Clayton Christensen |

I had the opportunity to speak with a doctoral class on systemic education reform at UC Berkeley a couple weeks back. I briefly walked them through the core constructs of the theory of disruptive innovation, as well as how online learning fits into that theory. We then had an engaging 45-minute discussion.

We talked through the areas of nonconsumption where we are seeing online learning take off, and one of the women, an assistant principal at a high school, in the class spoke about how she was using online learning in her school for credit recovery in classic disruptive fashion.

And just like most disruptive innovations, she said, it wasn’t as good as the traditional face-to-face classroom experience. I started to protest and say that studies were suggesting that online learning was no worse and often better than traditional face-to-face classrooms—and besides, think about the transformational possibilities(!), but then I stopped.

I was missing the point, she said. It wasn’t as good because it wasn’t as rich or penetrating. For example, the students in an online credit recovery English class might not read the same literature as they would in the traditional one, but she said that she wasn’t disparaging that; in fact, it provided them with great lessons in grammar, but this was not the point either. Whether it was the same or better than the original was the wrong question (I pause here to observe that in many online credit recovery programs this would not be the case, but it seems that in the program they had chosen this was the reality).

Putting her words through the prism of our language on innovation, she said that the “Job to be Done” in credit recovery was not to provide the most engaging possible learning experience, but instead to allow students who had failed a course and needed to make it up to graduate to do just that no matter what it took so that they could go to nursing school or whatever other future experience lay before them that would be closed off without that high school diploma. The second time around the class was much more transactional, and that was just fine–and in fact an important attribute.

I’m still contemplating the implications of this, but suffice to say it has given me pause and made me think about one of the central points of disruptive innovation that is so important to grasp, which is that quality is relative (as I blogged about last week).

I thought about this as well when I read the following two articles in Education Week recently—one titled “Districts Embracing Online Credit-Recovery Options”, which discusses how New York City, Boston, and Chicago are finally coming to this game (see Tom Vander Ark’s blog for a bit more perspective on this) and one that was a blog by Katie Ash titled “eLearning Update: The Rise of Credit Recovery.” Granted, some of the commentary is not the most informed and misses the greater possibility of online learning in my view, but what if they were 100 percent accurate? Would we be doing to a disruptive innovation precisely what we are not supposed to do and stifling it from improving as it grows by asking the wrong question at the outset when the alternative in these circumstances is literally nothing at all—and the online credit recovery is infinitely better than that?

More than nearly any writer I think I’ve read, Sarah Lacy of TechCrunch gets it. She understands disruptive innovation, as well as why some promising innovations work whereas others don’t, and why all of it flummoxes the experts in a field who grow frustrated with why people would be attracted to a so-called lesser offering (lesser as judged by historical measures of performance; quality is always relative).

I urge readers to check out her piece on Nixty, a platform for eLearning courses worldwide that recently launched and whose founder I’ve had the opportunity of corresponding with quite a bit over the last couple years, as well as her piece titled “What the Valley is Missing in Online Education” that I tweeted when it came out.

A few sections or lines that jumped out at me in the Nixty article:

“It’s easy to say that online education can never capture the full experience of being in a classroom, the one-on-one chats with the teacher, the face-to-face bonding with classmates, the simplicity of raising your hand when you have a question. Opening a chat window or sending an email just doesn’t compare. The question is: How much do people care about those differences? Because we heard the same argument with CDs versus MP3s, TV versus online video, reading physical books versus reading over a Kindle or iPad. Evidence has shown that in most categories a meaningful group of people will take convenience over immersive experience.”

Yup, classic disruption, and a clarifying way to think about the blog I wrote about Knewton and were disruptions generally not as good as the existing paradigm. In this case, they don’t replicate what we think education “should look like” so we naturally judge them as not as good along those old measures of performance.

“Nixty is hardly the only company trying to be an open, social eLearning tool. This has been a hot market especially in developing countries, and Nixty is wise enough to recognize that’s where a lot of the battle is going to be fought, rather than in the US. Which is not to say there are no niche markets here – for instance, children being homeschooled whose parents would like new-self-driven curricula, or people who can’t easily leave the house, either because of disabilities, childcare issues or even house arrest (speaking of which: continuing education courses for attorneys or lawyers may be another niche.)”

Classic areas of nonconsumption about which I’ve written.

“But back to the argument of how much people care about immersive experiences, the fact is that most people who can afford to go to college in the US want the experience of actually going to college. Those of us who would love to go back to college but don’t have the time to take off from careers or raising families, could use Nixty, but the problem is what I call the “Rosetta Stone dilemma.” I love Rosetta Stone’s (link) software, and I think the approach to learning languages works – but the bottom line is there’s no short cut to the hours you need to put in to really learn a language fluently and I just don’t have those hours. It’s the same reason a lot of eHealth ventures have flopped. You have to build companies for how people actually behave, not how you’d like them to.”

Wonderful description that drives home the concept of Jobs to be Done in almost our exact language that we use in our forthcoming second edition of Disrupting Class that will have a new chapter about this very idea.

Stay tuned.

For those naysayers who have been suspect of whether online learning would continue to grow in the highly regulated K-12 sector as disruptive innovations do, more evidence emerged recently to suggest that it’s not just us and the theory saying that it will do that, but it is in fact doing just that.

According to a report titled Speak Up 2009 released by Blackboard and Project Tomorrow, a whopping 27 percent of high school students took at least one online course in 2009—nearly double the 14 percent who took at least one online course in 2008.

If that’s remotely right, that is not so far off the number of students who were taking at least one online course in post-secondary education a couple years ago.

This rapid growth is also broadly in line with our projection in Disrupting Class that by 2019 50 percent of all high school courses will be taken online—either at a distance or in a blended/hybrid way. That prediction doesn’t seem as far fetched as it perhaps once did.

There are a couple of other interesting findings from the study, for which you can find more information here and here.

First, only 4 percent of teachers report receiving any education about delivering online courses when they were in education school. If that is indicative of what is happening today still, we have a problem—and one that is consistent with what I hear. I would suspect we might begin to see more start-up teacher preparation programs that solve this market need more than do the existing players in the short term.

Second, the survey finds that students who have a parent who has taken an online course were twice as likely to take or explore one. And 33 percent of parents reported enrolling in an online course for work or for pleasure. This prompted a great quote in the Education Week piece from Jessie Woolley-Wilson, the Blackboard K-12 president: “The archetypes … are changing. Teachers are students. Students are teachers. And so our notion of a linear learning curve that is completely dictated by your age and by your grade and all this stuff, it all blows up.”

Lastly, there are a string of findings about the leadership challenges to providing access to these courses that have interesting policy implications as well.

* * *

One more note about one of the sponsors of this study, Blackboard. If you haven’t already seen by now, they recently acquired two rival companies in education, Elluminate and Wimba, which both provide synchronous learning platforms. This is a fascinating and smart acquisition that further unites the LMS with live collaboration and social networking, which makes complete sense to me. Although I don’t know the full terms of the deal, I suspect it also shows that there is a payoff for investors in the education space that hopefully will serve to attract more investment in the future. I recommend reading Steve Hargadon’s reflections on what this acquisition might mean.

Many have by now seen that the Gates Foundation is launching what it is calling “NextGen Learning Challenges,” with the aim of improving college readiness and college completion in the United States “through the applied use of technology and digital media.” An overview of the effort, its goals, partners, and more is here.

The Foundation is currently in the midst of a six-week comment period—a chance for people to chime in to provide input and ideas to help shape the efforts in the ways that can have maximum impact. From my conversations with people at the Foundation, it is clear that they are eager for this input to help shape the initiatives, so this is a really unique opportunity to play a meaningful role. The section for commenting is here.

The challenges aim to provide grants to innovators, build evidence of what works, and foster a community of professionals committed to helping students and young adults prepare for college and successfully complete their postsecondary educations.

You’ll see that the challenges fall under four categories: open core courseware, blended learning, web 2.0 engagement, and learning analytics. There is also a section for general comments on the initiative, and although the first wave will focus on postsecondary, future challenges will focus on high school—and to that end, there is a separate section at the bottom devoted to “Future Challenges, Focused on Grades 9-12” where some early discussions are already under way.

I’m also encouraged that the Foundation has chosen some great partners to help with this effort, in particular iNACOL, but also EDUCAUSE, the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges, and CCSSO, as well as the Hewlett Foundation.

So if you believe, as the Gates Foundation has said it does in announcing this effort, that “technology can be a key tool for making learning more flexible, engaging, and affordable” and that “we must use its power to transform education, particularly for those who need it most” then now is a good time to get involved to help shape the efforts. The Foundation is looking to harness the energies of people in and outside of education—from entrepreneurs to educators; from technologists to higher education leaders; and from business leaders to the people who ultimately matter the most, students.

I’ve had the good fortune of hearing Reed Hastings speak twice in the months since his recent purchase of Dreambox Learning about his vision for the future of education and how we’ll get there. I’m intrigued by his vision of the future, as it aligns quite closely to the way I think about the future as well—a world of rich learning opportunities that are individualized to a learner’s needs and are affordable—but I have some departures from him I think on how we’ll get there.  His talks are always intriguing and thoughtful. Below I provide a bit of commentary.

First, many have made the point, as did Hastings, that the advent of the chalkboard in the 1840s was hailed as a game changer, and it didn’t change much. It’s tempting to agree, but I’m actually not sure that’s right. Prior to the advent of the chalkboard, the dominant school model was that of the one-room schoolhouse where students of all abilities were in one room, and a teacher’s job was to work with each student much as a tutor would. Mass education changed all that, and it seems to me that the chalkboard was actually a technology enabler that allowed for that, as it helped transform the teacher into the sage on the stage and away from the guide on the side—precisely what we’re largely trying to reverse now.

Hastings also talked about how Round One of the role of technology over the next five to ten years will be to augment the teacher by allowing kids to catch up, but it won’t be permitted to allow kids to race ahead. Round Two will do that, and as a result, there will be a lot of variation in the classroom, which will pave the way for the teacher to become more of an aide. In Round Three, the teacher will become more of a modeler of behavior. This idea of “augmenting” the teacher sounds a lot like the cramming of technology that we’ve always had—as though the classroom will magically transform itself. I’m quite skeptical that this is the way we’ll get from here to there.

In another strand, Hastings talked about how Rosetta Stone has had roughly $100 million of development effort behind it, and you can buy the product for considerably less (he said $50, but the consumer product is in fact around $200; nevertheless, his basic point remains). He cited several other technology products that are similar. Why doesn’t this happen for most education products? According to him, there isn’t enough distribution; there aren’t enough labs; there isn’t the proper equipment in the labs. No disagreement from me, although what should give us pause is that Rosetta Stone, an education product, is now taking their affordable offering and selling it to schools (for an incredibly low $13 a license in at least one district). How did they get the distribution such that they could do this? By starting as nearly all successful disruptive innovations do—by targeting nonconsumption, in this case the consumer market for people who couldn’t afford to take language lessons or for whom most in-person language lessons would be inconvenient. Once Rosetta Stone built a successful business there and had invested a lot in the product, then they could take it into the formal schooling environment.

Hastings talked about his view that the big problem in public education today is boards of education. He convincingly cites reasons why eliminating unions would not solve our education problems—reasons that accord with the introduction of Disrupting Class. As he said, if unions were the sole problem, then you would expect the education in Massachusetts to be awful, and the education in Mississippi to be great (it’s the opposite). Schools boards, however, create problems everywhere, because they do not allow effective leadership teams to self-perpetuate in essence. So you may see a school district pushing the envelope for a few years, but then a few years later, that same district will be back in the pack or even lagging. It’s a governance issue, according to Hastings.

I don’t disagree that school boards as constituted today create problems for reforming education—see Chapter 8 of Disrupting Class for more on this. But it’s not clear that fixing this in the absence of fixing the incentives in education would solve much. Without going into lots of depth, Hastings makes the point that charter networks, because they solve this problem, are the answer. But charters are beholden to the same seat time rules that regular districts are. They are not funded based on mastery. And the idea that charter networks will just gain scale and serve most kids to solve this I think has a slim chance of coming true for several reasons—one of them being that, as the theory of disruptive innovation shows, if you were placing bets over who would have dominant market share in 30 years from now, it wouldn’t be the entrant organizations that are attacking the incumbents with all of the resources at their disposal head on.

A study commissioned by Psychological Science in the Public Interest called “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” by Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork, finds convincingly that, at this point, there is no evidence that teaching to different learning styles—specifically meaning to a student’s apparent preferred modality such as visual or auditory—works. The authors therefore conclude that using scarce school funds toward doing just this doesn’t make sense.

People may be quick to conclude that this invalidates one of Disrupting Class’s central premises—that we all learn differently. That is a faulty conclusion.

Although we did talk about learning styles in the book—which in retrospect appears to be a mistake—we made it clear that we were not experts in cognitive or neuroscience and that although “there is considerable certainty that people in fact learn differently, considerable uncertainty persists about what those differences are. At the moment the only sure thing is no one has yet defined these differences so unambiguously that there is consensus.” (p. 24) The point is that people learn differently—not that we profess to understand what those differences are.

This recent study by Pashler et al says that, in the words of an eSchoolNews article, “those studies that did use an appropriate [research] method found results that flatly contradict the learning-style theory.” It does not, however, contradict that people learn differently.

This isn’t all that stunning. As I’ve been specifically saying in my talks for well over a year now, categorizing these differences in how individuals learn by learning style is among the most discredited in the research. Noted cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, for example, refuted this notion as well in an article in the American Educator back in 2005 titled, “Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?”

Of course, there appears to still be some disagreement. According to a March 25, 2009 article in The Journal of Neuroscience titled “The Neural Correlates of Visual and Verbal Cognitive Styles” by David J.M. Kraemer, Lauren M. Rosenberg, and Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, there is some evidence that teaching by learning style could make a difference. In this study, the authors used fMRI scans and saw that visual and verbal cognitive styles did map back to specific areas of the brain. They could also see differences in how individuals process information regardless of the content type. (A quote from the summary reads: “Results demonstrated a pattern of activity in modality-specific cortex that distinguished visual from verbal cognitive styles. During the word-based condition, activity in a functionally defined brain region that responded to viewing pictorial stimuli (fusiform gyrus) correlated with self-reported visualizer ratings on the VVQ. In contrast, activity in a phonologically related brain region (supramarginal gyrus) correlated with the verbalizer dimension of the VVQ during the picture-based condition.”)

Moving outside of this particular debate, this doesn’t change the fundamental point that people learn differently. People don’t disagree with this. There is clear evidence that that people learn at different paces. Some people understand a concept quickly. Others struggle with it for some time before they understand it. We know that explaining a concept one way works well for some people, and explaining it another way works for others whereas it baffles the first group. We also know that this can differ from person to person depending on subject area. One of the key reasons online learning seems to be better on average than face-to-face learning is because time can become variable in an online learning environment so that students can repeat units and lectures until they master a concept and only then move on to the next concept.

As Ken Koedinger, a cognitive science researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, says in the eSchoolNews article: “There is lots of evidence that individualizing instruction based on students’ prior knowledge of a topic leads to more effective and efficient learning. Students entering an algebra class vary much more on their prior knowledge—for instance, their skills with fractions and negative numbers—than they do in their learning styles. And the instructional strategy is clear: Move on for concepts and skills that a student knows well. Slow down or double back for ones they do not.” In the same article he also says that individualizing for student interests may make sense, although we need more research: “For instance, students read more, and thus may learn more, when they are given reading assignments selected to match their interest areas.”

Even some of our supposed critics don’t actually disagree, as at least one has worried that in an online learning world people who would better learn from lectures or in other settings might not have that option.

We still need to do a lot of research in this area. And my hunch tells me that some of our best learning on this topic will come from actual practice in the field. Companies like Knewton and Guaranteach that are building engines with robust data systems so that they can better individualize learning opportunities for students based on a great variety of possible categories not based on any preselected theory (think how Netflix learns over time what movies you are likely to like and Amazon better figures out what books you’ll enjoy) will likely find patterns that lead to breakthroughs in what we know about how different individuals best learn better than we could do in a laboratory. There will be limitations to this approach as well of course—and lab work will be important to complement it. It’s possible that with the assessments we have today, engines like this will miss large chunks of what is actually valuable in learning and lead us astray. But with the ability to do rapid randomized control trials with thousands of people over and over again either consciously or unconsciously, the possibilities to understand what these differences actually are become more real and ever more exciting.

In the meantime, ruling out faulty categorization schemes is vital so that we can improve our understanding. But that doesn’t mean that an overarching premise that doesn’t pretend to be so specific as to have the answer is itself a faulty premise.

Innosight Institute is collaborating with the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) Office of Global Social Innovation in the launch of a new global education grant program called the HP Catalyst Initiative. Through this initiative, HP will support thought-leading education institutions as they explore what the future of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education can look like.

Each of five different consortia will explore a specific innovation theme and will receive more than $1 million in technology, cash, and professional assistance. The goal is to create international collaborative “sandboxes” of innovation to examine this future—one where students use their technical and creative ingenuity to address urgent social challenges in their communities and around the world. For 2010, this initiative is focused on 11 targeted countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Germany, Kenya, India, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For more information about the initiative and to explore eligibility for a grant, visit www.hp.com/go/hpcatalyst.

Innosight Institute, along with other thought-leaders in education, will serve in an executive advisory capacity for the initiative. The HP Catalyst Initiative deadline to register an intent-to-apply is June 30, 2010. The application deadline is August 9, 2010.

In addition, the HP Catalyst Initiative needs reviewers. Experts and volunteers with education technology experience may submit an application to be a reviewer. The deadline to apply to be a reviewer is June 21st. Visit https://www.surveymk.com/s/hpreviewerapp to apply online.

The article “An Open Mind” from the New York Times came out a little while back but it related enough to some of the higher education work I’ve been blogging about as of late so I thought it worth a brief blog this week.

A few lines in particular grabbed my attention. First, and most notably for me, the writer quoted Kevin Carey, the policy director of Education Sector, with a line that echoed strongly something I’ve been saying on the road.

Carey, who audited one of Yale Professor Shelly Kagan’s courses online, wrote about it in Inside Higher Ed and remarked: “I would like one more thing from Yale. A small thing, but an important one. I would like a grade.”

In essence, Carey wanted some acknowledgment or some credit that he had completed the course along with some feedback on how he had done and what he had learned. And why not?

Now I understand why Yale (full disclosure: my alma mater and a place to which I volunteer a fair amount of my time) might not do this itself because of its risk to its brand— the courses alone do not begin to come close to the Yale experience and all the rest. But to make these open courses sustainable and better, it strikes me that if Yale started up an autonomous school called “Open Education: Powered by Yale” (or something like that) it could wrap a new business model around these free resources and extend many of the other services an education provides to thousands more people than can attend its traditional and highly (some, including its president, would say overly) selective campus for not much cost—and for far less than the amount it seeks to raise to build two new residential colleges to enroll 200 more students at the campus.

Other highlights in the piece for me were the good description of how Craigslist had disrupted newspapers and iTunes disrupted the music industry by unbundling songs from albums and then the parallel to the unbundling of the “four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree.”

The description of Peer 2 Peer University continues to excite me as well. I love the part from its cofounder, Neeru Paharia, when she says, “Having a degree is a signal. It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” The article continues: “Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary.” I couldn’t agree more. People focusing on that metric to determine if the U.S. is properly educating its citizens are focusing on the wrong thing ultimately. P2PU “is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have—maybe a written report or an online portfolio.” Good stuff.

Lastly, the final paragraph that describes Shai Reshef’s University of the People nails disruption on the head when he says: “A lot of people are telling us, ‘It’s you or nothing.’ … We’re the alternative to nothing.”

Classic. Maybe Yale could learn something.

In an op-ed in the Washington Times a couple weeks ago, I introduced the idea of a QV Index in higher education to create the conditions for what we all want to see happen rather than regulating against what we don’t want to happen. There are a few points embedded in this concept that are worth explaining. For reasons of brevity (this blog will be quite involved as it is), I won’t ground the whole argument here.

To quote from the piece:

“One possible way the government could influence the demand side would be to establish a new track for institutions to access its money based on measures of quality and student satisfaction relative to cost. The better a school performed on these measures compared to its peers, the higher percentage of its educational operation it could finance with federal aid — thereby eliminating the all-or-nothing access to federal dollars and encouraging students to make decisions based on quality and cost, which would drive institutions to innovate.

To create this metric — an institution’s Quality-Value Index — the government could add together four measures: First, does the institution help a student get where she wants to go — or what is its job-placement rate? Second, upon leaving the institution, how much do the student’s earnings increase — over some amount of time to account for growth in salaries in a given profession — relative to the total revenue the institution received? Third, would alumni choose to repeat the experience? Fourth, are the students able to repay their loans — or what is the institution’s cohort default rate (CDR)? If this measure is used, CDRs should be indexed to credit scores or a similar measure upon matriculation, or else institutions would retreat from serving students who are the least well-off and need education the most. “

The formula, in essence, would be the following:

QV* = 90-Day Hire Rate + Change in Salary/Revenue per conferral + Retrospective Student Satisfaction + Cohort Repayment Rate

*(Each factor is normalized and measured relative to the average)

The first key to this is that it changes a college’s access to funds from an all-or-nothing game, as it is now, to a sliding one based on how well it does on the QV Index. There are lots of advantages to a system like this. Students would feel the pressure to make smarter investment decisions in their education based on the historical quality of that investment because it would be easier to get financing to schools that offer higher value. This is a big departure from the current state where an institution either clears a bar or doesn’t—and therefore there is no pressure on the demand side for all of those institutions that clear the bar (which in the current system can’t be too high or it just eliminates access for many). Moving to this system will also calm some of the volatility we’ve seen as of late during the debate over the change in gainful employment rules.

I’m not sure the right sliding scale to use to determine how much an institution can finance its operations through federal Title IV funds. One of my colleagues has suggested something along these lines:

The above system might produce some unintended consequences, but it does seem like a reasonable and simple place to start the discussion. The ranking system, which is based on how an institution does relative to the others—not on an absolute number—is important because it will keep institutions competing to improve and jump into (or remain in) higher tiers.

The components of the QV Index itself are all based on the idea that students attend higher education to improve their futures.

The first part—the 90-day placement rate upon a student’s departure—is self-explanatory. If institutions are serving their ultimate customers (employers) and their clients (students) well, there will be a clear connection here.

The second element is vital— a student’s change in salary upon leaving an institution divided by the revenue per student (or total cost—this includes tuition, alumni gifts, financial aid, endowment payments, other subsidies, etc.). This serves as an incentive to offer an education that is affordable—not an education that we’ve just allowed people to afford regardless of true cost. Right now there is little incentive to be lower cost in the market because of the ready access to the dollars regardless of price. Of course, if an institution markedly increases one’s salary upon leaving—and therefore improve their fortunes considerably—paying more for that may make sense. But we shouldn’t incentivize institutions to be more costly as we do right now based on U.S. News & World Report rankings and the like. At its heart, this says students should be able to make good money because of—and relative to the cost of—the investment.

The third element—one’s retrospective satisfaction rating—would be based on answering, on a 10-point scale, the following question: “Knowing what you know now, would you choose to repeat your experience at X university?” The purpose of this is two fold. First, it corrects some for the student that is not attending college to get the highest paying job and instead, for the benefit of her future and her long-term happiness (the most important thing), wants to work for a lower paying job—say in the non-profit or government sector—and believes it’s worth paying more for that particular experience (of course, it could also be the case that we could deliver a great program for those wanting those experiences at lower cost). It also judges a school not only on how its students do upon leaving, but also while they are in attendance. Do students there enjoy the experience? As the clients, that’s a worthwhile thing for someone to know.

The fourth element is one that receives a lot of attention already—the cohort default rate. This is another measure that asks if people can afford the debt they have to incur to take what you’re offering (of course, if this works correctly, maybe people will have to incur a lot less debt in the future)—that they can repay their loans on time. This should be adjusted for credit risk so that there is not a disincentive to not serve those who are the least well off. By having this be a sliding scale of access to the government’s funds, rather than a binary all-or-nothing game, we solve a big problem that the current debate over gainful employment has brought to life as discussed above.

The overriding incentive here for students from this is to choose schools that are likely to deliver a lot of value at low cost because that’s where the money is. One of my colleagues is working on how this would affect different students in different scenarios and life circumstances to make sure it works for all of them. I’ll potentially share some of that on a future blog.

Back to the providers themselves. Schools looking to take advantage of financial aid will have to innovate to improve outcomes relative to costs. Their incentives will be to:
- Target a student population they can serve uniquely
- Create new business models that don’t push students out unless those students can pursue their goals better outside the system
- Deliver what the student herself needs (be it good learning, connections, etc.)
- More affordably serve students
- Make students happy
- Connect students to what they want
- Serve students well while consuming

My gut is that in many cases a new group of providers will rise up to deliver education that is fundamentally affordable because most of the providers around today of all stripes have competed on dimensions other than cost. For example, online providers today have largely competed on convenience, not cost, so this won’t be something that their business model can readily absorb, and they may be disrupted. That could be a good thing.

That said, because this is a big shift, you would want to implement this responsibly. One way would be to make this just one way initially to get access to a limited pool of total government funds and bypass the accreditation process that encourages institutions to look like the others out there and not necessarily be all that innovative. Another way might be to implement this gradually—over a 4-to-6 year window perhaps so that schools could build their capacity to innovate on these new metrics.

As I said in the initial op-ed, I recognize that we certainly don’t have all the answers. This blog is more to post this idea and then allow others to join the conversation and improve it. What did we miss? How can we collaborate to create a better system? I’m always worried about unintended consequences from formulae like this; what are the ones here?

I hope to hear from you as we seek to transform higher education.

Students on balance need more time for learning. Chester Finn’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal lays out the basic case around this.

Meanwhile, school districts everywhere are looking at giving students less, not more, learning time as they consider shortening the school year for budget reasons. According to this NPR report, 100 schools in 17 states use a four-day model and many more are looking at an abbreviated week. The Los Angeles Unified School District is cutting a week from the school year. Rural schools, as is often the case, are disproportionately affected. And the red ink isn’t likely to stop anytime soon as this report out of AEI makes clear.

This is madness. Especially because there is a solution: online learning.

For more about how online learning can help students still have time learning and help with the needed budget cuts, check out the Alliance for Excellent Education’s great report here, and I also recommend again Cathy Cavanaugh’s report about more learning time online.

Indeed, if schools need to cut back on the physical days in class to save dollars on building and transportation costs, there is no reason the learning has to stop, too. Why not have students come in for some days into class and other days learn online? It’s unclear from this article, but it seems that that is exactly what Grand Rapids school district may be doing as it sets up this new model.

Let’s stop the madness.