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End of Decade Thoughts (1): An Increasingly Divided United States

This is a series about what we have seen in the past decade.

An Increasingly Divided United States

Three aspects:

1. The 2008 financial crisis provided a great opportunity for those who had equity while made many others in debt work years to recover. And the tax reform exacerbated the process.

– When we entered the past decade, prices were cheap for a lot of equities, but only for those who can buy.

– Differences were then created when the economy recovered – those who held equities enjoyed it.

– On the other hand, those who can’t buy didn’t share the growth (in any bull markets like stock, housing, etc.)

– Thus, more wealth inequalities were created. Supporting evidences could be found for a graph

2. The Republican and Democratic parties are more divided than ever – in fundamental values and action plans.

– The voters were divided before and in the 2016 election.

– It’s a result from dissatisfaction caused by the inequalities mentioned above and also from clashes over values [which is fueled by a multi-year accumulation of “opinions” mentioned below in 3].

– “Like the American public, Congress is also deeply divided. Lack of trust in the other party as well as a lack of bonds between representatives have fueled greater partisanship.” [Harvard Politics Review]

Democrats and Republicans More Ideologically Divided than in the Past
Source: PEW Research

– They are also unable to agree on what issues they should prioritize for policymaking.”

Republicans and Democrats differ over key priorities for the president and Congress in 2019
Source: PEW Research

3. Social medias fueled bias

– “Fake news” is a popular phrase. And misinformation is wide-spread. Meanwhile, social medias have become the primary sources of news.

– Machine-learning enabled “feeds” fulfills the confirmation bias among others.

– Personalization feeds “the most engaging and relevant” content for each individual user, which could easily compromise objectivity and expose human’s weakness.

– When people connect directly with their peers, the social biases that guide their selection of friends come to influence the information they see. [phys.org]

– Social medias made the discovery of “similar” peers, influencers and public accounts much easier, which again made the sources of information biased.

Summary: The econ pressure and social medias “cultivated” the public, leading further disconnections between parties, who made policies that most won’t see as “uniting” forces.

The dividing problems affect the policies again other nations, which are usually used when there is chaos inside.

The fight with the tech industry is also inevitable as political power is diminishing in driving/organizing the society. But tech is needed for overall growth and jobs – making them look more like monopolies is a good way to tackle/regulate.

Online Higher Education (3) – MOOCs

Udacity

As mentioned in the previous blog, Udacity started in 2012, with roots from free computer science classes offered by Stanford in 2011. Its co-founder and CEO Thrun, known as one of the inventors of self-driving cars, has previously founded Google X and Google’s self-driving car team.

In June 2012, Udacity pioneered the on-site finals for MOOCs for a $89 fee, partnering with Pearson.

In Jan 2013, Udacity announced a partnership with San Jose State University (SJSU) to pilot three new courses, available for college credit at SJSU for the Spring 2013 semester and offered entirely online. The courses, if taken for college credits, have a price of $150 per course.

However, six months after it launched, San Jose State was suspending the Udacity partnership as more than half the students in the first batch of online courses failed their final exams.

Udacity has focused more on the vocational courses and create materials from non-universities sources, especially in tech.

In June 2014, Udacity and AT&T announced the “Nanodegree” program, designed to teach programming skills needed to qualify for an entry-level IT position at AT&T. The coursework is said to take less than a year to complete, and cost about US$200/month.

In Nov 2015, Udacity raised a $105 million Series D valued at $1 billion, led by Bertelsmann, with Scotland’s Baillie Gifford, Emerson Collective and Google Ventures joining as new investors. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital also participated in the round. The announcement came as the company celebrated the one-year anniversary of its nanodegree program. Udacity reported 11,000 students are currently enrolled in nanodegree programs in 168 countries.

Coursera

In Apr 2012, Coursera raised $16 million in venture funding from KPCB and NEA. At the beginning, the company has partnered with Stanford, Princeton, University of California at Berkeley, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania to bring professor-created classes online.

Aside from offering free courses to the masses, Coursera’s learning management service (LMS) platform can be used internally by universities to revamp their online course programs.

In Sep 2012, Coursera announced that it is working with the American Council on Education (ACE) to initiate a credit-equivalence evaluation of a subset of the MOOCs.

In Jan 2013, Coursera announced that students would be offered the opportunity to earn Verified Certificates – called Signature Track, priced from $30 to $100 on a course-by-course basis. Students will create a Signature Profile by first taking two photographs with their webcam: one of themselves and another of an acceptable photo ID document. Next, students will create a biometric profile of their unique typing patterns by typing a short phrase. When a student submits work in the course, they authenticate their identity by typing the same short phrase, which is then matched to their recorded samples. Upon successful completion of their course, students will receive a Verified Certificate issued by both the participating university and Coursera.

According to InsideHighEd, revenue from the fee-based path will be split with partner universities. A Coursera spokeswoman said universities would keep 6-15 percent of revenue from courses taught by their professors, as well as 20 percent of profits.

Some other statistics shared by Coursera in May 2013: almost 70% of the students who joined the Signature Track went on to successfully complete their course; 9,000+ students from all around the world have joined the Signature Track for their course; over 2,000 students are taking Gamification from University of Pennsylvania with Signature Track.

Coursera brought in $220,000 in the first quarter of 2013.

More recently, in Apr 2019, Coursera raised $103 million Series E, led by a strategic investor, the Australian online recruitment and course directory provider SEEK Group, with participation from Future Fund and NEA.

A summary so far for MOOCs and fee-for-certificates

As of 2019, we could see fee-for-certificates has become a mainstream business model to monetize on a subset of MOOCs users. Certificates are issued for single-courses or programs (grouped courses).

Certificates could be issued/recognized by the platform (e.g. Udacity, Coursera, edX) and/or by the organizations (companies or universities). Letting users put those certificates on social medias such as LinkedIn do provide an incentive to purchase.

At the same time, part of the materials/courses can still be accessed for free if users don’t need the certificates.

To be continued

Online Higher Education (2) – MOOCs

Developed from universities

The history of massive open online course (MOOC) dated back to 2008 (by Stephen Downes and George Siemens entitled Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledge). The intention was to exploit the possibility for interactions between a wide variety of participants made possible by online tools so as to provide a richer learning environment than traditional tools would allow.

MOOCs with an emphasis on interactions and connectivity are now called cMOOCS.

In the fall of 2011, Stanford offered three courses for free online.  Peter Norvig and Sebastien Thrun offered their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to an initial enrollment of over 160,000 students from around the world. Over 20,000 students completed the course. These xMOOCs focused less on interaction between students and more on exploiting the possibilities of reaching a massive audience.

Nowadays, through MOOCs, anyone with internet access can take some of the most famous courses taught by world-class professors for free, such as Harvard’s Justice. And courses on updated topics such as The Opioid Crisis in America by Harvard Medical School.

Transformed to independent organizations…

Seeing their success of MOOCs, Thrun founded a company called Udacity in February 2012 which began to develop and offer MOOCs for free. Udacity is funded by venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and $200,000 of Thrun’s personal money. In October 2012, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led the investment of another $15 million in Udacity.

Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, two other Stanford CS professors started Coursera in April 2012 with three classes in fall 2011 from Stanford.

We will come back to these companies later. But let’s first take a look at a non-profit effort – edX.

edX

The establishment of edX was traced back to MIT’s effort – MITx platform. Announced in Dec 2011, MITx platform is led by Prof Anant Agarwal to offer MOOCs as a constituent program of MIT’s Office of Digital Learning.

Harvard joined forces with MIT in May 2012 when the two schools pooled $60 million in resources and renamed/spun-off the open platform component into edX, a non-profit organization. Open edX is the massively scalable learning software platform behind edX.

Since the origin of MOOCs, which are basically free for users, monetization methods are explored to make those platforms sustainable.

In Sep 2012, edX, partnering with Pearson, introduced “proctored exams” option, which would charge a small fee. edX learners have the option of taking a course final exam at one of over 450 Pearson VUE test centers.

Full fee-for-certificates models were introduced in 2013 following the industry trend.

Students can pay a fee to receive an ID-verified certificate upon successful completion of class requirements. Debuting in Fall 2013, three initial paid certificates would cost $25 for Stat2x: “Introduction to Statistics,” $50 for CS169x: “Software as a Service,” and $100 for 6x: “Circuits and Electronics.”

edX launched grouped-courses-based programs (XSeries) in Sep 2013, and MicroMasters programs in 2016, which may count as credits towards master degrees.

XSeries usually costs several hundred dollars with certificates and includes 3-5 courses. If taken separately, those courses usually can be access for free without certificates.

XSeries on edX | Source: edX
Xseries on edX | Source: edx

For MicroMasters, they are more linked with institutions and existing degrees.

As an example, the MicroMasters® Program in Supply Chain Management, can be used to apply to MIT’s SCM program which awards the Master of Engineering in Logistics (M.Eng. Logistics). The degree will also require another semester of on-campus study. The MicroMasters Program in SCM is also accepted in other universities worldwide.

The MicroMasters in SCM has five online courses. The cost to take each course is US$200. The cost to sit for the Comprehensive Final Exam is $200. The overall cost of the five course plus the final exam is US$1200. And the package can be purchased through edX with a 10% discount.

To be continued

「What’s News In China」

On Dec 17, Tencent Games and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) announced a collaboration to bring PC gaming in the cloud to China. NVIDIA’s GPU technology will power Tencent Games’ START cloud gaming service, which began testing earlier this year. START gives gamers access to AAA games on underpowered devices anytime, anywhere. Tencent Games intends to scale the platform to millions of gamers, with an experience that is consistent with playing locally on a gaming rig. // nvidia

SoftBank Ventures Asia, a unit under Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, has led a CNY500 million (USD71.4 million) fundraising round in Chinese powerbank sharing provider Energy Monster. Energy Monster had over 200 million users in over 1,300 Chinese cities as of the end of November. Founded in 2017, Energy Monster has a 25 percent share of the domestic charger sharing market behind Jiedian with 28.6 percent and Xiaodian with 27 percent, according to figures from TrustData. // YiCai| Trustdata

Apple’s China iPhone shipments fall 35% in November and total iPhone shipments in the September-November period dropped 7.4% from a year earlier, according to Credit Suisse. // Reuters

「News of the Week」India’ New Citizenship Bill

WSJ – Modi Defends India’s New Citizenship Law as Protests Persist

[The new Citizenship Bill was passed in Dec 9]

The Citizenship Amendment Act, passed in December, creates a legal loophole for persecuted religious minorities who belong to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi or Christian religious communities — but not Islam — eligible for citizenship.

Dots to connect: India’s slow-down -> IMF world economic outlook, potential nationwide registry, access to the web, etc.

 

「Video of the Week」David Rubenstein Conversation With BlackStone Chairman & CEO Stephen Schwarzman

MIT’s new college of computing was formed on Sep 11 2019, enabled by Schwarzman’s $350 million donation.

And Schwarzman’s new book is out – What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence

Online Higher Education (1)

US Higher Education

According to The Condition of Education 2019 by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES):

  • Undergraduate Enrollment
    • In fall 2017, total undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions was 16.76 million students.
    • Between 2000 and 2017, total undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions increased by 27 percent (from 13.2 million to 16.8 million students).
    • By 2028, total undergraduate enrollment is projected to increase to 17.2 million students.
    • Percentage enrolled in any distance education course grew from 30.8% to 32.9% ▲
    • Percentage enrolled exclusively in distance education grew from 12.8% to 13.3% ▲
  • Post-baccalaureate Enrollment
    • In fall 2017, some 3.0 million students were enrolled in post-baccalaureate degree programs.
    • Between 2000 and 2017, total post-baccalaureate enrollment increased by 39 percent (from 2.2 million to 3.0 million students).
    • By 2028, post-baccalaureate enrollment is projected to increase to 3.1 million students.
    • Percentage enrolled in any distance education course grew from 32% to 34% ▲
    • Percentage enrolled exclusively in distance education grew from 15% to 16% ▲

NCES is located within the U.S. Department of Education and the Institute of Education Sciences. Distance education is a broad definition here but is an approximate to online education.

We can see that:

  1. Online education is one of the fastest growing forms of higher education.
  2. Around 1/3 of those enrollments have used online courses.
  3. Online degree programs have grown at least to 13-16% – as many programs will require on-campus immersions to some extent.

Another report by Wiley Education Services said by the 2020/21 school year, online programs are expected to account for 26% of all higher education market share.

It also lays out some headwinds & tailwinds.

Source: Wiley

To be continued