I can tell you about the future of education, or you can just look for yourself. Peck around on the Shmoop website, and ask yourself how much it would cost to deliver this awesomeness to Utah students.
Currently, Shmoop’s website is pointed toward AP and college placement testing, but don’t let that limit your vision. They are in the student-learning business. And, they are one of the innovators that is changing the rules and improving outcomes. In an engaging way, and in a stinking affordable way, they help students learn. They are finding their way into libraries and schools, and they are changing the dynamic.
I just had a fabulous meeting with Shmoop founder Ellen Siminoff, and I couldn’t be more excited!
I am recommending that the Utah System of Higher Education put together a product (1) to inform high school students (and their parents) whether they are college ready and (2) to remediate the specific deficiencies of students who are not ready. For too long, USHE has been accepting grossly unprepared students and, as a result, USHE has been taking lots of money from those students and lots of money from taxpayers but actually graduating few of those students. (Undisputable fact: a majority of unprepared students who enter college will not graduate college – no matter what the colleges do with those students. Once they start college, time and money are working against them. The delay of remediation stacks the deck against too many of the unprepared students.). Shmoop shows what remediation tools look like. Other businesses also show what the tools look like. The tools do exist.
So, did you hazard a guess how much this awesomeness costs? Answer: when it comes through a school, it costs a couple of bucks a year per student – as in $2/course. Or for all of Shmoop’s offerings, they get greedy and want $5.
Shmoop helps show that affordable answers exist to our most vexing problems in education – if we will brave enough to ask the right questions. We have educational opportunities today that mankind has never enjoyed, not even as recently as 4 or 5 years ago. The only thing in the way of racing forward is the incredible weight of the status quo.
I am the Media Coordinator at Desert Hills High School in St. George and I have opted to subscribe to all the AP and ACT/SAT test prep that Shmoop offers and have gotten some great reactions and responses from my students. My teachers also love Shmoop. I have presented the materials to all of the Media Coordinators in the district trying to convince them to subscribe as well because it is such a great resource. The cost for subscribing is well worth the funds! There is even SO MUCH offered for free on their site! The Shmoop subscription resources are fantastic; I cannot say enough about them and how they appeal to high school students.
Glad to see that I am not the only fan of Shmoop!!