A few years ago I heard Ezra Klein make an offhand comment about Harvard's endowment: given how rich they are, why aren't there 10 Harvards scattered across the country?
Years ago I thought of starting a nonprofit that was a kind of synthesis. Like you, I don't think online learning has legs for the vast majority of people for the simple reason that it's too easy to blow it off. I had a vague idea of renting a classroom somewhere and serving as a kind of proctor for lectures from Harvard or MIT or whatever. So we watch the video together in the classroom, then use it as the foundation for class discussion.
I didn't pursue it because it's not my area of expertise, but I still think something similar is feasible.
As a startup and turnaround specialist I consulted for a husband-and-wife business that offered courses on how to teach ESL. I soon worked out that their money-making skill wasn't anything to do with ESL. It was pairing up lecturers and students,. They were labor brokers. As a trial I got them to present a course on Excel for beginners, although neither of them had ever seen a spreadsheet in their lives. Just recruit a lecturer! A lot more students want to learn Excel than to go to China and teach English in some remote village.
Your idea will work, if your presentation is as professional as you can make it. Spend some money on designing and printing a classy cover in which the students can keep the professionally designed lecture material.
I enrolled for three MOOCs and every time, that's when my computer decided to take a sabbatical.
Nevertheless I remember one of my law lecturers telling us that university was the most expensive method of self-education known. If we didn't spend the hours in the law library reading and summarizing cases we were going to fail the oral.
Here's another one: I ran two part-time businesses to pay my way through university. Being short of time I skipped all but one of the lectures on Paradise Lost. I only started reading the poem the night before the exam, and got halfway through. To my horror in the exam the passage for critical analysis was from the last half. A month later I was on my way into a party when I ran into that lecturer on his way out and he said, "That was an amazing analysis you wrote. Talk later!" I never saw him again and to this day I wonder what I did right. BBB.
Coincidentally one of the other active tabs on my browser is Robert Sapolsky lecturing on genetics.
College should continue to exist, perhaps in a radically altered form, because the meaning of life is to articulate oneself. Since we're going back to the 19th century in so many other ways, why not revisit the legacy of the old lyceum and the land grant school, as equipment for self reliant (not to say "omnicompetent") citizens. The obvious obstacle to this is that it's against the "California ideology" in pretty much every way!
Very nicely done. So much has happened, that I'd kind of forgotten the details of this craziness. And yes, it repeats . . . One of the things you touch on is the tech world's ability to generate plausible and internally consistent arguments that turn out to be completely wrong.
Weirdly, and speaking of California ideology, I read this while flying to Palo Alto for our son's graduation. And whatever gets said, being there matters to this crowd. A lot. At any rate, keep up the good work!
The MOOC ideology was the Californian Ideology in a nutshell: vague egalitarian rhetoric combined with unquestioned certitude that the profit motive was the primary vehicle of moral progress
That’s such a devastating summary of the whole MOOC craze! I always felt that the idea was very over hyped and I guess we were right 😎
A few years ago I heard Ezra Klein make an offhand comment about Harvard's endowment: given how rich they are, why aren't there 10 Harvards scattered across the country?
Years ago I thought of starting a nonprofit that was a kind of synthesis. Like you, I don't think online learning has legs for the vast majority of people for the simple reason that it's too easy to blow it off. I had a vague idea of renting a classroom somewhere and serving as a kind of proctor for lectures from Harvard or MIT or whatever. So we watch the video together in the classroom, then use it as the foundation for class discussion.
I didn't pursue it because it's not my area of expertise, but I still think something similar is feasible.
As a startup and turnaround specialist I consulted for a husband-and-wife business that offered courses on how to teach ESL. I soon worked out that their money-making skill wasn't anything to do with ESL. It was pairing up lecturers and students,. They were labor brokers. As a trial I got them to present a course on Excel for beginners, although neither of them had ever seen a spreadsheet in their lives. Just recruit a lecturer! A lot more students want to learn Excel than to go to China and teach English in some remote village.
Your idea will work, if your presentation is as professional as you can make it. Spend some money on designing and printing a classy cover in which the students can keep the professionally designed lecture material.
I enrolled for three MOOCs and every time, that's when my computer decided to take a sabbatical.
Nevertheless I remember one of my law lecturers telling us that university was the most expensive method of self-education known. If we didn't spend the hours in the law library reading and summarizing cases we were going to fail the oral.
Here's another one: I ran two part-time businesses to pay my way through university. Being short of time I skipped all but one of the lectures on Paradise Lost. I only started reading the poem the night before the exam, and got halfway through. To my horror in the exam the passage for critical analysis was from the last half. A month later I was on my way into a party when I ran into that lecturer on his way out and he said, "That was an amazing analysis you wrote. Talk later!" I never saw him again and to this day I wonder what I did right. BBB.
Coincidentally one of the other active tabs on my browser is Robert Sapolsky lecturing on genetics.
Great work, Geoff.
College should continue to exist, perhaps in a radically altered form, because the meaning of life is to articulate oneself. Since we're going back to the 19th century in so many other ways, why not revisit the legacy of the old lyceum and the land grant school, as equipment for self reliant (not to say "omnicompetent") citizens. The obvious obstacle to this is that it's against the "California ideology" in pretty much every way!
Very nicely done. So much has happened, that I'd kind of forgotten the details of this craziness. And yes, it repeats . . . One of the things you touch on is the tech world's ability to generate plausible and internally consistent arguments that turn out to be completely wrong.
Weirdly, and speaking of California ideology, I read this while flying to Palo Alto for our son's graduation. And whatever gets said, being there matters to this crowd. A lot. At any rate, keep up the good work!
The MOOC ideology was the Californian Ideology in a nutshell: vague egalitarian rhetoric combined with unquestioned certitude that the profit motive was the primary vehicle of moral progress
That’s such a devastating summary of the whole MOOC craze! I always felt that the idea was very over hyped and I guess we were right 😎