I have read three articles in the last three days about alternatives to earning a college degree, primarily through certification of one kind or another.

The first article, from The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the concept of “badges” that are awarded by various websites, training companies, individuals, etc. The concept is that the badge is relatively easy to earn (to keep the learner motivated and engaged) and indicates that they have achieved a certain skill level or learning competency.  At the Khan Academy, students receive a “Great Listener” badge for sitting through 30 minutes of video lectures and can earn an “Awesome Listener” badge after completing a full hour of video lectures.  In addition, visitors and users of that site can earn badges indicating “Master of Algebra” or “Challenge Patches.”  Similarly, MITx is a newly announced venture by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), slotted to be released in an experimental prototype version in the spring of 2012 and designed to recognize people who complete MIT’s online courses and successfully pass the tests and quizzes.  MIT has an arrangement with OpenStudy to offer badges to students who are helpful in course discussions.  The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has a $2 million grant to test the badge platform in education.  With the Foundation’s support, The Mozilla Foundation (best known for the Firefox browser) is “building an Open Badge Infrastructure to enable the interoperability and collection of badges” which will “support badges from any issuer across the Internet.” 

Both The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education wrote about the tenured Stanford professor who has left to form a startup, Know Labs.  Sebastian Thrun and a colleague taught an artificial intelligence MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) this summer to more than 160,000 students and he plans to commercialize that type of course through the Udacity portal owned by his startup, Know Labs. Thrun’s venture will not only offer courses developed and taught by him but also by others.  One of the first courses that Udacity will offer is “Building a Search Engine” which will be seven weeks in length and which will be taught by David Evans, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia.  Thrun is betting that the word (grades/recommendation) of a highly regarded professor will win over prospective employers or current employers of students taking courses.

Richard Vedder, an economist at Ohio University, wrote an article for the Chronicle’s Innovations blog entitled “Beware: Alternative Certification is Coming.”  Most of the article talks about Straighterline’s lower priced college course offerings and the announcement last week that Straighterline is offering students the opportunity to take the Educational Testing Service (ETS) iSkills test and the Council on Aid to Education’s (CAE) Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) test (the one made famous by New York University Professor of Sociology and Education, Richard Arum and University of Virginia Assistant Professor of Sociology, Josipa Roksa in their book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses).  Vedder also discusses the Khan Academy and MIT certification offerings.  My favorite paragraph from his article relates to his discussion of the first week of beginning economics courses when professors explain the point that:  “If the price of something rises a lot, people look for substitutes.  Resources are scarce and they [people] maximize their utility by shifting away from high priced goods or services to the lower priced good or service.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Approximately two years ago, I reviewed Nicholas Carr’s book, The Big Switch.  At the time, I applauded Carr’s creativity for examining the declining costs in computers, the increasing power of processing through “the cloud” and enormous server farms and his prediction that lower computing cost would enable and empower individuals, not large corporations, to create and control new businesses.  Carr wrote that the situation was not unlike the era when the cost of electricity decreased with the development of public utilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicholas Carr is known to many for his book,
Does IT Matter His new book, The Big Switch, is just as provocative and one that I recommend for stimulating your thinking about many of our businesses today.  Carr provides the reader with a background on the electric industry and its evolution from private company and municipality driven systems to standardized and large public utilities empowering the widespread usage of electrical appliances.  He envisions a similar transformation with computers and cites the widespread influence of “server farms” being established by Google, Microsoft, Dell, Yahoo!,
and IBM.  Carr predicts that computing power and consistency will be as standardized and as inexpensive as electricity at some point in the future.  The prohibitive costs of establishing a business utilizing computers will decline substantially, resulting in the empowerment of individuals to begin, manage, and grow large-scale businesses, capitalizing on their intellectual property.  Monetary capital won’t be the driver, intellectual capital will be.

Read the rest of this entry »