The GSV Big 10: The End of School Boards and Grades?
The GSV Big 10: The End of School Boards and Grades?
Here's your weekly coverage corner for the top 10 stories, insights, and major plays in education and upskilling.
#1 The evolution of edtech: activity in private and public markets
While thereâs been some pause in the action in edtech, the trend is your friend. Education is four-fifths the size of the healthcare industry ($6.5T vs. $8T), but edtech VC investment is one-sixth the size. With less than 4% of education digitized, weâre still in the early innings of the learning revolution.
#2 Itâs time to eliminate school boards
The secretâs out of the bag: an unbelievably small number of voters get school boards elected⌠which school boards figured out a long time ago. Virginia was a wake-up call. In addition to getting the vote out, we ought to rethink the structure of boards. An average tenure of 2-4 years (vs. 10 years for a public company board director) is not consistent with how you create long term change.
#3 Quarterfinalists announced in competition for $1 million Yass Prize
In conjunction with the Yass Prize, the STOP (Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding and Permissionless (STOP) Awards are giving away over $10M to education innovators, providers and entrepreneurs. Thatâs a lot of juice going to innovative ideas. The awards will be held December 14 at Forbes on Fifth in Miami â one of the hottest places for innovation.
#4 University of hypocrisy
Ivy League schools are hypocritical in their role in producing inequality. Talent is equally distributed â opportunity is not. The âpoison ivyâ of elite universities is the fantasy that the system which they belong to does good. Elite means excellence, not exclusivity.Â
#5 Momentum builds for helping students adapt to college by nixing freshman gradesÂ
Itâs time to reimagine how we measure student performance. Higher education should measure âwhat did I learn,â not âwhat did I get.â Colleges have traditionally measured âtime in seatâ rather than competencies. If âun-gradingâ empowers students to focus on mastery and instructors to create outcomes-based assessments, weâre for it.
#6 5G rollout will benefit education sector in big way
The digital divide is a real issue in India, and 5G could be a transformative equalizer. Only one in four schools in India are connected to the Internet. Increasing school connectivity by 10% increases effective years of schooling by 0.6%, and GDP per capita by 1.1%, according to estimates from The Economist. 5G is long on potential and opens up digital opportunities.
#7 Meet Fizz, the social app downloaded by '95% of Stanford undergrads'
Weâve heard this story before: a social app starts at Stanford and spreads like wildfire. Time will tell if Fizz is the next Snap or if it will âfizz outâ like YikYak.Â
#8 With online learning, âlet's take a breath and see what worked and didn't work.â
How âbout them apples: 82% of Harvard faculty are interested in adding digital tools they adopted while teaching remotely to in-person classes. The consensus is clear: digital learning is here to stay âADâ â after disease.
#9 School disrupted part 3: What parents know (donât know) impacts schooling decisions
What you donât know wonât hurt you? We think the opposite. More parents are now informed about alternative school models. Younger parents are 20% more likely to say they will enroll their children in more flexible, adaptive, and personalized school models in the next three years.
#10 The Economist asks: How can covid learning loss be overcome?
While COVID was a natural disaster, the way we dealt with it was a self-inflicted one. Jamie Saavedra, Global Education Director at the World Bank, shared the consequences: 1 month of school closures equaled 1 month of learning loss, and this generation is on track to lose $17T in lifetime earnings (14% of todayâs GDP).