The Online Education Revolution

This is an interesting post about perspectives from the President of Thunderbird - School of Global Management (my alma mater)... I think the MIT Open Courseware Intiative Model is another disruptive innovation.

@Thomas Crompton

As President of the Thunderbird School of Global Management Angel Cabrera has observed a fascinating new trend in US university education, largely driven by the Internet.

First, the Ivy League model: Get as many highly paid Nobel laureates and great researchers as possible and select a small number of elite students. This model has been increasingly copied by many state schools, with the result of a somewhat inefficient use of resources. Many government supported schools, who have a mandate to educate the masses, get caught up in the race to have prestigious professors and selective admissions.

Now, enter the Internet, a total game-changer. Suddenly you now have scalable teaching methods where one teacher can engage an almost limitless population of students over distance and time.

One of the best examples, Cabrera said, is the University of Phoenix, which offer online degrees using great materials and teachers.

These may be online degrees, but Angel says you would be wrong to dismiss them. Instead of concentrating on paying many professors, the University of Phoenix and others in this cadre of online universities concentrate on creating the best possible learning curriculum that can be taught online and then administered in-person by lower non-specialists.

The power of the model is that they now have scale. Another interesting implementation of these methods that I have experienced is Praxis Language with their Chinese Pod teaching method. Praxis combines podcasts, blogging and twittering in a very effective way to teach Mandarin and a range of other languages.

Ken Carroll, one of the founders of Praxis, speaks about how the Internet creates a new cadre of teachers who become almost famous due to the large following of students under their tutelage. I experienced this effect when meeting Ken and his colleagues in Shanghai. Their podcasts gave me a tremendous sense of intimacy with them, a near emotional bond, though we had never met before. Here is a video interview I did with Ken.

New media channels are opening up times for learning that did not exist before. Now I can glance at my mobile phone to review a lesson in an elevator, instead waiting to sit down with a heavy textbook. With an Amazon Kindle or other e-reader a child does not need to carry a 30 kg backpack of books.

Here in Hong Kong, with the regular threat of avian flu, many schools have invested heavily in some quite effective e-learning platforms. There is even talk about launching school within virtual worlds to make the learning a more immersive experience.

The problem, of course, is that many professors and universities are - by definition - highly conservative. Many need to wake up to the opportunities (and threats) of new styles of teaching.

Shanghai sidesteps ‘one child’ rule

Shanghai, or should I say China is now worried about supporting its aging population. In hindsight, drastic measures like the "one child" policy don't appear to be working. Like Shanghai, Singapore has been intruding upon its population's private life by influencing a balance across its ethic composition. It goes to show how policymakers don't really understand the long-term consequences of their decisions. Bringing in migrant labor is like dealing with immigration into European countries facing a similar aging population challenge.

@Financial Times

The city of Shanghai is taking the dramatic step of actively encouraging residents to exceed China’s famed “one child” limit, citing concerns about the ageing of its population and a potentially shrinking workforce.

For more than a decade, Shanghai has allowed couples to have two children if each parent was an only child, but few have done so as rapidly rising incomes in the country’s financial capital have been accompanied by falling birth rates.

So family planning officials are to nudge eligible parents harder, with plans to push leaflets under doors and make home visits to promote procreation.

“We encourage eligible couples to have two kids because it can help reduce the proportion of elderly people,” said Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission in a statement.

Some 21 per cent of Shanghai’s registered population last year were aged 60 or older, which Ms Xie said was twice the national average, and births still lag well behind the national rate of 12.14 per thousand.

While Ms Xie cited worries about the city’s employment base declining, Li Jianmin, a population expert at Nankai university, said “the workforce shortage should be solved through encouraging migrants”. But he added that second children could ease the problem of an ageing population.

Chinese children are expected to care for ageing parents but as the current generation of only children reaches maturity, they are increasingly struggling to care for two parents and up to four grandparents.

China’s decades-old one-child policy, though relaxed in some areas, remains a significant intrusion into private life.

Twelve categories of Shanghai couples are allowed to have two children, including those whose first child is disabled and those with a spouse who was a fisherman at sea for more than five years. The new campaign highlights both the one child policy in limiting population and the fact that it does not apply to all.

In most rural areas, couples have been allowed a second child if the first was not a healthy son. Ethnic minorities are also not limited to one child.

Shanghai’s initiative follows campaigns to encourage more child bearing in other crowded Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which had previously worked to promote small families only to see birth rates trail off as income levels matched western levels.