Online education is hot these days. A perfect storm of record-level student debt, stagnating job growth, and soaring tuition prices has forced a knee-jerk reaction among universities now scrambling to offer free courses online, either through their own platforms or partnerships with startups like Coursera and Udacity. Professors, college administrators, and policymakers have expressed sharply divided views over what this shift means for an institutional learning model that has persisted for hundreds of years. But amidst the debate, lost is the voice of the student.

After all, why should anyone care what we think? Teaching is a profession that society accepts as inherently paternalistic. Conventional wisdom says the student must be told how and what to study. Schools dictate degree requirements and mandate class attendance. But the increasing number of unemployed college graduates shows that these traditional approaches must evolve because they are failing to adequately equip students with the skills they need to be successful. The great promise of online education is that it facilitates the transition to a model that gives students greater input into how they learn and challenges instructors to reflect on what students really need. Here are three reasons why universities must adopt online education to remain relevant:

Limited access to on-campus classes

Much discussion around the benefits of online education has centered on enabling access for students who would otherwise be unable to afford or attend college. But a parallel problem exists today: students currently enrolled at colleges can’t get into classes that they need or want to take. Budget cuts at schools have resulted in fewer instructors and oversubscribed classes, causing students to fall short of fulfilling academic requirements and delaying their graduation dates. Lotteries for classes are common, leaving students literally begging administrators to open more spots. The problem extends to elite universities as well. The implicit promise made to prospective students that they will get to learn from marquee professors often goes unfulfilled. Frustration over paying more than $50,000 per year to attend a school without access to the best classes is today mostly confined to students venting amongst themselves. But if costs continue to rise, there will come a day where students, and their parents, say enough is enough. Online platforms are a low-cost way for universities to support, rather than hinder, students’ learning in light of the resource constraints that schools face.

Lack of customized programs

The traditional classroom model also largely ignores the fact that students learn at different speeds. Students who are already familiar with some of the course material are unable to skip ahead, resulting in wasteful repetition. Students who do not grasp concepts taught during class are left to figure them out through a combination of office hours and peer support, often struggling to recall, “What did the professor say about X?” Online classes mean that students can learn at the pace that’s right for them, which translates into better learning overall.

Restricted innovation in course content

Moving classes online also means that content and teaching materials can be distributed on a recurring basis at very low cost, freeing up instructors’ time to further develop new content. Today a professor may spend a few years developing a body of course materials that eventually gets “recycled” in a particular course, year in and year out, for the next decade without much further modification. This model of repetitive teaching is highly inefficient. It consumes time that could be better spent developing new content or engaging with students in a manner that supplements lectures that only need to be recorded once, not recreated in a classroom every year. Online education will drive new, hybrid learning methods and push teachers to create innovative content instead of rehashing what they have already done before.

The value of emerging online platforms today lies in their ability to distribute content to anyone who wants to learn. Of course the value of the traditional university model goes far beyond access to content. Equally, or perhaps even more, important is who we learn with, especially when surrounded by a peer group that is smarter, diverse, and collaborative. It is this community aspect that online platforms will find difficult to replicate, but we should not underestimate their ability to figure it out. The Internet is social by nature and will inevitably invent new ways to implement collaborative learning. Universities must respond to the needs of their students by moving online or risk turning their backs on the very sort of innovative ideas that they are meant to foster.

Online Education image via mtkang/Shutterstock

This guest post was written by Wei Lien Dang, currently a JD/MBA student at Harvard University. He previously attended the California Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, and University of Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Video games for the iPad are an unlikely ally in the fight to help America’s students close the achievement gap in math. But that’s just what startup Motion Math has in mind.

Motion Math is a San Francisco game design studio that creates fun and engaging iPad and iPhone games to teach children mental arithmetic skills. Motion Math: Hungry Fish was released on Thursday, to teach addition and subtraction with the help of a fish who wants to snack on number combinations.

Most educational games teach a single problem-solving method and emphasize the answer. Add 2+2 and you get 4. Hungry Fish inverts mathematical instruction to teach conceptual knowledge.

If the fish is marked with a 7, there are a variety of ways to reach this sum; 5+2, 6+1 or 3+4. Tap the screen to get the fish to chomp on bubbles with the different numbers, collecting points as you go. Part of the fun comes from adding a visceral component to math instruction. And as a result, students learn the process by which they can reach an answer, instead of just memorizing a bunch of number combinations.

“It’s both more engaging, and there’s a lot of evidence that doing the same thing over and over again doesn’t lead to deeper, conceptual knowledge,” Motion Math co-founder Jacob Klein told VentureBeat. Hungry Fish has 18 levels and is even challenging for adults in the later stages, says Klein.

Winning a level allows the player to customize his or her fish with new colors and snazzy fins. Klein says an updated version of Hungry Fish with new levels will be released over the weekend.

Motion Math also commissioned a study to verify the effectiveness of video games in the mathematics learning process. “It’s easy to make something that looks educational,” says Klein. “We wanted to learn from experts in the field.”

Researcher Michelle Riconscente of the USC Rossier School of Education conducted the study, funded by a grant from the Noyce Foundation and Motion Math. Riconscente’s study observed 166  5th grade students who played the Motion Math fractions game and found that they improved their fractions test scores by 15 percent after playing Motion Math for 20 minutes each day for five straight days. The study also found that students’ confidence towards math problems improved after playing the games.

So perhaps parents have one more good reason to buy their kids an iPad or iPod Touch for Christmas this year.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Education technology is a red-hot market, and both startups and investors are taking note.

Edmodo, a social network for education, stands poised to benefit tremendously from the great shifts taking place in educational delivery. The company announced today that it raised $15 million from  Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital. Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Benchmark Capital general partner Matt Cohler also joined Edmodo’s board.

A typical student will spend 13 years in the classroom before graduating high school, and American taxpayers invested more than $536 billion on K-12 education during the 2005-2006 school year, according to the Department of Education.  At this rate, roughly $7 trillion dollars will be spent on a public primary education by the time today’s kindergarteners receive their high school diplomas in 2024. And that’s not accounting for inflation.

Edmodo is a free tool that allows teachers to create and maintain a private social network for their classroom. It’s available to students and teachers on PCs and any wireless device, such as a smartphone, or an iPod Touch. Edmodo can be used to share educational content, manage projects and assignments, handle notifications, conduct quizzes and create collaborative learning experiences that live long after the school day has ended. The company dubs the experience the “educational graph,” which closely tracks the Facebook’s “social graph.”

Edmodo was founded in September 2008 and has grown to more than 5 million users in the past year — a tenfold increase from just one year ago.

“This is a really exciting time in the education space, with more and more classrooms having access to the Internet,” Edmodo co-founder and chief executive officer Nic Borg told VentureBeat. ”We’re excited to be bringing cloud technologies to the classroom.” At a private event with Hoffman, Borg told a group of reporters that more schools were equipped with Wi-Fi in 2010 than in the previous five years combined.

Edmodo recently demonstrated the scale and flexibility of its educational technology, teaching students about polar bears through a live video stream. In collaboration with Polar Bears International, Edmodo sent five researchers to the tundra to host a series of three live, interactive webcasts that were viewed by students in 1,700 classrooms in 40 different countries, and 48 states in the U.S.

Edmodo will remain free for teachers and students to use, Borg stressed. Ultimately the company has its sights set beyond the classroom. The company wants to be the Salesforce for Edtech, Borg said, and move school districts’ legacy information technology to the cloud. Edmodo hopes to  save school districts money and eliminate the hassles of maintaining legacy IT by selling “premium services,” and replicating these information systems with a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) model.

Each year $40-$50 billion in K-12 education is spent on non-salary expenses, Borg says. Part of this goes to maintain computer systems to handle functions such as grading, attendance and other academic record-keeping. Typically IT procurement for schools is done at a district-wide level. But because millions of students are already using free Edmodo classroom software, the company has  injected itself into school districts from coast-to-coast, avoiding the need for lengthy approvals. How’s that for viral marketing?

Edmodo is based in San Mateo, CA, and currently has 35 employees. Hoffman is a previous investor in the company, and Edmodo has received previous funding from Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital.