The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Monday announced a $20 million grant program to improve college graduation rates via technology, which will probably be oriented around online education and learning programs.
Next year, the focus will be expanded to K-12 programs, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft and the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in a conference call.
The initiative, first disclosed last week, will be known as the Next-Generation Learning Challenges, a $20 million "funding round" of grants that will be handed out in grants ranging from $250,000 to $750,000. The request period will run until Nov. 19; the winners will be announced by March 31, the foundation said.
Gates, the world's richest man announced his intent to donate $3 billion to improve education over five years in 2008, after leaving Microsoft that same year. He formed the his foundation with his wife, Melinda, in 2006.
Since then, the Gates foundation has worked to attack the fundamental problems plaguing society, including medecine, agriculture, and hygiene. In 2009, Gates pointed to technology as the way out of the recession plaguing the U.S. economy.
"Education is the biggest priority for our foundation here in the United States," Gates said in a conference call Monday afternoon. "We think it's the most important thing for the future of the country," he said.
Gates said that the goal was to develop more effective methods for education, and that the primary means was by tapping into the most effective educators and sharing that knowledge with others. The most effective way, he said, was through online education, where "it was pretty clear," Gates said, that pairing world-class lecturers with the ability for a student to move at his or own pace, acceessing the material online at any time, any place, would be the most effective.
"It seems like there are some incredible possibilities," Gates said.
Meanwhile, online education is taking off; in the fall 2008 term, 4.6 million students took at least one online course, a 17 percent increase, according to the most recent report by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. About 66 percent of the institutions polled by the Sloan consortium reported increased demand for new online courses, with 73 percent seeing increased demand for existing online courses and programs.
But many of those, in Gates' words, are "not fantastic," with not a strong commitment to the breadth and depth of coursework other institutions offer. "But we feel sure there are some real gems even beyond what we can even point out ourselves," Gates added.
The Gates foundation has put together a team, working with Carnegie Mellon, to try and identify these new opportunities, Gates said. He identified the Khan Academy and the University of Central Florida as two leaders in bringing education to a broader audience via the use of online videos. But making a course interactive take a lot of extra effort, he said.
Gates said he envisioned a future where a very motivated student could complete nearly all of her coursework online, while another might require a blend of face-to-face and online interaction. Schools will also need to balance the online coursework with in-person coursework, all against a backdrop of rising tuition.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has an annual trust endowment of $33 billion and paid out $3 billion in grants during 2009. In June of 2009, Gates urged the world's wealthiest to donate heavily to charity. In July 2010, Gates, investor Warren Buffett and others of the world's wealthiest launched the Giving Pledge, an invitation the wealthiest individuals and families in America to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to charity.
Because of the relatively small size of the grants, both in comparison to the amount the charity gives annually and the size of the online education market, Gates characterized the foundation's role as a "catalytic" one, "getting in on the front edge of online learning," he said.
