How To Dramatically Slash The Cost Of College Education

The exorbitant cost of higher education is a recurrent topic of conversation, concern, and discontent these days. Against that backdrop, an announcement from edX and Arizona State University caught my attention last week. ASU and edX announced a program called Global Freshman Academy:

The Global Freshman Academy (GFA) will give learners anywhere in the world the opportunity to earn freshman-level university credit after successfully completing a series of digital immersion courses hosted on edX, designed and taught by leading scholars from ASU. By allowing students to learn, explore and complete courses before applying or paying for credit, the Global Freshman Academy reimagines the freshman year and reduces academic and monetary stress while opening a new path to a college degree for many students.

The program differs from other digital immersion undergraduate programs in the following ways:

• Course Credit for Open Online Courses – By completing the full series of eight Global Freshman Academy courses, students earn full college credit for freshman year; students will also be able to opt for taking individual courses for credit if they prefer
• Cost Effective – Freshman year credit earned through GFA is a fraction of the cost students typically pay
• Learning Before Payment – Students may decide to take a course for credit at the beginning or after coursework has been completed – reducing financial risk while opening a pathway for exploration and preparation for qualified students who may not otherwise seek a degree.
• Unlimited Reach – Because of the open course format, learning takes place while scaling completely – there are no limits to how many learners can take the courses online
• Innovative Admissions Option – GFA’s approach is different from the traditional admissions process of other credit-bearing courses, eliminating such barriers to entry as standardized tests and transcripts that are part of the traditional application process.
• Track Record of Success – This partnership brings together a globally recognized online educational platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a university whose innovative online degree programs boast an 89 percent retention rate.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 5)

Warren Barkley: There is a district in Washington State who have way less money than most districts. They’ve a lot of kids who are in and out of school, but every kid has a laptop in its population of 20,000. The curriculum is online for pretty much everything that they want to learn in the K-8. So if the kids miss a class because something happened with their parents, they can catch up. The way the superintendent did it there is through community. He has kids who do PR almost. They’ve parents who are massively involved. This is a district where you would not expect this type of thing to happen if you look at the demographics, yet they’re wildly successful with their technology and with their ability to affect the learning outcomes with kids.

When you talk to the superintendent, he will say that it’s all about the community. How is the community involved? I’ve seen this in other places as well and the recipe of success is community involvement. You can get to an effective use of these >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That sounds terrible. The example you gave is shocking.

Warren Barkley: That was probably one of the worst examples. I’ve seen scenarios where kids aren’t allowed on the network, so they have apps downloaded for them. They can work on some applications, but then there’s no learning artifact out of it. The devices can’t just be fancy game-playing machines. You’ve to have output in the form of a digital artifact that kids can carry along and see the learning. In a lot of places, the best thing I’ve heard around this is that our classrooms are authentically reflecting the reality of the society that our kids live in >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You are bringing in students from different countries together, and you have some sort of a social media element to your platform. You have teachers and experts from different domains on that platform who can operate across the school boundaries.

Warren Barkley: It’s not quite like that. Basically, as a teacher, I have a class. I have this big virtual space. I can split it up in a lot of different ways. I can posit questions into it. It does have a social media piece to it. I wouldn’t say it’s a rendezvous to Discovery Point. It would be two teachers who knew each other on Twitter saying, “Let’s get our classes to work together on this stuff.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 2)

Warren Barkley: One of the things we’ve seen worldwide is this movement in the pedagogy where teachers want to have very small bites of information which have project work attached to it. Then they let the kids work on that project inside or outside the classroom. A lot of teachers want that kind of learning to continue outside of the classroom when they go home. In providing that virtual learning space, it allows kids to work with whatever media they want and they can do their homework all together at the same time. It’s something that we see in many different countries.

Sramana Mitra: We are seeing this as well. Everything that you said are trends we are seeing as well. One thing that I picked up in your answer that I want to double-click down on is I imagine you work with K-12 mostly, right?

Warren Barkley: That’s right. We do have a little bit of higher ed, but almost 90% is K-12.
>>>

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 1)

Warren is the CTO of Smart Technologies, a $500 million provider of virtual classroom solutions. He offers a window into trends in the space and ideas for new entrepreneurs to focus on.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing yourself as well as SMART Technologies. What do you do?

Warren Barkley: I’m the CTO for SMART Technologies. I joined about two years ago from Microsoft. I was at Microsoft for about 16 years. I did a whole bunch of interesting things there. I worked on WiFi, networking, and a lot of other cool projects over the years. Before that, I was a teacher and a principal. If I reach far enough back, I was a musician at one point. I didn’t get a Computer Science degree but I somehow figured my way out into technology.

>>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 7)

Harman Singh: I’m a fundamental believer that this is going to go a long way. No matter how much I have in the business, it’s the reputation that’s going to be there forever—not the exit. That was the gist of the whole thing. We are where we are and the investors are happy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still maintaining the same logic in the business, right? You have this classroom product that test preps agencies around the world are using on a per educator basis. You’re selling this product using telesales from India. That’s the core of your business, correct?

Harman Singh: Correct. I’ll elaborate a bit more about that. We consider education service providers as a customer of ours. However, we want to broaden the definition from just education service providers. It could be community colleges or universities, but we don’t have K-12 right now. >>>

Building a Global Education SaaS Company From India: WizIQ CEO Harman Singh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you charging?

Harman Singh: On an average, $250 per educator per year. In those days, it was about $150.

Sramana Mitra: It was a per educator pricing?

Harman Singh: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you worked the test prep academy, were they buying for multiple educators? What would a test prep academy deal look like?

Harman Singh: About three to five trainers.
>>>