Scalable models for education

via my good friend Steve Stay:

The White House has a new initiative out: Winning the Education Future - The Role of ARPA-ED (16 pages)

To address the under-investment in learning technology R and D, the President’s FY2012 budget proposes to invest $90 million to create an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-ED). ARPA-ED will fund projects performed by industry, universities, or other innovative organizations, selected based on their potential to create a dramatic breakthrough in learning and teaching.

ARPA-ED is trying to catalyze development of:
* Digital tutors as effective as personal tutors.
* Courses that improve the more students use them.
* Educational software as compelling as the best videogame.

The intuition here is really interesting -- building technologies for education that scale. Our ed system is based on a 150-year-old chalk-and-talk delivery system. One teacher, ~20 students, one lecture at a time, interspersed with homework, projects, and some small group discussion. I'm stylizing here, but you know I'm not too far off.

The major bottleneck in this system is effective teachers. Roughly speaking, the number of students getting a good classroom education is equal to the number of good teachers times twenty. Given the tremendous difficulty of recruiting, training, and retaining teachers, this is a serious constraint.

Therefore, I am a huge fan of the idea of deploying better education via scalable technology. But I don't think we've seen this done right yet. Some also-rans:

• i-tunes U and similar platforms strike me as a partial first step -- maybe a good replacement for lectures. Suppose I'm a middling public speaker with reasonably good subject knowledge in an area. Why should I lecture when my students can hear from a top-of-the field virtuoso? But education is a lot more than content delivery. itunes can't give you feedback, answer questions, or hold office hours.


• In the long run, private online universities may be able step up to provide scalable education. But so far I've been pretty unimpressed. For instance, University of Phoenix seems to be running a pump-and-dump model based on government subsidies through student loans. (Maybe I'm out of line on this claim, but that's my impression.)

I think we're still waiting for the real thing in scalable education. What possibilities am I missing?