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The New York Times just posted a piece called "Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom": http://bit.ly/140OFU

The conclusion of a recent 93-page report on online education conducted by the Department of Education concludes: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

Wow!

This was a huge study conducted over 12 years. It covered a wide range of areas, including K-12, colleges, adult continuing-education programs, medical training, and military training.

The main advantages that online learning brings are: 1) personalized experiences tailored to the individual, and 2) collaboration enabled by networking tools. When you combine both of these, you have the potential for a revolution in the way people learn.

We will go into these findings and debate their meaning and potential implications in this panel.

This would be the main reason why I would go, To see this Conference

Online education is becoming huge - I would love this panel.

Online education is currently horrible, and is desperately in need of an upgrade. That said, it's the best way to reach geographically dispersed people.

I'm hoping that this panel can show the (few) that do online learning right, so that we can jump-start eLearning towards the right path.

Online education is not without its glitches, but I think it has wide potential and will deliver substantive educational assistance to learners all over the globe. A panel that explores the best eLearning practices would be effort well spent. I look forward to this panel.

Panel Update:

Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire, has agreed to join the panel. Thanks Jon!

Jon and his team have built up one of the best blogs on the web that addresses both the education crisis and the coming revolution in education that web technology will bring about.

You can dig into it here: http://blog.edufire.com/category/education/

Panel Update:

Albert Wenger, Partner at Union Square Ventures, has agreed to join the "Crash Course" panel.

At Union Square Ventures, Albert asks the big questions, such as how the web itself is changing, and how the web is changing industries and society.

In his post “Power to the People” (http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/09/power_to_the_pe_1.html), Albert writes:

"To us, this appears to be one of the great constants of the web. It is taking power away from existing large institutions and pushing it out to smaller entities and often all the way to individuals. In the process it is building up new institutions (such as Google), but the net result appears to be a distinct shift of “power to the people.”

...We believe that the same shift will become increasingly important in other areas of life that have longer standing and slower changing institutions. Take education, for example. For hundreds of years education has essentially been organized around schools and universities. To date, this has even been largely true in distance/online education (e.g., University of Phoenix). It may be difficult for us to conceive of alternatives because we are so used to the existing structures, but these are in no small part based on historical difficulties in disseminating information. Books at one point were super expensive and even the Sorbonne (the oldest still operating university) had only a few hundred in their library. With book digitization proceeding at a rapid pace and most new research publications available electronically, having a library will soon no longer be a reason to have a university. Lectures could historically only be heard at the time and place of the lecture. Now we can watch a video recording of a lecture over the web. A tutor had to be in the same place to look at the work of a student and provide feedback...

In recent years, however, we have seen a significant upswing in home schooling. While other social factors are at work, a key enabler for homeschooling has been the web. With access to course materials, ability to watch lectures and even tutor at a distance, we believe that we are only at the beginning of the web’s impact on the fundamental structure of education. We expect much of that change to be away from the existing educational institutions and towards empowering individuals and newly-formed groups."

We're excited to see the unique angle Albert would bring to this conversation about the future of education.

this sounds fantastic!

I am excited to be a part of this panel. I have written extensively on the role that I think education will have in revolutionizing education on our blog at http://blog.edufire.com/author/jon. Here's a recent post I wrote in response to an article that Josh Catone wrote on Mashable.com.

**What is the Future of Teaching?**

Great article from Josh Catone in Mashable yesterday entitled What is the Future of Teaching? I posted a follow-up in the comments and wanted to share. Here it is. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

Great article Josh. I’ve spent *tons* of time thinking about this over the last decade. Here’s my quick take:
#1 – Online vs traditional learning can be viewed across three vectors: Cost, convenience and quality.

There is little doubt that its cheaper to run classes online (no facilities costs, less personnel required, etc.). There is also little doubt that online classes are more convenient. You can take them from home, office, etc. and likely have a more flexible schedule than traditional classes offer.

However, the big question is around quality. I’d offer (and this is coming from the CEO of a company that specializes in online classes) that on quality alone traditional classes are still better. But what’s interesting is that the gap is narrowing quickly. It’s not at all unrealistic to envision a future in which the online class is significantly more engaging and effective than its offline equivalent. If that happens then guess what? Game over for the traditional class model (after all, why would you choose something that is more costly, less convenient and lower quality?).
#2 – I do disagree with the notion that the price of education is going to zero.

I believe in The Grand Unified Theory of the Economics of Free (I think that’s the right title…it’s a TechDirt post from back in the day) which states while abundant resources will trend towards zero (their marginal cost), the spreading of those very same resources will drive up the prices for scarce resources. In music, a band gives away MP3s (abundant resource) and makes more money from concert tickets. MIT gives away OCW material but more people hear about MIT (especially in developing countries) which leads to more demand for MIT degrees.

The abundant resources (e.g., textbooks, audio/video recordings of lectures, etc.) will tend towards free. That makes total sense. What will not tend towards free will be things like the value of a scarce degree (Ivy League degrees are likely to become valuable not less), a teacher’s time or the attention of the students. To say that education will be free assumes that the marginal costs of those things are zero which is almost certainly not true. Sure you’ll always have people who might volunteer to teach a free class (just like a band might play a benefit concert for free) but that doesn’t mean this will happen at scale anymore than any other industry can expect to draw talented people in if they aren’t being paid.
#3 – Flat out, we need better tools.

And to get better tools we need more innovation and investment. While education is a huge industry ($2 trillion by many estimates) I think it’s safe to say that social gaming has received more investment in recent years despite being a much (much!) smaller industry. The problem is that while it’s easy to look at a social game and figure out how to squeeze out some short-term cash it is much (much!) harder to look at a big industry with huge structural problems and figure out how to improve it. And improving it likely will take a lot of time and patience. It won’t be a “Build one thing in year 0. Have billion dollar company in year 3.” scenario.

But there are a lot of great people trying. Check out places like 2tor, Academic Earth, Cramster, Grockit, Knewton, LiveMocha, PrepMe, School of Everything, Smart.fm, TeachStreet, Tutor.com, Tutorvista and a whole host of others that I’m sure I’m forgetting to see what I’m talking about.

Oh, and of course us. :) (http://www.edufire.com)

Panel Update:

More cool news regarding the panelists.

David Wiley--currently Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, Chief Openness Officer of Flat World Knowledge, and Founder of the Open High School of Utah--has kindly agreed to join us for this conversation in Austin.

There’s little doubt that David Wiley is in the front ranks of education revolutionaries. His career has been dedicated to increasing access to educational opportunity for everyone around the world. His business experience includes founding a free online charter school with open-source content and curricula and running a business which provides digital versions of textbooks for free. David is also the Founder of OpenContent.org and was recently named by Fast Company as one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.

And we’re excited to have him join this panel!

And in other developments, in this week's "Kirk's Lunch" video, Kirk McMurray the panel organizer answers in 3 minutes what this panel will try to answer in 60! The video rocks, and if you want more of this, vote for the panel and we'll see you in Austin!

Kirk's Lunch #9: "Disrupting the Education Industry in 180 Seconds or Less":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvVWl4GJ24A

I'm conflicted because I'm an investor, but +1 from me. I'll be there.

I would love this panel.

Love it! Look forward to seeing this in the mix of options when I arrive in Austin!