72. Beyond the Khan Academy
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
Check out Udacity.com, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, who until recently, was a tenured professor at Stanford. His goal is to teach courses that have 200,000 simultaneous students. And why not?
He reports that in the last class taught at Stanford, every single person in the class who got a perfect grade wasn’t in the classroom at all—all the A students were remote, some as remote as Afghanistan. Many of the students would watch a lecture twenty or more times because they were so focused on learning what he had to teach.
I’ve shared one example after another of what happens when we combine motivated students with specific and refined educational assets delivered digitally. It’s easy to see how it works for computer programmers and math students, for those that want to learn a craft or understand a novel (not for a grade, but because they actually care).
And yet, like all things associated with the ever-increasing yield of the networked economy, the examples are discounted. “Yes,” people said after Amazon sold a few books, “it works for speciality books, but it will never work for novels.” And then, after novels started selling a third or more of their copies online, the skeptics said it would never work for DVDs or MP3s or chocolate bars. But it did.
Just as online shopping scaled, an inexorable rise due to the efficiencies of the connections created by the net, so will the digital delivery of information permeate every nook and cranny of what we learn.
What we can’t do, though, is digitize passion. We can’t force the student to want to poke around and discover new insights online. We can’t merely say, “here,” and presume the students will do the hard (and scary) work of getting over the hump and conquering their fears.
Without school to establish the foundation and push and pull and our students, the biggest digital library in the world is useless.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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