaches $0. The marginal cost of delivering a calculus lecture at a university is much much higher. This is why the traditional university is in serious jeopardy, especially traditional universities not in the global top 500. This is also why Exosphere will be making use of all the digital tools on the market. It allows our candidates access to the near complete corpus of knowledge available to be acquired at virtually no cost to us, or to them.
But we don’t think that is the whole story. Commoditized learning means commoditized workers, and the global economy demands fewer of those, not more. Higher education has been commoditized for years (especially below the global top 500 universities), but it was a commodity that was expensive and messy to produce. The digital education wave that is starting to take off is going to wipe out most community colleges, third tier state schools, and especially non-ranked private colleges where tuition rivals that of the Ivy Leagues. It will, at the same time, force the so-called elite universities to further differentiate their product offerings and eventually to cease the factory-style pedagogy that still dominates everywhere but Oxbridge and their few imitators. The problem with this is embedded in the economics of elite higher education, which has essentially become a vast ponzi scheme (complementing the far larger ponzi scheme of student loans).
Most universities operate on the factory model we have already discussed. Tenured professors and full-time bureaucrats–err–administrators are the “foremen” of the factory. They stand atop the scaffolding attached to the walls of the factory and supervise armies of graduate students piecing together little widgets on the factory line. The factory work includes boring lectures, grading homework assignments, and scoring exams. The widgets themselves don’t care much about the process, their goal is to make it to the finished product box without getting thrown into the bins of defective widgets that will be discarded out back.
When this process can be reduced to digits and bytes, and the new processes are widely accepted by employers, we will see a landslide in any institution still mimicking this process.
At Exosphere we have a fundamentally different approach. We reject the production-factory metaphor altogether. Education is about people, not about numbers. It isn’t about how much grant money you receive or about enrollment numbers or test scores or graduation rates or even employment rates post-graduation. It is about living, breathing people with needs, dreams, and desires. People who have passions they haven’t yet discovered, talents that remain hidden even to themselves. People who long and yearn to belong to something, to relate to others, and to become more than what they are at present. None of whom deserve to be tossed into a bin labeled “defective.” None of whom deserve to take out massive loans only to be abandoned to debt slavery and dead-end jobs when they receive their diplomas.
We are creating a community that helps people discover their passions, develop their skills, identify their talents, and harness those things to imagine, create, and build the technology, products, and services that will make everybody else’s lives better and more fulfilled. We believe that institutions of education cannot be merely about imparting knowledge. That is, they cannot be focused on the “what” or the “how” or even the “why” but rather on the “what now?” and within a framework that is always anticipating that question. We can only answer this question in collaboration with other people.
The Digital Education Revolution is the beginning, not the end of a greater economic evolution toward empowering individuals and decentralizing institutions, power, and wealth.
But it is the people, not the tools that matter.
- Skinner Layne
“The Digital Education Revolution” is part of a series of articles we are taking from our archives and publishing again. The concepts and thoughts formulated and developed are the foundation of Exosphere. Check our website to see how we are turning those ideas into tangible reality.
Original post here: http://old.wescribe.co/t/the-digital-education-revolution
