With a collection of disruptive elements rocking big-box schooling, it’s time to revisit the rules of the game

It started simply enough. A young man in a modest Manhattan apartment started demystifying Algebra to his young cousin by uploading You Tube videos, and besides his cousin, 10 million other children logged on to them because they found the content so riveting. The experiment led to the birth of Khan Academy.

Today, the not-for-profit, KhanAcademy develops and distributes educational content to children around the world, aiming to refashion the K-12 model in a manner unimaginable before. One man, one computer, one simple idea and imagine the snowballing impact!

Best of all, children don’t have to pay for these highly engaging, interactive sessions. It’s available free-of-cost. Indeed, teachers in traditional schools have begun to re-build their curriculum around Khan’s lessons for higher impact.

Small wonder that KhanAcademy has received widespread financial support from a host of individuals and organizations – from from Bill Gates, who was one of its earliest champions, to the famous venture capitalist John Doerr, the Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt, and many others including the Skoll Foundation and the Carlos Slim Foundation.

KhanAcademy’s stated mission is “to change education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere”.

Disrupting the learning curve

KhanAcademy’s success has unleashed a tsunami of innovation across the education sector – from K-12 through University to the non-formal education sector.

Alternative K-12 Offerings:

In the K-12 sector, two other players to watch, both non-profits, are CK12.org and Gooru Learning. CK12, run by Neeru Khosla, is funded by the Vinod Khosla Family Foundation, Gooru founded by former Google Executive, Prasad Ram, is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Ram Shriram Family Foundation, and Google.org among others.

While Khan Academy’s focus has been on creating and offering high quality video content on a host of subjects, primarily Math & Science, both CK12 & Gooru seek to offer a multimedia platform of online educational tools and content – digital textbooks, videos, lesson plans, and interactive simulations – all for free. Gooru, for instance, says, “we’re building an open and collaborative online community that can transform the way K-12 teachers help students succeed. With Gooru, the best free learning materials can be found, rated, remixed, and shared.” It’s believed that over 500,000 teachers in 140 countries and all 50 United States are using Gooru material in their classrooms to help students reach their full potential.

Another notable venture in this field, a for-profit one, is AltSchool. A new startup aiming to transform K-8 education and schools, AltSchool, founded by longtime Google executive Max Ventilla, has raised $33 million in Series-A financing from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, John Doerr, and Omidyar Network. AltSchool is a network of schools that focuses on child-centered education supported by a technology platform. The school is founded on the belief that most students vary widely in their skill levels – in subjects like math, reading, science, art, and even PE, and that assigning them ‘grades’ can be confining. AltSchool instead offers highly customized “playlists” that a student can use as a personalized curriculum.

Shifting paradigms at the University/College level

In today’s knowledge economy, University level education is widely perceived and accepted to be one of the key requirements to effectively participate in this new marketplace. And the demand for higher education is global, and at an all-time high. At the same time, however, the costs of college education has become so high, that it is now beyond the reach of most aspiring students; there is the danger that this is going to significantly widen the already yawning gap between the haves & have-nots in this world.

This is where MOOCs – “Massively Online Open Courses”- come in. To quote Wikipedia, ‘MOOC is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web’.

In a sense, it was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that got the MOOC ball rolling in 2001, when it moved a big chunk of its curriculum online, and for free. Dubbed ‘MIT Open Courseware (OCW)’ the bold experiment started with 50 courses and today offers over 2100 courses that anyone, anywhere in the world can access.

Stanford refined this approach with the launch of Introduction Into AI, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Structured differently from OCW, Stanford offered a complete Course online, where everything was set up so you can easily move through, the course; they included notes, videos, interactive sessions, and automated assignments that you have to turn in. At the end of the course, students were issued a certificate of completion from StanfordUniversity. Enrollment reached 160,000 students for this single course!

Stanford’s early success with MOOC encouraged other Universities to consider offering similar programs. But the real fillip for the MOOC model, however, came when Sebastian Thrum decided to launch Udacity as an online education company, followed by Andrew Ng & Daphne Koller’s roll out of Coursera. Several leading Universities, including UPenn, Princeton, Stanford and UMichigan, soon announced a partnership with Coursera to offer a variety of online courses in the MOOC format. Concerned about the commercialization of online education, MIT created the not-for-profit MITx in 2012, which has then evolved into edX, in partnership with HarvardUniversity; subsequently, UC Berkeley, UT Austin and a few others have joined this edX initiative.

It is estimated that over 10 million students have since enrolled in 1200 MOOC courses from more than 200 of the world’s best universities! The big attraction for them is that most MOOC sessions come free-of-cost. While a college degree may cost $50,000 from a publicly funded University or $140,000 from a private college, inclusive of four years of tuition, room and board, MOOC’s offering is virtually free. However the learner has to be sufficiently driven and self-motivated to not drop out of the program. This remains one of the biggest challenges to date that are gradually being plugged with the use of more interactive tools.

A challenge to the traditional fee-based model

From the user perspective, MOOC is not just about fee; it’s also about access. It’s about making a decided shift towards self-study with the use of out of the box tools. It’s about giving learners unlimited choices about how they want to approach their learning material. Alexander Halavais, an associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University sees MOOCs as “a collection of disruptive elements,” “a shorthand for experimenting with online education at scale.” It’s still evolving, so the beast that may finally emerge from this churn might be of a different species altogether.

While MOOCs hold a lot of promise to disrupt higher education, as we know it, it has more than its share of critics & detractors. It is not at all clear that MOOCs can ever hope to replace conventional classroom education. Even Sebastian Thrun believes the original MOOC model is flawed and is attempting several changes to this now at Udacity.

Online Vocational Education

The online model is now starting to be applied in Vocational and non-formal continuing education too. There are a variety of companies & initiatives now offering very focused vocational programs in specific skill areas. Check out Codecademy.com (for computer programming); Udemy offers over 16000 courses, in 10 languages, in subjects as diverse as Programming, Yoga, Design, Photography, Spanish, Marketing, Guitar, Finance, Cake Decorating. And that’s just the beginning!

The old school model ain’t working

World over, the conventional education systems are undergoing a great deal of churn. Notwithstanding the rising cost of education, inner city schools in the US are not producing great results. In India, China, Indonesia, 5th grade children can’t read or write. Worse, there aren’t enough trained teachers in these places to make smart adults out of today’s precocious children. But with the new online models where teachers can be present more as facilitators, the same system can hopefully be nursed to health again.

It is estimated that for every child in Africa to receive quality education by 2015, the region will require to hire at least 350,000 new teachers, every year. Since that is unlikely to happen, the solutions being attempted use smart phones in traditional classrooms. Yoza Cellphone Stories and MXit are worthy experiments in this direction.

Whatever its future, the fact that technology is changing the way education is delivered, and received, cannot be disputed. Nor can the fact that these approaches are democratizing education in a way the world has not seen for a long time. For the millions, if not billions, of aspiring students across the world, who just have no means or hope of attending school/college today, this is a truly a god-sent opportunity. And I, for one, believe that as these students grab this opportunity with both hands, they are going to change the whole education marketplace in the world, forever.