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subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange.

felt decidedly unlike a normal classroom. For one thing, it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag

One educational psychologist, Ludy Benjamin, likens lectures to Velveeta cheese—something lots of people consume but no one considers either delicious or nourishing.)

adically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.

past half millennium, the technology of learning has hardly budge

Lectures are banned

attending class on Apple laptops

Lectures, Kosslyn says, are cost-effective but pedagogically unsound. “A great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.”

Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning. Lectures, gone. Tenure, gone. Gothic architecture, football, ivy crawling up the walls—gone, gone, gone.

“Your cash cow is the lecture, and the lecture is over,” he told a gathering of deans. “The lecture model ... will be obliterated.”

when you have a noncurated academic experience, you effectively don’t get educated.

Liberal-arts education is about developing the intellectual capacity of the individual, and learning to be a productive member of society. And you cannot do that without a curriculum.”

“The freshman year [as taught at traditional schools] should not exist,” Nelson says, suggesting that MOOCs can teach the basics. “Do your freshman year at home.”) Instead, Minerva’s first-year classes are designed to inculcate what Nelson calls “habits of mind” and “foundational concepts,” which are the basis for all sound systematic thought. In a science class, for example, students should develop a deep understanding of the need for controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical techniques of rhetoric and develop basic persuasive skills. The curriculum then builds from that foundation.

What, he asks, does it mean to be educated?

methods will be tested against scientifically determined best practices

Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs.

We have numerous sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn, and what teachers can do to improve learning.” Some of the studies are ancient, by the standards of scientific research—and yet their lessons are almost wholly ignored.

memory of material is enhanced by “deep” cognitive tasks

he found the man’s view of education, in a word, faith-based

ask a student to explain a concept she has been studying, the very act of articulating it seems to lodge it in her memory. Forcing students to guess the answer to a problem, and to discuss their answers in small groups, seems to make them understand the problem better—even if they guess wrong.

e traditional concept of “cognitive styles”—visual versus aural learners, those who learn by doing versus those who learn by studying—is muddled and wrong.

Professors are able to sort students instantly, and by many metrics, for small-group work—

a pop quiz at the beginning of a class and (if the students are warned in advance) another one at a random moment later in the class greatly increases the durability of what is learned.

he could have alerted colleagues to best practices, but they most likely would have ignored them. “The classroom time is theirs, and it is sacrosanct,

I couldn’t wait for Minerva’s wrecking ball to demolish the ivory tower.

The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”

Minerva’s model, Nelson says, will flourish in part because it will exploit free online content, rather than trying to compete with it, as traditional universities do.

The MOOCs will eventually make lectures obsolete.”

certain functions of universities have simply become less relevant as information has become more ubiquitous

Minerva challenges the field to return to first principles.

MOOCs will continue to get better, until eventually no one will pay Duke or Johns Hopkins for the possibility of a good lecture, when Coursera offers a reliably great one, with hundreds of thousands of five-star ratings, for free.

It took deep concentration,” he said. “It’s not some lecture class where you can just click ‘record’ on your tape.”

part of the process of education happens not just through good pedagogy but by having students in places where they see the scholars working and plying their trades.”

“hydraulic metaphor” of education—the idea that the main task of education is to increase the flow of knowledge into the student—an “old fallacy.”

I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the college itself to provide what I’d need in order to get a good education.

it is designed to convey not just information, as most MOOCs seem to, but whole mental tool kits that help students become morethoughtful citizens.

for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old-boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club.

professors and students increasingly separated geographically, mediated through technology that alters the nature of the student-teacher relationship

The idea that college will in two decades look exactly as it does today increasingly sounds like the forlorn, fingers-crossed hope of a higher-education dinosaur that retirement comes before extinction.

which makes transformational change

ifficult

In Finland, the goals of education are explicitly linked to competitiveness, research and innovation.

nowhere in the UK do they really drive the terms under which schools are assessed.

In England, the government has defined its approach as being based on curriculum rigour.

This lack of a comprehensive statement of the achievement we are looking for schools to deliver is a key failing.

best schools

areas of high disadvantage

define the outcome they need

in the face of the complex and inconsistent demands the system places on them.

Our system should reward schools making brave decisions which focus on boosting long-term outcomes for pupils, not punish them.

It should be able to survive changes of government and provide the test against which policy changes and school actions are judged

shine the light on whether the system is truly addressing the needs of all students, rather than just the few required to meet a government target.

Focus on raising the ambition and attainment for every child as far as their abilities permit

guide young people effectively on their choice of enabling subjects…

thos and culture that build the social skills also essential to progress in life and work, and allow them time to focus on this

Have a school accountability and assessment framework that supports these goals rather than defining them.

social literacy

a range of core subjects

ncluding critically maths, English, the sciences

effective use and understanding of computer science.

‘enabling subjects’

humanities, languages, arts, technical and practically-based subjects

equip a young person to move on

o university, or to an apprenticeship or vocational qualification

a set of behaviours and attitudes,

An exclusive focus on subjects for study would fail to equip young people with these, though rigour in the curriculum does help

‘employability skills’

Behaviours can only be developed over time, through the entire path of a young person’s life and their progress through the school system.

right context at school

A supportive culture, pastoral care and the right ethos are all needed to make the difference.

a long tail of pupils failing to achieve the desired outcomes can no longer be accepted.

enable all of our young citizens to reach the desired standards.

conflicting expectations placed on schools.

renewed system should be able to judge performance against the goals based on more complex metrics.

judgement

on overall culture and ethos, teaching and governance

group of data points, including testing but also outcomes data.

Development of a clear, widely-owned and stable statement of the outcome that all schools are asked to deliver.

beyond the merely academic, into the behaviours and attitudes schools should foster

basis on which we judge all new policy ideas, schools, and the structures we set up to monitor them

Ofsted

asked to steward the delivery of these outcomes

resourcing these bodies to develop an approach based on a wider range of measures and assessments than are currently in use,