71. Lectures at night, homework during the day
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has a very different vision of how school can work. He’s already raised millions of dollars from Bill Gates and others, and his site currently offers more than 2,600 video lectures that (for free) teach everything from Calculus to World History. To date, the lectures have been delivered almost a hundred million times.
None of the videos are as good as they will be in two years, just as Wikipedia, Google, and Amazon started as mere shadows of their current selves. But as each video is replaced by a better one, as others start competing to increase the quality, here’s what will happen:
There will be a free, universal library of courses in the cloud online, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Every lecture, constantly improved, on every conceivable topic. This means that students will be able to find precisely the lecture they need, and to watch it at their own speed, reviewing it at will.
The next day at school, teachers can do what they want to do anyway—coach and help students in places they are stuck. In a school like this, the notion that every student will have to be in sync and watch the same (live!) lecture at the same time will become absurd. And for good reason.
The most visible symptom of the death of traditional schooling is going to be the rise of online video lectures. Not just online, but specific. Specific to a topic, to a problem, to a student’s status. With the long tail of the Internet at our disposal, why settle for a generic lecture, the local lecture, the lecture that everyone else needs to see?
And most important, why settle for an amateur lecture, not very good, given by a teacher with a lot of other priorities? It’s a bit like requiring teachers to write their own textbooks.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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