Classroom-less World: The World is your Classroom

The information age will be more about disruptive innovations or reconfiguring specific social activities via decentralized platforms. 

This should apply to education where online classes may be a transition towards a more decentralized paradigm: ‘Socialstructed learning’ or the world as your classroom.

Socialstructed learning as defined by Ms. Marina Gorbis writing at fastcoexist.com “is an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards. The microlearning moment may last a few minutes, hours, or days (if you are absorbed in reading something, tinkering with something, or listening to something from which you just can’t walk away). Socialstructed learning may be the future, but the foundations of this kind of education lie far in the past.”

How the possible transition will go about, again Ms. Gorbis

Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology introduction we try to fit new technologies into existing social structures in ways that have become familiar to us.

MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).

We are moving away from the model in which learning is organized around stable, usually hierarchical institutions (schools, colleges, universities) that, for better and worse, have served as the main gateways to education and social mobility. Replacing that model is a new system in which learning is best conceived of as a flow, where learning resources are not scarce but widely available, opportunities for learning are abundant, and learners increasingly have the ability to autonomously dip into and out of continuous learning flows.

The good news is that the radical decentralization of the educational process will translate to its democraticization. With learning resources becoming more “abundant”, this means prices will fall towards zero bound— yes free education. And this means that education will span to cover greater number of people who will have access to specialized learning. This will also mean lesser politicization of the industry.

On the other hand, education service providers will have to discover other sources of revenues.

Also traditional education institutions will need to redraw their business models in order to adapt with the current changes otherwise face extinction.

Online Education: Movement for College Credits Gain Momentum

One of the main objections to online education has been in the aspect of credentials, i.e. it is not recognized by traditional universities and or colleges which makes them less appealing to prospective employers.

I’ve been saying that the deepening of information age will radically transform people’s lifestyle which should include education.

This will happen for many reasons; such as cost efficiency (more profitable), increasing network (more online graduates percolating the job markets will become future bosses, thus will likely decrease resistance; an estimated 4 million students are enrolled online in the US), better performance, greater specialization and or simply more tolerance for online graduates or a combination of all these and perhaps more unidentified factors.

In his defense essay at Cato Unbound on the online education debate, George Mason University Professor and Marginal Revolution blogger Alex Tabarrok (who along with colleague Professor Tyler Cowen has their own free online learning platform university called MR University)  notes of the other advantages:

1. Leverage of the best professors teaching more students.

2. Large time savings from less repetition in lectures (students in control of what to repeat) and from lower fixed costs (no need to drive to university). 

3. Greater flexibility in when lectures are consumed (universities open 24 hours a day) and in the lecture format (no need to limit to 50 minutes).

4. Greater scope for productivity improvements as capital substitutes for labor and greater incentive to invest in productivity when the size of the market increases.

5. Greater scope for randomized controlled trials of educational strategies thus more learning about what works in education.

Read the insightful arguments on the online education here.

Academicians can debate the merits or demerits of online education but the world has been moving forward: traditional colleges are now considering to give credit to online courses.

Notes the USA Today:

The American Council on Education, a non-profit organization that represents most of the nation's college and university presidents, is preparing to weigh in on massive open online courses — MOOCs, for short — a new way of teaching and learning that has taken higher education by storm in recent months.

A stamp of approval from the organization could enhance the value of MOOCs to universities and lead to lower tuition costs for students, who could earn credit toward a college degree for passing a particular course. At issue is whether the quality of the courses offered through MOOCs are equivalent to similar courses offered in traditional classrooms.

The popularity of MOOCs, which have been around for barely a year, has intensified quickly. Top faculty at dozens of the world's most elite colleges and universities are teaching hundreds of online courses in a variety of disciplines to millions of students around the world. The courses are free, but they don't count toward traditional degree programs

Online education will pop the government inflated education bubble and democratize ‘education’ via the competitive free markets. 

In the future I envision the proliferation of domestic graduates of Mises Academy, Coursera, Khan Academy, Academic Earth, MIT-Harvard, MR University, Stanford, University of People and more.

Traditional universities will either have to adapt or perish.

War on Education: ADB Disdains Tutoring, Seeks Regulation

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) detests private tutoring which they pejoratively calls the “shadow education”

From Yahoo,

Asian parents are spending billions of dollars on private tutors for their children, and the practice is growing despite doubts over its effectiveness, according to a study published Wednesday.

"Shadow education" is an expanding business not only in wealthy countries but also in some of the region's poorer nations as parents try to give their children the best start in life, the Asian Development Bank said.

Nearly nine out of 10 South Korean elementary pupils have private tutoring, while the figure for primary school children in India's West Bengal state is six out of 10.

"Proportions are lower in other countries, but throughout the region the shadow is spreading and intensifying," the study said, calling for a review of education systems to make such extra teaching less attractive.

Extra academic work is aimed at helping slow learners and supporting high achievers, and is seen by many Asian parents as a constructive way for adolescents to spend their spare time.

However, it can also reduce time for sports and other activities important for well-rounded development, as well as cause social tensions since richer families are able to pay for better-quality tutoring, the study said.

Funny, but are we not suppose to know more of our own interests or what is best for us and our family? Yet these haughty ADB people are saying otherwise...they know more about our children's welfare than us, the parents.

If a family finds that the “one-size-fits-all” educational standards implemented by incumbent institutions has not been sufficient in providing learning services for their children, would it be morally deviant to procure educational services outside of these institutions?

To consider, in the Philippines, nearly 4 out of 10 college graduates are unemployed and one in 10 of graduates go abroad. So how effective has traditional education been? Yet these are the standards which the ADB desires that our children be confined with.

I have to admit I have been a product of tutoring too, as my parents felt the need for me to learn more, when I was in grade school.

Education comes best from the self, as educator John Holt once said,

I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning

This has been true for me, where everyday is a learning day.

I would extend this idea to say that most of my learning came from self education or “deciding what to learn” and from indirect mentorship (Dr. Faber and the Austrian school for instance).

And I think that most of what I learned from contemporary education has been useless and merely went down the drain.

Yet here is what ADB wants to do…

The study called for state supervision and regulation of the industry, as well as a review of Asia's educational systems.

So the ADB wants to control and regulate the education of your children.

The truth of the matter is that they want our children to become worshipers of state.

Again John Holt,

Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves

It may NOT just be the state, which the ADB promotes.

They may have secondary objectives. They may serve as mouthpieces or shills for established educational (politically connected) institutions whom have feeling the heat from online competition and from homeschooling.

The following video are the kind of stuffs which statists (like the ADB) hates:


Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra, in a TED talk, tackles one of the greatest problems of education—the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most.

Some great quotes from Sugata Mitra:

1:41 children will learn to do what they want to learn to do

16:33 Education is a self organising system where learning is an emergent phenomenon

Like John Holt, the message from Mr. Mitra is simple: education is self determined.

Online Interactive Learning: Flipped Classrooms

I have been predicting that the information age or digital economy will be driving radical changes in many aspects of social life especially in education.

Peer based instruction seems as another frontier for innovation in education.

From Harvard (bold emphasis mine)

Researchers at Harvard University have launched the Peer Instruction (PI) Network (www.peerinstruction.net), a new global social network for users of interactive teaching methods.

PI, developed by Eric Mazur, Area Dean for Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is an innovative evidence-based pedagogy designed to improve student engagement and success.

Mazur, famous for his talk titled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer," developed the method after realizing in the 1990s that his physics lectures at Harvard, while popular, were not helping students to master the basic concepts.

The PI technique relies on the power of the "flipped classroom." Information transfer (i.e., a teacher transferring knowledge to students) takes place in advance, typically through online lectures. In short, students study before rather than after class.

As a result, the classroom becomes a place for active learning, questions, and discussion. Instructors spend their time addressing students' difficulties rather than lecturing.

While originally developed for Mazur's introductory physics courses, PI is now used across multiple disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities.

The Peer Instruction Network will serve as a hub for educators around the world to connect and share their PI experiences, submit questions, and engage with other PI users.

Most of the changes will gravitate towards personalized or individual based learning rather than from the current mass based ‘classroom’ education. Online education will bridge the geographical distance and competition should drive down costs. Online learning will drive the knowledge revolution.

Is There A Brewing Bubble In The Philippine Education System?

The Philippine educational system seems to be in a bubble. By bubble, this means that the current setup is unsustainable. As famed economist Herb Stein once puts it, if something cannot go on forever it will stop.

The cost of private education has been exploding, as exemplified by the estimated 7 year annual fee increases by PIDS on architecture and engineering courses from 1994-2001 (left window). This has been way beyond the rate of inflation (tradingeconomics.com-right window).

Yet it would be misleading to claim that competition among private schools doesn’t exist.

Most school participants of the major sports tournaments as the UAAP and NCAA demonstrate not only competition for sports superiority, but likewise “competition” for privately funded education.

And competition ought to have brought down tuition fees to market (affordable) levels. But this hasn’t been happening. So what’s wrong? Is this a case of market failure?

Competition Is In The Real Resources

Table from the Department of Education

Even as public schools dominate the education market in the primary/elementary (37,607 for school years 2008-2009) and secondary/high school (5,359) relative to the private sector (primary/elementary 7,084 and secondary/high school 4,707) based on the DepEd report, the relationship between the private sector and the public sector is incomparable or can’t be discerned as either “monopoly” or “market based competition” in the traditional sense, because both cater to distinct constituents, particularly to the underprivileged for public schools and to privately funded education.

However, where factual competition is going on is in the real resources department. Both the private sector and the public sector basically compete to consume the same materials, such as pencils, papers, food and etc... And this includes manpower (e.g. teachers).

Yet the fundamental difference will be on how the consumption patterns are being carried out, i.e. the private sector is sensitive to price mechanism via profit and loss discipline, whereas the public sector is politically determined.

A good example of how this competition for resources is being waged is in the subsidies provided by the Philippine government to private school students.

This from the Inquirer.net, (bold highlights mine)

Monsignor Gerardo Santos, national president of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), said private schools needed more subsidies from the government because their lowly-paid teachers were transferring to the public schools.

“That’s not just okay with us. We are advocating it [subsidies]. We are fighting for it,” Santos said in a recent media briefing.

“We want it increased. I hope the government hears us. We really need more,” he said.

The Department of Education estimated that almost half of the country’s 1.3-million private high school students are subsidized by public funds though the Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (GASTPE). The program provides a P10,000-subsidy to first- and second-year high school beneficiaries in Metro Manila.

Junior and senior high school beneficiaries in the metropolis get P5,000 while all the beneficiaries in the provinces also receive the same amount.

The government allotted P3.59 billion for the GASTPE program this year.

We learn of several things from the article;

1. There is a mandate for private schools to accept or accommodate welfare constituents via tax funded subsidies.

2. Since government subsidies are considered as deficient, then the private schools shoulders the additional load of expenses (resource consumption) incurred by the welfare students.

3. Operating similar to the mechanics of the senior citizen’s discount cards, the subsidy gap contracted will have to borne, not by the school owners (through profit or earnings), but by passing these costs to the paying consumers, in this case, the paying students.

The last thing that anyone would do is to apply the onus of the cost of government compliance to their own income or earnings. Instead, it would be intuitive for them to just pass it to consumers. This means that any subsidy that comes out of the pocket of the owners suggests that market pricing limits have been reached and that consumers can bear no more. Alternatively, this means lots of marginal providers will go kaput upon reaching this level.

Hence, the exploding costs of private education partly reflect on the subsidies covered by private students on welfare recipients.

And perchance, the high cost of education has significantly diminished the rate of college enrolment from 2001-2005 (tradingeconomics.com).

4. Since government has extensive controls over private schools at almost every aspects, from welfare accommodation to curriculum mandates, enough to designate private schools as extensions of the public school system, then the operating ‘competitive’ environment may not be seen as genuine market based competition but a semblance of cartel-like pseudo-competition.

Thus the first pin to the bubble is when these indirect costs of private sector subsidies become too onerous to bear.

Of course, this resource competition represents only a symptom to a much a larger disease-the education welfare state.

The Original Sin-Welfare Education

For the public ingrained with state paternalism, it would seem like blasphemy to talk about the ills of welfarist education. The deeply entrenched popular opinion is that the state is the only dutiful and rightful provider of education and thus must supply, and if not regulate, almost every activity associated educational development.

Hardly anyone ever realizes that throughout world history, schools or the educational system have been frequently used as the primary conduit by the state to inculcate or impress upon political or religious agendas to commandeer society’s acceptance or what is known as theory of passive obedience.

Murray N. Rothbard in Education: Free and Compulsory wrote,

``It is inevitable that the State would impose uniformity on the teaching of charges. Not only is uniformity more congenial to the bureaucratic temper and easier to enforce; this would be almost inevitable where collectivism has supplanted individualism. With collective State ownership of the children replacing individual ownership and rights, it is clear that the collective principle would be enforced in teaching as well. Above all, what would be taught is the doctrine of obedience to the State itself. For tyranny is not really congenial to the spirit of man, who requires freedom for his full development. Therefore, techniques of inculcating reverence for despotism and other types of "thought control" are bound to emerge. Instead of spontaneity, diversity, and independent men, there would emerge a race of passive, sheep-like followers of the State. Since they would be only incompletely developed, they would be only half-alive.” (emphasis added)

And all these ‘romance with the state’ through education has clearly been visible on budgetary allotment of Philippine government as shown from the above table from National Statistics Coordination Board.

Budgetary allocation for education has ballooned to Php 185.5 billion (Philstar) out of the Php 1.541 trillion or accounting for about 12% of the national budget for the year 2010 (Sunstar).

Yet for the many who embrace Sta. Claus economics, nothing is ever enough. There are many who still clamor for more spending as if government is a fountain of endless wealth.

Never has it occurred to them that government’s primary source of revenue is mainly through taxation which means government redistributes rather than creates wealth. And government can only redistribute what is available, or that there are effective limits to redistribution.

The worst part is that by depending on government, welfare recipients have been relieved of their major personal responsibilities such as family planning, by which the ensuing dependency mindset could have contributed to the above world average population growth for the Philippines (Google Public Data). “Why not have more children”, welfare beneficiaries might think, “since government pays for their education anyway”.

The dependency mindset via the welfare state is the most obvious way to manipulate society to create a political constituency that could ensure the preservation or the expansion of power by the political class.

Yet what we aren’t told about is that resources consumed by the public sector, in this case Php 185.5 billion worth from the education department, represents as lost productive opportunity or money that could have been used by the private sector to get invested into productive ventures that could have increased the per capita of the Filipinos, from which would allow them to finance out of their own pockets, a quality education of their choice for their own children.

Besides, private sector charity or philanthropic activities would surely get amplified once the burden of taxation will have been mitigated from the diminished pressures of government expenditures. But all these aren’t likely to happen until the unsustainability of the system will forced upon by economic laws.

The crux of the bubble in welfare state is that the bubble can only last for as long as the taxpaying population is willing to tolerate the costs or comply with government’s redistribution program or the market is open to funding fiscal spending requirements.

For now, this would seem to be the case, as per capita GDP of the Philippines appears to be picking up.

Three Pins To Pop The Bubble

Nevertheless, I see three possible proverbial pins that could implode the education welfare bubble.

One, An Overdose of Welfarism.

As mentioned above, disharmony in the economic system caused by too much subsidies and other interventions could drive up the cost of education to highly restrictive levels. And as consequence, there will be increases in the political demand for more free (lunch policies) education. And instituting more of these welfare policies will push the country’s fiscal conditions into a boiling point where funding from taxation or from market based debt financing won’t be sufficient.

Two, Contagion Effect From Boom Bust Cycles

Since the world operates on boom bust cycles, I don’t see it as a distant possibility for a crisis to happen in Asia or within the Southeast Asian region. And any crisis of this nature is likely to have a severe contagion effect on the Philippines, similar to the Asian crisis of 1997.

Like all cycles, during good times, social programs like education are alluringly on path for expansion. That’s because as the economy expands, political leaders are likely to exhibit more generosity—in order to buy votes or preserve or enhance their popularity ratings—in the expectations that the growth in tax revenue collections will be sustained.

However, once a financial or economic bust should emerge, all these programs will suddenly suffer from a withdrawal or a dearth of funding. It’s not hard to picture a recent noteworthy example of government prodigiousness penalized—Greece.

Three, there is always the transition to the information age to consider.

Acceptability of “affordable” online education seems to be picking up momentum and may displace the overrated industrial age educational system in place.

This from SFGate.com

``Evidence nationwide suggests students could be warm to the idea of online learning.

``The number of college students taking online courses nearly tripled between 2002 and 2008, according to the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit that encourages online education. Nearly 5 million students took at least one online course in 2008, up from 1.6 million in 2002, Sloan found.

``UC wouldn't be the first university to offer undergraduate degrees online. Among the most successful is the University of Massachusetts' "UMassOnline," which includes graduate degrees. It reported revenue growth of 20 percent since last year, to $56 million, and 14 percent enrollment growth, to 45,815 students.”

And here is how Mises Academy fared with its introductory online course, according to Jeff Tucker at the Mises Blog,

``From our own experience, the success of the Mises Academy has far exceeded anything we imagined. It grows and grows. The venue is super compelling, highly effective, economically rational, and it connects students and professors together again as they were before the rise of the overfunded, unresponsive, heavily bureaucratized brick-and-mortar U. There is no doubt about the future; the only question is who will be making it happen vs. who will be left in the dust.

The major problem for online courses, for now, is that the current business environment has been oriented towards the recognition of credentials via government accreditation procedures or mechanisms. This is actually part of how the state controls our actions.

As Murray Rothbard once wrote,

By enforcing certification for minimum standards, the State effectively, though subtly, dominates the private schools and makes them, in effect, extensions of the public school system. Only removal of compulsory schooling and enforced standards will free the private schools and permit them to function in independence.

But the continued permeation of online education could reach a tipping point where the current credential-accreditation system risks being deconstructed.

And this obviously will pose as another threat to mainstream’s educational platforms, be it on the private sector or on the public schools.

As online education grows expect fireworks (resistance to change) from here.