What happened to music because of the Internet—going from few creators to many—is going to happen to education very soon, says Don Smithmier, and his new “social teaching” Web site, Sophia, is going to be part of that change. That’s a big claim for a small start-up now in beta testing, but it seems more plausible the first week of February, after Capella Education, the corporation behind the online educator Capella University, made a substantial investment in his company.
“The money is going to let us scale up,” Mr. Smithmier says. “And they have 38,000 learners in their system, so it lets us pilot studies of our technology.” Michael Walsh, a Capella spokesoman, said the company could not disclose the amount of money, because they were in a so-called “quiet period” required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Officials did say in a prepared statement that they viewed Sophia as a strategic investment.
The basic idea behind Sophia is to identify the best teachers for any concept, put their instruction for that concept online, and students all over the world can use these “learning packets” free of charge. For example, a professor who has a really great lesson on how to factor polynomials can package that lesson—complete with video and any other materials—on Sophia, and search engines like Google will let students find it and use it.
But who decides what makes a lesson really great? Or even accurate? Mr. Smithmier says the site has two levels of quality assurance. One is votes from users. Currently there are about 1,100 of them, and more than half are educators at the college level. They get to rate each learning packet with a 5-star system. The second level is a rating of academic soundness. “People on Sophia identify themselves as someone with an advanced degree in a particular subject, and then they rate the packets,” Mr. Smithmier says. “Three positive ratings get a packet a green check mark.” He admits that people can lie about their expertise in this system. “It will happen,” he says. But he thinks other experts and the community in general will catch them. Raters themselves are constantly rated by others in the Sophia network.
The difference between Sophia and a learning-management system that also allows professors to post instructional material, like Moodle or Blackboard, is that Sophia is not institution-limited. It starts with a public community, rather than just people affiliated with a particular course at a particular college.
There will, however, eventually be private versions of Sophia licensed to colleges, Mr. Smithmier says. These versions would be integrated with a college’s student information system, letting instructors track an individual student’s performance. That’s how the company intends to make money. For now, Sophia intends to make its beta version public in March, and free for all.
8 Responses to ‘Social Teaching’ Company Gets Buy-In From Capella Education
allie_shipper - February 5, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Sophia is using a very interesting model to make education more sharable. I will be curious to see which subjects will be heavily developed – I would hope to see a heavy science and math concentration.
Will this also be implemented in junior colleges?
illinois1 - February 7, 2011 at 7:23 am
Comparing what will happen to education to what’s happened to music says it all.
hkacpa - February 7, 2011 at 8:30 am
I record and post every accounting class I teach on my schools intranet using camtasia. I posted approximately 130 full class videos during the Fall 2010 semester. Students are finding this a great resource they can access 24/7.
I also communicate with my students using Skype.
This isn’t beta anymore. It is what you will be doing if you want to make your classes relevant to the next generation.
Check out The Next Generation Accounting Classroom for more at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbvkLLBj7Q4
H. Kyle Anderson, CMA, CPA
Professor of Accounting
864-933-3815 / Skype: hkacpa
http://aandaupdate.com/
drdelia - February 7, 2011 at 9:10 am
How is this different from Merlot http://www.merlot.org/merlot/index.htm which has been offering learning modules contributed by educators and rated by peers since 1997?
From their site: MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.
Sounds like Sophia is reinventing the Merlot wheel.
Dr. D’Elia
grward - February 7, 2011 at 10:57 am
I think this is going to be the way of the future: various instructors (or would-be instructors) explaining specific concepts in various ways, in small “packets” of instruction, while students seek the one who best fits their personal style. It won’t much matter whether we like it or not. Like anything involving technology, however, this will have both good and bad implications. Obviously, if someone needs to learn the steps behind, say, genetic recombination during the first meiotic division, and a particular instructor has a clear way of explaining it, then there are obvious benefits to making that explanation available to large numbers of students. However, I see at least two potential problems here.
1) students benefit most from those “eureka” moments when they’ve been pondering a problem in their heads (often from lecture notes), twisting and turning the bits and pieces until, eureka!, they figure it out. I see future students deciding that trying to figure something out is no longer worth the effort, when they can spend their evenings going from one video to another until they find one that makes it easy enough that they can “know” the concept without expending a lot of intellectual effort. Both methods lead to the student knowing the concept, but I think I speak for most of us in academia when I suggest that the value of the first method is superior in its benefit to the students.
2) Understanding based upon discrete “packets” of information can help build a foundation of knowledge in a particular area, but the value of that knowledge will be formed by the ability of the students to “tie it all together” into a larger level of understanding. Will there be videos of instructors trying to explain how to get the most out of the knowledge just acquired? If so, will it be meaningful if the instructor tying together all of the “packets” isn’t the one the students learned from in the first place? I worry that we’ll end up with a generation (much like the current one, I’m afraid to say) that equates knowing a bunch of “stuff” with being truly educated.
triangleman - February 7, 2011 at 11:16 am
As a present Sophia user, I’ll answer a few questions in order from the top:
allie_shipper: Yes; lots of math and science on Sophia, and yes, there is a focus on community (junior) colleges. I teach at a community college in Minnesota and got involved with Sophia when they presented to our math department on campus.
illinois1: Indeed (maybe). And I would add journalism to the analogy. Here’s an interesting article on the phenomenon in journalism; I saw a lot of parallels to education: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/12/0083200
hkacpa: you wrote, “It is what you will be doing if you want to make your classes relevant to the next generation.” Amen. And old-style learning management systems aren’t set up to do these things. I was excited about Sophia because it would let me do some basic things that our adopted D2L does not, such as make resources publicly available, notify my students automatically (if they wish) when something new goes online, write text to accompany videos and links, etc.
drdelia: I recently wrote a Sophia packet on “Circles” for a geometry course I teach. If you go to Sophia now, as a student, and search “Circles” you actually get a list of packets-including mine-right away. One search, one click, you’ve got information you’re looking for.
Merlot is oriented towards sharing resources among educators. Search “circles” on Merlot and you get lots of results; hard to know which one is going to tell me about the important properties of circles, and hard to know how I get some information that speaks to me directly as a student, instead of a conglomeration of resources that my teacher might use to teach me about circles, but which may not be directly useful to me. I just drilled down 5 clicks on Merlot and still don’t have something that will give me the mathematical definition of a circle.
grward: I agree with everything you’ve written. Keep in mind that Sophia is a TOOL. How people (e.g. instructors) use that tool will vary greatly. As I have used Sophia in my courses in recent months, I have found that it is really good for providing review and support of important ideas from our class sessions, whether they are lecture-based or activity-based. Just as lectures and class activities (and assignments and exams, etc.) are tools for teaching and learning, so too is Sophia. Just as there are good, rich, thoughtful and useful lectures; there will be good, rich, thoughtful and useful Sophia packets. And just as some class sessions are stinkers, so too will some learning packets.
pr_professional - February 7, 2011 at 1:41 pm
Before social media and open courseware, we had the guest speaker to provide specialized knowledge or a unique take on a subject. Guest speakers were (and are still) paid. If we now expect experts to give us the fruits of their research and years of teaching excellence free of charge–how are they to sustain themselves? It’s the same with online news aggregators. At some point, the sources producing expert, quality content will cease to exist unless they establish a model whereby the aggregators pay for use. There will be no expert, quality news content to aggregate.