Author: David Wright

Great new article on the possible pending disruption of higher education. Here are some quotes.

First what some ideas are:

That preppy-looking guy near the barbecue? He’s launching a company called Degreed, which aims to upend the traditional monopoly that colleges and universities hold over the minting of professional credentials; he wants to use publicly available data like academic rank and grade inflation to standardize the comparative value of different college degrees, then allow people to add information about what they’ve learned outside of college to their baseline degree “score.” It’s the kind of idea that could end up fizzling out before anyone’s really heard of it, or could, just maybe, have huge consequences for the market in credentials. And that woman standing by the tree? She’s the recent graduate of Columbia University who works for a company called Kno, which is aiming to upset the $8 billion textbook industry with cheaper, better, electronic textbooks delivered through tablet computers. And then there’s the guy standing to her right wearing a black fleece zip-up jacket: five days ago, he announced the creation of the Minerva Project, the “first new elite American university in over a century.”

And on what scale is possible:

To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people? This is the way most of the people in the valley talk.

And finally:

I can go online right now and get everything I need to learn—courses, textbooks, videos, other students to study with—for free. And if I need to know what someone else has learned, I can look at their Linked-In profile or their blog to find out.

At a certain point, probably before this decade is out, that parallel universe will reach a point of sophistication and credibility where the degrees—or whatever new word is invented to mean “evidence of your skills and knowledge”—it grants are taken seriously by employers. The online learning environments will be good enough, and access to broadband Internet wide enough, that you won’t need to be a math prodigy like Eren Bali to learn, get a credential, and attract the attention of global employers.

Here’s Yglesias:

The way it works is that you charge the same price for all the courses. When I tookPatrice Higonnet‘s five-person seminar on Vichy France, I didn’t need to pay a premium tuition over what I paid to take his 150-person lecture survey course on the French Revolution. Part of the way the college works is that the large courses generate profits that subsidize other activities, including the small seminars. The seminars themselves happen in part because some of the faculty wants to do them, and in part as an investment in the value of the brand. But while it would be very difficult to replicate the value of the small Vichy seminar, it’s pretty easy to imagine a French Revolution MOOC that’s both higher quality than your average French Revolution lecture-format survey course and radically cheaper

One of these ideas that I like being hammered with over and over is that performance (skill) is about repetition. It’s about muscle memory for athletes and autopilot recall for exam-takers.

And this is what it’s about for Navy Seals:

The best preparation for any scenario is having done it before — or the closest thing to that.

Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills:

When U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 mounted its May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, it prepared by constructing full-scale replicas of the compound in North Carolina and Nevada, and rehearsing for three weeks. Dozens of times the SEALs simulated the operation. Dozens of times, they created various conditions they might encounter. They used the power of repetition to build the circuitry needed for the job.

This is one of the key principles of deliberate practice, the best system for building expertise.

Another way of putting this is that these SEALs have planned and practiced reactions to every conceivable scenario. That way they can maximize how many situations they react to with ‘instinct’, which is just a way of saying they’re on mental autopilot. When trained properly, autopilot is simply a faster and more reliable mode of human thought than focused attention.

The cornerstone of my exam strategy is mental autopilot. I maximize what I can achieve without really thinking, saving my mental resources for the very end. Here is the progression I go through at exam time:

1. Comb through the test and read every problem. If I know the answer INSTANTLY, I work the problem (category #1 problems). If I have any hesitation at all, I skip it. If I don’t complete more than half of the test on this pass, I am in big trouble. Time: 25-33% of total allotment (45 mins-1hr in a 3-hour test).
2. Go to the problems (category #2 problems) that I think I can figure out quickly and skip the ones that are really tough. Most of these problems are easy problems disguised as really hard problems. Once I crack it, I switch on autopilot again and blow through the sucker. This should get me to about 75% complete. This is probably about another 25% of the exam time.
3. Go back over every question and (re-)work them all. I’ve probably screwed up a few category #1 problems (which are actually category #2) and I correct these here. It takes discipline to keep skipping the really tough problems but I need to save those. Get the easy ones right!
4. The real toughies should be <10% of the total problem set. Now you tackle them.  You’ve probably got about 20-30 mins left on the exam and your brain is nearly fried. These last few minutes will take FOREVER because once you switch off autopilot the world slows down.

This is why return journeys feel quicker, why childhood feels like it takes FOREVER and why time flies when you’re having fun. Thinking is HARD. Thinking is PAINFUL. Your brain only has a finite amount of focus and attention and lighting up all those neurons is costly.

When you are studying, your goal is to have an autopilot that is as complete as possible. Understand that to sign up for an exam is to sign up for mental torture: you need to think a LOT to learn and, as I said, thinking is PAINFUL. That’s ok: no pain, no gain and you’re here to make something of yourself, dammit.

If you don’t train properly, you need to do more thinking on the test, which is costly. You need to work dozens/hundreds/thousands of problems to have well worn grooves in your mind for the problems you encounter.

Generally speaking, kids have no grooves. Older folks have nothing but grooves. Neither group likes putting down those grooves; kids just have no choice in the matter.