This is a tweetstorm about things that have surprised me having started a school, coming from a non-educational background
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1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad
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Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their effectiveness, and most don’t try. If you can’t measure effectiveness you can’t fail.
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3. Many academics believe you can’t learn online. Not that you can only learn a subset of things or that the learning is worse because it misses x y and z if not in person. They literally don’t believe it’s possible to have an effective online education.
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4. Apparently I can’t spell or number things correctly
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5. We accept students from all sorts of backgrounds, including socioeconomic, educational, etc. Our top performers? The poorest students with no college education. Hypothesis? They have no other options
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6. Everyone knows too many people attending universities don’t consider the financial burden, but NO ONE thinks about the time. Four years is a LONG time, but it doesn’t enter into peoples’ thinking generally when deciding if they should get a degree
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7. We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane.
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Replying to @AustenAllred
$400 is incidentally the average annual cost for a 5 Mbps Internet connection. Wonder if it'd help partnering with ISPs around the country for a sort of "educational access grant?" Sort of a free year of access with, say, a two year contract if student nets a >$50K job?
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Replying to @prezcannady @AustenAllred
Spitballing here, but it seems a good way for companies to go about cultivating future customers is to get in on the ground floor on boosting incomes. Connectivity is a pretty cheap way to invest, I'd think.
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Anecdotally there have only been a couple times when Internet has been the issue
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