microeducation

Having been in the education technology industry for six years, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the major players. But in the past week of active searching, I’ve found a number of great and interesting sites, from learnboost.com to sophia.org, which are doing amazing work and which I had never heard of before.

The field of economics which is concerned with analyzing phenomena of this sort is called search theory. Rather than assuming that everyone in a marketplace has perfect information about all the opportunities available to them, search theorists argue that most people exist in an information-poor environment and only become aware of potential trading partners idiosyncratically.

The contrast between traditional microeconomic theory and search theory is reflected in differing approaches to education. A vast oversimplification of this complex subject might go something like this:

• One way of looking at education is that children are proceeding through a curriculum which adults have designed to introduce them to The Most Valuable Concepts They Should Know. This approach, like traditional microeconomics, presupposes that adults have perfect information about a checklist of Things To Learn (or “learning outcomes” in edu-speak), and the problem we’re trying to solve as educators is to get through that list in the most efficient way possible.
• Another way of looking at children is to see them exploring a vast and mysterious new world, driven by their own curiosity and constantly testing hypotheses about the way that world works. This approach, like search theory, postulates that the most important skills to teach our children revolve around how to thrive in a world of information scarcity: skills like learning a new programming language quickly, researching a topic for a presentation, or leading a scrum team. In this world, the problem we’re trying to solve as educators is to harness children’s creativity and drive, while keeping them focused and on track.

Both of these approaches have merit, and neither would be good for all kids, especially in their more extreme forms. What I know from my own experience, though, is that my son has learned more about the scientific method from going to the Exploratorium and watching Mythbusters than he has in school. And it makes me wonder what we in the education technology industry can do to harness, rather than suppress, the creative instincts of children.

In a recent Planet Money podcast, Alex Blumberg and David Kestenbaum performed a brilliant economic analysis of the recent political controversy over public funding for NPR. Much of their discussion revolves around the concept of a public good: something like public radio which is both nonrival and nonexcludable. These two properties present a paradox: because a public good is nonrival, it can be delivered freely to vast numbers of end users, each of whom can derive value from it; this is a good thing. However, because a public good is nonexcludable, no mechanism exists to force people to pay for even a fraction of the value they receive from consuming the good.

This is the paradox of online content: the very same technology which increases access to content simultaneously decreases the incentives to produce high-quality content in the first place. Put another way: in a world where high-quality content is available for free online, how can you sustain a business model in which you invest the time, money, and effort it takes to produce high-quality content?

One way to solve this problem is a ”freemium” model in which consumers can choose between getting ad-supported content for free, or paying for ad-free content. Indeed, KQED, a National Public Radio station in San Francisco, now offers a paid pledge-free stream for those who don’t want to listen to pledge drives. However, the “price” in this economic model reflects not the value of the content itself, but the amount someone is willing to pay to not be annoyed by ads; therefore this model cannot achieve an efficient outcome in the economic sense.

Another solution is to give valuable content away for free, but charge for a credential or certificate confirming that users have received the value from the content. This is the business model of MIT, which makes course materials freely available online but charges upwards of $50,000 per year for tuition, room, and board if you want an MIT degree. In short, in this model the content itself is not scarce: MIT’s willingness to confer degrees is.

There are other solutions, and I’ll get into them in later posts. One thing that’s clear, though: if you’re in the business of producing and selling content, you can’t solve this problem just by raising prices on the smaller and smaller pool of people willing to pay for it. Sooner or later — and mostly likely sooner — this strategy just leaves the field open for new entrants who have found a way to provide the same value you do, but at much lower cost.

Whenever I talk to anyone about microeducation, Khan Academy inevitably comes up. Sal Khan’s work is a great inspiration to all of us in education technology, and his videos in particular are perfect examples of the kind of microeducation artifacts I’d like to see more of.

To my mind, Khan’s most impressive achievement has been to show that a single inspired person can create great content and share it with the world, and that the world can find it useful. But the model of any one person providing this kind of content at scale is at best difficult and at worst counterproductive. On the Khan Academy discussion boards, users are clamoring for videos and exercises on everything from English grammar to music to chemistry. There’s just no way for one person, or even a talented team of people, to create that range of content and maintain quality.

The answer to that conundrum lies in those same discussion boards, where a host of people have expressed their own desire to contribute by creating videos, or writing exercises, or even just sharing their insights from teaching. But any one of those people would have a difficult time reaching a wide audience on their own, and Khan Academy isn’t set up (at least yet!) to manage the contributions of their legions of fans.

So the question in my mind isn’t “How can Khan Academy scale?” Rather, it’s “What can we do to find and empower the next Sal Khan — or the next hundred, or thousand, Sal Khans?” To answer this, we’ll need to overcome three challenges:

• Technological challenge: How can we create a platform in which anyone can create and share microeducational content (videos, exercises, lesson plans, etc.)?
• Economic challenge: What incentives can we provide to encourage people to contribute content, and what mechanisms can we put in place to identify and reward high-quality content?
• Social challenge: How do we drive the adoption and usage of this content in education, either within current institutional framework or through institutional change?

Key to the concept of microeducation is the prefix micro. As an economist, I associate micro with the notion of individuals and firms, as well as interactions between individuals and firms, rather than the study of larger economic systems. Microeducation, in my mind, concerns individual students and specific concepts, and the interactions that lead those students to gain a deeper understanding of those concepts.

This in no way denigrates the notion of macroeducation, which I would consider to be the design and implementation of educational systems (public school policy and financing, curriculum design, encyclopedic textbooks, etc.). Macroeducation policy, like macroeconomic policy, is incredibly important. But the purpose of this endeavor is to improve the quality and efficiency of microeducation.

Small, of course, comes in different sizes. So to think about microeducation, I’ve created three resources: (S) a blog, for brief essays on the nature and implications of microeducation; (XS) a facebook page where anyone in the “microeducation community” can post, analyze, and comment on microeducational artifacts (I need a better name for those…more in a later post); and (XXS) a twitter feed, for quick links to interesting educational pieces from around the web.

It will be interesting to see, as this project continues, which size of small works best…

I’ve started this blog to explore the idea of microeducation: that is, education delivered in quick, easily digestible, fascinating, beautiful, and engaging pieces. Examples of microeducation I have in mind are exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco like the one in the picture above, NPR’s Planet Money podcasts, or Steven Strogatz’s posts on mathematics on nytimes.com. More to come soon…