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Can computers and the Internet really change the education industry? Over the past decades, teachers, principals, and technologists have come up with a variety of methods. They hope to use computer to improve their teaching skills with little effect.
However, Marc Andreessen, a well-known venture capital expert, believes that education is about to usher in a big change. Andreessen has successfully invested in many technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Slack, and Lyft. At the same time, he has also made significant investments in education. Andreessen hopes that the companies he has invested in will eventually bring about real changes in the education industry.
At the end of September this year, Vox's reporter visited Andreessen to discuss the issue of whether software can really transform the education industry . This article is the next part of this interview (please click here). The following is the compilation of Lei Feng Network (search "Lei Feng Network" public number concerned) , without permission may not be reproduced.
reporter:
You said long ago that software will "eat all industries" in the future. But do you think that certain industries can not be affected by the expansion of the software industry? Take care of children, for example. Or can you even create robots, iPad apps, or other things that take care of your kids? But it seems that most parents want children to communicate more with people than computers.
Marc Andreessen:
What I want to say is that software is already helping us to take care of children . One hundred years ago, taking care of children meant letting them go to work; 50 years ago they were allowed to watch TV. At that time, people were very worried that TV would erode our brains and we would become completely useless.
Obviously, every child in the ideal should grow up happy with parental discipline and guidance. But the reality is that moms and dads are very busy. The only thing that accompanies them is television. So are you willing to let the children watch TV or let him play the iPad? I think you will choose iPad because of this problem, because it is much more interactive than TV.
There is no doubt that so far, the work of nurses, day care classes, and preschools has been completed by people. It seems that this should be the case. But I want to say that software will change this way of personal care in the future.
Obviously, two things must happen. On the one hand, the matching model of labor will be more optimized than before . I now serve as a Director of Honor. The company is trying to create a new advanced home care model. In addition, we also want to make people's work content more valuable, and really can pay people more pay in the process. I think that someone will do the same thing in the area of ​​child care. This is only a matter of time.
On the other hand, the way to take care of and educate children will become more diversified, and both people and software will participate. For example, AltSchool, in essence, this school is built on the basis of high technology. It is entirely an entirely new approach to building classrooms and organizing extra-curricular activities. It also provides a very flexible teaching environment centered on children and parents. Of course, people still teach, but complex software systems will also participate. Parents and teachers can also use software to better help their children grow. In the future, teachers will rely more on software.
reporter:
People always repeat over and over again that "technology will change education." Computers and smart whiteboards have long been installed in classrooms, as well as new classroom formats such as flipping classrooms and MOOCs. However, the education community does not seem to have received a single change. An ordinary student still sat in classrooms with 30 other classmates to listen to the teacher. So, what makes you think that technology really brings about change?
Marc Andreessen:
In the United States, primary education is monopolized. The public sector has been controlling this area and there is almost no competition at all. This state of monopoly is even broken by the fact that charter schools (a type of special primary and secondary schools in the United States, between the public and private sectors) continue to rebel against the public sector. You see, the recent Mayor of New York De Blasio is trying to suppress these schools. The monopoly supported by the government is not so easy to say.
Although there is still a small amount of competition in the field of higher education, it is also in the form of government-funded cartels (also known as monopoly unions). In the United States, the higher education market is a traditional market that cannot keep up with the rapidly increasing demand. The funds invested in this area are only transferred between those colleges and universities and have not really been used to improve education. Most of them are government support. So you will see the student loan crisis, the prevailing inequality, and the fact that only a minority of people have access to elite education, and most students are destined to go to low-level schools.
However, new technologies can disperse these obstacles to the development of education . Of course, the last thing that unionized public schools do not want to do is to change the current mode of operation. They are also reluctant to accept new technologies.
reporter:
You are an investor in Udacity. When you started this project in 2011, your idea was to have a celebrity teacher teach online to tens of thousands of students at the same time . But afterwards, the effect was still not as optimistic as it was expected.
Marc Andreessen:
Udacity is growing fast and doing well, and has determined the direction of development centered on nanodegrees (similar to micro-professionals). Google launched a machine deep learning course on their channel. Also involved in the course production are Facebook, Amazon and so on. Udacity will sponsor these courses because they need more professionals to participate.
They are now launching a new series of courses to teach people how to design and build a car for themselves. Think about it. In 2005, the construction of unmanned vehicles was a challenge for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; by 2010, Google had put 1,500 people into the darkened science. In the field, outsiders do not understand what they are doing; today, you can learn how to build a car by Udacity, and then go to Google, Uber or Tesla to display your talent.
I think this is very meaningful. For the first time, this is happening and the progress is rapid. Second, such courses are not made by Harvard or community universities, but Udacity.
This is back to what you just asked about medical care and education. We can't subvert the entire industry. Nobody can do it. But I think the gap between the existing industry structure and people's real needs will grow bigger and bigger. So there are opportunities here. We can build parallel systems. At least people can choose. Of course, it is best that it can really challenge the status quo.
reporter:
The basic theory of disruptive innovation is to start from the low-end market and quickly occupy the market. Is this what you expected to happen? Do you think that with more and more courses like Udacity Micro-Professional, getting better and better, you may later become a student student who would have been able to go to Harvard to study at Udacity, because the latter is cheaper? Or do you think that students who can go to top universities still go to school for four years, and Udacity just gives everyone an extra choice?
Marc Andreessen:
This has a research report on the correlation between income and graduate school rating. You see this data is very interesting. If you graduate from a college in the US and then join the work, your income will be directly linked to the school level: If you graduate from Harvard, you must be a high-paying family; if you graduate from a community college, the wages are relatively low. . Therefore, salary and school education are directly linked . And if you have a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) degree, or an economics degree, then the income is almost entirely determined by the institution you are studying.
So you see, if you can read Harvard, you will still go. This is where I disagree with Clay Christensen. He will tell you how Harvard Business School is going to decline, but I do not agree. If you have the ability, you should go to such a school because in addition to being educated there, you still need the benefits of reputation and alumni connections. This is an educational opportunity. Corporate recruitment also cares about this. McKinsey and Goldman only recruit students who graduated from the top 10 schools, so if you are not, you do not get a high-paying job at all.
If you have strength it is certainly the best. But do you count the number of students that Harvard, Ivy, and all of the top 10 public universities in the United States have collected? This is a simple task for all 18-year-old high school graduates.
Therefore, most children in the contemporary era are not fully educated . Whether they are going to colleges with lower education levels, or because the cost of education is too expensive to go to college.
Think about the children in other parts of the world. If you are a 16-year-old child growing up in a rural area in Indonesia, Kenya, or Chile, you are as smart as those who will be able to enter Stanford. But the reality is that unless your parents are diplomats, senior government officials, or drug tycoons, there is simply no opportunity to enjoy the modern higher education we have advertised. This is cruel, but the fact is that a large number of 18-year-olds do not have access to better education every year.
I think this problem will take a long time to solve. There are so many children in the world. If there are people like Andrew Carnegie (who established Carnegie Mellon University) or Leland Stanford (made a donation to establish Stanford University), they intend to build a physical university in all these places. That won't work either. Because the number of schools they donate is far from meeting the needs of the children, there are not enough teachers to teach them . Therefore, the existing education system cannot meet the needs of global education at all. With this long-standing demand gap, subversion can happen.
For subversion, the classic explanation is to seek to develop an immature market, rather than seeking a better solution for an already mature market. As it happens, the education market is not yet saturated.
In addition, educational platforms such as this, in addition to Udacity, there is the Khan Academy. The YouTube video has also been added and it is a very important part of the Khan curriculum. As you can see, many people are entering this field. Everyone wants to find out how big this cake is, but now we are still not clear. But I think that in 10 years and 20 years, the progress of things will be much faster.
However, if we think that only the US market is the case, this is naturally a prejudice. This is because this is not just a problem for the United States. In the future, this phenomenon will become more and more global.
Via:vox
Extended reading:
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