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abramdemski comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - LessWrong
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Tagline: Coursera for high school
Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?
The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I've written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let's bring a similar model to high school.
This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.
The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.
By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.
With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.
Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.
My background: I cofounded a company that's had reasonable success. I'm not much of a Less Wrong fan - I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.
The nice thing about this is that it works on an existing market, while leveraging the successful tactics discovered through hard work by Coursera & the like to bring advances to the domain.
Of course, techniques designed for university courses may not precisely transfer.
I'm skeptical about 'leveraging' videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.
This idea may fit with the general spaced-repetition enthusiasm I am seeing in other proposals.
...And you just blew your cover. :)
Some selected public or private schools are already doing this, with great results from what little data I've seen. The feedback from the children themselves, at the very least, is impressive - the vast majority of them allegedly report (in less sciencey words) a vast improvement in their reasoning skills and their enthusiasm, motivation and enjoyment of mathematics, sciences, and studying in general.
Unfortunately, this is still on an extremely insignificantly small scale, with only a handful of teachers spread out over 4-6 schools doing this, some of them with direct collaboration from Khan Academy IIRC.
Nobody of any importance reads Less Wrong :)
...you just jinxed it! Now congress is going to pass a new bill forbidding online aids to count towards compulsory education requirements for home schooling, and otherwise hamper the idea by whatever means necessary.
After all, what better propaganda system is there than a bunch of gullible "teachers" who regurgitate everything you tell them to and whom children look up to as absolute authorities?
Fortunately, the United States has a strong evangelical Christian lobby that fights for and protects home schooling freedom.
Good point. I have a tendency to forget about them. Mind projection and all that.