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Is Tech's 'Free' Business Model For K-12 CS Education Good Or Bad? 46

Posted by BeauHD from the every-gift-has-a-price dept.
theodp writes: The challenges of competing against free have long been noted. In the K-12 Computer Science education space, those who build a better mousetrap will still face the formidable challenge of competing with free offerings from tech giants such as Microsoft, which on Tuesday highlighted a new collaboration marrying tech-backed nonprofit Code.org's free CS Discoveries curriculum and Microsoft OneNote for Education. "Microsoft is a key Code.org partner," reminds a Microsoft blog post, "and the organizations have worked together over the past several years to boost computer science education globally." Free K-12 CS education offerings tied to their own products (or even expansion plans) are also pushed on educators by the likes of Google, Apple, and Amazon. We've already seen some of the hidden costs of free social media -- so should the tech-bankrolled 'free' K-12 CS education model promoted and led by Facebook and others, which apparently even involves monitoring every coding move schoolchildren make ("Young women want you to interact with their apps! They use 10% more interactive elements in their App Lab projects than boys"), set off any alarms?
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Is Tech's 'Free' Business Model For K-12 CS Education Good Or Bad? More

Is Tech's 'Free' Business Model For K-12 CS Education Good Or Bad?

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  • better than nothing.
    • The question is not whether it's better than nothing, but if it's better than paid-for but neutral CS education. Of course for some, a high cost would force a choice between free or nothing. But for many, the availability of a free offering - which comes with all manner of hooks - means that there is no good paid-for option that isn't pushed by tech giants with an agenda, and doesn't mine your kids' efforts for sweet sweet data. That is the issue with "free" CS ed.
      • What I'd be curious to know is how high the cost actually is; and how much of it can actually be defrayed by accepting the 'free' curriculum being offered:

        CS is one of those areas, like a lot of math, where it's not as though the fundamentals are shaken up too terribly often(certainly not at the level you'd be teaching K-12 students; and unless you are teaching-to-tool in ways that are probably a bad idea anyway even the more hands on stuff doesn't shift too radically, again particularly at K-12 level ra

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Veretax ( 872660 )
        It would matter a lot more if schools were more market focused. If the local market has more Microsoft focused software, why not teach that? If apple? Than teach that? If open source? Well do that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Seems like an area where some regulation wouldn't go amiss. Just make sure the free help isn't abusing the kids and check out the companies involved (at their own expense). Their motivation for doing it is to create a greater supply of skilled workers in future, so none of this should be a problem for them.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Yes, regulation, lets tell schools how to do their job through central planning because that has worked so well in the last 40 years. The DOE is spending upwards of $1000 per child every year, local governments in my district is spending nearly $110M for about 5,000 children - that's $23,000 per child for PUBLIC schools that are rated 'average' (suburbs). Poorly rated schools in nearby inner cities are spending ~$30-40,000 per child for 'poor' outcomes (basically you can pay a private tutor with unlimited s

      • The last thing the education system needs is another useless group of bureaucrats involved in the process. There are already too many and despite the good intentions of the people who put them in place, they invariably try to take on more responsibility in some bizarre form of scope creep or desire to justify the existence of their own position and invariably get in the way of the teachers educating their students. Worse, you wind up with the same kind of regulatory capture you see in government in a broade

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aqui ( 472334 )

      You get what you pay for.

      Canada's public education system is worth every penny.
      https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]

      The Canadian Economy (Toronto in particular) is booming because Canadians are well educated and have a talent pool attracting business:
      https://www.theglobeandmail.co... [theglobeandmail.com]

      Germany one of the strongest economies in the world even offers free university education to non-Germans:
      https://www.studying-in-german... [studying-in-germany.org]

      They understand attracting the best talent is what drives there economy and if about 50% of th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by stdarg ( 456557 )

        "You get what you pay for" usually describes a positive correlation between price and quality. I don't know if that's how you meant it, but it's clearly not the case with education.

        On the one hand, the US is still clinging mostly to a one size fits all model of public education, which is wrong. One size doesn't fit all. I don't know much about Canada's system but I know Germany has a pretty heavy track-based system, so they aren't wasting resources trying to get everybody ready for college (the ostensible g

        • The US has a higher proportion of students who aren't that smart.

          Intelligence is partly genetic, however the ability to read AND comprehend is more important. Faster reading skills coupled with greater comprehension has no foreseeable upper limit. The Dark Ages were diminished by the Gutenberg press, which promulgated reading by the masses. Before this, only the religous orders could read and write. This gave them great power. To negate the ever increasing reading skills by the "masses" , it became imperative to regulate what could be read and what could be written and i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hasaf ( 3744357 )

      better than nothing.

      As I wrote in my post, "a teachers point of view," it really is free and web-based, or nothing.

      • a teachers point of view

        When it comes to the welfare of children, shouldn't we all be teachers? Granted, some teachers are better than others and some should work at mickey D's instead. The biggest issue is whom kids want to emulate. Sports, music, and movie celebrities; lots of money and fame do little to incentivize learning. Considering the number of celebrities over the millions of kids who would be better off being educated, the odds are in favor of education. The truly talented are the exception not the rule.

  • I don't doubt that there are plenty of well-intentioned people involved; and likely some cases where an employee of one of the tech firms managed to exert enough influence over the direction of a specific project that it did end up being a more or less genuine donation of money and/or expertise without strings; but the overall concept seems too fundamentally marred by some competing interests and perverse incentives to be anything but suspect.

    Aside from some of the creepy data-mining instances; there's t

    • America spends more money per pupil than every other country except Norway. The poor school thing is a complete myth.

    • In a much broader sense the idea that tech companies have a role in funding CS education is reasonable: one of the benefits companies receive by operating in countries with public education is a more educated workforce, so one hopes that their taxes appropriately help pay for public education; and since they employ a lot of subject matter experts(though hardly all, there's some decent firepower in academic CS) there's no reason to spurn contributions from those experts when designing curriculum; but the current model of much more direct 'we have no money so we teach what we can get donations for' and 'the curriculum is served up on platforms the companies control' is quite a different animal.

      Another part of the issue is for teachers to find time to design and maintain a curriculum. Then there is the issue of adapting the curriculum for students with special needs. They often simply don't have the time to create one so a "class in a box" is the only alternative to none at all.

    • Anything that teaches more people that code isn't mystic, magic, or arcane, is good. I'm not afraid of being replaced by a minimally educated drone who may complete the curriculum and decide they want to do something else in life.

      The persistent monitoring angle needs to be addressed universally, not bundled with theodp's pet project.

  • Wait, no. Bad.

  • Would you let McDonalds sponsor a biology class about healthy eating? Or Phillip Morris a class on how to avoid cancer?

    Why do you think letting Facebook, MS and Google sponsor classes about computer use be a brighter idea? Because you don't know jack shit about computers is the only answer I could think of.

    • Would you let McDonalds sponsor a biology class about healthy eating?

      I wouldn't send my kids to a school that had a class on healthy eating.

      • Judging by what I see in the US, it would be sensible, though.

        Just not one sponsored by a fast food giant.

      • Why not? it's probably much more useful than many other classes taught in schools (e.g. sociology).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Hasaf ( 3744357 )

          Why not? it's probably much more useful than many other classes taught in schools (e.g. sociology).

          What I find funny about this is that my High School Sociology class sparked my interest in Statistics and Economics. My interest in Economics quickly moved past the Nep-Liberal economics that are, paradoxically, espoused by the Neo-Conservatives in the US. Instead I found a home in researched-based empirical economics.

  • Why can't people who go into computers just have a normal job market? Anything that relieves companies from having to pay more to find people in a shortage is bad.

  • Those companies are advertising 'Free' K-12 virtual education, but the truth is that what's happening is they're charging a flat fee rate to the school district that kiddo resides in. Because of conservative lawmakers, they've allowed this, and their being paid out of tax money.

    The trouble is that there are no requirements on testing. There are no requirements on the teachers of those K-12 classes. There are no requirements on the rigor of the coursework.

    Often a teacher of a class will have 30-40 or more

  • It makes sense, from an economic point of view, to push for a reduction of free offerings in order to allow the market to thrive. After all, free offerings become the equivalent of market dumping. However, the real choice is "Free or Nothing." As a teacher, I cannot "just try" a non-free, or non-web based application. Even to have a piece of software installed, I need to first send the request to the curriculum committee. In this request, I must show that the software is essential to meet the standards in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hasaf ( 3744357 )
      Sorry about the formatting, It was 7:30 and I had to run for a meeting.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by SRM2 ( 1157311 )
      The more i look the more options i find to overcome these shortcomings. Example - the state of Texas this year added Social Studies TEKS related to GIS software.
      "(20) Science, technology, and society. The student understands how current technology affects human interaction. The student is expected to: (A) describe the impact of new information technologies such as the Internet, Global Positioning System (GPS), or Geographic Information Systems (GIS); and (B) examine the economic, environmental, and social

    • It really is free and web-based, or nothing at all.

      Or, you get it, use it in your class and next year it gets cut from the budget in an attempt to cut costs. So you are back to square one.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hasaf ( 3744357 )
        The other thing that annoys me is that, by not paying, we are exposing the students to advertisements in the classroom environment. There are research-based reasons that exposing students to advertisements in the classroom is a bad idea, yet we continue to do just that.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The UK tried that with the British Broadcasting Corporation Microcomputer System efforts.
      A generation got "free" computers. To learn with and understand computer math with...
      A generation later everyone enjoyed paying for Apple and MS products from the USA.

      The US education system got lots of new books with new calculators.
      To learn with and understand math with...
      Great for books sales and the brand of calculator needed...
      The average and well below average students kept on not passing tests and exams.
  • It's a silly argument. Would you apply the same thing to FOSS software and say it's unfair because they don't require money either, which means that others have a harder time competing? In some cases, companies like these have to give the product away at no cost (or heavily reduced rate) because schools can easily go with a FOSS alternative that has the same monetary cost.

    Personally, I wish that companies would contribute developer time as opposed to materials. I'm sure that there are plenty of people at

  • "set off any alarms?" (Score:3)

    by rnturn ( 11092 ) on Friday August 30, 2019 @09:15AM (#59140612)

    Yeah. Vendor lock-in for the schools. And "Windows == computers" for the children.

    About as bad 15-20 years ago we were seeing CS departments getting Windows-based products for next to nothing and graduating a bunch of new Windows developers. As one wag put it years ago, Microsoft set the state of computer science back ten years. (At least.)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Have you been to a school recently? Apple has a huge dominance in the education market. All my children (3 kids in 3 different schools) have to use Mac computers in school, because that's what the staff is trained on
  • Can you help me with my Code? A=1; If A aint 1, den it aint da truf. Many of these kids cant even read and write and you want to teach them code? What a waste of time? Why teach coding at all? Most SW will just be written by code monkeys in India anyhow. Learn something useful.
  • Not a single gadget nor piece of software has made education more effective. It's expensive and schools are running out of money. Bring back the chalkboards and teach math, reading, writing, and the basics. Without those, you definitely can't code.

  • Will C++ do? NO. I said C, and I mean C. If students don't like C, they won't be interested in Computer Science. We shouldn't force students to learn a specialized skill they aren't interested in.

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