On Friday, an article about Open Teaching was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, describing a future of decentralized, loosely coupled education:
Imagine the hosts of the TV show Myth Busters offering a course on the scientific method delivered via the Discovery Channel’s Web site. Or Malcolm Gladwell, author of the best-selling Tipping Point, teaching an online business course on The New Yorker’s site. Or a retired Nobel Prize winner teaching via a makeshift virtual classroom set up on her personal blog.
We won’t have to imagine for long. In the Presidential debate last Friday, both candidates promised an overhaul of the energy infrastructure that would create millions of new jobs. As Tom Friedman noted in his NYTimes editorial this weekend:
“The exciting thing about the energy technology revolution is that it spans the whole economy — from green-collar construction jobs to high-tech solar panel designing jobs.”
But how will the market for these jobs work? There may not be such thing as “5 years experience” for many of these jobs, let alone 10 or 15 years. To make matters worse, there is no mainstream, standardized way of comparing how qualified people are for these jobs.
There are green certifications for buildings, Co2 Stats is a green certification for websites. But there is no certification for green career skills.
This problem is indicative of more to come. Just as real-estate bear market has challenged the strength of the credit market, the impending tidal wave of quickly changing knowledge requirements will pose a similar challenge to our job market.
Google famously took a process that was dominated by human effort - organizing and ranking web pages - and created a program to do it even better than humans could.
As a thought exercise, let’s suppose that we have a test with 3 hundred test questions. Each person who takes the test can take a test of 10 questions, composed of any combination of these questions.
To make matters worse, we don’t have any pre-existing knowledge about the difficulty of the test questions or the proficiency level of the test takers.
If we were just anybody, this might be too tough to tackle. We’d likely continue to use criterion-referencing tests, no matter how much redundant human effort they require.
But if we were Google, perhaps we could take the optimization technique used to rank webpages, and adopt it to grading tests. Instead of PageRank, perhaps we could create a ProficiencyRank….