Header image: KF in Midjourney
Watters, A. (2015, April 25). The invented history of ‘the factory model of education’. Hack Education. https://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model
Many education reformers today denounce the “factory model of education” with an appeal to new machinery and new practices that will supposedly modernize the system. That argument is now and has been for a century the rationale for education technology.
EG MOOCS: [Weller] “MOOCs were meant to democratize education by making courses free to all. But the lack of tutor support in a MOOC has meant that it is best suited to experienced, confident learners. This is indeed what a demographic analysis of MOOC learners has revealed (Christensen et al., 2013), with the result that, far from democratizing education, MOOCs might actually increase inequality.”
Christensen, G., Steinmetz, A., Alcorn, B., Bennett, A., Woods, D., & Emanuel, E. (2013, November 6). The MOOC phenomenon: Who takes massive open online courses and why? https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2350964
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Greene, P. (2019, July 15). What can we learn from an experimental high-tech wunderschool failure? Forbes. [https://archive.ph/a0Lsh]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/07/15/what-can-we-learn-from-an-experimental-high-tech-charter-wunderschool-failure
Re AltSchool
Ventilla came from Google, and had a Silicon Valley attitude about innovating other fields. In 2016, he told Adam Lashinsky of Fortune, “We’re kind of flying the plane while we’re building it.” Lashinsky saw the problem: The difference is that AltSchool is experimenting with the lives of children, not a better way of tagging beer-bust photos. The reason the plane-flying analogy amuses is that no one in their right mind would tinker with an airborne plane. Yet AltSchool asks parents to pay for the privilege of supplying their children as guinea pigs.”
- Modern education reform has been driven in large part by wealthy amateurs, convinced that their expertise in other areas can be translated into education reform, rebirth, and revival.
Personalized learning is one of the great new waves in education, promising that every student can have an individualized, customized education. Zuckerberg has been backing it, both with AltSchool and at Summit Learning. Charles Koch has a new initiative focused on it. What is offered is almost always a version that cuts some corners, because full scale personalized learning would require a huge bank of resources and a great deal of human-hours to do the personalized design for each student. AltSchool had the resources– human, technological, and financial– and still had trouble making it work.