Rock Star Professors
A ton of people sent me this link last week so I had to blog about it!
At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star
There are a lot of Professor Lewins out there. Some teach at places like MIT. Other toil in even greater (relative) obscurity.
Had an interesting conversation with my girlfriend on the subject of the direction of media. There’s definitely a lot of trash out there these days and it seems that society is increasingly drawn to fluff, pettiness and shocking vulgarity. Not all of us of course but the whole the picture ain’t pretty…
I’m a big fan of the notion that instead of kicking at the darkness you make the light brighter. That’s what’s happening here. 99% of the planet learned physics from someone a lot duller and less passionate than Mr. Lewin. And that’s a shame because many of us don’t have the same fire for these ideas that he’s instilling in students. Which is also exactly why this is so cool…millions of people learning from Lewin? In the future that’ll happen. Kids from China will access his lectures…oh wait, they already are.
What we’re attempting at eduFire is exactly the same thing. We’re trying to make the light brighter by elevating the best teachers on the planet.
Is it possible that one day they’ll be blogs and magazine following hot teachers and detailing their techniques?
Is it possible for an eBay-esque ecosystem to rise up around education?
Is it possible for a teacher to make a million dollars a year?
Yup.
It is.
Not easy. But possible.
Which is why it’s 2:15 AM on a Saturday night…er, Sunday morning and I’m so fired up about the opportunity to help make all that happen that I can’t sleep.
eduFire has a new spokesperson
We gotta hire this kid!
BTW, if you haven’t signed up for the beta yet head on over to eduFire and put in your deets. Invites start going out soon!
More Mankiw-related ranting…
More interesting stuff from Mankiw’s blog (this time in the form of a response written by Bob Frank):
My point is not that people don’t care about money. On the contrary, when the pay in one occupation goes down relative to others, fewer people enter that occupation. Public school teachers, whose starting salaries were more than 20 percent higher than those of the average college graduate in the 1960s, now earn below-average starting salaries. So we are not surprised that fewer qualified people now enter teaching.
This really is just common sense isn’t it? When salaries for teachers are stagnant or declining and salaries for hedge fund managers go ballistic doesn’t it make sense that relatively fewer people will aspire to be teachers and more will aspire to be hedge fund managers? I went to business school @ UCLA and it’s pretty funny to watch the parade of people into what the hot industry is…late 90s = tech startups, early 00s = real estate, recently = private equity and hedge funds…
But what’s sad is not just that less people are aspiring to become teachers but that when you look at the smartest and most ambitious people the proportion who want to become teachers is even smaller (this is a bit anecdotal on my part but my guess is that it would hold true empirically as well). So what you end up with is a general shortage of teachers and a severe shortage of highly motivated, hyper-intelligent teachers.
And it’s not just about the money. A lot of people I know wouldn’t teach not just because teaching here in a city like Los Angeles is one of the best ways to ensure you’ll almost never be able to afford to buy a house but rather because teachers are afforded such low status in our society (watch this awesome Sir Ken Robinson video for a humorous riff on this). We live in a society that, for better or for worse, puts private equity/hedge fund managers and real estate developers on a pedestal. Teachers fare far worse in the appreciation hierarchy.
So can this change? Absolutely, but only radically so. Incentives like merit pay for teachers won’t help much if at all. We need a rethinking of the system from the ground up. And if we don’t do that soon enough what we’re going to find is people dropping out of the traditional educational system in droves (some evidence is appearing that this is already happening. You have to think long and hard about who’s creating value in the system and who’s not (hint: it’s pretty easy to look at the value chain and see where value is being created and where’s it not). Then you do the darnedest to move money in the directions where value creation is occurring and yank it away from where it’s not.
Same thing is happening in the music industry right now. Next up…education.
The Superstar Theory of Increasing Inequality
Interesting post from my favorite econ blogger Greg Mankiw:
The basic idea, originally from labor economist Sherwin Rosen, is that technological change now allows the highest quality producers to service a larger share of the markets in which they operate. If Jon Stewart is the funniest guy around, television allows the entire world to enjoy his comedy. This gives Stewart a huge income but leaves little for second-tier comics.
This “superstar theory” of inequality has never applied to teaching because technology has never really been meaningfully applied to education. But that’s about to change.
For instance, look at South Korea as a harbinger of what’s to come (as Aydin Senkut is doing). In South Korea companies like Megastudy (fascinating article here) are starting to turn teachers into rock stars. These teachers are featured on billboards, have fan clubs and can (unbelievably it seems) make seven figures a year.
It’s quite simple. Technology = Scale. No technology (Ghost of Education Past) = No scale. Technology (Promise of Education Future) = Scale.
Another example can be seen in the movie The Inconvenient Truth. In that movie Al Gore is essentially teaching (Global warming being the subject, the accuracy of his teaching and viewpoint decidedly not the subject of this blog post). Prior to the making of the movie he was touring the country teaching a (relatively) small number of people and making a (relatively) small amount of money doing so. The movie (i.e. technology) allowed him scale and greater returns whether measured in impact or dollars.
Education of the future is going to look a lot more like Al Gore than what you might have remembered from high school. It’ll be moving in a direction where the top performers make significantly more than average performers (a stark contrast from today). The sea change may take decades. Or it might happen a lot faster. Regardless of how swift or gradual this change is it’ll be a lot of fun to watch.
Welcome to Online Learning circa 2002
A few people sent me this link from NPR:
Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges
It’s cool but at the same time there are at least 3 things about this story that make me feel like it was written in 2002. In other words, seismic shifts that are taking place elsewhere on the Web that aren’t touching the world of online education (at least as mentioned in the story).
Post what you think they are in the comments. Anyone who gets any of them will get a brand spanking new EduFire t-shirt when we get around to making them.
TeachStreet…I likes
My friend Dave Schappell is running a cool new start-up called TeachStreet. Their business has a lot of parallels to ours with one very significant difference. Rather than connecting people for the purposes of teaching and learning over the web they are connecting people to teach and learn face-to-face. I think it’s a great concept and can’t wait to see it take hold here in Los Angeles.
Here’s an embedded presentation that gives more info on what they’re up to. I wish them the best of luck!
Open-Sourcing the Start-up: Unaccredited Investors
One subject that often comes up in start-up financing is the issue of unaccredited investors. An unaccredited investor is someone who the government has deemed as possibly less sophisticated and therefore more in need of protection than a more sophisticated “accredited” investor. For a listing of the ways an investor qualifies as accredited you can check Rule 501 of Regulation D here. The two most likely qualifications are probably this one:
a natural person who has individual net worth, or joint net worth with the person’s spouse, that exceeds $1 million at the time of the purchase;
and this one:
# a natural person with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year; or
So what happens if you have someone who wants to invest who doesn’t fit any of the criteria for accreditation? Can they still invest? Some people have written that they can’t, or at least shouldn’t. For example, check out blog posts from Jeff Clavier and Brad Feld on the subject. Reading through these makes it seem pretty scary to take money from unaccredited investors. But it’s not necessarily always a terrible idea.
DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER. PLEASE USE THE FOLLOWING ONLY AS A LEAD-IN TO A CONVERSATION OVER COFFEE WITH YOUR ATTORNEY. THIS ISN’T LEGAL ADVICE.
OK, so what happens when your Uncle Bob wants to invest and you’d really like to have him invested in your company despite the fact he’s not a miliionaire? Well, first you have to be really, really careful. You definitely can’t exceed 35 Uncle Bob-type investors in your company. And if you want to be super-safe you really need to get a Private Placement Memo drafted and provide financial statements to these investors. However, the cost of that is often prohibitive which would again seem to exclude unaccredited investors from investing.
However, it’s not necessarily true that have a few unaccredited investors is an absolute no-no. Case law has generally held that so long as the number of unaccredited investors is kept reasonably low and there isn’t other general shadiness going on (e.g., fraudulent activity, etc.) then you probably aren’t in violation of securities laws. However, this is where it starts to get complex (and where you need to make that call to your lawyer). You see each state has its own laws on this so if you are receiving investment from multiple states then it’s possible that one of your unaccredited investments might be perfectly fine while another one might cause an issue (such as the investor having the right to ask for a refund of their investment). It also could be a problem to have a large number of unaccredited investors if you end up getting acquired.
At the end of the day, there are two things I’d emphasize. First, this is a complex topic that you definitely want to have good legal representation for. Second, while it is possible to take money from unaccredited investors you need to be careful when you do and should be well-aware of the risks involved.
EduFire + Our first “press”
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged as we’ve been heads down on getting a product to market but I wanted to offer a quick update.
First of all, we’ve got a brand new name. We’ll be launching next year as EduFire.com. This name was inspired by the Yeats quote “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” That quote does a great job of conveying our feeling about education. Education/learning isn’t about just memorizing facts and figures. Rather it’s about inspiring new ways of thinking and getting people to spread their wisdom with others and realize their genius. To the extent that we can help to enable that we’ve done our job.
As for an update, I was gonna write one but this interview we did recently with Brian Norgard (founder of Newroo which was acquired by Fox Interactive last year and eventually became MySpace News) sums it up pretty well. Check it out:
We’re launching privately to a select group of language tutors and students this month. If you’re interested in being a part of our beta drop me a line at jon @ edurev dot com.
One Laptop for You, One Laptop for a Child in the Third World
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has a special deal over the next two weeks. It’s simple:
Buy an OLPC laptop for a child in the developing world, and you get to buy one for yourself. It costs $400 total, but $200 of that is a charitable donation for the laptop you donate.
You can buy them at LaptopGiving.org, but only for the next 10 days. After that, no laptop for you!
Bill Clementson has a great description of the OLPC laptop. For me, I’m excited about it because it runs Linux, weighs less than four pounds, has a battery life greater than 10 hours, and I’m sure will be hackable to high heaven. I’m excited about the possibility of developing on such a portable, rugged machine.
So if you’re a geek, or want to buy a cheap laptop for your child while buying one for a kid in the third world, head on over to LaptopGiving.orgin the next 10 days and do some good.
10Things.tv - Micro-learning is here
A while back I blogged about micro-learning which I think is going to be an increasingly strong trend in the world of education. In short, micro-learning is breaking up learning modules into bite-sized chunks that can consumed in isolation or in series. It’s respecting the fact that people are busier than ever and that the population is becoming more ADD-ish in its media consumption habits.
To that extent, we’ve recently launched a side project called 10Things.tv. It’s a series of short instructional videos for learning languages. The initial videos teach Spanish but eventually we’ll be adding other languages. It’s a great way to pick up a bit of Spanish before you head off on a trip or to whet your appetite to learn more. Take a look at videos below and if you like them visit 10Things.tv for more.
