Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge
I apologize I can’t remember who sent me this article. Thank you kindly.
I’ve often linked to free online courses (here, here, here, here) here’s an article on the future of education.
Click Here To Read About How: Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge
Introduction (Via NYT)
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — In the autumn of 1963, the American magazine Popular Mechanics heralded an innovation that seemed bound to change the world: the “teacherless classroom.”
The magazine told of a new building at the University of Miami, doughnut-shaped and carved up into 12 rooms. Professors stood in the hole and had their image projected into every room simultaneously. Faculty productivity was said to have soared. What was lost in intimacy would, readers were assured, be made up for by feedback buttons on students’ chairs, including one for “I don’t understand.”
Fate and technology have pummeled many professions since 1963, from bookseller to travel agent to auto worker. But teachers have resisted the powerful forces reorganizing industry. The dream of the teacherless classroom has remained just that.
Today the dream has returned. Thanks to broadening Internet access, advances in multimedia and the market potential of millions of historically underserved learners among the developing world’s youth and the rich world’s adults, modern versions of the doughnut building are flowering globally: systems through which chunks of teaching can be “scaled up,” in business jargon, and beamed to hundreds of thousands worldwide.
The Open Courseware Consortium, started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has enlisted universities around the world, from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa to the University of Tokyo, to post courses online free, including professor’s notes, video and exams. The portal iTunes offers lectures from Berkeley and Oxford and elsewhere. The new University of the People, founded by an Israeli entrepreneur, provides tuition-free bachelor-level degrees through what it calls “peer-to-peer teaching” — students learning not from teachers but each other, trading questions and answers online.
Teacherless or virtual-teacher learning is described by enthusiasts as a revolution in the making. Until now, they say, education has been a seller’s market. You beg to get in to college. Deans decide what you must know. They prevent you from taking better courses elsewhere.
They set prices high to subsidize unprofitable activities. Above all, they exclude most humans from their knowledge — the poor, the old, people born in the wrong place, people with time-consuming children and jobs.
Additional Excerpt (Via NYT)
Education, re-imagined as a consumer product, will become about giving the young what they want now, not what they need or might later want, critics say. They worry that universities will cede their role in civilizing us and passing down the heritage of the past, and will become glorified vocational schools.
Education’s goal, the novelist Mark Slouka wrote in Harper’s Magazine, should be “to teach people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst. It is only secondarily — one might say incidentally — about producing workers.”
As the digital classroom comes, we will face hard questions. What will happen when teachers, like banks and retail outlets, are consolidated by the market, with favored professors teaching hundreds of thousands and regular Joes relegated to night school? Will there be a night school? Will a freer marketplace generate more ideas, or narrow the diversity of ideas as certain teachers crowd out others?
Click Here To Read About How: Virtual Classrooms Could Create a Marketplace for Knowledge
