Top Quality Education For Everyone! But What’s ‘Top Quality’?

The following guest post is by Eren Bali, cofounder and CEO of Udemy

When 160,000 students registered for an online version of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course, many thought that the dream of bringing top quality education to everyone was within reach. But do we really know what a top quality education looks like?

This year, the number of unemployed people with college degrees surpassed the number of unemployed people with only high school degrees. That’s incredibly alarming. It means that even if we bring higher education to more people, they may not be able to find jobs and get a return on their educational investment.

Education hasn’t changed much in the last 300 years. Many people in education are passionate about improvement and innovation, but unfortunately the system is set up to be risk averse. We are afraid of failing our students, and consequently we don’t test enough and learn how to improve. Now, don’t get me wrong – innovation certainly happens in many places. One great recent example is in New York where Mayor Bloomberg is opening small, theme-based high schools and successfully doubling graduation rates. But we need even more innovation like this.

I realized the scale of this problem while I was watching Reed Hastings, the CEO of
Netflix
, tell a story at a conference. The California State Board of Education, which he was a member of at the time, was deciding which textbooks to approve. Reed suggested using Book A in some classrooms and Book B in others. By testing the two options, they could figure out which book led to better student results. In the marketing and technology worlds, this approach is widely used and known as A/B testing. But this approach wasn’t something the California State Board (and much of the educational world) would normally consider.

You often hear things like, people with college degrees earn 30% more than people with only high school degrees. But these statistics are very misleading and they don’t tell us that a college education results in a 30% increase in earnings. Unless you take a random group of high school graduates and prevent them from going to college, and take another random group of high school graduates and force them to get a college degree, and then compare the outcomes of the students in the two groups, you can’t tell if the effect you see is a result of causation or correlation. It may be that the people who go to college tend to be more motivated and so they get better jobs.

This lack of testing & innovation in education is preventing us from keeping up with student needs. It’s not for lack of effort. Surely everyone who works in education genuinely wants to improve student outcomes and make education better. Rather, there are a range of structure, cultural, and organizational issues in the system which we need to work together to solve.

The way to move forward and break down these issues is to open up the education market and encourage more risk-taking and more innovation. Time after time we’ve shown that opening up markets causes dramatic increases in innovation. One of my favorite examples is blogging. The rise of blogging platforms opened up the news market and allowed anyone to be a journalist – this caused incredible innovation in the way we deliver and consume news.

We need to open up the education market to spur more innovation and risk-taking. We need more teachers taking risks, but to encourage them to do so we need to empower, reward, and incentivize them in the right way.

Teachers need to be given more ownership and control of their courses. They need to be able to explore a wide range of teaching styles and they need to be able to measure their effects by looking at real outcomes (e.g., employment rates or student incomes). That’s why Udemy and many other ed-tech platforms are focused on connecting teachers directly with their students. If the millions of experts in the world are allowed to innovate and teach in their own ways, over time we will figure out what courses, what teaching methods, and what approaches work best for each student’s learning style. The result will be a better educated, more qualified, dynamic, global workforce. And much happier students!