I'm sure you've already thought about this but bear in mind that as a buyer, I don't want to hear "unlimited" for things that have material scaling costs for my service providers, it just sounds unsustainable and likely to change later or be the cause of an issue.
On the other hand being free from arbitrary limits is great.
Unlimited usage like that means someone else has to pay for your usage - when the provider's pricing changes or their growth declines your usage may no longer be subsidized by someone else's. You risk becoming dependent on them without knowing the true cost of your usage, which also might not be sustainable for you.
i have been involved in quite a few code escrow agreements but none that were actually used. i'd be curious to hear any stories about cases where that did happen.
in my experience it has just been a way to help business decision makers credibly claim they are managing risk when buying from a startup
I imagine that it is for either insurance or regulatory reasons. Someone upstream is nervous about the bank relying on a startup for its core infrastructure, and is only placated by knowing that the code is in escrow. They're not themselves programmers and don't know how useless the code would be without the institutional knowledge of the startup.
WGU was a customer when I was at Learning Objects, they always impressed me visionary and outcome oriented. glad to hear a positive anecdote more than 10 years later.
I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
I saw a blog post a few years ago about a Canadian dude getting an exception to go to WGU. You might just email WGU and ask if you can get an exception.
In Canada, Thompson Rivers University offers a bachelor's in computer science as a fully distance option. On the French language side, Université TÉLUQ (part of the Université du Québec network) also offers a BS in CS.
yes, i was part of doing something like this at a small elearning startup for one of the largest publishers in the world circa 2010.
Exactly as you say, brought in to provide the tech platform for a strategic initiative involving a transformative shift to digital-first courseware and content.
in the future our personal editors will create our own editions of these books. mine will have an even longer captain crunch section and yours will be abbreviated
what works for me is to think of it like the mob of people is already there in front of you, and you're first grabbing out just a subset of the mob based on some conditions, then checking only those qualified at random which is the same as checking the distributions inside the qualified group.
so for problem 1, the mob is all parents with 2 children, each child is either b or g. the underlying distribution is 25%bb, 25%gg, 50%bg.
you first cull the set by saying "only parents with at least 1 b, line up to be examined". i think it's clear that the selected population will be 1/3 bb parents, 2/3 bg parents, right?
on the other hand the second problem is you saying: "all parents with a b born on tuesday, report to be examined!". note that most of the parents that were in the question 1 selected population are now excluded. try to imagine which parents get selected by this one.
you can't make the inference back to the original question because it's a different question about a broader group of people. question 1 population distrubution actually is 1/3 vs 2/3. the key is to think of it as selecting different subsets of the parent mob.
> on the other hand the second problem is you saying: "all parents with a b born on tuesday, report to be examined!". note that most of the parents that were in the question 1 selected population are now excluded. try to imagine which parents get selected by this one.
But we expect about the same number of parents to show up for "all parents with a b born on Tuesday" as "all parents with a b born on Monday." This feels like some kind of Simpson's paradox I've invented where every subgroup has a the same outcome, which is different than the outcome of the group as whole.
If you have 2B you might show up in both groups (Monday and Tuesday in your example), if you have only 1B you can't show up in both groups, that's why the probability is different.
true but note that the day of week selector is knocking out 6/7ths, it's quite a dominant excluder of parents. thus countering the effect of "has one boy already" on the composition of the group
This is twisting my brain a bit -- there's a third possible version, where the only info you have is the day of week. Something like "i have a child, one of whom was born on tuesday. what are the odds the other is a boy?" perhaps.
And the answer there has to be basically 50:50. So when you combine these two filters, day of week wins somehow. Will have to ponder more
ah i didn't actually explain it, the other responder did though.
6/7th (~85.7%) of parents with b g are knocked out by the day of week filter, while only ~%73.5 of the b b parents are knocked out by it. (if i did that math right) so proportionally the sample has more bb parents than the one without day of week.
And what makes probability so hard, is that these word problems describe a situation that never happens in real life, so human-language speaking people interpret the problem as something more sensible, before doing the math
