Get Ready For More "Personalized" Online Learning

Not much on the education front in today's state of the state/budget address by Cuomo, unlike in previous years when he was slamming teachers for all the ills in society and calling for the "death penalty" for failing schools, but this proposal seems education-related to me:

PROPOSAL 10: Dramatically expand and improve access to high-speed Internet in communities statewide. Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul detailed this proposal shortly after the New York State Public Service Commission voted to approve the merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications, which will dramatically improve broadband availability for millions of New Yorkers and lead to more than $1 billion in direct investments and consumer benefits.

Additionally, the state issued a $500 million solicitation for private sector partners to join the New NY Broadband Program, which will greatly expand Internet access in all regions of the state, with a focus on unserved and underserved areas.

In order to begin shedding humans in the education system and switching to "personalized" computer learning, they need to ensure "unserved" and "underserved" areas have widespread broadband Internet access.

So the "dramatically expanding and improving access to high-speed Internet" proposal is not specifically about education but it is education-related.

The future is not only online education and testing in schools, it will be online schooling at home.

This will be a disaster for society in the long run of course, but in the short term it will be a boon to the state and municipality coffers when they shed payroll, building costs, et al.

With public sector unions expected to lose large swaths of their membership after the Supreme Court rules on the Friedrichs case, who will be around to stop them when they decide urban and rural areas are going to have "personalized" learning at home?

Sure the suburban parents will make sure this doesn't happen in their communities, but you can bet they're aiming to make it happen elsewhere where the pushback will be minimal.

Just add "dramatically expanded and improved high-speed Internet access" and you're ready to go.

Online Pre-K - The Next Frontier In Education Reform

Given the excitement by the investor class over online, for-profit education, you knew this was inevitable:

WASHINGTON—Saying the option is revolutionizing the way the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds prepare for the grade school years ahead, a Department of Education report released Thursday confirmed that an increasing number of U.S. toddlers are now attending online preschool.

“We found that a growing number of American toddlers are eschewing the traditional brick-and-mortar preschools in favor of sitting down in front of a computer screen for four hours a day and furthering their early psychosocial development in a virtual environment,” said the report’s author, Dr. Stephen Forrest, who said that the affordability and flexibility characteristic of online pre-primary education are what make the option most appealing, allowing young children to learn their shapes and colors on a schedule that works best for them.

“With access to their Show-And-Tell message boards, recess timers, and live webcams of class turtle tanks, most toddlers are finding that they can receive the same experience of traditional preschooling from the comfort of their parents’ living room or home office. In addition, most cited the ability to listen to their teacher’s recordings of story time at their own pace as a significant benefit of choosing an online nursery school.”

Forrest added that, despite their increasing popularity, many parents remain unconvinced that online preschools provide the same academic benefits as actually hearing an instructor name farm animals and imitate their noises in person.

Okay, the story is from The Onion and it's a parody.

But given the push for online schooling from the reform movement and Wall Street, it may not be parody for long.

MOOC Study Shows Having A Real-Life Teacher Available Offline Is Important

Forget the hype over online courses - the so-called MOOC's - and how they're going to remake education.

The online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on a study of student performance in a MOOC course offered at M.I.T. The major finding was that online learners who took the first session of “Circuits & Electronics,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or “someone who teaches or has expertise” in the subject did better than those who did not.

The research team, led by Lori Breslow, director of MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, tried to drill down to what types of demographic and behavioral factors contribute to student success in a massive online environment.

“On average, with all other predictors being equal, a student who worked offline with someone else in the class or someone who had expertise in the subject would have a predicted score almost three points higher than someone working by him or herself,” write the authors.

 The correlation, described by the authors as the “strongest” in the data set, was limited to a single instance of a particular MOOC, and is not exactly damning to the format. But it nonetheless may give ammunition to critics who say human tutelage remains essential to a good education. 

I am just shocked that students with access to an offline teacher or someone with expertise in the subject did better than students who just worked by himself/herself online.

Online Education Insanity

Wow - this is taking the "online education revolution" to it's logical and absurd conclusion:

Triumph Higher Education, which licenses the school’s name from the Escoffier Foundation, already has two brick-and-mortar professional cooking schools in Austin, Tex., and Boulder, Colo. It just launched its online curriculum, modeling it after the online degree programs such as those offered by the University of Phoenix. The course costs $5,000. While half its new enrollment comprises enthusiasts looking to learn the basics of cooking, the school’s core objective is to train the professional cooks that make up the rank and file of every restaurant kitchen.

At this point I should mention that I worked as a prep and line cook for several years in college. I had no formal training and I’m certainly no chef, but I make a decent vinaigrette, can debone a chicken, and have developed an unhealthy indifference toward open flame. I also carry the baggage accrued by anyone who has learned to cook in a restaurant.

Sure, your grandma can teach you to cook, but to learn how to cook professionally, there is no substitute for a hairy man in sweat-drenched chef whites bellowing in your ear, demanding to know how you could foul up a carrot brunoise.

I expressed my skepticism to Jeffrey Larson, Triumph’s director of admissions marketing, and Brian Sherrill, its vice president of technology, and they say they get that response a lot. Sherrill says cooking is such a hands-on profession that an entirely online curriculum seems counterintuitive.

Sherrill says no one is going to graduate from the school’s two-to-four-month program and open a restaurant. The idea is to teach the rudiments of cooking, along with a healthy dose of French culinary theory and kitchen science to students who want to embark on a restaurant career, he says.

Triumph expects its Escoffier graduates to develop the basic knowledge needed to land an entry-level position in a restaurant or caterer’s kitchen and go on to continue their education on the job.

“You’re not going to complete the class and become a sous-chef,” Sherrill says. “You’re going to learn knife skills, to learn your mother sauces, to learn the fundamentals.”

Okay, so graduating from this $5000 dollar program will teach you enough of the basics to get an entry level $7.50 an hour job at Applebee's.

And how will students be assessed and graded by the instructors so that Applebee's knows graduates from the Triumph Online Culinary School really know knife skills, how to make mother's sauces, etc.?

Why, by taking pictures and sending them in to the Triumph's teachers, of course!

The most obvious flaw in the school’s online system is that no instructor is eating the dishes these students create. No matter how good a meal looks, you’ve made an unacceptable dish if it tastes poorly. I share this criticism with Sherrill and Larson, expecting them to cringe in fear at my astute observations. I get the impression I’m not the first person to have raised this point.

You can divine a lot about how a dish will taste just by looking at it, Sherrill says. You can tell if a scallop has been seared properly by noting the level of caramelization on its exterior. You can see if a steak has been cooked properly by cutting it up and observing the redness of juices. You can tell if eggs have been scrambled properly by the size of their curds and the sheen of moisture on their surface.

This program so smacks of "How Do We Make Some More Money From An Online Component Because We Can't Raise Tuition At Our Brick And Mortar Schools Anymore."

I worked restaurants for a long, long time, albeit in the front of the house.

I am highly dubious that paying any culinary school $40,000 to get a degree that will eventually get you, at max, a $12 or $13 an hour job cooking in a restaurant makes any sense.

I am completely dubious that spending $5000 for an online culinary program makes any sense at all.

Unless you know, going in, that you're only doing it to learn the basics for yourself.

But if you think you're going to get a job out of this program, you should think again.

In my day, people started as dishwashers and moved onto the line where they learned the very same basics without paying any school $5000 for an online program.

I know times have changed and restaurants are looking more for trained chefs from programs rather than a newbie they're willing to train themselves.

But there are at least seven SUNY programs that you can attend to learn culinary skills that would serve you a lot better than this online program, and CUNY has at least two programs that will do the same.

Every school and every would-be edu entrepreneur thinks they can turn to the Internets and make a bundle with an online program.

I am skeptical of most of those, but I am really skeptical of this one.

Next week we'll take a look at the News Corporation''s online medical school program called "Operation!" and ask the question, "Would you go to a doctor trained online?"