Bill Gates on Adoption in K-12 and Education
by Rob Paterson
Few people are as passionate about Education than BG. Here he is talking about what he has learned by a lot of experiments.
- That K-12 is best as an immersive system with long days – best 6 days a week and in the summer as well. The best charter schools know this and practice it. Having had all my school like this myself – my sample of 1 agrees with this.
- This means that for K-12 Place is key – like going to Boot Camp. But there is a real role here for online in that it expands the scope of the place
- BG feels (2.50) however that shifting the formal system to either of these ideas – more immersive and more online – can never happen – the cultural barriers are too high
- On the College and university front, he points out that here the issue is access. The main barrier to access is “Place” that drives direct cost and prohibits the student from having any flexibility.
- Here he anticipates big movement driven by the economics. Place drives costs of up to $250,000 for a BA. He thinks that the target is to reduce this not to $20,000 but to $2,000
I think this is entirely possible. But what established university will have the guts to do this? Will they all end up like the newspapers? Hanging on for dear life?
I think that most will rather die than change. As many of us are finding in the front lines of change – it is impossible to underestimate the power of the establishment.
But I think that maybe a few established universities might go the whole way. I think that those who do will win the most. There is something very important about having an establishment organization or person as part of a revolution. Martin Luther had his Prince who defended him from both the Pope and the Emperor. In newspapers it may be the Guardian. In public TV it may be KETC. (Here is KETC Immigration page where they are putting the Public Into Public TV).
I think of my university here on PEI – What if UPEI had another 25,000 online students? here is a snip of a larger idea like this that I wrote 5 years ago:
Come to PEI for the summer and meet the other students and then go onto take an online Master’s degree in the Natural Economy. The Master in the Natural Economy (MINE) is a master’s degree course that engages the learner as many of the ideas and practices of the new ways of organizing and acting as possible. It embodies the ideas of our new time. It draws on hundreds of “Gurus” that live all over the world that bring their own story and experience to bear. Students, who nearly all are employed, develop their own path of study within the context of the course intention.
The school initially emerged out of one course, Marketing as a Conversation inspired by Cluetrain and by the ongoing thinking and blogging of by people like Seth Godin, Hugh McLeod, Johnnie Moore and Jennifer Rice. Their marketing revolution was the first breach of the old system that took hold.
There are a number of paths that students can take but all the work is founded in the ideas of how real relationships and real networks work. Paul Hawken is Dean Emeritus and the current Dean of the School in Natural Economy is George Dafermos who’s early writing on the use of Open Source, as an organizational model, has been so influential. Robert Scoble is the Visiting Guru this year and will be on PEI this summer offering workshops in Voice and Culture. He replaces Dave Pollard who will be sorely missed.
Students spend a month in the summer here on PEI where their task is to get to know each other and to decide on their focus for study. They then return home and form groups that are facilitated by the gurus. The full Masters degree costs only $7,000 and has of course no other costs. There are now 17,000 students in the system that is 4 times the size of UPEI, conventional undergraduate school.
MINE Graduates are in extreme demand as organizations struggle to understand the shift that they have to undergo. The traditional business schools have had great difficulty in moving this fast because they have such an investment in the old. Similarly, the major consulting firms have all but collapsed, as they too could not reframe their costs and their competence.
In their place have emerged networks of “Gurus” like the Hughtrain Alliance that are recognized as the key talent that shook the marketing world. These networks have a very different model and become partners of the host organization. They are not report writing organizations with expensive offices and extreme hierarchies but are much more like coaches of a team. Most of the students of the Natural Economy work and most of their study is in the context of solving their real challenges.
In effect, consulting has become an extension of the education process.
As with Luther – the big change will happen on the edge where the “field” is weakest. A small undergraduate university, like UPEI or back in the day Wittenberg, is less gripped by the power of the prevailing culture and can see the gains that might accrue to them.
