The competitions and the judging and the reviews later, and the keynotes and the panels and the hoopla, plus of course the obligatory dinners and cocktails and the drenching rain yesterday morning all added to the fun and the exhaustion. I hate to admit it, but I must be aging (slightly)....
So, postscripts -- look for a new company, AspirEdu -- which I sketched in the last post. They are building a great little app for helping For-Profit Schools predict and track "at-risk" students based on proprietary algorithms and a decade of work in the field by the founder, Kimberly Munzo. They have actual paying customers, and just today Canvas (one of the best LMS's in the crowded field) announced a "Certified Partnership" with AspirEdu. See http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases-test/aspiredu-attains-certified-partner-status-with-canvas-by-instructure-206764321.html
I'm not sure how many of you track the Education Software field, or the For-Profit higher-education field, or the OnLine Education field, but it is just in turmoil. I spent today at the SV Forum (that is a great group of about 2800 'members' who have weekly programs about Silicon Valley ventures). Our meeting today was titled "Game Changing Technology" and education figured prominently in the sidebar discussions. I'll report on it in the next post, but here all I want to say is that any one of these three arenas -- Ed Software, Ed For-Profits, and Ed OnLine -- is 'on fire' for somewhat related reasons.
A quick sketch of the issue re For-Profits (FPs). These are now 1,000 secondary For-Profit schools in America, most of them with OnLine programs. The basic issue is what kind of education is being delivered; the concern is that the FPs basically spend lots of money on recruiting (with inflated promises and payola for the recruiters) and exorbitant executive (admin) salaries, while cheating on faculty costs, and the student graduates are seldom skilled enough to land a decent job in their chosen field of study. The Harkin congressional report of last year was scathing, as are the repeated stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE).
Of thirty 'universities' studied by the Harkin team, on average the CEO's made $7M per year from salary, bonus and stock options, vs. one-tenth that for Ivy League and Big Ten presidents. CHE found that 27 of the top thirty paying jobs in Education in America, all over $1M per year, were at FPs, matched in #28 spot by Ohio State's football coach as I recall. Yet FPs only were 6% of America's secondary school students. Where does the money come from? From federal student aid, 41% of which went to FP students. Lessee now, the feds are financing the CEO salaries? Yup.
The Feds reacted to this by imposing 'new rules' about Mandatory Attendance (believing, more-or-less rightly, that there is correlation between class attendance and successful course completion), about student debt loads, and about student retention (must be 70% of the entering class graduates within 6 years) and even Gainful Employment, although the FP lobby in Washington DC was able to get this last order put on indefinite hold (the Feds shouldn't be making up 'states' rights issues, etc.).
This is an abbreviated assessment, but it is important to note that 'regular colleges' don't have to meet any of these rules even if they have federal loans to their students (and my undergraduate and graduate schools did NOT have a 70% retention policy in place; in fact, they took pride in noting that 'look to your left and to your right -- two of you won't graduate here'). It gets worse for OnLine -- the exciting new MOOCs (Massive Open OnLine Courses) that have made such news this past 18 months, typically have completion rates in the 5% to 15% range, not 70%. But since they're 'free', no Federal intervention.... even as it raises big questions.
OnLine courses are harder to generate and maintain interest -- buddy systems are harder, the professor's charisma is harder to transmit, the help when you're stuck is scarce, motivation gets robbed by daily routines and crises, etc.
It is against this backdrop that AspirEdu plays. And they have impressed the Canvas folk, who for my taste are easily the best of the current LMS crop (users seem to agree -- a relatively impartial set of evaluations I've seen by a sample set of 200 schools using the 'top five' LMSs gave them far and away the highest marks). So, you read it here first about AspirEdu -- check 'em out!
No, I'm not on their board, nor an investor. Just an interested and intrigued observer, seeing a product that my last gig, as Chancellor of Cogswell College, would find indispensable.
I'm not sure how many of you track the Education Software field, or the For-Profit higher-education field, or the OnLine Education field, but it is just in turmoil. I spent today at the SV Forum (that is a great group of about 2800 'members' who have weekly programs about Silicon Valley ventures). Our meeting today was titled "Game Changing Technology" and education figured prominently in the sidebar discussions. I'll report on it in the next post, but here all I want to say is that any one of these three arenas -- Ed Software, Ed For-Profits, and Ed OnLine -- is 'on fire' for somewhat related reasons.
A quick sketch of the issue re For-Profits (FPs). These are now 1,000 secondary For-Profit schools in America, most of them with OnLine programs. The basic issue is what kind of education is being delivered; the concern is that the FPs basically spend lots of money on recruiting (with inflated promises and payola for the recruiters) and exorbitant executive (admin) salaries, while cheating on faculty costs, and the student graduates are seldom skilled enough to land a decent job in their chosen field of study. The Harkin congressional report of last year was scathing, as are the repeated stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE).
Of thirty 'universities' studied by the Harkin team, on average the CEO's made $7M per year from salary, bonus and stock options, vs. one-tenth that for Ivy League and Big Ten presidents. CHE found that 27 of the top thirty paying jobs in Education in America, all over $1M per year, were at FPs, matched in #28 spot by Ohio State's football coach as I recall. Yet FPs only were 6% of America's secondary school students. Where does the money come from? From federal student aid, 41% of which went to FP students. Lessee now, the feds are financing the CEO salaries? Yup.
The Feds reacted to this by imposing 'new rules' about Mandatory Attendance (believing, more-or-less rightly, that there is correlation between class attendance and successful course completion), about student debt loads, and about student retention (must be 70% of the entering class graduates within 6 years) and even Gainful Employment, although the FP lobby in Washington DC was able to get this last order put on indefinite hold (the Feds shouldn't be making up 'states' rights issues, etc.).
This is an abbreviated assessment, but it is important to note that 'regular colleges' don't have to meet any of these rules even if they have federal loans to their students (and my undergraduate and graduate schools did NOT have a 70% retention policy in place; in fact, they took pride in noting that 'look to your left and to your right -- two of you won't graduate here'). It gets worse for OnLine -- the exciting new MOOCs (Massive Open OnLine Courses) that have made such news this past 18 months, typically have completion rates in the 5% to 15% range, not 70%. But since they're 'free', no Federal intervention.... even as it raises big questions.
OnLine courses are harder to generate and maintain interest -- buddy systems are harder, the professor's charisma is harder to transmit, the help when you're stuck is scarce, motivation gets robbed by daily routines and crises, etc.
It is against this backdrop that AspirEdu plays. And they have impressed the Canvas folk, who for my taste are easily the best of the current LMS crop (users seem to agree -- a relatively impartial set of evaluations I've seen by a sample set of 200 schools using the 'top five' LMSs gave them far and away the highest marks). So, you read it here first about AspirEdu -- check 'em out!
No, I'm not on their board, nor an investor. Just an interested and intrigued observer, seeing a product that my last gig, as Chancellor of Cogswell College, would find indispensable.
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