A new concept in higher education
All over the world school is a huge migraine. Everyone recognizes that education is the most powerful weapon of a nation, a family, an individual, but this weapon is always jammed and nobody really knows how to fix it. It is not even known in countries such as the United Kingdom, the USA, Germany or France where there are still many excellences and where the dominant models have been invented. In general, primary education works well and better: the children are small and the educators know more or less what to do. Higher education looks like a formula one car that's always sitting in the pits with the mechanics sticking their heads into the engine.
Educating and being educated is also one of the most expensive and demanding activities of modern societies. Lowering the personal and social cost of this irreplaceable activity is one of the major aims of governments and reform movements. But no one has the right formula and his problems continue to perpetuate. More and more people are convinced that a real paradigm shift is needed.
Let us take, for example, university training in the technical-scientific field. Here a big misunderstanding has developed in the common belief, undoubtedly a legacy of predominantly industrial and agricultural societies. It is thought that, once you leave university, you can put a tombstone on your studies and start making use of the knowledge you learned during your studies. It's like having filled up with fuel a huge tank that will feed the engine almost permanently.
Unfortunately, the development of technology in advanced tertiary economy societies has shattered this reassuring conviction, ushering in an era of continuous change in which knowledge and techniques are constantly surpassing themselves. The obsolescence of knowledge, especially in the technical and professional fields, is a problem with which millions of people are confronted every day. There is now a different concept, which is developing particularly in the United States, thanks to the intuition of some technologists. This new approach to higher education can be summed up in one word: nanodegrees. Formation is no longer one that lasts forever, but an experience that lasts a lifetime and that must be able to be repeated when necessary.
Beyond MOOCs, there is only Udacity
It is something to do with the phenomenon of MOOCs, even if it has its origin here. It is a positive overcoming of MOOCs and a way to resolve the limitations they have manifested.
The biggest proponent of this new approach is Sebastian Thrun, former director of the Google lab [x] creator of Google Street View and pioneer in the field of driverless car research. In 2012 he left Google and founded Udacity with which he carries forward his vision of him in the field of higher education. Here's what Thrun told The Economist about it.
The dream of a lifetime job is gone. In my field for example, what you've learned becomes obsolete in five years. If only six months are spent on the first degree, instead of an average of six years [in the US] as is the case now, a person can afford to get additional training when they need it later.
This vision is based on five pillars: speed, economy, efficiency, reliability and repeatability of education with paroxysmal attention to the professional outlet in a hi-tech company. In the US, a large proportion of technology companies recognize nanodegrees and offer internships. Udacity requires a strong involvement of the student who is an active subject: he must contribute to structuring the course and he is asked to carry out his own project under the supervision of Udacity's selectors.
To operate, Udacity uses a very simple distance learning platform that combines these elements: on-demand video lessons, short online tests and detailed projects assisted by a network of qualified tutors. The lessons are held by rather atypical teachers because they work in the field, sometimes it is the people who invented the technology that you are learning. The costs are miniscule compared to traditional university education. Individual courses, now around a hundred are offered, cost $200 a month and last 4-6 months with a minimum of 10 hours a week. If a student passes the course she gets a refund of half of the money paid. The entire curriculum, which may consist of multiple courses, must be completed in one year at the end of which a nanodegree can be obtained. The final total cost of a nanodegree is therefore around $600. Udacity currently offers only six nanodegrees all related to software development and related subjects.
Unlike MOOCs that do not interact with students when designing teaching programs, Udacity builds courses starting from the knowledge and learning skills of the student in order to obtain maximum engagement. “My dream – says Thurn – is to make the student as devoted to learning as he is to a video game”. Thanks to this approach, 60% of Udacity subscribers complete their course compared to just 10% of MOOCs. Udacity's success is extraordinary. It has 4 million registered students worldwide and about 60 students in the process of obtaining a nanodegree. Numbers that no other university can boast.
Farhad Manjoo intervened on the experience of Udacity in his "State of the Art" column in the "New York Times" with an article entitled "Udacity Says It Can Teach Tech Skills to Millions, and Fast" which we offer to the reader of ebookextra translated by John Akwood.
* * *
Kelly's dream
“I'm the least experienced person on my team at Google,” Kelly Marchisio, 25, a software developer, recently told me. “Frankly, I might be the least experienced technologist in all of Google, period.”
This is not about false modesty. Like all Google employees, he has an enviable academic record, including a Harvard degree. But his graduate degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Education deals with the interaction between neuroscience and teaching, something that is very distant from software development. In 2103 Google hired Marchisio in its customer service team, a job that gives him a living but does not stimulate his true intellectual passions.
What he really wants is programming. To this end, you have attended some courses at Harvard which have increased interest in this profession which is one of the most requested by the economy. But how do you find employment in software development with a degree in education and a job in customer service?
I saw how much Google works to initiate girls and young people in the field of software development, and then I thought "and me?". Now I'm here, I already have a job. I may join in the future if I get the right training.
Economists and technologists agree that there will be more and more technology in the working future of each of us. In recent years, many local and online schools have mushroomed to teach software development. All offer a wide choice of prices and techniques. Some, like Codecademy, are free, while others cost thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. Some offer general training, while others leave the choice of topics up to the students.
Now Udacity – a four-year-old start-up that offers online courses – after much trial and error, has figured out a model of professional training to teach millions of people technical disciplines. Sebastian Thrun, an artificial intelligence specialist at Stanford University who also headed Google[x], the search engine's advanced search division, said nanodegrees introduced by Udacity since 2014, are the solution to the high cost and the accessibility of qualified training. Initial experiences show that the program is reliable and efficient in creating new jobs, including that of Marchisio who started working as a software developer at Google after following a software development course at Udacity in the spring of 2015.
Udacity and MOOCs
Nanodegrees work like this. In 2014 Udacity partnered with some technology companies (Google, At&T, Facebook, Autodesk etc.) to create online courses aimed at teaching a series of specific technical skills, highly demanded by the market, such as programming mobile devices , data analysis and software development. Students who complete these courses earn a nanodegree, an award Udacity developed with technology partners to turn it into a new form of workplace certification. Trun told me:
We can't turn you into a Nobel laureate. But what we can do is increase your knowledge. Are you an intelligent person, but the knowledge you have isn't adequate for the current job market or doesn't allow you to find the job you like? We can help you gain this knowledge. We can help you achieve this goal.
The role of technology in improving education has been greatly exaggerated. For a long time it was thought that computers were the magic wand for teaching, and instead it was the opposite: not only was this prediction not respected, but higher education has only become more expensive and less accessible with the advance of digital technology.
Udacity itself had quickly stranded on the beach of naïve optimism. In fact, in 2011 Thurn, after discovering the widespread interest in his online courses on artificial intelligence, founded Udacity as one of the first paid MOOCs. MOOCs were, and to some extent remain, an existential threat to elite universities. “Nothing has a greater potential to lift people out of poverty,” wrote Thomas L. Friedman, columnist for the “New York Times” in 2013 about MOOCs.
In fact this has not happened. Thurn says his first attempt at a MOOC based on a broad, general curriculum garnered a lot of enrollments, but no one finished the courses. So in 2013, he set about transforming Udacity from a university ersatz into a hands-on professional school with highly structured coursework for the purpose of learning. primary goal of helping people find work.
In an economy constantly turned upside down by technology, Thurn thinks that lifelong learning could become increasingly important for the labor market. Thurn sees it this way:
It is a mistake to think that university education is once and for all and that it can be enough for a lifetime. To keep pace with change, training must take place throughout one's life.
The Udacity model: engagement and outsourcing
Udacity's new model shows signs of success. Within a year of the program's inception, the company has 10 students enrolled in graduate programs, and the number is growing by a third every month. Udacity costs $200 a month for courses. After course completion, half of the money is refunded. Udacity says a typical student gets a nanodegree in about five months for about $500 in total.
It is still premature to evaluate how many students will actually graduate. Udacity currently estimates a 25% completion rate. Thousands of people have obtained degrees and many have found a job.
Thurn attributes part of the success to the course materials, which have been developed in collaboration with some companies to impart the knowledge that is required of the employees of these companies. For example, Udacity's course on Android is taught by teachers who come from Google and who are working on the operating system. Udacity's model also favors the one-to-one relationship between teacher and student for training, tutoring, job placement and management of job interviews, all activities that spur the student to invest in studying. Student involvement is the cornerstone of training. The other cornerstone is human interaction.
The absence of human interaction has been the Achilles' heel of online training, but Thrun has found a way to offer a teaching system that incorporates this factor while keeping costs in check. He managed to do it thanks to an old internet trick – online outsourcing. Udacity has developed a worldwide network of recruiters for each course who are typically Udacity alumni. When students propose their projects, a recruiter takes charge of the proposal and quickly evaluates it by inserting detailed comments on the student's learning progression. Recruiters can be paid $50 to $100 an hour.
“With what I earned last month, I can go on a trip to Europe,” Aparna Sridhar, a Udacity recruiter in Chennai, India, told me.
Despite these costs, Thurn assures that Udacity has been profitable since last July. It also ensures that profits will be invested in creating new courses. Udacity raised $35 million from investors in 2014 and now has around 150 employees.
Does Udacity Change Your Life?
I've spoken to several students who have told me that Udacity has changed their lives. One of them is Dan Haddigan, a 500-year-old who graduated from art school with a degree in printmaking and worked for several years in an art gallery in Philadelphia. Last year he had contemplated going back to art school, but then he heard about Udacity and decided that software development was a more worthwhile option. “For several months – he says – I got up early, working on projects for Udacity, then I went to work at the gallery and, when I got home, I resumed working on my projects”. The course - in web development - lasted about five months, and cost him $XNUMX. But, Haddigan assures, it was worth it. After completing his degree, he found a new job at IntuitSolution, a web agency.
He had had some hesitation in applying for employment: “Who am I? I took an online course and I expect to have a full time job. They'll laugh in my face at the interview."
But it didn't happen and he got the job.
It really takes Udacity!
