Have We Seen the Future, and Is It This?
April 16, 2020
Have we seen the future, and is it this?
In September 2015, I sat in a room the size of a small airport at the San Diego Convention Center, listening to Salman Khan, the visionary founder of Khan Academy. He was the keynote speaker at the annual gathering of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Charismatic and engaging, Khan delivered a fascinating, compelling, and passionate address titled “Counselors Can Help Make Education a ‘Fundamental Human Right.’” It was a powerful and uplifting presentation in which he chronicled his own story and his noble quest to educate the world.
It is hard not to be captivated by Khan or his message or his forthrightly announced goal: to provide a first-class education, free, to everyone in the world. And yet, as 6,000 colleagues leapt to their feet around me in thunderous applause, I thought: “If he can accomplish that, (and he gives every indication that he can,) we in this room are all out of a job!”
Over the last few weeks, I have thought about that keynote often and the clear recollection of myself as a lemming who sits and watches incredulously as his peers scamper gleefully off the precipice.
For over a decade I have noted that universities face two barriers to widespread acceptance of online education. The first is identity verification; making sure that the person taking the assessments is, in fact, the student enrolled in the class. The second is credential value; making sure that the online diploma carries the same gravitas as the traditional sheepskin. I have also been asserting that once the heavy hitters, like Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech, or Yale, solve these two problems, then scores of small colleges will disappear.
“Physical presence and social proximity still have value in our students’ eyes and in their hearts. We may not yet see the end of the tunnel, but when we do, there will be light.”
This week, the College Board announced that they were canceling the June administration of SAT Reasoning and Subject Tests. Buried later in the announcement was this tantalizing nugget:
“In the unlikely event that schools don't reopen this fall, the College Board will provide a digital SAT for home use, much as we’re delivering digital exams for three million Advanced Placement® students this spring. As we’re doing with at-home AP® Exams, we would ensure that at-home SAT testing is simple; secure and fair; accessible to all; and valid for use in college admissions.”
The College Board is fanatically obsessed with test security. Those of us who are AP Coordinators live in mortal fear of opening a test booklet at the wrong time or having an inspector show up when a proctor is checking email. And yet, on three weeks notice several million students around the world will be sitting for 45-minute open-book assessments in their homes instead of 3-hour versions under the watchful eye of a proctor. And now we learn that the gargantuan testing agency is prepared to blithely make the same move with their signature product, the SAT. Is it because, as they say in today’s announcement: “We’re committed to giving students as many chances as we can to show their strengths to admissions officers” or, perhaps, because every day dozens of highly selective colleges are implementing test-optional admission policies?
Either way, if the College Board, clearly facing what they must perceive as an existential crisis, feels they have solved those two thorny issues of identity verification and credential value, does that mean we are at the tipping point? Is the global educational system about to spontaneously re-organize into Khan Academy plus an online consortium of wealthy, powerful, elite academic institutions? Will bricks and mortar, populated by flesh and blood human beings, become the relics of COVID-19?
I suspect not; at least not yet. As a lifelong educator in a family of educators, I do wonder daily if the world we will find at the other end of this will look familiar. But it is the words of my students, your children, that fill me with hope. They miss each other. They miss us, their teachers. They miss the red doors and the cafeteria, the library and the labs, the gym and their classrooms! They are making the best of BrowningConnect, but they all, it appears, want to be back in school. Physical presence and social proximity still have value in their eyes and in their hearts. We may not yet see the end of the tunnel, but when we do, there will be light.