I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. For more than two years, I’ve been curating the weekly Re:Learning newsletter. Now I’m using it to share my observations on the people and ideas reshaping the higher-education landscape.
Here’s what I’m thinking about this week:
Stephen M. Kosslyn spent his 40-year academic career teaching at elite institutions where, he says, “a lot of those students didn’t really need me.”
If you take him at his word, that also goes a long way toward explaining his announcement last week that he was launching a new venture called Foundry College, an online institution designed help prepare adults for middle-skill jobs that won’t leave them vulnerable to losing their livelihoods to a robot in the years to come. “At this point in my life,” Kosslyn told me, “I would really like to have an impact.”
I’ve learned to be cautious about spending ink or pixels on announcements like this, having seen more than a few so-called higher ed innovations crash and burn in the face of their (often-self-generated) hype. But I’ve also learned to take Kosslyn seriously. He’s a legit academic — a former dean of social science at Harvard and a former director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
He’s also no stranger to the world of investor-backed education. At the Minerva Project, an edgy, five-year-old online college that quickly became the darling of the Silicon Valley venture-capital set, Kosslyn served as founding dean and chief academic officer. In some sense, he gave intellectual gravitas to an educational experiment that aims to create a new technology-driven, campus-free, liberal-arts experience with highly selective admissions. Minerva, which this year will graduate its first class, now enrolls 600 students. It has said it will enroll 10,000 students by 2025.
“Middle-skills” jobs
Foundry’s mission is diametrically different from Minerva’s, and it launches with its own set of trendy educational buzzwords: a competency-based educational curriculum; a focus on teaching critical thinking and soft skills; employer-aligned practical training for people working in “middle-skills” jobs (think store manager or IT-department supervisor).
Like Minerva, where Kosslyn spent the past five years developing the teaching and curricular philosophy, Foundry is for-profit. But while Minerva drew lots of attention for its $95 million in investor backing, and initially, a splashy board of advisers that included Lawrence Summers and Bob Kerrey, Foundry is starting with just $6 million, from Learn Capital, and a more low-key group of advisers. And while Minerva aims to recruit students internationally, Kosslyn says Foundry is “very focused on America.”
Or perhaps more precisely, Americans — specifically those adults whose jobs are most vulnerable to automation. Kosslyn told me that he’s long been fascinated by the topic, but he says the idea for Foundry began stirring in his head after reading Joseph Aoun’s recent book, Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. (My colleague Scott Carlson went deep with Aoun on the topic in this interview last year.) Kosslyn and Aoun then co-wrote an article on the topic; look for it soon in Liberal Education, the publication of the Association of American Colleges & Universities.
San Francisco-based Foundry of course isn’t the only organization thinking about serving the adult working student population online. Among many others, the California Community College system’s planned new online college is also designed specifically for such students. But that venture is expected to focus more on skills training and certificate-level offerings; Foundry plans to offer an associate degree in business management.
Before this announcement, the last time I had spoken with Kosslyn, we talked about the value of synchronous education, especially in online teaching. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that his teaching model for Foundry is built on student engagement in real time. In fact, that’s the entirety of the teaching for each course: two 90-minute classes a week, each designed with lectures and in-class quizzes and live-action exercises such as role-playing. He’s basing some of the teaching techniques on an idea first developed in the 1970s called the jigsaw classroom (I had to look it up, too.) Oh yeah, and no books to buy and no homework.
