The whole concept of being able to mix real world (trade school) courses with heavy theory is a tricky question. We have traditional theory heavy courses in the pipeline, but realistically, it is extremely difficult to bootstrap with theoretical courses. It's been tried before and typically fails quickly. Oddly enough, you can give away theoretical classes, and you can charge $10,000 a class for them, but you can't really sell enough at our $200-$400 price point to pay for the cost of developing the class. We believe you can teach both, and should teach both, but I'm well aware that we'll always have people saying you can't or shouldn't even attempt to do so.

Oh, one note on the textbooks for the course. Of course there is an image issue when you use Oreilly and Apress texts, but honestly, for that subject there just aren't any traditional texts that come anywhere near the level needed to teach the subject. Even those three have serious holes that Dr. Ostrowski has worked with the authors to plug in this course. If you know of a better text that we somehow overlooked, please drop me a note and we'll see if we can integrate it as we create V2 of the course.

What a system like this really needs is a strong way for future employers of graduates to rate their relative ability (eg. 'according to our benchmarks this person's ability in python lies _x_ far between the average coder on github and [insert famous python user here]').

Perhaps establishing 'credentialing' should come before establishing a school?

Two thoughts come to mind:

1) Salman Khan is arguably this already (although he's not a "teacher" in the narrow, institutional sense) - he's managed to educate thousands of students rapidly, and he's raised a significant amount of capital for Khan Academy (not to mention attracted quite a bit of media attention)

2) The best private schools, I suspect, house many potential "superstar" teachers. The problem is that the schools have most of the reputational value and reap almost all of the financial rewards. In a lot of ways, it's an information asymmetry problem; I attended such a school and had what I would imagine to be a very disproportionately high number of superstar teachers, but I didn't know which teachers were superstars until after I had enrolled in the school and taken their courses.

I can buy the fame for sure; the salary is harder: movie stars may be able to more effectively withhold their appearances/endorsement. Educators have more constraints on their withholding/spinning/endorsing behavior. But maybe!

How about a further prediction:

Once there are teacher superstars and they are considered a normal part of our culture the pressure to pander or appeal to the masses will result in the most famous being pretty crappy educators. It will be like politics and acting, superstar attributes are more important than teacher/leader/actor attributes.

Unless we get a really good way of measuring student performance somehow. If we can get that good enough then it becomes like sports, the superstars are actually among the best at what they are supposed to be doing. This is the optimistic prediction.

The first one is the realistic one.

Cost is actually the one area where we can compete very aggressively. Columbus state may be able to sneak under the $10k mark, but for an equivalent program we'll be just over $3k with a much more flexible and adaptable system. That number, btw, is with state and federal subsidies for the school, often upwards of $10,000 per student per year. We're coming in completely unsubsidized at a price that's less than a third of our cheapest competition with an offering that is significantly higher quality (we're competing with MIT for some of our professors).

Brand building really is the toughest nut to crack, and one what we have a couple different strategies for. Not really comfortable discussing those strategies on this forum, but let's just say we've thought a great deal about the problem.

If you look at the value proposition for a student, our web app class is extremely high. The material covered in that class can have a direct impact on job prospects, billing rates, or internal promotion opportunities, and it is such a difficult area to self teach that saving tens or hundreds of hours fighting though online tutorials is well worth the $200 or $400 that the class costs.

1) Retention sucks in the current model of higher education.

I've been thinking about this one a lot lately. I've been doing a one year masters where I'm taking two courses a semester and doing research. The depth with which I am learning things is night and day compared to the depth with which I learned my undergrad material. During undergrad, I was drinking from a firehose and just trying not to drown. I would turn in unfinished problem sets, not having learned the material, and move on with my life. I would sleep through classes out of sheer exhaustion.

Now, with just two classes, I'm able to learn things almost well enough to teach them. So one way to improve retention is just to take things slower.

Another model comes to mind if we consider how people study at Cambridge, Oxford, etc. I have not experienced it myself, but according to students who went there as exchange students (and students from there who came here (here being MIT)) it's pretty different. Students here are overwhelmed with constant work. There, it is a lot more self paced, with a set of final examination at the end (someone please correct me if I am not doing it justice). So perhaps self-pacing and working smarter, not harder leads to more retention.

Do you know of any sources for retention statistics such as those you cited? Some of them don't match my experience (for example, I would say that I spent 8-10 hours a week in classes related to my major).

2) Courses need to happen in a logical sequence so that they can build on one another.

When I first read your post I thought you were suggesting that students should, by themselves, pick what to learn based on what they want to build, in lieu of being guided through a logical curriculum.

The point about scheduling gaps is interesting. Scheduling gaps happen because it's hard to satisfy the constraints of so many student and faculty schedules. If you could take courses on demand, that would fix things.

3) Results driven learning can be excellent for motivation and retention.

When one talks about results, there is a fundamental issue of time scale.

Courses that say things like "When you're done, you will have built an autonomous mobile robot" are great.

But there are many fundamental things to learn, over a long period of time, whose benefits

* you might not see for a long time * are broader than you could have ever imagined (and hence the benefit would seem artificially low to you)

If you as a student get to pick the desired result yourself all the time, you might be tempted to pick shorter-term results. This can be catastrophic to your education.

I believe in forcing people to learn fundamentals of their chosen field --- fundamentals whose power they might not appreciate until later. Learning fundamentals (that you might choose not to learn if you weren't forced to) is fruitful in powerful and unexpected ways.

Take pure math classes. You learn analysis. Then you learn measure theory. Then you learn measure-theoretic probability theory. Then you learn stochastic processes. All of a sudden, financial mathematics becomes easy to grasp. But so do a host of other things. Signal processing, computer vision, statistical mechanics, complex multiagent systems, epidemic modeling, control systems.

I suppose you could have started on this path because you wanted to learn financial mathematics. But it probably would have seemed way too complicated and difficult. But if someone says they want to be an applied mathematician (a much "broader" and more long term goal than just learning financial mathematics), then they'd better take a ton of pure math.

But, you have to look at what the larger impact can be with accreditation and Title IV. Even though we are strongly against student loans, being able to work with state and federal governments for grant and work study funds is the best and most direct way we have at hitting "free education for all" status. It's also the quickest way to move out of the relatively small group of students who don't care about accreditation to reach the much larger group that does. It's only by being a reasonable alternative to this group of students that we can apply real pressure to the current system. As long as we aren't accredited, the existing institutions can simply point to that fact and write us off and most people will listen to them.