Why student success is such a radical idea
MIT recently announced its plans to offer its free online course materials with the opportunity to earn certificates of completion through its new MITx platform.
Sebastian Thrun recently announced he is leaving Stanford to offer free online courses through a platform called Udacity.com, which also will offer certificates of completion.
Both MITx and Udacity are experiments in offering online learning to large numbers of students for free, along with some kind of “official” recognition of achievement. One way they differ is in their orientation toward student success and completion.
MIT emphasized the rigor of its courses by pointing out that not all students will be successful:
“Reif emphasizes that the [MITx] courses will be built with MIT-grade difficulty. Not everyone will be able to pass them. But, he says, ‘we believe strongly that anyone in the world who can dedicate themselves and learn this material should be given a credential.’”
Chronicle: MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
Thrun reflected on his own realization that weeding out students does not promote learning:
“In all my life of teaching, my 20 years of teaching at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I had always been a tough teacher. I had always given students really hard questions, I had always let them fail, and would come to their rescue, making myself look really smart. Here was no purpose of ‘weeding.’ This was an open university. There was no reason to reduce class size. There was no certificate to be earned. And here I was teaching a ‘weeder’ class. Then I started to realize that we set up students not for success but for failure. We really empowered the professors by looking smart, and we don’t really help the students to become smart.”
MIT starts out with the traditional assumption that only a limited number of students should be successful. Thrun is instead starting out with the assumption that all students should be successful, provided enough support and opportunity to learn.
It’s no surprise that Thrun is leaving Stanford to pursue his vision on his own terms. Institutions and the academics within them are heavily invested in their own prestige and exclusivity. Even as they experiment with new learning formats, they measure the quality of their program by guaranteeing failure for some and success for others. Thrun takes the view that the success of his program is vested in the success of his students. This radical idea simply isn’t compatible with the mission of an institution like Stanford.
Of course it is the prestige of Thrun’s status as a now-former Stanford professor that enables him to be taken seriously, as is his role as a Google Fellow and the connections that brings (Google founder Sergey Brin is featured in a Udacity.com video). He’s not just some guy recording math lessons on YouTube, though Sal Khan and the Khan Academy have been part of his inspiration. The difference, though, is in how Thrun is using that prestige to create a platform that promotes successful learners.
The future will bring many more experiments and many more radical ideas designed to bring online learning and higher education to vast numbers of students. If you’re going to teach the world, maybe you should start out by expecting success. It will be quite a different world when education is no longer a zero-sum game.
