The state of California – a big player in establishing educational standards that are often adopted across the nation – is moving to approve legislation that will require colleges in that state to honor and give credit for faculty-approved MOOCs taken by their students.

Remember when Steve Jobs said 3D simulations on the NeXT computer would revolutionize education?  That vision helped him break free of Apple. It led to the evolution of what is now known as Mac OSX and it is directly responsible for the smartphones many of us use every day.

But the education revolution he spoke of never happened.  For generations, educational technology was a sleepy market sector that was always touted but never fulfilled. What makes this time any different?

I see three major forces at work that will create a “perfect storm” that will fundamentally change what we call education.

Huge student waitlists

As the cost of higher education has skyrocketed, colleges have been forced to cut back on expenses.  As a result, many classes at public universities and community colleges are over-subscribed.  Some students can’t get into the classes they need to graduate and must extend their college experience to gain the credits they need – which further overcrowds schools and classes (and mires students in even more debt).

The biggest waitlists are for introductory courses, which generally are also the least rewarding for professors to teach.  In California alone, an estimated 784,000 community-college students are on such waiting lists, with the prospect of demand only increasing. It’s a legitimate crisis.

Last Fall, MOOC pioneer Udacity tested three math courses with San Jose State University. Students could enroll in intermediate algebra, college algebra, and elementary statistics courses online and only show up on campus for exams. One Udacity computer class alone had 250,000 people enrolled. The power of MOOCs is that they can fulfill the demands of students and schools in an economically efficient manner on a massive scale, while resolving the problem of overcrowding that has been festering for decades.

Academics as the new rock stars

MOOCs are already proving to be the greatest thing to hit universities since football. They bring worldwide attention to universities yet in a genuine way that completely supports the overall mission of university. And the MOOC platforms tend to feature university brands as prominently as ESPN features a school’s sports teams, making top-tier universities even more powerful for attracting students, faculty and research funding.

In times past, an outstanding professor could publish textbooks on his or her own as a supplement to teaching, which featured the professor’s personal brand as much as his/her employer’s. Early on in the development of its online courses, though, Stanford (followed by others) has made it clear though that all courses are owned by the university, not the professor doing the teaching.

That could change, but for now the personal brands of faculty have become analogous to athletes or rock stars. While for now they can’t earn royalties for teaching a MOOC – and it’s worth noting these represent a significant undertaking – their visibility is unlike anything remotely possible before, with many courses reaching tens of thousands of students at a time. Such recognition bolsters their careers and reputation far beyond the royalties they might receive from textbook publishing in the past.

Untapped demand

Some skeptics have pointed out that overall MOOC completion rates vary from 3 percent to 20 percent of those who initially enroll in a given course.  They say the “dropout” rate is 90 percent, which indeed sounds bad.  But it’s also misleading, and here’s why:  Most of the dropoff is by people who are not really ready to take a full-on university course but who are happy to observe and learn something along the way.

What are we to make of this?  Millions of people around the world want to take online course, but the current offerings are too rigorous and not yet suited to their needs.  And this is a problem?  Sounds to me like we are engaging a whole new set of students and developing new methods to invite them to pursue their dreams through the courses and classes they can take online. If the goal is spreading knowledge and education, then MOOCs are wildly succeeding.

Photo courtesy Andrii Muzyka/Shutterstock.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

On Monday, the program formerly known as the Boston Startup School announced that it is changing its name and expanding to New York City.

“Our instructors are the entrepreneurs and professionals across the startup landscape. They teach with real world examples, and let students under the hood to learn how the startup engine really works,” co-founder Shaun Johnson told me in an email. “At the same time, they gain in-depth access to a well-vetted pool of candidates that are eager to join their company, all while evaluating the best fit potential hires throughout the program.”

Admitted students choose from one of four tracks — web development, product and design, marketing, or sales and business development — and then, over eight weeks, they learn the basics from industry professionals.

It’s not cheap – the program costs $3,750 – but Johnson said they have a 94 percent placement rate so far, with students landing jobs at startups in roles including associate business developer, senior rails developer and junior product manager.

Given the rise of Skillshare, as well as other online education sites like lynda.com, Codecademy and Coursera, aspiring startup worker bees have plenty of free and low-cost options when it comes to getting help building new skills. But Johnson said that despite their value those kinds of programs don’t necessarily lead to a new job. The Startup Institute, he said, helps students build a peer network, connect with the employer community and learn new skills.

The program’s summer track tends to attract recent college grads, Johnson said, although other more advanced employees have taken the program as well. But considering the full-time commitment needed for the eight weeks, it’s not really a feasible option for a professional who wants to keep his current job while he looks for a new one.

Co-founded by the managing director of TechStars Boston, Katie Rae, the program has graduated nearly 200 students. The program declined to name New York instructors but said New York City-based Lot18 and CrowdTap had already hired some of the program’s graduates.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 11 steps for scaling a startup
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches

Compared to some of Apple’s other software, 1 billion downloads in nearly six years may not seem like such a big deal. (The iOS App Store hit 40 billion downloads this year, less than five years in.) But the service is picking up steam. Apple released some other numbers as well that illustrate the size and scope of iTunes U:

• More than 1,200 colleges are using iTunes U
• 1,200 K-12 “schools and districts” are using it
• There are 2,500 public courses in use and “thousands” of private courses
• Some courses have more than 250,000 enrolled in them
• Access is available to students in 30 countries
• About 60 percent of iTunes U app downloads come from outside the U.S.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Flash analysis: smart watches

At one point, Howe asks Christensen to name some industries that are “either in a state of disruptive crisis or will be soon,” and the professor says:

“Journalism, certainly, and publishing broadly. Anything supported by advertising. That all of this is being disrupted is now beyond question. And then I think higher education is just on the edge of the crevasse. Generally, universities are doing very well financially, so they don’t feel from the data that their world is going to collapse. But I think even five years from now these enterprises are going to be in real trouble.”

Christensen recently co-wrote a study for Nieman Reports entitled “Breaking News,” which focused on the media industry and the disruption< that is going on there. He also described some of his thinking about what has happened to the newspaper and traditional media business in an interview with the Nieman Journalism Lab — in which he said that many newspapers were lulled into a false sense of security and then “very quickly, all of a sudden, you go off the cliff.”

When it comes to education, Christensen said that the availability of fairly high-quality online learning would be the disruptive force because “it will take root in its simplest applications, then just get better and better.”

“You know, Harvard Business School doesn’t teach accounting anymore, because there’s a guy out of BYU whose online accounting course is so good. He is extraordinary, and our accounting faculty, on average, is average. Some [universities] will survive. Most will evolve hybrid models, in which universities license some courses from an online provider like Coursera but then provide more-specialized courses in person.”

For more on the question of disruption in education, see the ongoing debate between media theorist and journalism professor Clay Shirky and Aaron Bady, a PhD student in African literature at the UC Berkeley. Shirky started it with a piece about the disruptive effect of “massively open online courses” from companies like Udacity, and Bady responded with a rebuttal, followed by a response from Shirky.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Don Skarpo

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Talking about the importance of aligning education with employment opportunities, he said in countries like Germany, students finish high school armed with the skills they need for the jobs that are available.

“Now at schools like P-TECH in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York public schools and City University of New York and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in computers or engineering,” Obama said. “We need to give every American student opportunities like this.”

Opened in September 2011, P-TECH is an IBM-backed, six-year program for New York City public high school students. At the end of the program, students get a high school degree, an associate’s degree and better chances for an entry-level position at IBM upon graduation. Even before the president’s endorsement, educators in Chicago, Maine, Massachusetts and elsewhere had started to explore the model, but given last night’s recognition you can be sure P-TECH will be getting even more attention.

In a chat with GigaOM Wednesday, Rashid Davis, P-TECH’s founding principal, talked about what makes P-TECH work, how it could be replicated and what could make the model even better.

GigaOM: As we write about frequently on GigaOM, the digital economy is creating the demand for new skills and new ways of learning those skills. From your perspective, what’s driving the momentum behind P-Tech and new schools like it? 

Davis: I think, really, it’s industry coming forward and saying these are the skills that are important and working with secondary and post-secondary institutions to say how do we make sure those gaps and skills are filled.

GigaOM: Corporations have worked with educators in the past but what really distinguishes P-Tech’s model?

Davis: Every student has a mentor from IBM and the expectation is for students to complete the post-secondary credential, not just earn a college credit. And it’s an open-admission school that starts in grade 9. We’re not taking students that have taken an academic test or have been academically screened for this particular model. 

GigaOM: Why is it a model that can succeed in different cities and school districts across the country?

Davis: Because you’re talking about the diversification that’s necessary – how do you get people who are underrepresented and you’re broadening the applicant pool for areas where jobs are not getting filled. … It can also be replicated for other industries – not just IT. It could be manufacturing, it could be fashion, it could be sports.  It really depends on the industry and the skills that you want to address and the post-secondary institutions that could give you that credential.

GigaOM: The first wave of students will graduate in 2017, but what early indicators can you look at to evaluate how the program is doing and measure success?

Davis: There are some students that may complete this program in four years or five years. But so far, we have 103 students who started with us in grade 9 last year and, of those, 62 are enrolled in at least one college course. … It’s important to understand that this an open-admissions population, with many students who may be the first in their family to even graduate from high school. I don’t want people to try to compare these students to traditional students who may have a different economic background or different levels of support and then [give less value to] measures of success from not really understanding [that difference].

GigaOM: What kinds of challenges have you encountered so far? 

Davis: The challenge is to have 13- and 14-year-olds who may have thought of themselves as students who have not done well, and now we’re telling them that they’re college students from day one. That becomes a challenge because students need to not only make a mental shift, but change their habits so they can… believe in themselves and be consistent in their outcomes.

GigaOM: How do you support them in that shift?

Davis: In addition to every student having a professional IBM mentor, every teacher mentors students and we’re having students adopt each other.

GigaOM: If you could do more to make this model a success, what would it be?

Davis: I would add a boarding component for six months in the summer and I’d try to find a way to house the students for the last two years… 85 percent of my students are on free or reduced lunch and they’re not coming from within walking distance of the community. And it’s important to remember that 76 percent of our population are boys, with 73 percent being young men of color. Every day they go into their communities and we’re at risk of losing them or having them sidetracked to other realities. With boarding, I think it’s essential to make sure we can continue the learning.

GigaOM: Aside from schools like yours, what else would you like to see in NYC schools?

Davis: I’d like to see every high school in NYC attached to one of the [City University of New York] schools to allow this same opportunity to exist for all NYC public school students. We know it’s hard for students to actually get meaningful employment – we need to start off by saying that it’s important for every NYC student who graduates from public school leaves with a post-secondary credential or associates degree.

GigaOM: And, as other schools around the country create P-Tech like schools, what would you advise them?

Davis: They should keep in mind: how do we move quicker? How do we really think of the ways that postsecondary schools could be dual-credentialed for students to actually let them do more while they’re younger and before life gets in the way?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

The big theme of the letter was innovation in measurement and the value of setting goals and finding the right metrics to track progress — not a surprising position from the man who built Microsoft.  But especially given the dearth of feedback most teachers currently receive, he said, the opportunity for teacher evaluations to improve education is particularly strong.

“I think the most critical change we can make in U.S. K-12 education is to create teacher feedback systems … that are properly funded, high quality, and trusted by teachers,” he wrote.

Since 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project to figure out how to build an evaluation and feedback system with the goal of helping teachers improve.  After working with 3,000 classroom teachers, the project this month released its third and final report, maintaining that to evaluate teacher effectiveness, schools should use student surveys, teacher observations by trained evaluators and standardized test scores.

One of the MET project’s partners was  Teachscape, a company founded in the late 1990s that provides software and support for video-based teacher evaluations. Over the years, support for video-based teacher evaluations has waxed and waned.  But as video technology has improved and become more ubiquitous (in professional and personal settings) — and amid calls for teacher improvement and accountability — demand for observation tools has grown.

More teacher training programs are moving toward the use of video as a part of documenting candidate readiness for certification (not just for evaluation purposes but for self-reflection and self-improvement). And the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education has endorsed the use of video observation in the certification process.

In the past year, a few startups have emerged to serve that need, including SmarterCookie, which was a part of the ed tech startup accelerator Imagine K12, Edthena and Torsh. Essentially, the companies enable teachers to easily record themselves during class, upload the video to a secure platform and then share the video with coaches and mentors to receive time-stamped feedback.

Since launching Edthena, Adam Geller, the company’s co-founder and former Teach for America teacher, said it’s worked with Teach for America, the Uncommon Schools charter school organization, the University of Michigan and other organizations. Instead of focusing on teacher evaluation, he said, Edthena’s emphasis is on improvement and giving teachers a safe place for receiving feedback from the best mentors and coaches, wherever they are.

“It replicates the experience of having someone sit at the back of the classroom, but it takes away time and geographic barriers,” he said.

Teachboost, another startup backed by Imagine K12, takes a different approach to teacher development by providing a mobile-optimized (and web-based) tool for gathering and analyzing teacher feedback. Schools can use the product to streamline teacher evaluations and observations but teachers can also use it to solicit feedback from peers and share their progress.

When it comes to teacher feedback, as with any area in education, innovation isn’t just about the technology. As Gates suggests in his letter, teachers need to trust the system, be willing to commit their time and feel confident that it will provide specific enough feedback to help them actually improve and progress professionally. Technology can only play a bit part in much of that, but it can still play an important role in helping to deliver more personalized and contextualized support for teachers.

Image by ZouZou via Shutterstock. 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

The Globe announced this week that is using $65,000 of reader vacation funds to buy 75 iPads for Boston Public Schools and Stoneham High School. The idea, according to Globe executive Saurer, is that “digital kids turn into digital adults” and that the iPad program will expose them to the paper’s content and knowledge from around the web.

“In the past, teachers would ask elementary school kids to cut out pictures from the paper — it was very tactile,” said Saurer by phone. He added that the advent of digital reading and the impractical economics of supplying paper and ink led the Globe to try the iPad program.

Saurer said the Globe will tweak the program going forward by, for instance, looking at whether the projectors are a good use of money or if more iPads are a better option.

Newspapers around the country run similar education programs funded by vacation subscriptions but Saurer believes the Globe and its sister paper, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, are the first to provide school kids with devices. He said about a quarter of readers choose to donate their subscriptions.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Flash analysis: smart watches

According to GE’s annual Innovation Barometer , it looks like that’s what they want. The report, which surveyed 3,000 C-suite executives in 25 countries and took their temperature on a range of issues affecting innovation and competition, found that business leaders highlighted education as one of their top policy concerns.

When asked about the most pressing priorities for governments to support innovation, they ranked improving education just above fighting bureaucracy and protecting IP. In particular, they indicated that schools should encourage more entrepreneurial cultures through partnerships with business savvy individuals and develop curricula that better prepares students for future jobs.

The survey also indicated that, globally, executives’ confidence in education systems had fallen an average of six points over last year, although the confidence of U.S. executives increased.

The report comes on the heels of a number of interesting U.S.-based efforts by business leaders, particularly those in technology, to support education. Microsoft backs the Philadelphia School of the Future and works with high school students in Seattle to teach them computer science.  Schools in Newark got a $100-million gift from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a few years ago. And, in New York, two new tech-focused schools launched this academic year supported by big business and local venture capitalists. The Academy for Software Engineering, for example, opened with the support of Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, as well as other local and industry leaders. And IBM jointly created the Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-Tech), a six-year computer-science related high school that offers graduates the chance to apply for IBM jobs.

Corporate-sponsored education has its critics, who worry that students will get too steeped in the culture of business or won’t get pushed enough in critical thinking. Education observers also point out that past attempts haven’t always been successful — after launching in the early 1990s, New York’s Metropolitan Corporate Academy was eventually shut down after support from Goldman Sachs waned. But as the economy shifts and the demand for new skills rises, it’s important that business leaders step up to support the schools in their communities, as long as educators can keep their interests in check.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

As student debt climbs and new crowdinvestment models proliferate, Pave’s founders say their site enables students and other young people launching careers to connect with more established professionals willing to provide money and mentorship. In return for their investment, backers receive a cut of the student’s future earnings over a predetermined period of time.

“It’s an online funding community where young prospects get to follow careers of passion supported by teams of backers they can meet on the site, who want to put time, money and resources to good use,” said co-founder and CEO Sal Lahoud.

Lahoud said he first started thinking about the model after a friend came to him asking to borrow money to jumpstart a career in design. At first, he said, he thought it would be an uncomfortable arrangement because if things went badly he’d feel bad asking for repayment and if things went well he’d feel as though he should share in the success. But when he proposed an investment model, the friend supported the idea.

Soon after, Lahoud, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs and in other business roles in media and tech, looked into building an online funding community around that kind of relationship. He quickly found two co-founders who shared his interest: Oren Bass, Pave’s chief operating officer, and Justin Mitchell, the company’s CTO and a former Facebooker.

Since the beginning of the year, the company has raised $5 million in seed funding from private investors and said it has created a new kind of legally-binding financial agreement for participants on its site. On Monday, it is launching a pilot program that includes 8 “prospects” and 22 “backers.”

Prospects get money and mentorship

Through Pave, prospects can establish a profile by providing verifiable information, such as their college major and GPA, as well as evidence of their talent or work, such as portfolios. They list the amount they want to raise (from $3,000 to $50,000, but the company says the average is $20,000 to $30,000) and share the story of what they want to pursue and why. For example, one of the pilot’s prospects interested in pursuing film turned to the site to raise $50,000 to produce a script as well as give her some flexibility in building her career. The funding came from six backers, one of which is a film industry veteran who can also provide creative feedback and professional advice.

Once backers (who can search the site by industry and affiliation) identify the prospects they want to support, the different parties negotiate the terms of the agreement with help from the site’s algorithms, which can calculate a prospect’s projected future income. According to the company, under most arrangements, prospects owe their backers 3 to 7 percent of their earnings over 10 years.

Given the rise of crowdfunding platforms, it’s not surprising to see such a model target education and career-building. As my colleague Ryan Kim recently wrote, Kickstarter-like startups are pushing into all kinds of fields – from medicine and science to music and gaming. And, in education, USEED and Smartn.me are two sites that enable students to raise money for specific projects.

A different kind of risk profile for students

But Pave is interesting in that it’s not project-centered and backers don’t just garner goodwill or small in-kind returns, they get a real cut of a prospect’s future earnings. And that increases the risk for parties on both sides.

To protect backers, Pave says it does a credit check on all prospects and shares that credit history with backers. And once a prospect starts earning an income and filing tax returns, backers are owed the agreed upon share and an unpaid amount is treated like any other payment claim.

Pave also acknowledges that the site offers a different kind of risk profile to prospects and students.  While students might owe more to backers if they succeed than they might to a traditional lender, ideally, they also receive more mentorship and ongoing career support. And, if they don’t succeed or earn a lower salary, they don’t owe a lender a lump sum that’s disproportionate to their earnings.

It seems like there could still be room for prospects to ask for money to pursue one path and turn to a different field or for backers to invest money but provide little ongoing support in other material ways, but Lahoud said the platform’s design, community and contract are structured to discourage bad actors. It’s not an arrangement for everyone, but it’s a compelling model that could make more capital accessible to more people.

Image by zimmytws via Shutterstock.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Since 2000, company has been based in Tokyo and through its social learning service iKnow has focused on helping Japanese speakers learn English. But on Tuesday, the company announced that it has opened a stateside office in Palo Alto, Calif. and is launching a new product to help people learn and remember any kind of content.  The web-based tool is currently in private beta (the first 500 GigaOM readers can click here for an invite) but is expected to be launched more widely in early 2013.

While several new startups and learning platforms provide formal students and lifelong learners the opportunity to take courses on all kinds of subjects, Andrew Smith Lewis, Cerego’s cofounder and executive chairman, says his product applies learning principles drawn from neuroscience and cognitive science.

As students progress through courses on the site, Cerego takes a “spaced rehearsal” approach, which supports a learning technique that involves the repetition of content over increasing periods of time, to calculate the optimal moments to review content. The algorithms consider what students got right and wrong, as well as their familiarity with related content and, potentially, what others on the platform found challenging or easy to determine how likely they are to forget specific content items and when that content should be reviewed.

“They’re like interactive notecards that are smart and know exactly what you know and don’t know,” said Lewis.

The site has been seeded with about 50 courses on topics from exotic animals to statistics to American cuts of beef, but the goal is for users – whether they’re students, professors, casual learners, publishers or even corporations – to add to the site with their own content. College students could use it to study for a test on anatomy or adult learners – including those taking courses on online learning sites like Coursera and Udacity – could use it to review programming terminology, Lewis said.

The company said the basic service will remain free, but it plans to charge for premium content from validated publishers as well as premium services, such as advanced analytics or functions for power users.

To date, Lewis said Cerego has raised $28 million from private investors and claims companies including SoftBank and Yahoo Japan as clients. It’s also attracted an interesting group of advisors, including Scott McNealy, co-founder Sun Microsystems and Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. Since launching, 1.1 million Japanese users have logged 3.7 hours on the platform, and Cerego says all of that data has been used t refine the algorithms for its latest product.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro