USV’s “Research” on Online Education: Well, That’s Depressing
Union Square Ventures (a venture capital outfit) posted their “research” into online education yesterday (blog post , links page). I put quotes around the word “research” because as far as I can see, only one item (a report from Stanford’s Ed School) is actually research: the rest is articles from the popular press, opinion pieces from various bloggers, and a handful of TED talks. It appears USV doesn’t know there are people who actually study this stuff carefully, rather than just have opinions about it. *sigh*
(Of course, it doesn’t help that a lot of the real research is hidden behind paywalls, and only available in practice to academics who are then, funnily enough, invisible to the people who make policy and fund new ventures. Double *sigh*)
Later: I spoke with Christina Cacioppa by phone yesterday after she commented on this post. She talked a bit about the constraints they work under: busy people won’t read narrowly-focused papers reporting micro-progress on nano-topics — they need overviews they can absorb in a hurry, because they have nine other meetings this week to prepare for. One of her questions was, “What do you think we should have included?” I think it’s a fair question, so my offering is Fagen, Crouch, and Mazur (2002): “Peer Instruction: Results from a Range of Classrooms” (warning: as of this writing, Harvard’s preprint server hangs midway through the download, which is a perfect example of why non-academics don’t read this stuff). What are yours?
Later still: prompted by Larry Cuban’s latest post, I would add Labaree’s paper on educationalization to the “must read” list.
Thanks for checking out the document Greg.
I’m clearly biased — I put together most of it — but I think it’s worth saying: we do know people study pedagogy, online and off, and publish their research. Much of the research is paywall’d, as you point out; we’d love if more academics kept blogs, but they’re few and far between. If there are specific people we should be following, we’d love to hear about them.
The document didn’t aim to be a literature review; it was created to get our entire team (9 investors) on the same page before an internal discussion; some of us knew more about online education than others. The discussion’s goal was deciding where we saw “investible opportunities” in online education writ large. It was a high-level discussion. (VCs do have many 50,000-foot discussions, for better or worse, and this was one of them.) We posted the document for two reasons: 1) we thought it might be interesting to people starting to think about the space; 2) we’re curious about what things we should be reading that we’re not. S
o most of all: if there’s studies we should have included, we’d love to hear about them.
I think you are missing the point of them sharing their insights.
The best research is what the market tells you, not what academicians, bloggers or “researchers” publish.
By giving companies $2-5 million, USV participates in funding experiments that can yield big gains if they work out. That, in my opinion is the best Research money can buy.
Forget the links they shared or hypotheses they drew. It is dwarfed by market acceptance of big ideas whose time has come.
But wouldn’t it be more useful if USV (and others) didn’t back things whose flaws are already known?