OnlineFail

100% Online Class – 300% Fail

It was sexy, so enticing. Take the Stanford Advanced Program Management course (SAPM) online and save 50% over the on-campus, in-person cost. The online course featured the same professors, same lectures, the same class materials – all online, all accessible at any time. Take the classes at your leisure, complete the test at the end of each class, six classes, and voila a SAPM Certificate.

Is it possible to digitize college content, drive out costs, deliver terrific content and create prodigious prodigy? 

College Classes as Digital Content

I consider myself a smart guy. Not brilliant, but certainly capable of completing an online program. I did hesitate when my company refused to pay for the program – which means that I’m on the hook for the $9000 tuition. Academic capacity (check), economic capacity (conditional check), execution (big red ink "Fail"). 

The first copy of Digital Content is expensive to make. The second copy is not. Consider the obvious examples of music, books, and software. How many hours, weeks, months, years, does it take to create a book, or produce an album, or write a program? How long does it take to produce a movie? Once it is in digital format, what is the cost of the second copy?

Blind

Blind to the Real Investment

AEI asks, "Have we stopped investing in poor people?" and outlines these comments from the President. "The president spoke at length about his belief that, as a country, we need to invest in those who have not had opportunities. He said (emphasis by AEI):

"A free market is perfectly compatible with us making investment in good public schools, public universities; investments in public parks; investments in a whole bunch — public infrastructure that grows our economy and spreads it around. But that’s, in part, what’s been under attack for the last 30 years. And so, in some ways, rather than soften the edges of the market, we’ve turbocharged it. And we have not been willing, I think, to make some of those common investments so that everybody can play a part in getting opportunity."

Later, the president went further in suggesting that our country’s investments in poor people have declined:

"And right now, they [poor kids] don’t have those things [mentors, social networks, decent books and computers and so forth], and those things have been stripped away. You look at state budgets, you look at city budgets, and you look at federal budgets, and we don’t make those same common investments that we used to. And it’s had an impact. And we shouldn’t pretend that somehow we have been making those same investments. We haven’t been. And there’s been a very specific ideological push not to make those investments. That’s where the argument comes in."

What Is Really Missing

What is really missing is the family - most glaringly... Dad. 

Returning to my meeting with the vice-principal and counselor, (Digital Native or Digital Naive). We discussed a recent field trip where 90 of 460 kids could not go. The reason: poor grades, or a high number of absences. The ISD threshold is 18 days missed in one semester - or nearly 20% of the school year. Our daughter had made off-handed comments that "half" of her class was failing school. We were reassured that it was "much less than half".

So, let's be clear... we live in a neighborhood that should not have students missing 18 days of school in a five-month semester. How can students that miss a day a week of school keep up?  The vice-principal and counselor make daily calls to try to keep students in the process... this is the 6th GRADE! I am having a hard time imagining how "poor" schools can function. 

Speaking a Bit of Truth

This is not an issue of "common investments". Every kid in our school has the same facility, the same teachers, the same resources. What they don't have is all of the environmental support (read: family support) when school is out. Obama's "Ideological Push" might be considered another flavor of victimization. This speech is a lesson in learned helpless and victimhood. 

Bottom Line

Agenda and ideology are certainly to blame for political polarization. But the assignment of "investment" failure to a particular political ideology is no recipe for finding a solution. 

I will continue to exercise my "beige privilege" - my dad was Hispanic and mom Anglo. I will continue to push my kids to excellence - to turbo-charge their chance for success. Playing the race card, spewing ideological rhetoric, and ignoring the significant absence of family stability is bunk. 

~Tot1