Breakout Search: Adjunct Professor

It seems Google has found another "breakout" search term, that is one with a suprisingly high inquiry level, Adjunct Professor and related searches. Check it out here...

What Happens When Out of Stock On Amazon

How flattering.  Used copies on offer at Amazon.com for up to $800 some odd dollars.  What happens is if you are out of stock, which happened recently for me while I was printing another run, those with used copies jack up their prices hoping to find someone desperate.    Now that I am back in stock, the prices will come a-tumbling down.

Ideogram Etymology

This fellow is teaching physics at Beijing Normal, but it is his passion that is getting him renown:

For 20 years Richard Sears has been devoted to making the etymological information of Chinese characters available online for people to trace them back to their original form, when they were first carved or written on bamboo slips or silk more than 2,000 years ago.
Although the 62-year-old launched his website in 2002, it elicited little response from Chinese netizens until last year, when two Chinese newspapers published his story.
That led to Chinese bloggers praising his work, as well as bemoaning the fact government-funded cultural promotion agencies had been unable to create such a good website for people fascinated by Chinese characters. Each character on his website comes with three former variations - the seal script, bronze inscriptional and oracle bone inscription - and an illustrated guide on its etymology.

And next he needs to extend his reach worldwide by teaching his methods and having his students help in in the task.

The University as Co-op

Comes a report on Mondragon University, in the Basque...

Nor is the cooperative university model a solution to all education’s ills. It’s private and charges tuition (a little more than $7,000 a year),

Hey, those are exactly the figures I show in the biz plan for Seattle Teacher's College!

What is being done now is to collapse education into vocational training, teaching into a fee-for-service form of employment, and research only as a profit generator. The faculty are being put on term contracts and administration is now a career with big salaries and great distance from the places where value is actually being produced. The overall result is the consolidation of a two class system: elite education for economic and political elites and vocational education for the masses.

So when will this take off?  Who knows....

MOOCs In Retreat

Comes an article in slate that covers what we covered a few months ago...

As of this month, that prediction is looking overblown. After a year in which almost every big-name university in the United States rushed to get in on massive open online courses, or MOOCs, the backlash is in full force. And no wonder: The idea of free online video lectures replacing traditional classrooms not only offends many educators’ core values, but it threatens their jobs. Worse, the early evidence suggests the model may not work very well: A partnership between San Jose State and Udacity this spring ended with more than half the students failing. In the same spaces where advocates not long ago trumpeted the MOOC revolution, critics now warn of the “MOOC delusion.”

The idea that MOOCs would replace anything was absurd,  the medieval model of sage on the stage will live on like the Pub and the Trade Show Booth.

The MOOC will never be anything more than a study group, and will not come into its own until is figures out how to take the top 5% (one in twenty) and let them lead the other 19 in studying the material.

People keep trying to ascribe to the web powers just not there.

Counterintuitive and Bifurcation

There is something counterintuitive about these articles...  one the one hand we have witness that traffic does not matter on websites.  I've been saying that for a while...

Capital New York is small in traffic. Is there a mandate to boost those numbers?High traffic is way overrated.  It works if you are truly a traffic hose, like BuzzFeed. But, for speciality sites, it is all about the right readers. The advertisers we want are the knowing ones seeking to influence a very attractive and hard-to-reach set of readers. If we deliver those readers, the traffic numbers will mean little.

And then comes this, in media it is the conference, not the magazine that matters.

“From my experience, I knew conferences and live events were a big revenue generator,” Waxler, who had previously co-founded the Glasshouse NY and Glasshouse SF events, said. “There’s something special about live events and the FABB conference immediately became the big, shiny, attractive thing to sell to advertisers. It pushed a lot of revenue to the magazine.”

 So we have these business realities based on human imperatives.  The web was supposed to be a mass communicator, when in fact it is a mass customizer.  The web was supposed to connect people, when in fact it isolates them.

When you market right and get an audience in the cold online world, you then invite them to meet-up at conferences.

People don't change.

Bernstein on Teaching

Leonard Bernstein considered teaching and working as integral, and upward spiral.  When you have a topic you love as much as Bernstein loved his, you love working and teaching as much as he loved his.

We may not be as great, or even as sensitive and intuitive in ours as he as in his, but we can certainly enjoy to our full capacity, as his does in his...

http://www.wiziq.com/ webex citrix Summary

Comes yet another enterprise promising the world... at no cost if you have a .edu email address.

Create, manage, & deliver courses online. Use the WizIQ Virtual Classroom to deliver live classes to any number of students, online.

My skepticism comes from more than 20 years of listening, testing, etc on promises.  The challenge is in no instance do the people who develop the offerings have any sense of what teachers want or need.  These platforms are what investors want, loaded up with junky, counterproductive patent-rich clunk-fests that make me sorry that yet again, I tried the offering out.

This one is sure to be a stinker since it has as partners (how come?) with blackboard and moodle, two systems that require massive tech support to operate marginally.

I do a bit of teaching online, so I keep up with the ever expanding universe of means to deliver content.   Two of the most admired online webinar systems, citrix and webex, I find abominable.  I still use the ancient IRC for the live sessions, since the most modern delivery methods, for some reason, are relentlessly unproductive

I mean relentlessly because every upgrade does not make it workable for a wider group, it makes it workable for a smaller group.

I have a 3 year old mac v 10.5.8 which cannot host those systems.  Both swear they have plug-ins, but not that I can get to work.  My year old 10.7.5 will host it, both, but why cut out 90% of the market?

I was in a Nuance voice recognition software online webinar, and the opening was a technical disaster and the presenter was under much stress from that opening.  Several times the webex system has gone down.  I wonder to myself how this can be tolerated?  50 minutes into the presentation they were still having technical difficulties.

Well, because their main users do not care.

1. Their #1 customers are govt and big biz.  (opening target makes that clear...) The content of the seminars is pointless, so it does not really matter if it gets delivered or not.

2. Big biz and big govt spend their "use it or lose it" budgets on brand new equipment, so these platforms compliment the people who waste money and time with features that workable only on the newest systems.

I have noticed a pattern, the more Indian engineers are involved, the more difficult the system, and the more subsidized the market is targeted.  They seem to subscribe to the Bill Gates school of thought, that one is guaranteed to become a billionaire if you write lousy code that forces users to be your development team, and captive "could care less" users.   I yearn for the day Indian coders reject this failed ethic, and get to writing clean, easy code.  This is not to pick on Indian engineers, for it was Gates who pioneered the failed technique.  It is only to recognize we are denied the good of Indian genius.

Also, giving away memberships to .edu people is a back door marketing technique.  Why not develop something that can be sold through the front door?

Real productive people cannot buy the brand new always, don't want to anyway, so we are not able to access the junky clunk-fest systems on offer.

Google hangout is difficult with no method for effective feedback and change.

I will try yet again, but not right away.  I am enjoying my summer, and don't want to wreck it by having another bad experience brought to education by angel investors.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

Udacity On Pause at San Jose State

Udacity.com came on with a rush with high profile plans to aid education.  But it seems San Jose plans to take a breather on its association:

After six months of high-profile experimentation, San Jose State University plans to “pause” its work with Udacity, a company that promises to deliver low-cost, high-quality online education to the masses.

It might be low cost, but online education and classroom education are not the same things.  With the classroom as the standard, online is more akin to time with a librarian.  A very good learning experience, if done right, but different.  I suspect most online education is not unlike being alone in a library.  In any event, education is the one area where there is almost no valid and reliable studies because the money flows most to scammers.  Education, like medicine, could be fixed, but with "social engineering" the goal, the means will remain hijacked by ideologues, and the easily scammed, like Bill Gates.

EdX and Udacity, along with Coursera, are part of a trio of closely watched MOOC start-ups. MOOCs are not-for-credit, free online courses. The three startups are also branching out into other teaching and business models.

I bet they are.  There is one that brought the West from the "dark ages" to the enlightenment.  It would do well now.  But it would take deregulation and de-subsidizing education to achieve.  Just have the students pay the instructors directly.

Feel free to forward to three friends.

Graduating into Unemployment

India has a million engineers looking for work.  It is unwise to have a few hundred people decide what a country needs in terms of education.

Somewhere between a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of India's engineering colleges run the risk of being unemployed. Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India's overflowing technical talent pool. Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India's engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.

The alternative is to introduce more freedom, so people might seek gainful self-employment.

Google Hangout

Google has what is called the Hangout, that looks promising...  Tried it a couple of months ago, and we could not get technical problems solved...

Maybe it has gotten better, and if so, I could see moving to it...

New Income Stream For Teachers

One reason I am so anti-"intellectual" "property" "rights" is it so constricts creativity and distribution.  As copyrights is dying out, artists are learning to market their work themselves.  The guitarist for Dire Straights has a tour coming up.  Now, of course you can buy tickets from his website, nothing new there.  But you can also pre-order a recording of the live concert from his website as well.  

Sadly his website seems not up to the task, as people are complaining an inability to make a purchase.  Sigh.  Yahoo offers bulletproof ecommerce solutions for $30 a month but people still spend megadollars reinventing the ecommerce site wheel.

Now, this marketing in some ways is nothing new, because the Grateful Dead used this method to promote their record sales, that is the bootleg tape.

My guess it is audio only since the media is a USB stick, but one in the shape of the fellows famous guitar.

So, if you are giving a live seminar somewhere, record it, and sell it on your website, or pre-sell it. Make it an event.

Why?

I've been listening to this for over 40 years.  And there is absolutely no improvement, or help from any quarter, or a single plan on offer to make a change.  I guess USA must end, then things might improve. In the meantime, everyone is on their own.

Catalogs Are King

I was on the U Washington campus the other day so I dropped in at the offices of the once glorious ASUW Experimental College.   I mentioned to the nice receptionist I had taught for 25 years with them, but had to decline once they cut catalog distribution.  I mentioned in the heyday they put out 140,000 catalogs and got 7,000 enrollments each quarter, a 5% response rate, which is fantastic.

I asked how they were doing now.  She looked it up.  20,000 catalogs and 1000 enrollments.

Hmmm...  so 20k is 1/7th of 140k, 1k is 1/7th 7k.  Exact!

Still 5% response rate.

The paper catalog is king in noncredit continuing education.

Studying the Classics Today

Ted Turner studied classics at Brown and this aggravated his father...

If you are going to stay on at Brown, and be a professor of Classics, the courses you have adopted will suit you for a lifetime association with Gale Noyes. Perhaps he will even teach you to make jelly. In my opinion, it won't do much to help you learn to get along with people in this world. I think you are rapidly becoming a jackass, and the sooner you get out of that filthy atmosphere, the better it will suit me.

What a strange view of education, to help you get along with people.  The word means "to lead out.." (presumably the darkness...) to enlighten.  You learn to get along with people, or not, by age 5 or 6.  The point of an education is to be able to have a wider reference to draw on when navigating these treacherous waters.

I am reading Plutarch right now, The Makers of Rome, and the parallels to events today are remarkable.    I am convinced one reason the classics are now denigrated is that it in fact tips people off as to various power-scams, and the results.  Ignorance is victory for the powers that be.

Another thing I note is how these people would kill themselves rather than suffer ignominy.   Christianity takes bad times as having meaning, and even the idea of "time in the desert" as a purifying thing, a stark contrast in those times.

Ted was going to need that perspective he got from the classics later, when his father shot himself to death.  His old man could have used a classical education.

Why You need to make Your Course Free on youtube

Here is a common enough email...

Dear John,

After watching all of your videos (Some of them many times) I realized I MUST take your course. Thank you so much for providing humanity with such immensely valuable content and at no cost. I find your insights into economy and your way of teaching absolutely genius.

Anyway, I currently live in Barcelona, Spain and am trying to get an import/export business going and I really really want to take your class, but it would be realistically impossible to attend live sessions at 7-9PM with a +8hr time difference. What do you advise? How much would I miss without the sessions? Or is there an alternative?

Thank you very much.

Sincerely yours,

--
A D

Your youtubes sell your class. Some 50% of google searches end up on youtube, and google put youtubes high on searches because the front run the videos with ads from which they make money.

I learned from Gary North.

The First Known MOOC: The Jews

I have many good and original ideas.  The original ones are not good, and the good ones are never original.  MOOC means massive open online course.  The problem is having 40,000 people taking an online poetry course, and having them all understand it.  So my great idea what to note there would be one in 20 who would be natural teachers who could form up small groups and get the sense of the content.  Brilliant!  Except, my great idea about having natural teachers emerge in MOOCs has been done.  Nehemiah chapter 8:

2 And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month.
3 And he read therein before the street that was before the water gate from the morning until midday, before the men and the women, and those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the law.
4 And Ezra the scribe stood upon a pulpit of wood, which they had made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, and Shema, and Anaiah, and Urijah, andHilkiah, and Maaseiah, on his right hand; and on his left hand, Pedaiah, and Mishael, and Malchiah, and Hashum, and Hashbadana, Zechariah, and Meshullam.
5 And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people; (for he was above all the people;) and when he opened it, all the people stood up:
6 And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God. And all the people answered, Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands: and they bowed their heads, and worshipped the LORD with their faces to the ground.
7 Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, caused the people to understand the law: and the people stood in their place.

OK, it is not online, but it was the closest thing at that time.  So with Ezra teaching everyone at once, Jeshua and so on worked the crowd to make sure everyone understood what Ezra was teaching, as the people stood in their place.

Good ideas are never new.  But we need to update it, and have a means of providing a platform for those natural teachers in the crowd in a MOOC, who can then begin teaching online in their own right.

Feel free to forward this to three of your friends.

MOOCs & Natural Teachers

No sooner than I mentioned the idea of natural teachers and MOOCs comes a reply forma  colleague at WAOE:

John -

We're on the cusp of giving the natural teachers a way to collaborate on leading others through material. 

Just as Wikipedia allowed crowd-sourcing of reference material, a tool like SlideSpeech will allow crowd-sourcing of learning material. 

Consider the Learning Creative Learning MOOC today:

10233 members organized in small groups by time zone/location

As you say, all they need is a platform.

SlideSpeech is a platform which uses text-to-speech for making interactive web/mobile presentations, so multiple authors can work together to create lessons which 

1) speak with one voice

2) are searchable (since the voice over is text and the text is searchable)

3) can be collaboratively developed and improved over time (check out a bit of this video which produced this presentation)

As noted in a post to the EdTech Google group:

"If you are not surprised by A. G. (the awesome kid who created this)  math skills, then let me tell another thing about him. A.G. is from Venezuela. English is his second language and he teaches math like Salman Khan from Khan Academy.  We arrived to a point where is possible to imagine that the next wikipedia of educational content for children may be made by kids."
http://bcontext.com/bfile/solo/fqydpr/?width=507&height=422

SlideSpeech homepage

SlideSpeech interactivity tutorial

SlideSpeech Google+ community (check out the presentation for the Fountainhead Schools in Gujarat, India)

Please contact me for more information.

Regards,

John Graves

john.graves@slidespeech.com

Natural Teachers and MOOCs

So five years in Thomas Friedman notices what is going on.

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.

I generally think Friedman is a dope but here he is right, if about 5 years behind.  I come from a family of academics, but I am a black sheep who went into business.  Yet by staying studiously outside the credit system I work when I want, for how much I want, and have absolute academic freedom, not in any way curtailed, which no University professor can claim.  (There are always things even a tenured professor cannot say, even though true.)  I have all of the teaching I can stand, plus a couple of books selling on amazon and a articles cited dozens of times daily.

Course flipping is Socratic dialogue on steroids: watch the lectures as homework, do the homework in class...  this is the future.

But I see something I don't think anyone else has noticed.  When there are 40,000 people taking the course, yes there is no access to the sage on the stage, but among the 40,000 there must be 4000 natural teachers.  What is missing is a way for those natural teachers to assume a means of leading a dozen or so others through the material.

Another WAOE gig?  Some means of identifying the natural teachers in a class and giving them a platform?  Pose this to the Panasonic group looking for something to fund?

John Spiers, MA

Black Sheep Enterprises

Student Loans Slow Moving Train Wreck

Here is a data round-up on student loan debt.    here is the summary:

Higher education is an important investment among young

workers for better jobs and higher income, but it is

accompanied with a growing student debt burden

OK.. we see the train wreck in progress, and what to do about it.  As far as I can see, the only entity that is addressing the problem in any meaningful way is SeattleTeachersCollege.net.  Wait, wait... that's me!

That may sound a little nutsy, but the fact is education is NOT a business, and it is NOT a state function.    Education is an economic event, but it is not a market event.  So it falls into that category best served by co-ops, with those who "fall through the cracks" being assisted by charity.  Neither the market nor the state should ever get involved with charity.

No putative "education leader" understands this, so there is no solution on the horizon, except SeattleTeachersCollege.NET.

At some time and place, the right group of people will gather, this will launch, and become the way education is delivered.  An education at least as good as anything Harvard or Stanford puts out, but one as student can pay for out of his own pocket, what we had only 40 years ago, but was inherently unstable since it was state-provisioned.

Analysis ofStudent Loan Debt by

Testng Google Hangout

Google Hangout

Last night as a part of a class on self-employed teaching, a trio of us tried out the new google hangout.  It is easy to sign on, and the sound quality is excellent.  The other two were in Chicago and Ontario, Canada, and I in Seattle.  They could see each other and me, but I could not see them, why, I'll have to investigate.

It has a chat function and claims to offer the ability to record and post to youtube the sessions.  That could be very useful.  It allows for desktop sharing and document collaboration, but although we could open each, we say no way to close them except to exit and re-enter.

Google hangout looks promising, and it is in beta, but for now the learning curve is too steep to employ as a classroom medium.

Private Libraries

When the state took over libraries they pretty much ruined them for all involved.  I talk about libraries and librarians in my book, and my opinion has not changed.  They are actually more important today than before.  Comes an article from The Atlantic

One of the world’s first and most famous libraries, in Alexandria, Egypt, was frequently home some 2,000 years ago to the self-starters and self-employed of that era. “When you look back in history, they had philosophers and mathematicians and all sorts of folks who would get together and solve the problems of their time,” says Tracy Lea, the venture manager with Arizona State University’s economic development and community engagement arm. “We kind of look at it as the first template for the university. They had lecture halls, gathering spaces. They had co-working spaces.”

All over the USA there are still private libraries, and we need more.  I've toured the Mechanic's Institute Library in San Francisco, with its stacks, meeting rooms and bar. Quite charming.

Most of ancient literature is gone because the huge state libraries were burnt out.  When we have comes from private collections that survived.  As our society descends in to self-immolation, independent libraries are all the more necessary.

Private gyms abound, why not private libraries?  People pay $120 a month for a gym, why not the same for a library?

First Market, Then Make

Kevin checks in on a fine point...

On Feb 19, 2013, at 10:42 AM, Kevin wrote:

Hello John,

I have two questions I thought I would ask before tonight's class.

1.      As we begin to send out our proposals to the colleges should we already have in place a delivery system for our course (Mibbit, ed2go,..etc) or do the schools decide how the class is delivered?

One example I came across in my local area is http://ce.d214.org/cep/cep_online_classes.aspx

This is a continuing education course instructing prospective online students to visit ed2go.com/dist214  

Essentially I want to know is there anything I should have in place via web/course ability (before) submitting proposals to the schools?

***Our proposal has to do with marketing our course, to find if people are ready willing and able to promote it as it is.  There is a very good chance they are not ready willing and able, for whatever unknowable reason right now.  

If not, aren’t you glad you have not invested a few hundred hours into developing a course no one will take?

If not, aren’t you glad you can right now make changes, based on school feedback, so the course is in fact marketable?

So, most decidedly, we DO NOT want to have delivery methods yet.***

2.      Do you have any suggestions for how a new instructor should address reference requests on applications? Most of us if not all have no actual teaching experience to speak of.  Any references we’d normally use are unable to validate our teaching skillset.

Is the proposal weighed upon more than the instructor’s experience?

***If not teaching references, then topical references...  who knows and approves of your work?  List everyone you can think of, then arrange them by power, from a noted expert down to your mom.  Good press is probably worthless (what do they know?), but satisfied clients is good.***

Promotion Headline

I am testing out a way to recruit instructors, that is teach them myself, and the local newspaper has a sale on 1/4 page full color ads.  Do I surveyed my listserv on various headlines for "draw" and here is what I got.

Cato Gets It Wrong

Cato is a putative free market think tank, and one of its "scholars" (from the greek, leisurely) advises we have free trade in education worldwide:

One way to promote free trade in higher education is with international trade agreements. 

But not really.  Free trade agreements are never about free trade, they are always bogus.  The only free trade possible is unilaterally pursued.  Anything negotiated is always constrained, not free.

So Cato uses the right words, but means nothing of the sort.  Only Seattle Teachers' College pursues free trade in education worldwide.

Student's Work Owned By School

Prince George County Schools wants to make it so...  who knows, some public school kid, sometime, somewhere, might actually produce something worthwhile, even profitable, at which point the school wants it.  It is possible somebody in a government school might produce something.

“Works created by employees and/or students specifically for use by the Prince George’s County Public Schools or a specific school or department within PGCPS, are properties of the Board of Education even if created on the employee’s or student’s time and with the use of their materials,” the policy reads. “Further, works created during school/work hours, with the use of school system materials, and within the scope of an employee’s position or student’s classroom work assignment(s) are the properties of the Board of Education.”

What happened to grateful students making donations?

The measure has some worried that by the system claiming ownership to the work of others, creativity could be stifled and there would be little incentive to come up with innovative ways to educate students. Some have questioned the legality of the proposal as it relates to students.

Once we have the idea of intellectual property rights, and the supremacy of the state, ther eis no logical limit to state power.  It is all ours.

No. 5 on the Seattle Hit Parade

A Seattle band called the Refusers musically review State Education.

Reviewing Lynda.com

I have submitted a course to Lynda.com with a view to reviewing how it works.  I continuously survey the opportunities for teachers to teach, what I call student-employed college instructors, or the German call privatdozents, or is it privatdozenten?  I filled out the form on this their "call for teachers" page.

Here a week later and no reply.  Every time I look at one of these sites I check out their "press" or media link and my heart sinks when I see "round two financing" or whatever because it can be accurately translated "screw the instructors."  When education becomes a business, someone has to get screwed, and the easiest target is the instructors, because they are the only ones who care, so they will compromise on money.

Lynda.com is not unique in this, it is baked into capitalism.  Education is like medicine, it is not quite a market event.  It is certainly an economic event, but not adaptable to a profit model.  Education works best on the cooperative model, like medicine.

There are various versions of lynda.com out there, straighterline, etc... made possible because the present alternatives are so bad.  But things are changing.

But in USA we have the false dilemma of "business model" vs "socialisr model" in both education and medicine.  And that is why education and medicine is so backwards in USA, very expensive and poor results.

If you disagree regarding expensive and poor results, then you are unaware what both can be, if freed from state intervention.

In the meantime, I'd love to see an "education" website answer a potential instructor within 24 hours.  But then, why bother?  It's about the money.

Feel free to forward this to three friends.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Here is a list of myths on online education...  some are debatable, and one in particular struck me...

Unmotivated students fail whether a teacher is watching him/her or not. While eLearning does not require a student to be in a certain place at a certain time, it still offers them access to the teacher and other classmates for help and support.

The old saying, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” is applicable to this myth. Students lacking the desire to succeed will fail no matter how robust the program or the teacher. Placing the blame on eLearning is foolish. eLearning is simply the catalyst for delivering information, it cannot be responsible for a student’s work habits.

Course completion is an issue.  This presumes the courses are asynchronous, which I think is something of an error in delivery.   I think course completion is best addressed by offering synchronous courses.  The idea that a big benefit of online education is that is can be asynchronous is one idea that should be challenged.  I believe something like 99% of online courses are asynchronous.   I believe when 99% are snchronoous, we'll see most of his 30 problems solved.

Brown v Accreditation

Former senator Hank Brown demonstrates how USA education has been in decline as accreditation has been ascendant. With all of the accredited risible schools out there, the accreditors are going after UV:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently filed a complaint with the Department of Education decrying SACS's interference with the University of Virginia governance powers and processes established by Thomas Jefferson himself. Anyone who knows American history, and regrettably few students do, would realize that Jefferson would be mighty upset to learn that a bunch of federally empowered bureaucrats are overstepping their authority and interfering with the internal governance of his university.

And this is very odd.  At City College of San Francisco, serving people since 1900, is under attack for not having enough administrators, according to the accreditors. How would they know?  By what metric do they measure this?

It is time for the University of Virginia and presidents and boards across the country to say no to this meddling, and it is time Congress recognizes what a failure the system of accreditation has been. Over the years, accreditation has increased costs without protecting quality. A new, transparent system of quality assurance is needed to protect the public—before it's too late.

The solution is to return to the system in which the students pay the instructors directly, and rate their instructors online for all to view.  There is ratemyprofessor.com but that is the wrong approach with confidential reviews which are too often poison pen letters.  A rating system would have to be by adults who sign their names to the review and verified they actually took the course.

55 and Older 100% of Net New Job Growth

So People are preferring hirees in my age group?  Better yet, get self-employed as an instructor...

Note that 100% of the job growth since the recession is in age group 55 and over.
Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/#im8BHg2JcULPxcug.99 

Straighterline.com is close to it...

Inside higher education highlights two programs, with the delightful opening

"Self-employed professor" could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them and share the tuition revenue.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/14/two-companies-give-faculty-more-control-online-courses#ixzz2GqMXDr5V
Inside Higher Ed 

The article highlights Straighterline and Udemy.com.  the more interesting to me is straighter line, especially reading this quote in the article:

Smith calls the new course offerings an “eBay for professors,” who can now “hang out their shingle” with the company's help. “It used to be that students paid professors directly,” Smith said. “We’re rebuilding that model, but with a baseline for assessments.”

I've inquired after this point, because as far as I am concerned, I am the only one advocating students pay instructors directly, a resumption of the medieval model.  Straighterline has confirmed he refers here to the medieval model, and the article comments sections takes up this point.

I search constantly to find someone doing the revolution in education right, and this is pretty close.  But to my mind accreditation is the Berlin Wall of education, and although straighterline is not accredited, they are associated with schools that can get the students credit for classes taken with straighterline.

Now Straighterline gets criticized for some iffy content, to which the CEO has responded.  To my mind this is no big deal, since innovations are always pretty junky at first.  Think about the first Apple ... yeccch!... computers and their products today.    That will get cleaned up over time.

What is far more interesting is the CEOs defense of his courses, after being trashed by Inside Higher Education, this in the comments section after the article:

The course taken by the writer has been reviewed and fully recommended for college credit by the ACE Credit service, a service to whose recommendations more than 1000 colleges profess to adhere. This course was reviewed by DETC. This course was reviewed by the College Board’s AP service. Our partner colleges, who award transfer credit for our courses, have been given complete access to the courses. What is the appropriate way to evaluate courses – a single student’s perspective or course-level reviews conducted independently by dozens of professors, dozens of accredited schools and several higher ed associations?

Unfortunately, the standard used by most colleges for the award of transfer credit, the presence or lack of regional accreditation, is not only insufficient to determine course quality but is also unavailable to us. Despite the fact that credit (and courses) are the unit of academic currency in an age when students can take courses from anyone at anytime, individual courses cannot be accredited, only degree granting programs. This means that colleges can offer, and accept for transfer credit, taxpayer-subsidized courses of wildly varying and indeterminate quality under the umbrella of accreditation. If industry-wide course level, outcome based standards existed, we’d be thrilled to follow them. Unfortunately, such standards are always resisted by colleges and accreditors alike, resulting in entirely subjective decisions about what constitutes college credit. Such subjectivity lets colleges keep those with threatening business models out without having to examine their own standards of course delivery.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/16/review_of_straighterline_online_courses#ixzz2GqUji5iK
Inside Higher Ed 

Correct!  Since the basis of accreditation is whimsical, yet it is mandatory for qualification for student loans, that which drives up the cost, and then with cheap money flowing to the schools they ladle on admin on top of admin, with payola to textbook makers, it is clear accreditation is the problem.

My quest continues:  unaccredited education, where students pays the instructors directly.

Read especially the comments sections in both articles.