A #HackEdu session hosted by Union Square Ventures was held in New York this morning. It’s been a long time coming, but this event is a good indication that the moment for substantial disruption in the edu space has finally arrived. Edufire’s Jon Bischke said as much last night:
“We stand at a really unique point in history. As I mentioned in my personal blog earlier in the week, I think we have a real and unique opportunity to re-make entire industries. I can’t think of a more powerful opportunity on the planet today than the opportunity to re-make education.”
Just from taking a look at the #HackEdu Topics of Discussion page, you can get a good idea of the breadth of the conversation.
I found the “Sources of Motivation” section on the list to be of particular interest:
Sources of Motivation
* Intrinsic
* Fun (learn through games)
* Explicit rewards (pay for grades)
“Pay for performance” is already quickly gaining ground as a mode of teacher compensation. While teachers unions have been battling tooth and nail to prevent adoption of performance pay, they are clearly fighting against the tide. Under recently appointed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s authority, incentive pay pilots are expected to expand to a nationwide scale.In the video below, he describes “tremendous demand” for performance pay plans, saying that “we must continue to think differently not just about how we recruit, retain, and support teachers, but how we compensate them.”
Somewhat more controversial, however, is incentive pay for students.
Providing extrinsic motivators such as cash to students has two sorely-needed benefits:
1. Reduces the need for student debt. This is the most obvious benefit. With endowments and family college savings way down, an enormous educational unraveling is beginning to occur. Some are opting to go to public school. Some, no school at all. But there will always be plenty of students who have very good reasons to want to attend a university, whether for networking or for access to specialized programs and resources.
There’s a few good ideas about how student debt could be improved through incremental measures, such as income-contingent loans, but the radical change that personal educational funding requires depends not on the single points of failure brought upon by One Big Test and One Big Loan, but rather an emergent accumulation of funding that could cumulatively offset a significant portion of a hard working student’s learning-related expenses.
2. Provides a feedback mechanism. In the age of Guitar Hero, students are still supposed to care about letter grades given every few weeks. Really? If there’s one thing we know about the success of videogames, it’s that it’s able to provide a consistent feedback mechanism designed to ease the player through the learning curve. By seeing their funding slowly accumulate and tracking their performance over time, there will be a direct connection between the performance of a student now, and their opportunities later.
A few startups over the last 6 months have started offering extrinsic motivators to students for their performance:
Gradefund: Upload your report card. Friends and family members can donate cash gifts to you provided you get high enough grades.
SmartyCard. Aimed at the primary school level, a student’s performance on educational games can earn rewards like toys and videogames.
Ultrinsic. A class competes for a pot of cash that is given to the highest graded students. If the pot size is factored into tuition, the effect would be that lower-performing students subsidize higher-performing students, and a new energy of competition is injected into the classroom with zero cost for the educator.
(Incidentally, the Ultrinsic model could also be adapted to startup seed incubators.)
As innovative as all three of these models are, there is a major challenge that remains for these startups, explained in a Christian Science Monitor article:
The idea that ulterior motives consistently transition into intrinsic ones remains heavily disputed. Parents often characterize cash payments as shameless bribes, and academics point to studies suggesting that external motivation can have the opposite effect.
Research by Edward Deci, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, often feeds arguments against such programs. In one of his studies, a group of college students that were paid to solve puzzles often quit brain-teasers altogether when the experiment (and the payments) ended. Students in the experiment who weren’t paid continued working on the puzzles even after the study’s conclusion. The monetary award offered to the first group, Mr. Deci says, reduced the students’ interest in general puzzle-solving as a way to learn for learning’s sake.
“The idea that [being motivated by money] is going to magically turn into intrinsic motivation is really a pipe dream,” he says.
Simply put, cash is not a good motivator for students. The goal of these services is to invest in students who show effort and achievement, or to provide a form of “micro-scholarship”. But cash is a bad medium for scholarships, because rather than investing in a student’s education, you’re investing in whatever stuff they want to buy.
Instead of cash, we should be working on a convention for giving credits to students that can be redeemed by accredited educational institutions and exchanged for cash through tax returns. Imagine a”tip jar” for educational funding that a student carries around from kindergarten through adulthood. Credits for traditional “grades” could be awarded, but also for more automatically measurable metrics, such as your karma level at a social news site, or the number of pageviews on your videos.
The tip jar acts as a new kind of performance indicator. Each time you’re tipped, there’s a record of when, how much, and why you were tipped. And who was tipping you. The tip jar could also accumulate all kinds of things that aren’t tips. Keep it simple and open, and it’ll only be natural for people to begin experimenting and creating #conventions.
Furthermore, it would be a natural fit to use existing social media activity in a merit-based mechanism for determining when performance-conditional donations should be made to a student’s tip jar. In contrast to traditional school grades, you could derive grades practically in real time without any extra effort from students, and fashion together more convincing pitches for donors. Grades could either be inherent quantitative data (how many retweets you’ve gotten on an item) or could be derived from the content itself, keeping more in line with familiar pedagogical practice.
The tip jar could relieve student debt, act as a powerful feedback tool for students, and serve as a de-facto standardized resume and be an incredibly valuable source of data mining material. There are still some devilish details, such as whether donations to the jar would be tax deductible and how exactly jar tokens might best be redeemed via a tax credit or rebate.
With some creativity, we may be able to bootstrap this process and move it along faster than it otherwise would. Of course, this may all just be wishful thinking. But as the USV event this morning demonstrates, change - of more than one type - is in the air.