[FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

Sat Oct 30 11:24:22 EDT 2021

Why isn’t dave’s program continuing?  Such a good question.   One of a number of such questions that one might ask of this stupid world.  Why ARE we going to Hell in  a handbasket. 

N

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2021 3:34 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

Dave, Sounds like a wonderful program. Is it continuing? If not, why not? If so, how has the structure changed so that it sustains itself as an ongoing effort?

-- Russ Abbott                                       
Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles

On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 12:40 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

Pieter,

Your plans are admirable and exciting.I wish you the best in this endeavor. If you would have any interest, I would be happy to share my experience in New Mexico developing and delivering an industry award winning program — the Software Development Apprenticeship.

We totally blew up the academy. The program had no courses — instead we defined "competencies" that had to be demonstrated — acknowledged by peers, professors, and industry professionals — at five different levels: basically following directions or rote learning; applying knowledge solo; applying in different context; mentoring others / sharing knowledge; and making an 'original' contribution or extension to the knowledge. Everyone had to master all the "competencies" to level 3, but would vary widely by individual interest in which ones were achieved at higher levels.

We had a "one room schoolhouse" where students worked in teams on real-world development projects alongside industry professionals, graduate students to freshmen mixed on each team.

If we had packaged the knowledge delivered in the program into traditional semester credit courses it would have been the equivalent of two undergraduate and three graduate degrees. Subjects far transcended programming and other computer science topics to include business (of course since business constituted the vast majority of our projects), hard and soft sciences, writing, presentation, inter-personal and "soft" skills, philosophy and history (Computer Scientists and Software Engineers are abysmally ignorant of their own history and the thought foundations of their discipline), art (including computer graphics of course, but much more), and math (but probability and statistics and geometry instead of calculus).

Students learned 'on-demand'. The project to which they were assigned would require some specific knowledge and they would "demand" that learning. Actually, every six weeks, students would complete a learning plan and the faculty had to combine them into a set of modules for lecture and presentation in the ensuing 6-week interval. All teaching took place in the same open lab/classroom, so everyone either directly or by "osmosis" picked up on what was being taught.

The program was immensely successful. Our student body came from the poorest county in the poorest state (sometimes Louisiana would take first place) and were woefully unprepared for college. But they succeeded: one exemplar student entered the program lacking even rudimentary user skills like "cut and paste," but was a team leader and J2EE mentor at the start of his second semester. (He was also the only one who figured out why the Hero — movie of same name — did not kill the warlord unifying China in a wonderfully written essay.)

Our student body was 70% minority (mostly because of where we were and the mission of the University) and 51-54 percent female.

Half of the students in the first year of the program had papers (not student presentations but full papers) accepted to OOPSLA and Agile  both conferences had a 90+ percent rejection rate). Every student was place in jobs, often before graduation and often with the companies who gave us apprenticeship projects.

The preceding is just bragging, but I am very proud of what we did.

We had two faculty, myself and Pam Rostal and both of us worked 70-90 hour weeks which would not be sustainable long term. We did attract a lot of attention and industry "superstars" would drop by to mentor in their particular area for 2-3 weeks at a time.

If you have interest in any details, please ask off-list and I will be happy to respond.

davew

On Wed, Oct 27, 2021, at 12:25 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:

The public education system in South Africa is largely broken. For those who can afford it, we have very good schools, but the majority cannot and the education options for them are bleak.

I plan to do something about it. 

This is my second attempt. About three years ago I started a school as a proof of concept with a radical model to have very high quality yet very low cost education and it failed miserably. (I managed to make plans for the kids and I don't believe any suffered from the experience - I pulled the plug before too much harm was done). I've thought, and discussed it a lot, and I'm ready to roll out my second, very different attempt.

The basis of this is that there are plenty of resources available for free, and provided you manage the environment properly, kids can and will teach themselves.

My plan is a model with two legs, both legs offering very high quality education, but the first leg is relatively expensive and has "bells and whistles" to attract the wealthy and the second is bare bones to make it affordable for those kids whose parents can't pay.

The profit from first leg schools then cross-subsidise the costs of the second leg schools. 

The concept for both legs are copied from https://www.khanlabschool.org/ , adapted for local conditions of course. The second leg schools will just be a low cost version, but the education offered will still be world class.

Our academic year starts in January. I'm working flat out to have my first school of the first leg open in January 2022. Then to have the first school of the second leg open in January 2023. Then to learn from the experience, adapt and roll it out so that every child in South Africa has access to world class education in five years time.

Pieter

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