Last night, President Obama formally announced that because “failure to act could turn a crisis into a catastrophe,” the federal government will finance an economic stimulus plan using of almost one trillion dollars to jumpstart the American economy.
When asked by a member of the press about the need for such a drastic measure, Obama described a dilapidated school he visited in South Carolina, and how the economic crisis presents an opportunity to invest in making a state-of-the-art education more universally accessible. At that moment, Obama evoked a suggestion made by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emannuel last fall that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. When I first read those words , I had just a few months moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area with vague plans to “do a startup”. I had studied news reporting, so my school friends and I were already sick with worry about our career prospects. But as the magnitude of the current employment crisis became evident, I began hearing anecdotes about people I knew – smart, capable people – that were having trouble getting or maintaining employment.
To get more data about exactly how my school cohorts were being affected, I began running this ad on Facebook, targeted to Northwestern alumni:
Overnight, I got four resumes from former classmates. Over the next few weeks, emails continued to trickle in until I had contact info for almost two dozen students who had been affected.
Before I fulfilled my end of the agreement, I asked everyone to respond to the question “what are your biggest complaints about education?”
There was a surprisingly small distribution of answers to the question, even for the relatively small sample size of twenty-two respondents. In fact, the respondents typically gave variations on the exact same three answers:
The biggest complaints about education
1. Too much of a financial burden
2. Assessments aren't relevant
3. Grades aren't useful enough
Below, I’ve written a brief overview of these three complaints.
A recent Forbes article describes the education debt crisis:
”A decade ago nearly all student lending was of the low-cost, federally guaranteed variety, most of it with 6% to 8% interest kicking in only after a student left school. As costs outpaced such financing over the past decade, the share of student loans from “private” lenders rose from 7% to 23% of the market, or $20 billion in the 2007—08 academic year.
The Forbes piece manages to put a human face on a huge, ubiquitous drama, and brings up some of the same themes that I did a few weeks ago in When the Education Bubble Finally Pops.
If we had no other educational alternatives, we might accept student debt as a fact of life. But we don’t have to pay anything to access wikis and video lectures and discussion boards and other forms of Open Educational Resources (OER), and these peer-produced resources are regularly updated to reflect the most recent - and often most important - information.
In some cases, the only remaining obstacle is certifying that we have acquired the knowledge. As crucial as this final step is, it should cost no more time and money than absolutely necessary.
While traditional testing assumes that the important body of knowledge tested is fairly static, millions of knowledge workers now live and compete in a consulting/gig economy where it is increasingly important to show what you know about quickly changing subjects that can potentially update with every news cycle.
For instance, among the resumes I received in response to the Facebook ad, there was a student who had earned a 160 on the LSAT. A polymath double-major. A straight A student. All of these classmates had a substantial interest in Energy Tech, but felt that there weren’t adequate ways for them to demonstrate their knowledge in the domain short of applying for grad school and increasing their financial burden.
There has to be a way to keep assessments relevant as the requirements on the ground become less static, and more dynamic. These assessments need a drastically shortened release cycle, and will require innovation in regard to how they are created, published, shared, and taken.
Letter grades just don’t cut it anymore. It’s not just that we need more detailed forms of grading – because we absolutely do – but the whole idea of a static grade is in need of some rethinking. Especially so if students are expected to pay a tuition for these grades.
Rather than ending at measurement, grading could be the basis for an ongoing connection, a building block for communities. For instance, what if there were an educational version of a Twitter-style attention economy where being “followed” extended beyond the 140-character micro-sized message metaphor such that participants could earn micro-sized sponsorships – earning them not money, but rather an ongoing gesture of attention and support.
One thing is for sure - grading needs a cost-efficient, scalable upgrade - one that will provide strong incentives and continuing benefits for participants.
As the economy has worsened and increasingly dire student debt and unemployment numbers continue to be released, I’ve been thinking about how I might contribute to addressing the educational needs of students, especially in context of extreme socio-economic challenges.
Specifically, my task has been to attempt to create an educational alternative that is simple, radically cost-efficient, able to cover relevant subjects that update frequently, and built around an incentive structure that provides continuing benefits for its users.
My work so far has taken the form of a website called PlopQuiz.
PlopQuiz is a way to show what you know by taking quizzes. These quizzes are about subjects of public interest that I’ve been obsessed with lately, like the recovery process, smart grid technology, cars 2.0, and energy efficiency. These quizzes can be shared on other sites, like this Recovery.gov quiz:
After taking a quiz, a report card on your PlopQuiz profile is updated with your latest performance info, and the top percentile of achievers for each quiz subject can earn awards and sponsorships.
PlopQuiz also offers sponsor accounts as a way for organizations to demonstrate social responsibility and open a dialog with motivated learners. As I allude to above, PlopQuiz sponsorships have less in common with traditional “sponsorships” than they do with the ‘following’ feature on Twitter.
PlopQuiz is completely self-funded, and runs on Google’s App Engine service for an operating cost so far of $0.00. The first month I spent working on PlopQuiz was on a $300 Acer netbook, sitting on a $14 red nursery chair from Ikea (Tracy Jordan’s “angry chair”, for you 30 Rock viewers).
This means that I can listen and respond to suggestions for improving the site, without worrying – at least for now – about pesky details like how to make money.
While the long term plans for this site are ridiculously ambitious, there is still quite a long ways to go, and it’s early enough in development for people’s suggestions to have a meaningful impact on the future of this website. If you have ideas about good subjects for quizzes or features I should add to the site, please get in touch and give feedback.
We still have a long way to go.