The future of undergraduate university?

(a bold tech entrepreneur thinks he can reshape higher education by returning to the essence of education, taking on large lectures, tenured jobs, rugby matches, and all the ivy-filled buildings and research libraries.) If he's right,

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(A daring tech entrepreneur thinks he can reshape higher education by returning to the essence of education, taking on large lectures, tenured jobs, football matches, and building and research libraries full of ivy.) What if he's right? ）

On a Friday morning in April, I took a headset, leaned on the microphone, and experienced a heard to the future of higher education. I was on the nine floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, where many new businesses were stationed, many of them technology start-ups. In a small room, I stood with a critic and a technical manager who came from an educational innovation agency called Minerva Project. And their founder and ceo,39, Ben Nelson, wanted to overturn (or, when he was less radical, use the word "reform") to teach modern undergraduate arts and sciences.

Minerva is an accredited university. Minerva's executive Body and dormitory are located in San Francisco, and plans to establish campuses in at least six other major cities in the world. But what really makes Minerva, unlike traditional universities, is a patented online teaching platform that will put into practice the teaching system, which is one of the world's top psychologists, the former Harvard Dean, Stephen K. Kosslyn, Studies and endorses. Kosslyn joined Minerva University in 2012.

I was previously invited by Nelson and Kosslyn to participate in the trial run of the platform. My first impression was like the opening of the TV series The Brady Bunch: a professor and eight "students" (all other Minerva staff) appeared in front of the screen, and then introduced themselves. In college classrooms, this feels impersonal. Although they are in different offices on the same floor, I feel far away from the students, as if they were receiving signals from the International Space Station (Minerva). I almost wanted someone's face to float an astronaut for ice cream.

But within minutes, the rhythm of the course became tense. This class is one of a series of inductive reasoning courses, which was tried by French physicist Eric Bonabeau to teach his teaching materials. Bonabeau first investigated our understanding of reading materials, a paper on the North Atlantic cod slump in the early 90 's. Then ask questions about which interpretation of the article is correct, four choose one.

Usually, the undergraduate class will be silent because the students have no courage to speak. Unless a loud voice or caffeine intake is too high for the students to guess first. But Minerva's class is not a refuge for timid students, and no one wins more privileges for words. Every student has to give the answer in a short time because of the teaching platform. Bonabeau lists these options so that we can defend our views when we are named.

Bonabeau, like a loving dictator, guides the rhythm of the whole lesson, giving us a little test of surprise, a name-raising question, and other teaching methods that are enough to sacrifice a lot of valuable classroom time in a small class in a traditional physics classroom. He divided us into groups of debates that held a different view-"cod disappeared because of overfishing by humans, or for other reasons".

No one needs a change of seat; Bonabeau just pressed a button and the other group of students just disappeared from my computer screen. I was left with the other three debater in the group, and we were working on a shared collaborative editing blackboard, so we could record our ideas on it. Bonabeau in two groups, providing advice when we work. After a brief debate in two groups of delegates, Bonabeau ended the interaction with a short video about the drawbacks of overfishing ("propaganda", he smiled, adding that we would discuss the logical traps in the next class). After a few flashes of the screen, a 45-minute course ended.

The system still has a few bugs-it goes down once, some videos are delayed-but overall it works well and doesn't feel like a traditional classroom.

First, it's too much of a brain drain: constant forced interaction without leaving a little time to wander or draw graffiti on a notebook or a break. Instead, the platform was a persistent guide to my attention, and because I felt like my professors and classmates were always staring at me, it was almost impossible for me to take my eyes off the screen.

Even if there is a moment I want to think about what is not discussed in the present--for me, these moments are creative moments, but they may also be daydreaming-I feel my attention will immediately return to the specific issues under discussion, because I have to answer a little test or articulate my position. In fact, I was forced to learn. If this is the future of education, it seems a bit fascist authoritarianism ah. Good, but a little fascist.

Minerva, a for-profit university, will begin teaching its first 33 students this month. In order to recruit a good first student, Minerva offers every enrolled student a full tuition scholarship for four consecutive years $10,000 dollars a year, and a first-year stay in San Francisco free of charge. The next Minerva is expected to have a total of 200 to 300 students and is expected to grow by about one times in the first few years.

These prospective students will pay about $28,000 each year, including tuition fees and lodging. Compared to most of the expensive tuition fees in most American universities, Minerva admission and admission means a $30,000 of annual savings--expensive schools including Ivy League schools and other highly selective school places such as Pomona University and Williams University These schools are Minerva rivals. (Of course, most of the American students in these schools do not pay the full tuition fees; like them, Minerva offers grants for students from middle-class families who have to pay tens of thousands of more dollars a year if they go to other universities.) ）

If the Minerva develops to a term of 2,500 students, that would mean 280 million dollars a year's income. The collaboration with KGI University in Claremont, Calif., has allowed Minerva to expedite its official certification, and its advisory board includes Larry Summers (former US Treasury secretary *, former president of Harvard University) and Bob Kerrey (former Democratic senator from Nebraska State, who also served as president of New York new parochial).

* Note: Larry Summers, who served as chairman of the Minerva Advisory Board in 2012-2013, stepped down at the end of 2013. In 2012-2013, Larry Summers as Chairman of the Advisory Board, with Stephen Kosslyn,the New parochial principal Bob Kerrey, former dean of the Wharton School of Business, Patrick Harker, president of the American Association for Educational Research, Lee Schulman and others participated in the design of the core framework of Minerva University.

Nelson's long-term goal for Minerva is to reinvent one of America's most rigid areas, which have been protected from improvement, so that the biggest "innovation" in the past 30 years has been a doubling of costs, hiring more executives and paying them higher salaries.

The paradox of higher education in the United States is that it makes the world envious and yet suffers from criticism. At this point, it can be compared with the American medical system. The high price is enough to make people in other developed countries feel gripped. Through student loans and federal research and development funds or Medicare, they are tightly tied to the government.

If you can afford the Mayo Clinic, America is the most suitable place in the world to be sick. If you can get a scholarship to Stanford University, you should, of course, reject all admissions letters from the best universities in Europe, Australia or Japan. (But, most likely, you won't get the scholarship.) America's 2014-year college graduates have an average debt of 33000 dollars. ）

It is claimed that education is both an art and a science. Nelson retorted: Education, in addition to science or science.

Financial obstacle is the most obvious dilemma faced by higher education. There has been little change in learning techniques over the past Half-century. The easiest way to find out what a university was 500 years ago was to go to any college, get a lecture hall, imagine the Professor speaking Latin, and stand there with a mitral valve. One of the most common types of teaching is still a professor facing a group of students to teach. Although we have been training students to attend classes for more than hundreds of years, we still have no evidence that this is a good way to teach. (Educational psychologist, Lucy Benjamin, takes a big lecture class as a Velveeta cheese-a lot of people consume it, but at the same time no one thinks it's tasty or nutritious.) ）

Over the years, before the advent of Minerva, many innovations in the field of higher education have emerged, most notably the large-scale online open curriculum, referred to as MOOCs. Among the most prominent MOOC courses are the Khan College (Khan Academy) and Coursera, founded by entrepreneur Salman (Salma Khan), a computer scientist at Stanford University, Andrew Ng and Daphne Kohler ( Daphne Koller) led the founder. Khan College began with child tutoring, but it has grown into a series of tutorials that are mainly technical subjects, with many categories and are very effective. Coursera offers university-level courses free of charge (you can also pay for services similar to real college credits). A course can accommodate hundreds of thousands of, millions of student registrations. At the most basic level, these courses are made up of typical college lectures, but they are recorded as video recordings.

But Minerva is not a MOOC provider. Its curriculum is not on a large scale (the upper limit is a small seminar for 19 students) and is not open to the public (Minerva emphasizes excellence and rigorous screening) and is not "online", at least not in Coursera's way.

Lecture classes are forbidden. Minerva All courses take the form of a small seminar and are conducted on the platform I have experienced. The first students have now moved to the fifth floor of a building in the NOB community in San Francisco, a dormitory in Minerva, and started classes with their own Apple laptops.

According to Minerva's plan, students will study and live in a different city every year so that they will have a truly global experience in four years, a goal that other universities often advertise but rarely achieve.

By 2016, the Berlin and Buenos Aires campuses will be officially opened. Cities that may expand in the future include Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. The students will live in two-room dormitories and a shared kitchen. They will also participate in field trips organized by Minerva. For example, visit Alcatraz Island Alcatraz (formerly the seat of a federal prison) with a prison psychologist. Minerva will stick to the idea of no facilities--except for dormitories, libraries, canteens and gyms. Students will use city parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, to enrich their extracurricular activities.

Kosslyn that lectures are inexpensive for schools, but the teaching effect is not good. "The teacher is very convenient to teach, but the students are very bad at it." ”

As long as there is a network connection, professors can live anywhere. Given the reluctance of many academics to live in Evansville, Indiana and other coastal elites, geographical freedom will be an important factor in Minerva's recruitment of faculty.

The student community can be very globalized, partly because Minervad's policy is to accommodate students irrespective of nationality, thus catering to a large number of unmet educational needs, such as rising Chinese, Indian and Brazilian students ' demand for American liberal arts education.

Minerva is proud that it shanfanjiujian the university experience and retains only the part that really contributes to the education of the students. Large lecture class, cut out. Lifelong teaching post, delete. Gothic architecture, rugby, ivy climbing over walls--delete, delete, delete. Those left will be more exquisite and cheaper. (Minerva has attracted 25 million of billions of dollars from investors who think it can cut jobs.) In addition, Minerva executives say that their teaching methods will be examined by scientifically validated techniques, unlike those adopted by other universities-which are supposed to be fine, simply because they are old and expensive. But also because the curriculum has just begun, we have little evidence that the "pruning" process has removed some of the necessary factors that make America's best universities the best in the world.

After all, Minerva doesn't look like a college--not just because it doesn't have the luxury of decorating. Teaching methods are likely to be optimized, but classroom hours are only part of the university. Can a school without a teacher's office, a research lab, a student community space and a specialized research professor be called a university?

If Minerva fails, it will dismiss employees and sell office furniture and disappear. If it succeeds, it will inspire many entrepreneurs, and a slew of corrupt institutions will be liquidated. You can imagine the deserted campus square overgrown with weeds, demolition of large iron balls to the students left after the empty teaching building, because those students only need to access the new online teaching platform.

The lobby of the building where Minerva is located is a tribute to the classical roots of education: The great Roman statue occupies its main place. (Minerva means the goddess of wisdom in Rome.) However, Minerva employees work in the nine floor, where the atmosphere is very California free-style professionalism.

Everyone, including the senior officials of the university, works in an open environment. Usually when it comes to academics ' offices, I associate chalk dust, scattered papers, and books that are stacked against fire regulations. But here, what I see is neatness.

Among Minerva employees, the least "academic" is its founder and CEO and chief evangelist. Ben Nelson entered the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School as an undergraduate student in the late 90 and had no further contact with academia until 2010, when he began hatching Minerva. The main item on his resume was his 10-year executive at snapfish--, an online photo service company that allowed users to print photos on postcards and books.

Nelson had curly hair and glasses, and when I saw him he wore a casual button shirt, no tie or coat. His ambition to reform academia stems from his own undergraduate experience. In his view, what he received at Wharton was a series of disordered business guides, and a lack of co-ordinated organization to ensure that he mastered those fundamental skills, such as critical thinking.

"All my criticisms of higher education start with the curriculum reform of Pentax," he said. "General education does not exist." It's like a very casual buffet. And when you lack a plan for the overall academic experience, you basically don't learn anything. You only get a bunch of random information and a collection of content. Liberal arts education should develop students ' intellectual ability and learn how to be a person who can contribute to society. You can't do this without a system syllabus. ”

Minerva students will start their university studies from four of the same cornerstone courses (Cornerstone courses), which will introduce core theories and thinking patterns throughout the scientific and humanities disciplines. These courses are not like 101 basic courses used in other universities to impart knowledge of basic subjects. ("The first grade in a traditional university should not exist," Nelson said.) He believes that large-scale online public classes have been completely free to impart basic knowledge. "Today's students should be at home to complete the practice of a freshman course." On the contrary, Minerva's first year's course was designed to foster what Nelson called "Thinking Habits" and "groundbreaking Theory", which are the basis of systematic thinking in all fields. For example, in a science class, students should develop a deep understanding of controlled experiments. In a humanities class, they need to learn the classical skills of rhetoric and develop basic persuasion skills. and sophomore to senior courses will be based on this basis for further development.

"Minerva University has let us rethink the original idea of education," said Harry Lewis, a former Harvard Dean. What does the so-called ' receiving education ' mean? ”

Nelson is happy to compare this structured core course design with the state of other universities: his core curriculum of design chaos at the University of Pennsylvania, the almost unconstrained core curriculum at Brown University, and the core curriculum of Columbia University, which is centered around historical writings. As Minerva students enter sophomore years, they will choose one direction from five major majors: Arts and humanities, social sciences, computer science, natural sciences, or business.

In 2005, Hewlett-Packard bought Snapfish,nelson at a price of 300 million dollars enough to support his two years in preparation for his dream plan. As for Minerva's idea of education, he will pour out his rhetoric, he has a very big judgment on the current state of higher education, some judgments are very insightful, others are merely speculative. He spoke at many meetings, dismissing some of the long-established teaching methods directly, and making the conservative academic executives nervous. "Your cash cow is a lecture class, but the lecture class is in the past." He said to a group of deans, "the model of the lecture class ... will eventually be replaced. ”

In academia, open competition between schools and schools seems to be grossly unethical, but Nelson is a bright presence. Imagine that the President of Columbia University told other Ivy League principals, as Nelson sometimes told his competitors, "Our goal is not to let you go bankrupt, but to let you see that there is a better way to do what you are doing and welcome you to follow our progress." ”）

Another taboo that Nelson ignores is the incentive to recognise profit. "It's the devil's job to profit from higher education-" said Nelson (who mentions that most for-profit colleges are indeed notorious diploma presses, which place posters everywhere), "as if non-profit institutions are not driven by profit!" He roared. "They just evade the taxes of the business. (see "The Law School Scam".) ）

Minerva was built to make a profit, but Nelson insists his motives will be in line with the interests of the students. As evidence, Nielsen says Minerva will not accept federal funding, which he believes is an important reason for the runaway costs of colleges and universities. The compliance cost of receiving federal financial aid is about 1000 dollars per student, or one-tenth of Minerva tuition. Such assistance is largely useless for most students of Minerva, who are from other countries.

The subsidy policy encourages universities to recruit and even enroll students who are unlikely to learn, Nelson said. And because the federal government's money is linked to costs, it has prompted universities to raise tuition fees. These influences, he says, permeate higher education but have nothing to do with the teaching of students. He thought that once Minerva accepted the lure of federal money, he would eventually have to ask for money behind the federal government. On the contrary, it is as if Ulysses had tied himself to the mast of a ship before the siren's temptation, Minerva would have only received the infusion of non-governmental funds. "If you inject a drug (federal fund) into a system, the system will change itself to suit the drug. If Minerva accepted the money from the government, we would be a school with a majority of American students in 20 years, and tuition fees would rise substantially. No matter how hard you try to resist these problems, if your architecture is not directed towards your ultimate goal, then it will inevitably go in the direction of misfortune. ”

Speaking of the future of Minerva, Nelson believes that a university's hundreds of-year lifespan is very different from the typical decades-long time span of a large company. The establishment of Minerva is a rare event. "We're building an institution that hasn't been tried and done for the last more than 100 years since Rice University." --rice University is a four-year institution of higher learning based on liberal arts education in the United States. It was founded in 1912, and now tuition fees have been $53,966 dollars a year.

At present, Minerva has recruited all the Deans, who will personally teach all the courses for the first students. Later this year, Minerva will begin recruiting staff with rank distribution. One of the main strategies of Minerva is to attract a group of outstanding scholars from the existing educational institutions. Other "new" institutions have tried similar ideas, such as the hugely wealthy institutions such as the King Abdullah Technology University in Saudi Arabia, which seem to have a belief in "goods worship", thinking that putting the labs and offices full of teachers will make their colleges a heavyweight.

Eric Bonabeau is one of the renowned academics hired by Minerva. He was the Dean of the Academy of Computational Sciences and was responsible for teaching me the course of the trial run. Bonabeau is an experienced physicist in academia and business, studying the mathematical calculations of cluster phenomena (bees, fish, robots). Michael Crichton's thriller novel Prey inspired by Bonabeau's research. Diane Halpern, a renowned psychologist, also contracted to become dean of the Minerva Social Sciences Institute this year.

The first big step in Minerva's recruitment was Stephen M. Kosslyn. I personally knew him when I checked my head in the fall of 1999. Kosslyn has been teaching cognitive psychology and neuroscience for 32 years at Harvard. I used to go to his lab at the undergraduate level and occasionally make a few bucks for his little white rat. This usually involves me sticking my head into an fMRI machine, and he and his researchers are responsible for documenting my brain activity and seeing which part is responding.

During that time, the news media began to focus on Kosslyn's lab, as it began to show the world that "thought-thinking"-that is, through your brain to "see" the experience of things-is really feasible. (one of the studies involved a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine for volunteers and asked them to keep a cat image as long as possible in the brain.) You can try this experience now. If you're particularly good at concentrating, the cat may disappear in a matter of seconds, and once your brain--it jumps over a puppy--there's another thing it wants to notice. Kosslyn, dean of Social Sciences at Harvard University for 2008-2010 years, went to Stanford for the next two years as head of the Stanford Behavioral Research Center. After a period of contract work for Minerva in 2013, he resigned from Stanford University and formally joined the Minerva University as the founding director.

Kosslyn's conversation was slow and soft, with little emotional overtones. Bald and bearded, he had an owl-like eye. For a few moments in the middle of my recent conversations with him, he was like scanning my brain with his eyes. To show some cognitive science theories (or also for fun), he will let you do small cognitive tasks and patiently wait for you to complete these tasks before telling you what actually happened in your brain. When you talk to him, you often feel as if your brain is a machine, and his job is to better understand how the machine works than the machine itself.

During his first year in Minerva, he spent a great deal of time reading literature about education and psychology. "We have a lot of reliable, repeatable experimental results that tell us how humans learn and what teachers can do to improve their learning." "From a scientific point of view, some of the research has been alive for a long time--but the experience they have summed up has been completely ignored."

For example, he referred to the study published in the Journal of Speech Learning and speech behavior by Fergus Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in the year 1972. The study shows that "deep" cognitive tasks can greatly improve people's memory of content. In a teaching environment, such tasks include practical exercises, applications, and arguments based on teaching content (memory alone is not enough).

This discovery is not revolutionary at all, but it is revolutionary to apply it systematically to the classroom. Similarly, research shows that a small surprise quiz at the start of a class and a second quiz at any other time in the class can significantly improve the persistence of the content in the brain.

Similarly, if you ask a student to explain a concept she is learning, the act of "active interpretation" seems to deepen the impression that the concept has left in her mind. Asking students to guess the answers to the questions and having them discuss their guesses in a group seems to make them better able to understand the problem itself-even if they guessed the wrong answer.

Kosslyn has the power that no one at Harvard has, even the president of Harvard University. He can tell people what to do and they have to do it.

Kosslyn has begun publishing research in the field of "Learning science". His latest signature paper, published in the psychology of public interest, the paper suggests that the traditional concept of "cognitive classification"--dividing people into visual and auditory cognitive (i.e., some people learn through practice and others through research)--is confusing and wrong.

The best teaching practices that Kosslyn understand have been programmed into the Minerva platform to make it easy for Minerva professors to apply. Not only is it easy, in fact, it is necessary, professors have to undergo intensive training to learn how to use this platform.

This approach does have a high efficiency. In the traditional classroom, the test is usually taken out of paper and pen, not to mention the eyes of the students turned. But in the Minerva platform, the quiz-often just a multiple-choice-can be done in seconds, and the students ' answers can be uploaded to the system for analysis in real time. Professors are able to divide students into groups based on standards--perhaps a group of poets and businessmen--so that weaker students in some subjects can fully observe the thinking process of their strong teammates. Some people say that education is both a science and an art. Nelson retorted: "Education is not only science, but science." ”

Nelson prefers to compare this method with a traditional seminar. He said he had spoken to a top university principal-he declined to say who-it was in the run-up to the Minerva that he discovered that the monarch's educational outlook, in a nutshell, was belief. "The man said that elite schools are so good, because you brought in a field of experts, plus a bunch of smart students, threw them into a classroom, put a lot of pressure on them-and waited for the magic to happen," Nelson told me, "and that's the man's analysis. It's like they're selling magic. It's like some kind of accidental probability event. Of course, it didn't happen when I was a college student. ”

For Kosslyn, it is a great advantage for Minerva to implant the efficient teaching method directly into the platform. "Usually, the teaching process is completely random," he said. "One day, someone graduated from his ph. D., and then the next day he stood on the podium as a professor and began to lecture, basically without any training." ”

Kosslyn said the lecture course is not reliable in teaching sense, although it is cost-effective for universities seeking to cut costs, and hiring a teacher can teach dozens of or even hundreds of students who pay for tuition. "The teacher is very convenient to teach," Kossly said coldly, "but the students are bad at learning." ”

I asked him whether he had tried to use certain psychology courses in the classroom at Harvard and Stanford. He replied that he could have reminded colleagues of the best practices, but they would probably just ignore them. "The time in the classroom belongs to them, sacred and inviolable," he said. The idea that he might impose his own rules on other professors is laughable. Professors, especially tenured professors at universities like Harvard, have no obligation to follow anyone's advice.

It made me think that Kosslyn was once fulfilling the dreams of every university administrator who had met professors who had even stubbornly defied the most reasonable opinions. Kosslyn once had the power to be a rival at Harvard-and the headmaster was no exception. He has the right to instruct people to do something, and they must do so.

For a few moments, in my conversations with Kosslyn and Nelson, I felt like I couldn't wait to see Minerva destroy the ivory tower with its big iron ball.

The undergraduate education system in the United States is a frustrating thing--and I say that as a satisfied client who has studied in two colleges--deep Spring College (a strange but highly selective university in the Desert of California) and Harvard University. In the deep spring, my class has very little more than five students. At Harvard, I went to a great lecture class, but only a few 10 students. I did not sleep in either of these two schools or eat and drink every day, and my education was very worthy of my parents ' annual $16,000 dollars in tuition, after deducting the scholarship I had received.

But Minerva's small classes really remind me of a lot of meaningless, not-so-called forms of discussion and lectures. Then it is clear that if Harvard can spend more time on student teaching, it should be able to improve the experience of small class seminars and replace the worst lectures with something else.

When Eric Bonabeau the students to read in his induction class, he barely cared about what he wanted to tell us about "inductive deduction," or what it had to do with the North Atlantic Cod. When I asked him later why not first introduce the concept of inductive derivation into a class, he said that there was a great deal of introductory guidance on inductive derivation on the internet, and that any Minerva student should be able to use his time to learn the most basic things in her own way. Small classes are used to give students advanced discussion. Of course, he was right.

"The reason we succeed in this mode is because of the existence of MOOCs." MOOCs will eventually eliminate lecture-style lectures. "

Minerva's model succeeds partly because it does not try to compete with free online courses, as traditional universities do, and Minerva uses them cleverly, explains Nelson. Students who need an introductory course in economics can log on to Coursera or Khan College. "We are a university, and Mooc is a form of content release," said Nelson: "We are able to succeed in this teaching model because of the existence of MOOCs." MOOCs will eventually eliminate lecture-style lectures. ”

Indeed, the more I know about Minerva and its operations, the more I begin to realize that some of the university's functions are obsolete when information is everywhere. Just as in the absence of books in different languages, it is necessary to learn Latin to study ancient books; to bring students together and to participate in lectures has been an essential part of higher education. But now, as if we already have a lot of books in different languages, the open classes offered by intelligent professors have emerged.

On the other hand, no one knows if the simplification of a university to a smooth-running teaching machine will continue to promote academic development, or merely to crush universities, replace academics with teachers, and block an entire generation of research. Any outstanding university has the research ability far wins the teaching professor, their work has the strong momentum to promote the academic development, this is the good teacher's instructor cannot match. If Minerva succeeds, is there any place in Minerva, or anywhere else?

Last spring, when universities began sending out admissions notices, and parents across the country began to tremble at the looming high tuition fees, Minerva issued 69 admissions notices. There are 33 students who decide to attend school, which is a typical admission ratio for a liberal arts college. Nelson told me that Minerva's admissions did not take the so-called diversity or gender balance into account.

Applicants at Minerva University need to complete a series of online exams, including the kind of spatial reasoning you've seen in IQ tests. The SAT is not included in the test because a good family student can improve his score by asking for a tutor. "It's a good way to learn how much money a student has," says Nelson. If the candidates perform well enough, Minerva will interview them via Skype and ask them to write a short essay during the interview to prove that they have not written the shooter. "We only have the top 30 applicants," he told me in February, with his hands in the air, marking the admission line. For the past three years, he has spoken to high school students in California, Qatar and Brazil, telling their ideas about education around the world. And this May, he and Minerva's dean finally made the final admissions decision.

Of the students enrolled, Americans accounted for close to 20%-much higher than expected. (Nelson thought there could be as much as 90% overseas students.) It may not be surprising that students of non-traditional backgrounds account for a significant proportion of them-almost one-tenth of them come from the very international United World College (Colleges), a series of campuses around the world (such as Wales, United). Singapore and New Mexico have concentrated students from all corners of the world.

Minerva requires that all enrolled students get their public relations department's approval before receiving a media interview, which seems too restrictive for a university. But they gave me the names of three students who would like to be interviewed.

"That's what Minerva offers: it allows you to experience a variety of different lifestyles, not just your major, but how you really learn to think." ”

When I reached the interview call from Ian Van Buskirk, Marietta, Georgia, he couldn't wait to tell me about his recent story of cutting a two-ton oak into a canoe with his axe, shovel and chisel, and he planned to start his maiden voyage when the interview was over. He told me that if Minerva didn't come to him, he would go to Duke, and although Minerva had no prestige like Duke and a 176-year history, he said it was not a difficult choice. "We don't have a reputation," he told me, "but that means we have a chance to win prestige with our own strength." I'm actually making history now, while I'm talking to you. ”

Minerva also asked him to try out the teaching system I had tried, and Van Buskirk said the "interactivity and intensity" of the course was an important reason for his decision to go to Minerva. "Concentrate on this class. "Unlike those lectures, you just press the recording key on the recording pen." He said that the degree of concentration required in the class was as if he had carved the first axe on the oak of the canoe, and a slight carelessness would have caused the oak to crack.

Another student, Shane Dabor from Brantford, Ontario Prov., Canada, intended to go to the University of Waterloo or the University of Toronto. But his past experience with online learning and a series of internships has convinced him that traditional universities are not for him. "A lot of my friends got nothing in college," he said, "and the two options all looked like gambling, and I chose Minerva." ”

A young Palestinian girl, Rana Abu Diab, from the Silwan district of East Jerusalem, described to me how she learned English by watching movies and reading books (she particularly liked the English translation of the Norwegian philosophy novel Sophie's World). "If I had to rely on something that I learned in school, I wouldn't be able to stick to the two-minute English conversation," he said. She told me in fluent English. During a year of studying media at Zeit University in Ramallah, she heard about Minerva and was determined to put aside all her academic plans and concentrate on applying there. For her, can Sihai life and study, but also by the American liberal arts education, such conditions are irresistible. "I want to read thousands of books and walk miles," she said, "and that's what Minerva can offer: You can experience a variety of different lifestyles, not just your majors, but also how you really learn to think." Minerva accepted her and, like One-third of her classmates, she received an additional scholarship to buy computers and health insurance.

Two students told me that they had had some uneasy thoughts and felt the need to convince themselves or their parents that Minerva was not just a project to make money. Minerva The opening day of the weekend for admissions students, and face-to-face communication with Minerva staff convinced students that the university is reliable. Students now say they have confidence in Minerva-though of course they can drop out of their own free time, almost without a penny.

Some people regard universities as sacred places, and they may even think that the freedom to teach in class without serious teaching is a special part of the university. For these romantics, the university is a safe haven from the world ruled by orthodoxy, money and everyday trifles. Professors can think completely independently, and students come here to undergo stereotypes, through the full experience offered by the university-courses, social life, extracurricular activities. We spend the rest of our lives chasing partners, money and jobs, but in college we enjoy the freedom to have aimless curiosity about subjects that are ignorant, not for efficiency or for practicality.

Although it is too early to attract "enthusiastic Minerva", it is entirely possible to assume that there is no enthusiasm for Minerva or other attempts to reform education through technological innovation.

MOOCs is loved by poor students who are unable to afford the traditional university fees, but also by those who are interested in novelty and who are willing to wear pajamas to study in the rest. MOOCs's position cannot be shaken: for a precocious girl in the rural area of the Republic of Malawi, she learns free math lessons through the Khan Academy, and new Internet resources can change her life.

But the dropout rate for online courses is about 95%, and the dropouts focus on certain subjects, especially computer science, and focus on the boys who feel good about themselves. Even so, Nelson would have loved to point out that MOOCs would be getting better until the end of the day when no one was paying to attend Duke or Johns Hopkins, when Coursera was able to offer a high level of reliable courses with countless five-star evaluations, and free.

Plutarch said: "The mind is not a container to be stuffed, but a lighted flame." My concern about these new internet things is that it is still not known whether they are good ignition. ”

It is still unknown whether Minerva can provide traditional education. Kosslyn's approach to effectively filling students ' brains with learning content is at least as good as "cramming teaching", which cannot be filled. And its design is not like most MOOC just to impart information, but provides a set of thinking tools to help students become more capable of thinking citizens. But advocates of traditional universities argue that the pursuit of "efficiency" is wrong.

"Looking at the other things that are happening in higher education today, Minerva takes us back to the point of education," Harry.r Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard, who has been in office since 2003, said, "What does it mean to be" educated "? "Perhaps the process of education is very abstruse, and it may include many Kosslyn that have failed to show up in the experimental tests of educational efficiency. "I'm sure there are a group of people who want to be educated more effectively," Lewis said. "But how do you improve the efficiency of people's growth?" ”

He warns that innovations in online education are apt to be overstated. "They look like they're going to recreate every aspect of the traditional university, maybe they will really succeed," he said to me, "but the education part is not only the result of good teaching methods, it also comes from putting students in places where they see how scholars work and practice.

He argues that the analogy of "education like Water"-the task of educating students as a torrent of knowledge-is an ancient fallacy. Lewis explains: "Plutarch, the Greek writer of the Roman Empire, said that our minds are not containers to be filled, but flames to be ignited." Part of my concern is whether these startups can do a good job of igniting the flames. ”

When Ben Nelson spoke to the dean of Business schools around the world at a university executive seminar in downtown San Francisco in February, Coursera's Daphne Koller close to his seat, They were calm but firm in their speeches, which seemed to me to be devastating to every school where the guests were present.

At the beginning of a video showing next year's conference, Nelson had a dull wry smile. In the eyes of the two educational entrepreneurs who pride themselves on their education programs, this elaborate video must be like the other expensive luxury of traditional higher education.

"The content is sure to be free and available in the future," said Koller, who is sure to be particularly concerned about the Dean who still thinks the university is responsible for teaching "content." "Those who can survive will be the ones who can envision their own development in this new era." ”

Even if Minerva finally failed to overturn higher education in the United States, other innovators would take his results and keep working.

Nelson lists the advantages they have in comparison to traditional schools: a vibrant and well-funded innovation agency, students from all over the world, and attractive treatment for teachers (they can have their own intellectual property, without having to give lucrative patents to schools, like Stanford University).

In a sense, however, the worst outcome for American higher education may be to set it up as a model and even abolish old universities before everyone confirms that Minerva can offer a satisfactory alternative. While chatting with the three Minerva students, I would like to ask them if they believe that Minerva, like traditional universities, offers them wonderful but intangible, distracting but rewarding experiences-something that Harry Lewis thinks is very important.

But it suddenly occurred to me that at the time I was in college, I was ignorant of the future of college and university life and how much I relied on universities to provide all kinds of resources so that I could receive a good education. These three young people more than I know how to find and use resources, and perhaps in college choice than I more cautious and deliberate. But they have only just started higher education, asking whether their schools can provide them as if they were asking passengers who had just set foot on the "Mayflower" in Plymouth Rock: "What do you think about America?" ”

Lewis's argument that Minerva is challenging back to the beginning of education is no doubt that such a conclusion is not good news for traditional universities. One of the chances of Minerva failure is that people eventually think that a college degree-whatever the so-called liberal education, lighting up wisdom, nurturing a thoughtful citizen-is essentially a diploma, or that you get your first job and some so-called big shots to get into the alumni circle. Minerva without its alumni, if it fails, it seems naïve and idealistic. In that case, it would be like a gamble on the essence of education-a world in which cynicism tends to prevail.

But from another point of view, it is hard to imagine that Minerva will fail: After all, a large part of the planet now has to choose between traditional American universities that are slim in chance, or more parochial vocational education in their own countries, And Minerva can provide another educational model similar to general education for this part of the people. This may provide Minerva with a steady stream of students to pay tuition fees, even if higher education in the United States completely ignores them. Minerva has the hope to get out of the United States and become the world's Amherst (Amherst College in the United States, known for its top undergraduate teaching and a very low proportion of student professors).

However, these are not the words that Ben Nelson defines success. For him, the most crucial thing is that Minerva can push himself to the forefront of educational consciousness and become a leader in the new era for cutting-edge universities such as Yale and Swarthmore. More likely, we can expect Minerva to force schools to look at which teaching smoke bombs can be removed. Its teaching platform will also challenge professors at traditional universities to stop thinking that they are using PowerPoint as a means of making full use of technology.

It seems unlikely that Minerva will have the same number of students as Ohio State in 20 years. But it is almost certain that the 20-year-old classrooms of top universities will become more like Minerva classrooms-professors and students will be geographically separated, and technology as an intermediary will change the nature of teacher-student relations. Even if Minerva finally failed to overturn higher education in the United States, other innovators would take his results and keep working. Any idea that 20 years from now would be exactly the same as that of today's university will become more and more like the hope that the "dinosaurs" in higher education are praying that they will retire before they are extinct.

I had the privilege of sitting next to a group of amiable deans from Australia and the United States at the Executive Council of the University, in which Nelson gave a speech in February. They listened very carefully, starting with interest and then becoming more attentive. At the end of the discussion, the chairman of the organizers asked the panellists if they would be able to say what they would have said if they had again taken part in a seminar on online education innovations in 2017. "If our school is not closed," muttered a Dean sitting next to me. ）

Daphne Koller admits she hopes that the Coursera, which started in 2012 by 0, will grow into an institution comparable to the size of a large state school. And before Nelson gave him his answer, I realized that some of the guest audiences were restless and moved their bodies. The whiff of fear in the audience seemed to make Nelson even more courageous.

"My estimate is that after three years, four, five, seven, or eight of you will stand on this stage and showcase your initial findings of a completely new undergraduate or graduate program that you started in your own school." Others will look at two or three of them and say, "Uh-oh" (Big Bad). "It was a joke, but there was almost no one laughing.