We’re #3 on Paul Graham’s Frighteningly Ambitious Idea List
turingcollege.blogspot.comThat's an excitingly ambitious project. I really hope you guys pull it off.
One (extended) question though:
The first course is "a cutting-edge class in web application development for mobile devices. Not only does it use texts focused on practical application and cover tech like PhoneGap, Jo, Sencha, jQTouch, and jQuery Mobile, but it is taught by a real-world developer with decades of university teaching experience".
That's not a university course, that's a trade school course. Look at the "textbooks". Probably a useful one but it's not CS. I know you say "We not only teach CS/SE theory at the highest level, but also provide the practical implementation that prepares you to excel in the workplace." but to be honest that seems like a lie. I don't have much experience with teaching CS but I have some.
The idea that you could teach a practical (necessarily complex) toolkit at the same time or alongside high level CS concepts seems absurd. Students have a hard enough time getting those high level concepts to click but now they are mixing trade school toolkit training in at the same time? Those two goals conflict with each other. It's like using gcc internals for a compiler course.
I am so onboard with the online, just in time, at your own pace learning thing. But I have to say that the copy on this page has seriously dampened by enthusiam.
You're called "Turing College" and the only course is a trade school mobile app course covering mobile app framework libraries (at least they'll have to come back in 6 months for the new version of the course) and say things like this: "We’re teaching you to be a rock star, not just look like one on paper". WTF? Was brogrammercollege.blogspot.com taken? And blogspot? really?
I hope my impression is wrong, but I'm not coming away with a good one from this page.
Thanks for the feedback on the copy. It's always hard to find that balance between being informal and jokingly reference overused terms like "rockstar", and being unnecessarily stuffy. We'll definitely take your comments to heart though as we refine the general descriptions.
The whole concept of being able to mix real world (trade school) courses with heavy theory is a tricky question. We have traditional theory heavy courses in the pipeline, but realistically, it is extremely difficult to bootstrap with theoretical courses. It's been tried before and typically fails quickly. Oddly enough, you can give away theoretical classes, and you can charge $10,000 a class for them, but you can't really sell enough at our $200-$400 price point to pay for the cost of developing the class. We believe you can teach both, and should teach both, but I'm well aware that we'll always have people saying you can't or shouldn't even attempt to do so.
Oh, one note on the textbooks for the course. Of course there is an image issue when you use Oreilly and Apress texts, but honestly, for that subject there just aren't any traditional texts that come anywhere near the level needed to teach the subject. Even those three have serious holes that Dr. Ostrowski has worked with the authors to plug in this course. If you know of a better text that we somehow overlooked, please drop me a note and we'll see if we can integrate it as we create V2 of the course.
The bootstrap problem explanation makes it more clear where you are coming from. That makes a lot of sense.
I think a few things struck a nerve with me because I've had a lot of interactions with junior developers who identify with the HN crowd, the startup culture, rockstar programmer thing who show really strong anti-intellectual opinions about CS.
Then they end up reinventing the wheel poorly because they would never bother looking up the 30 year old algorithm that solves their problem on wikipedia, nevermind reading an actual published paper. Every time I have to throw away weeks of their work because they wrote their own crappy sorting algorithm or didn't google "bloom filter" I blame their educators and feel bad for them. Because it never occurred to them to think about the high level problem and see if maybe one of those ivory tower geniuses solved their problem already. Sometimes they know they could have but don't know where to start or feel intimidated by that part of the web.
I'm gearing up to do some recruiting for my startup so it's on my mind. "Turing College? sounds like my kind of people. 'Rockstar' programmer? sounds like those kind of people".
Maybe that's unfair and I shouldn't be so crotchety when I'm barely in my 30's. Some clarity on where you guys will fall on the theoretical/practical spectrum and how the theoretical foundation courses will support the practical courses in your curriculum would help people like me get on board.
Maybe some copy on your roadmap for the curriculum and your higher level ideas about how you'll be teaching?
Perhaps your use of the word "college" is currently misleading. As the OP says, you're really offering trade school classes. When you offer a comprehensive curriculum that includes a theoretical underpinning, that's when you're a "college".
Our first class definitely has practical application, but it is still taught by a PHD and covers more ground at a higher level than the current college or university standard.
If teaching applied material makes you a trade school, someone should tell Harvard: http://cs76.tv/2012/spring/
As for the use of the word "college", well, it's the most accurate descriptor of what we are building. We're not there yet, but we will be soon, and having to print a whole new batch of business cards is just too darn expensive. We could have chosen a more startup-ey name, but we hate startup-ey names. I could have named it after myself as well, maybe something like "Huffman Coding". We checked though, and that was taken.
While we're discussing it though, singularity university isn't a university, and clown college does not cover the theoretical aspect of clowning sufficiently. Also, University of Maryland College University is mildly redundant. And why do you park on the drive way and drive on the park way?
Since I started using the term "trade school" here I want to be clear I don't use it as a pejorative term, just a differentiation.
I believe most of the new-model online/for-profit universities actually had to buy older universities to get their accreditation.
So I doubt that "play[ing] their game better than they do" by pursuing traditional accreditation is really the disruptive strategy here. Blow up the whole rotten credentialist system and replace it with something very different.
(A meta-credentialing service might be a neat startup. With an explosion of non-traditional courses, certifications, and credentials, which actually hold up as meaning something? Communicating something here is a process, trust, and even data/statistics challenge – a nice community/tech opportunity.)
I agree - very hard to start a (long-course) educational institution without first establishing the credibility (in the actual industry, not to the govt.) of the certificate you get at the end of it.
What a system like this really needs is a strong way for future employers of graduates to rate their relative ability (eg. 'according to our benchmarks this person's ability in python lies _x_ far between the average coder on github and [insert famous python user here]').
Perhaps establishing 'credentialing' should come before establishing a school?
You would think so, but we actually can't even apply for regional accreditation until the first student graduates from a full degree program.
Yes, the system is rigged against new entrants.
Shoot, you've gone ahead and skipped ahead to phase two of our master plan. Try not to tell our competitors...
Just-in-time learning is the future. No ifs, ands, or buts. Any argument you might have to the contrary is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong ... The current system of teaching students everything they might need to know, just in case it ever comes up, is an artificial construct that resulted from limited access to books and a limited amount of time available for study. Just in time, on the other hand, is how we actually learn by default.
This is an interesting point. I happen to disagree, and I hoped that the author would go on to say exactly why it's wrong, especially dangerously so. It seems like the author rejects curriculum-based courses of study that provide a broad, solid foundation in favor of just-in-time courses of study, in which one learns whatever is necessary at the moment, right before applying it.
My main objections are that
* There are things you don't feel like learning that you would do well to learn. I had a lot of freedom to choose courses during school, which was great, but I am about to graduate with a lot of holes in my knowledge.
* No matter how smart you are, you would benefit from the guidance of a teacher --- guidance through a full curriculum that gives you a solid foundation and imparts onto you important patterns of thought.
This was my sticking point as well. University doesn't just teach you facts, it teaches you how to think constructively, liaise, and how to research. Who is going to say "I need JIT Learning to teach me the scientific method"? That's an example of something that most people need to have introduced to them; folks just aren't aware that it exists as a process, let alone why.
I was hoping this comment would come up, actually. The real difference in just in time vs. just in case has to do with delivery, sequencing and retention. A broad, solid foundation sounds great on paper, but there are some hard realities that sink in shortly after graduating. First, within about 6 months the amount of actual knowledge you retain from this foundation is probably going to be between 5 and 7%. That's 5-7% of the total from a not very efficient 4 or 5 years of dedicated study. How not efficient? Well, if you look at the in major portion of your degree, you probably had about 450 hours in real classroom instruction, or a little under 2 hours a week. So, of those 450 hours, you will probably retain less than 30 or 40 hours worth of real useful knowledge. you may dismiss this as hyperbole, but trust me, all that work dissolves incredibly quickly. I remember Big O, a couple of formulas, and the ability to order a sandwich (or was it a donut) in German.
More importantly, though, is the fact that since you only have 40 or so classroom hours in any class, and you have to teach to the average, it is extremely difficult to build up to a properly high level of skill in any particular subject. It feels hard while you are doing it, but after you graduate, you realize the people who have been focusing on the subject for a couple years are light years ahead of you. It's even more difficult to chain subject together to reach that high level. The closest thing we have is a generic 100,200,300 level system with some prerequisites.
How does this relate to just in time vs just in case? Even if you assume an identical breadth of knowledge, being able to sequence classes together in series instead of having semester and scheduling gaps means you go into the next class with more knowledge retained from the previous, which means you can build on your foundation in a more logical and efficient way and reach those higher levels that you just can't in a fragmented system. You can approach this from the ground up (building on higher and higher concepts), but the very nature of a JIT system means you can also approach it from the top down. That is, you can define the ends result or top level class, and then sequence each course to build up the fundamentals you need, just before you need them.
The point? If you are defining a broad base of skills, JIT allows you to master each one quicker and sequence them together to reach higher levels of mastery. If you need skills in the real world, JIT is the quickest and most efficient way to build those skills. The reason I consider disagreeing to be dangerously wrong, is that JIT is so much more effective at real education that those who bank on JIC for their future (students, schools, or countries) will find themselves left in the dustbin of history.
Thanks for the thorough reply. It seems we agree on a few key points:
1) Retention sucks in the current model of higher education.
I've been thinking about this one a lot lately. I've been doing a one year masters where I'm taking two courses a semester and doing research. The depth with which I am learning things is night and day compared to the depth with which I learned my undergrad material. During undergrad, I was drinking from a firehose and just trying not to drown. I would turn in unfinished problem sets, not having learned the material, and move on with my life. I would sleep through classes out of sheer exhaustion.
Now, with just two classes, I'm able to learn things almost well enough to teach them. So one way to improve retention is just to take things slower.
Another model comes to mind if we consider how people study at Cambridge, Oxford, etc. I have not experienced it myself, but according to students who went there as exchange students (and students from there who came here (here being MIT)) it's pretty different. Students here are overwhelmed with constant work. There, it is a lot more self paced, with a set of final examination at the end (someone please correct me if I am not doing it justice). So perhaps self-pacing and working smarter, not harder leads to more retention.
Do you know of any sources for retention statistics such as those you cited? Some of them don't match my experience (for example, I would say that I spent 8-10 hours a week in classes related to my major).
2) Courses need to happen in a logical sequence so that they can build on one another.
When I first read your post I thought you were suggesting that students should, by themselves, pick what to learn based on what they want to build, in lieu of being guided through a logical curriculum.
The point about scheduling gaps is interesting. Scheduling gaps happen because it's hard to satisfy the constraints of so many student and faculty schedules. If you could take courses on demand, that would fix things.
3) Results driven learning can be excellent for motivation and retention.
When one talks about results, there is a fundamental issue of time scale.
Courses that say things like "When you're done, you will have built an autonomous mobile robot" are great.
But there are many fundamental things to learn, over a long period of time, whose benefits
* you might not see for a long time * are broader than you could have ever imagined (and hence the benefit would seem artificially low to you)
If you as a student get to pick the desired result yourself all the time, you might be tempted to pick shorter-term results. This can be catastrophic to your education.
I believe in forcing people to learn fundamentals of their chosen field --- fundamentals whose power they might not appreciate until later. Learning fundamentals (that you might choose not to learn if you weren't forced to) is fruitful in powerful and unexpected ways.
Take pure math classes. You learn analysis. Then you learn measure theory. Then you learn measure-theoretic probability theory. Then you learn stochastic processes. All of a sudden, financial mathematics becomes easy to grasp. But so do a host of other things. Signal processing, computer vision, statistical mechanics, complex multiagent systems, epidemic modeling, control systems.
I suppose you could have started on this path because you wanted to learn financial mathematics. But it probably would have seemed way too complicated and difficult. But if someone says they want to be an applied mathematician (a much "broader" and more long term goal than just learning financial mathematics), then they'd better take a ton of pure math.
1) There have been a few different experiments with self pacing and retention at schools like Oxford (and a college in Iowa of all places). The typical result is a significant increase in retention with lower stress. The problem, and fundamental reason why this isn't the norm, is simple logistics. Trying to build a serial system of education that still uses classrooms is massively difficult. The closest you can get is a compromised 6 week class system that is still extremely difficult to pull off. Parallel is just easier and more cost effective to administer. It's also easier and more cost effective to administer on an online system which is why the push for MOOC. The difference for us is that we care more about optimizing the learning process itself and real evaluation and guidance, and are willing to bet that enough students also care about those points to give us a chance at proving it at a large scale. Our system costs a little more than free, sure, but the difference in results can be dramatic, as you are seeing with your masters program.
I don't have the 7% study at hand, but I'll try to look through my list of references to see if I can track it down. They cover some statistics on retention in this article: http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
As for in-major hours, it may vary a bit by school (and MIT has a higher percentage than most), but here is the breakdown for UT. In-major credits required for a CS bachelors: 45. Average credits per class: 4. Weeks in a semester: 14. Average classes per week: 3. Total estimated lecture hours per class: 42ish. Total in major lecture hours for 45 credits: about 500. Subtract intro days, quiz and final days plus time for class to get settled, etc.. and you have somewhere around 400-450 hours left, or 100 per year, 2 per calendar year week or 3.5 per school year week. Some semesters you might not have any in major, some you might have 2 or 3, so remembering 8 hours in a week of classes is not outside of the data set.
2) A student should not have to know the exact set of skills necessary to build up to the higher level concepts. This is one of the problems with the self directed learning attempts in traditional schools. But, if the student has a clear end goal in mind (say, the goal of becoming a search engineer at Google), then a JIT system that can build a sequence of courses based on the concepts within the course is more effective and targeted than a standardized fire-hose curriculum. Speaking of fire-hose, I'm working on a post covering context switching in a parallel educational system that addresses exactly why this is such a problem.
3) This comes back around to the top down (or goal oriented) approach, and gets even more interesting with a mentor guided approach. Imagine a hybrid apprentice/mentor system where the mentor can define a sequence (or collection) of high level concepts which the learning system could then take and generate a path to master those concepts. All the while, the mentor could provide direct guidance and assistance where needed and help answer the tough questions that arise without having to dedicate all their time to the actual instruction. There are many, many, variations on this pattern that work extremely well with JIT systems but really don't work at all in JIC.
What does HN think of my prediction?
Within the next decade, we will see the rise of the teacher superstar. They will have salaries/compensations comparable to movie stars except their performance will be teaching online to massive amounts of students.
We can already see a beginning of that trend with Salman Khan or Peter Norvig teaching an AI class online.
Optimistically, I think it'd be a great thing if this (or even some portion of it) came to pass.
Two thoughts come to mind:
1) Salman Khan is arguably this already (although he's not a "teacher" in the narrow, institutional sense) - he's managed to educate thousands of students rapidly, and he's raised a significant amount of capital for Khan Academy (not to mention attracted quite a bit of media attention)
2) The best private schools, I suspect, house many potential "superstar" teachers. The problem is that the schools have most of the reputational value and reap almost all of the financial rewards. In a lot of ways, it's an information asymmetry problem; I attended such a school and had what I would imagine to be a very disproportionately high number of superstar teachers, but I didn't know which teachers were superstars until after I had enrolled in the school and taken their courses.
I like it even with doubts whether it will come to pass.
I can buy the fame for sure; the salary is harder: movie stars may be able to more effectively withhold their appearances/endorsement. Educators have more constraints on their withholding/spinning/endorsing behavior. But maybe!
I think you're probably on the right track with that one.
How about a further prediction:
Once there are teacher superstars and they are considered a normal part of our culture the pressure to pander or appeal to the masses will result in the most famous being pretty crappy educators. It will be like politics and acting, superstar attributes are more important than teacher/leader/actor attributes.
Unless we get a really good way of measuring student performance somehow. If we can get that good enough then it becomes like sports, the superstars are actually among the best at what they are supposed to be doing. This is the optimistic prediction.
The first one is the realistic one.
I love the idea and hope it happens. Day[9] springs to mind, he's a former pro starcraft player who teaches the high levels of the game to other players in a weekly stream. He appears to be at least ramen profitable. I wonder if he serves as a model for this kind of approach. It would be great to see a Day[9] for every subject, even something as far flung as tennis instruction. Access to coaches is limited to highschoolers or those with gobs of money.
Is anyone else surprised at the number of frontpage articles name-checking pg this week?
The way I look at it, he name checked us, he just didn't know our name yet.
I'm not sure I follow. Am I supposed to pay $10k for an online course that I know little about their reputation, with no free trial nor guarantee from existing businesses that they actually value your certification? It's hard to imagine how you'd get early adopters to get traction.
I think you're looking at it wrong. You shouldn't be comparing yourself to universities. Don't compare your prices, duration and accreditation with them. You should be building something completely different from the ground up. Something that is viable in today's world, not trying to bandage existing university models to today's world. Like pg said, build your own thing, if it's really good, it will eventually replace universities without you even aiming for that.
Personally, I think you should focus much more heavily on the accreditation side than anything else. Just try to build a certification system together with existing tech employers, something that they would sign and put a banner in your website saying "company X approves this certificate as important for our selection process". That would get early adopters interested. After you have that. Offer your classes for free, make those as widely available as possible. Charge for the certificate and one on one help with those who feel they need it to get your certificate. Well, that's how I think this universities will actually get disrupted.
I'd actually focus more on reputation for delivering results than accreditation. Accreditation is a massive bureaucratic nightmare and I'm not sure it's worth it. For access to Title IV, maybe, but it's going to seriously cost you in other ways, slowing you down on a 1000 fronts.
I don't think you can beat the current universities by playing the game by the rules they've set up to manage their competition. Just seems like you've lost before you've even started.
We actually have to focus on results first and foremost. By the time we can even apply for accreditation (probably 3 years out) the issue of accreditation for reputation will be moot.
But, you have to look at what the larger impact can be with accreditation and Title IV. Even though we are strongly against student loans, being able to work with state and federal governments for grant and work study funds is the best and most direct way we have at hitting "free education for all" status. It's also the quickest way to move out of the relatively small group of students who don't care about accreditation to reach the much larger group that does. It's only by being a reasonable alternative to this group of students that we can apply real pressure to the current system. As long as we aren't accredited, the existing institutions can simply point to that fact and write us off and most people will listen to them.
Well, the courses start at $200, we have a generous refund policy, and you can actually try the system and class out for free right now with a guest account. We don't even require a real email.
Also, we have thought very seriously about the business model of offering classes for free (Udacity model) and charging for certification/one on one. The numbers we see for that model just don't work, even at a large scale. You have to focus in introductory classes with the broadest possible appeal, reduce the difficulty of the course so you don't get 10,000 complaint emails from students who can't keep up, use a MOOC structure that is more about cost control than maximizing learning. Plus, the conversion from free to paid user may or may not be enough to cover the cost of course development. Our model, on the other hand, allows us to pay our professors quite generously for classes that may not have 100,000 students attending and focus more on building our catalog instead of just building the user base.
It doesn't quite meet your criteria for start today, but the Open University, a well respected "virtual uni", has been running in the UK for over 40 years.
Fees are a little higher but only marginally at around $8000 per 120 credits for international students. (A typical degree requires 300-360 credits)
Many degrees can be completed over 7 or more years if it's convenient. But I think there is a minimum time as some coursework is assessed to a schedule.
So there is definitely a market for this type of learning, and competition almost always benefits the customer, so good luck!
OU was a big inspiration for us. The bar we personally use is building a system designed for Silicon Valley. Pacing and availability are critical, as is maintaining a very high standard for classes. Right now, OU doesn't meet either requirement. (their SE program, for example, is little more than a few intro to Java classes and some SE theory)
Regarding the point: "Just-in-time learning is the future. No ifs, ands, or buts. Any argument you might have to the contrary is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong."
I don't think I agree with you there (or perhaps I just didn't interpret the point correctly). In certain fields of study - and perhaps software engineering is one - this might be true, but it does not hold generally. If tomorrow I find myself needing to write a good zero-finding algorithm in a new language, then yes, I can probably absorb that material quickly. If I find myself needing to model the temperature dependence of something using an esoteric branch of quantum mechanics, then good luck to me without 3 years of prior study in topics that didn't seem relevant to anything at the time.
This is very very a long shot project. I have watched colleges trying to get their first accreditation (I guess most likely going to be DETC in that case), but it is really a difficult process which gives them very little room outside of following the existing for-profit college business model. Plus the pricing is another issue. For example via distance CS Master Degrees at state colleges can go for under $10.000 (Columbus State, Dakota State). The other more important thing is brand building. And developing Top Education brand burns lots of money and time. But it is exciting to watch the new approaches to Education grow. Hopefully one or another are able to break out.
No arguments on the long shot part, and you're right, focusing on accreditation does put some serious limitations on exactly how we can structure our business model. Not focusing on accreditation, however, means it is very easy to create a business model that is impossible to accredit. Udemy, for example, will never be able to achieve their original vision of being a real college or university because their business model relies so heavily on revenue sharing for the instructors, which is a big no no for accreditation boards.
Cost is actually the one area where we can compete very aggressively. Columbus state may be able to sneak under the $10k mark, but for an equivalent program we'll be just over $3k with a much more flexible and adaptable system. That number, btw, is with state and federal subsidies for the school, often upwards of $10,000 per student per year. We're coming in completely unsubsidized at a price that's less than a third of our cheapest competition with an offering that is significantly higher quality (we're competing with MIT for some of our professors).
Brand building really is the toughest nut to crack, and one what we have a couple different strategies for. Not really comfortable discussing those strategies on this forum, but let's just say we've thought a great deal about the problem.
Isn't the traditional way to get a new college accredited to buy an existing, economically failing school which is already accredited and take over the credential?
Sure, it's traditional if you are unable to meet accreditation standards on your own and have a spare $10mil in the bank. We can meet those standards on our own, however, we don't have a spare $10mil in the bank.
A similar discussion/blog post in a thread on another trending HN post:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742455
Maybe we're all just seeing an end to the vague rhetoric about college "preparing you for life" rather than training you for the workplace.
That's really cool. Unfortunately, I'm not willing to drop $400 for an online course of unknown quality, with uncertainty about accredidation, when coursera is free. How do you plan to attract your initial users?
The best way we can attract our first users is with having a course that is so valuable for our students that accreditation concerns become secondary. In this case, if you are looking for a high level class in Web App for Mobile, you probably will never find it in the coursera, mitx, udacity or khan catalogs. They have no interest or incentive to put that sort of course together.
If you look at the value proposition for a student, our web app class is extremely high. The material covered in that class can have a direct impact on job prospects, billing rates, or internal promotion opportunities, and it is such a difficult area to self teach that saving tens or hundreds of hours fighting though online tutorials is well worth the $200 or $400 that the class costs.
How do I know it's high quality, though? $400 is a significant amount of money. Without user testimonials or reviews, am I supposed to take it on blind faith that it will be worth my $$?
I'm not slagging you, by the way. Just offering my initial reaction as someone who would be interested in such a class, who is doing a CS degree at a traditional university, and who would like to see someone disrupt the higher education model.
As soon as we have users, we'll have user testimonials and reviews. It's part chicken and egg, I know, but it's the same problem any new product has. Someone has to be the first.
Other than user reviews (and the free preview and money back guarantee), what could we do to convince you (or other prospective students in your position) that it's worth the risk? Would a google hangout with Dr. Ostrowski (something we have been talking about) make a difference ?
>free preview and money back guarantee
Make this more prominent; I didn't see any mention of it. Just "Give us $400 for our awesome class".
>Would a google hangout with Dr. Ostrowski make a difference ?
Absolutely. An AMA wouldn't hurt, either. Also, sign me up for your newsletter. Email's in my profile.
Thanks for the advice, We'll definitely work on making our guarantee more prominent.
I've been considering an AMA on Reddit, even though I actually had to quit the site three months ago to get to where we are. AMAs on HN are a little tricky as the commenting system is so...unique.
Either way, I'll add your email and keep you updated.
HN AMAs unfortunately seem to be a non-starter. I can definitely sympathize with blocking reddit for productivity reasons, but it's a connection with your target market that shouldn't be ignored.
I like your idea, and I love your goal, but it's going to take more than that to make me a customer who forks over hundreds of dollars. You've got the attention of the technorati; I'd first focus on how you can convert them to paying customers, then deal with the plebs later.
I think this would actually work better as a quick reference for people who are already coders - sometimes you just need to look stuff up. Target Stack Overflow rather than Stanford.
Excellent point, and a strategy we have built in the learning system part itself. As odd as it may sound though, I actually wouldn't want to go up against Stack Overflow. They are a much more dangerous competitor than Stanford.
Why is your blog completely unusable without javascript enabled?
It's blogger. Not really something we have control over.
You choose the platform you publish on, though.
I always browse without javascript enabled. Sites that load, and/or warn me correctly get a subtle mental nod and (maybe) even an addition to my safe-list. Obviously a blank white page isn't going to bring anyone back a second time...