I have a developing opinion that I’m not quite sure how to word.
It seems that schools all over the world are teaching the same lessons, but are all trying to recreate the wheel. I sense that it’d be more efficient if a bunch of effort and resources went in to each lesson, and that lesson was made available for everyone.
“Consider The Dark Knight. It’s amazing! They put a ton of resources into it. Got the best actors, directors, special effects etc. Now imagine if you took the same script and asked the local middle school to reproduce it. It’d suck! That’s education.”
I sense that there is some sort of economic logic/terminology that applies here and that better articulates what I’m trying to say.
My attempt at explaining it a bit more formally. Consider a lesson on mitosis. Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it’d be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students. Given that the lesson can (largely) be delivered via software, it’s non-rivalrous (my consumption doesn’t take anything away from your consumption), and thus can be distributed to everyone at no marginal cost.
Anyway, I hope I did a good enough job explaining such that someone can recognize what I’m trying to say. I’d be really happy if anyone was able to help me further my understanding.
There’s two problems here. First, we have duplication of labor in that we have something like 1% of the population doing essentially the same task, even though it’s fairly straightforward to reproduce and distribute en masse after it’s been done once. This encompasses things like lesson plans, lectures, and producing supplementary materials (e.g. a sheet of practice problems).
This leads into the second problem, which is a resulting quality issue: if you have a large population of diverse talent doing the same task, you expect it to form some sort of a bell curve. As noted above, we can take any lecture, tape it, and broadcast in en masse fairly easily. When we choose a system where each student is subjected to their instructor’s particular lecture, a relatively small portion of them get an excellent lecture, a very large portion get an average lecture (rather than an excellent lecture), and a relatively small portion get an execrable lecture (rather than an excellent lecture). If you’re really ambitious, you could even get the top, say, ten lecturers together and have them collaborate to make a super-lecture, and then get feedback on that particular unit, so they can improve the superlecture into a super-duperlecture.
(IMO, this is still a suboptimal way to do things. Try that process on textbooks (which are much easier to write collaboratively), and instead of getting feedback on hour-long chunks, get feedback on section-sized chunks (which, depending on the subject, can something like one-tenth the size). A good textbook is also cheaper to write, cheaper to distribute, more updateable, and better didactic material to begin with.)
It’s worth noting that there’s still a few wrinkles. Most importantly, there’s really no such thing as a “best” lecture, lesson plan, problem set, or textbook; the “goodness” quality depends, not just on the lecture’s content, but the intended audience. Think of this as a callibration issue. For instance:
Last I checked, MIT uses Sadava as their introductory biology textbook. If you dig around the reviews, you will find endorsements of another introductory biology book by Campbell that claim it’s “SO much easier to understand. It’s better organized, more clearly written”. When I found myself needing to relearn introductory biology (this time with Anki so I actually retain the knowledge), I tried Campbell, since that’s what my high school used, but gave up not halfway through the first chapter, frustrated by the difficulty I had understanding, the poor organization, and unclear writing; I find Sadava, however, to be much easier to understand, better organized, and more clearly written. Is the quoted reviewer lying, perhaps paid off by Big Textbooks? Perhaps, but a much better explanation is that Sadava is more technical; it’s much closer to the “definition-theorem-proof” feel of a math text. This makes it a fantastic text if you’re most students at MIT (or a typical LWer), but much less so if you’re in the other 99% of the population. This also solves the callibration problem: write two (or more) supertextbooks.
(This also neatly explains why MIT sometimse seems like the only school that uses good textbooks and why SICP only has 3.5 stars on Amazon.)
A second wrinkle is individual attention, which I tend to be dismissive of (if the textbook is good enough, you shouldn’t need any individual attention! And it’s not like the current education system, with its one-way lectures, is very good at giving very much individual attention), but if we’re optimizing education, there probably is more individual attention given to every student. However, because of reasons, I suspect that most of it should come from students in the same class, not staff. Also, it belongs after the reading.
A third wrinkle is a narrowing of perspectives. In any particular domain, there’s usually several approaches to solving problems, often coming from different ways of looking at it. In the current system, if you wind up on a team and come across a seemingly intractable problem, there’s a good chance that someone else has happened across a nonstandard approach that makes the problem very easy. If we standardize everything, we lose this. This is somewhat mitigated by the solution to the callibration problem, wherein people are going to be reading different texts with the different approaches because they’re different people, but we still kind of expect most mathematicians to learn their analysis from super!Rudin, meaning that they all lack some trick that Pugh mentions. The best solution I have is to have students learn in the highly standardized manner first, and once they have a firm grasp on that, expose them to nonstandard methods (according to my Memory text, this is an effective manner for increasing tranfer-of-learning).
A good writeup. But you downplay the role of individual attention. No textbook is going to have all the answers to questions someone might formulate after reading the material. They also won’t provide help to students who get stuck doing exercises. In books, it’s either nothing or all (the complete solution).
The current system does not do a lot of personalized teaching because the average university has a tightly limited amount of resources per student. The very rich universities (such as Oxford) can afford to give a training personalized to a much larger extent, via tutors.
Yeah. I’ve taught myself several courses just from textbooks, with much more success than in traditional setups that come with individual attention. I am probably unusual in this regard and should probably typical-mind-fallacy less.
However, I will nitpick a bit. While most textbooks won’t quite have every answer to every question a student could formulate whilst reading it (although the good ones come very close), answers to these questions are typically 30 seconds away, either on Wikipedia or Google. Point about the importance of having people to talk to still stands.
Also, some textbooks (e.g. the AoPS books) have hints for when a student gets stuck on a problem. Point about the importance of having people to help students when they get stuck still stands, although I believe the people best-suited to do this are their classmates; by happy coincidence, these people don’t cost educational organizations anything.
I’m tinkering with a system in which a professor, instead of lecturing, has it as their job to give each of 20 graduate students an hour a week of one-on-one attention (you know, the useful type of individual attention), which the graduate student is expected to prepare for extensively. Similarly, each graduate student is tasked with giving undergraduates 1 hour/week of individual attention. This maintains a professor:student ratio of 200:1 (so MIT needs a grand total of… 57 professors), doesn’t overly burden the mentors, and gives the students much more quality individual attention than I sense they’re currently getting. (Also, I believe that 1 hour of a grad student’s time is going to be more helpful to a student than 1 hour of a professor’s time. Graduate students haven’t become so well-trained in their field they’re no longer able to simulate a non-understanding undergrad in their head (an inability Dr. Mazur claims is shared among lecturers) and I expect there’s benefit from shrinking the age/culture gap. Also, no need to worry about appearing to be the class idiot in front of the person assigning your grade and potentially not giving you the benefit of the doubt on account of being the class idiot.) (Also, it has not escaped my attention that this falls apart at schools that are small or don’t have graduate students. And there’s other problems. Just an idea I’ve had floating around that may be enough in the right direction to effect a positive change.)
As for your point about quality I sense that it’d be inefficient to just take the lectures at the top of the bell curve and distribute them. I sense that it’d be more efficient to pool resources and “have them collaborate to make a super-lecture, and then get feedback on that particular unit, so they can improve the superlecture into a super-duperlecture”.
Could you elaborate a bit on this?
Note: I agree with you about the wrinkles and I think they need to be accounted for. This may be oversimplified, but I think of it as a spectrum of how much you pool resources. The wrinkles explain why it isn’t best to simply pool all resources. However, I think we both agree that right now we’re hardly pooling resources at all and that we should be way more towards the side of pooling. I sense that talking about the wrinkles may be distracting from the core point of “why do you receive gains from pooling”, but if you disagree please do what you think is best.
The argument goes “paying 20k camera-people for one year can replace 2M full-time equivalent jobs next year, which can either go into something more useful without changing anything else (1). Of course, once you’re going to do that, you’d do well to look into seeing what elements of anything else could be changed to make it even more awesome.”
If we optimize properly, I believe we wind up open-sourcing textbooks, somewhat like Linux. We have a core textbook, which has recieved enough feedback to make sure that everything is explained well enough that students generally don’t come away with misconceptions, but because they’re open source, every time you need to write for a particular audience, you have something to work from. LaTeX also supports comments, which makes it easy to include nonconventional perspectives for interested students (i.e. the ones who really need them).
But, yeah, pooling resources. Definitely something we should do more of and WHY HASN’T THE FREE MARKET SOLVED THIS 10 YEARS AGO?
(1) Fermi estimate is as follows: Cursory search indicates Harvard offers a bit over 3k undergraduate classes. Round it up to 5k to include secondary school and the few undergraduate courses not offered at Harvard (for instance, I can’t find an equivalent to 8.012.) Multiply by 4 for different levels, and we arrive at 20k camera-people needed to tape all these courses. (It’s actually less than that, since most courses are one semester.)
Cursory Googling indicates there are 3700k teachers in America; add in other English-speaking countries and eliminate primary- and graduate-level teachers should bring you to 4M teachers (I’m guessing that we add more teachers from English-speaking countries than we lose from not considering primary- and graduate-level teachers, since most classes are at these levels.) Assume that half their teaching job is replaceable by the videos we’ve created, and we’ve freed up the equivalent of 2M full-time jobs.
This is very much a Fermi estimate, but I feel I was liberal enough with the camera-people portion (we’re only hiring them a few hours a week!) to say that the cost of getting high-quality video of all secondary and undergraduate courses is 1% of the savings it should theoretically yield every year in the future. This upper limit goes down once we start writing textbooks instead of taping lectures, especially since most secondary and undergraduate courses already have very good textbooks to work from.
One issue with the chain of logic: The value proposition of school is NOT the lectures. It’s other things:
Good teachers who can individualize instruction (software cannot do this yet, even state of the art like Knewton is rudimentary compared to a good teacher)
Signaling (Everyone knows that if you learned at harvard you’ve already been preselected, nobody knows this about random person watching a video online)
I agree in large part with what you said, but the two issues above need to be solved.
I agree that other things like personalized attention and signaling matter. But I think the lessons and lectures do matter a lot (enough to be talked about anyway). And I think that getting into that other stuff now would be going down a deep enough rabbit hole such that it’d be unproductive for this conversation.
It might be worthwhile to distinguish between lesson content and the student experience.
For instance, if a million students watch the same video lecture on mitosis, have all of them had the same experience? Of course not. Different students have had different backgrounds. Some understand particular analogies that the lecturer makes better than others do. Some are colorblind and have more difficulty understanding a particular animation that is used.
And then there is the context in which that lecture is presented —
Ten of those million students are watching the lecture in a seminar classroom; and when one student gets confused, they pause the video and discuss it. Another ten students are watching the lecture in a different classroom; and when one student gets confused and looks out the window, he or she is punished for being inattentive.
Some students are watching at home on their laptops, and pausing the video to look things up on Wikipedia. Some are listening to the lecture as they drive to work or mow the lawn.
Five other students don’t watch the lecture at all. They agree to read the Wikipedia article on mitosis and whichever linked articles or sources they think might be interesting. Then they meet at a coffee shop and discuss it.
True, but I don’t see how that relates to the central point. Do you think that individual differences are large enough such that the gains to be made from specialization aren’t large enough to justify the investment I’m proposing?
I wasn’t refuting something or even disagreeing; I was elaborating on something else that is worth attending to in order to meet (what I suspect to be) your goal. This isn’t a refutation; it’s a “yes, and also …”
Part of what schools all over the world are doing is not just re-creating lesson plans, but providing specific student experiences. They may sometimes be doing this by deliberate design, and sometimes by following rules that are not terribly good, and sometimes pretty much winging it.
And just as some lessons might be better than others for learning (and thus, worth replicating rather than reinventing), some student experiences might be better than others for learning as well.
Could that kind of thing be a loss in the long haul? You’re able to create the superb lecture (assuming it’s actually superb) because there are a large number of teachers whose knowledge about lecturing you can draw on.
Use those superior lectures enough, and you have many fewer experienced teachers as new subject matter gets added.
I still think that there’s a place for teachers. I agree with richard_reitz that individual attention is overrated. That if lessons were good enough there’d be much less of a need for teachers to diagnose holes in students understanding and tutor them. And that there isn’t really too much individual attention in todays system anyway.
However, I think that even with these great lectures, there will still be holes in students’ understanding, and that using a human is the best way to diagnose and address them. Like Sal Khan has talked about, I think that if these lectures were available, it’d actually free up teachers to spend more time providing personalized attention. I suspect that there’s enough of a need for this such that teachers will still be employed.
I agree with you, I think you’ve explained it well, I think many other people in education are thinking along the same lines, and I think that’s sort of the idea with Khan Academy, Vi Hart, ASAP science, and all those other youtube things with fast-talking voices and sketches. The whole process could definitely do with a little more up-scaling, budget, and legitimacy as a lesson plan.
What you (and many other folks in education) are talking about is basically the function that textbooks fulfill- it’s just a matter of incorporating new media.
You may be interested in the term ‘inverted classroom’, if you’re not already aware of it.
The basic idea is that it’s the normal school system you grew up with, except students watch video lectures as homework, then do all work in class while they’ve got an expert there to help. Also, the time when the student is stuck in one place and forced to focus is when they’re actually doing the hard stuff.
There’s so many reasons why it’s better than traditional education. I just hope inverted classrooms start to catch on sooner rather than later.
(Edit: I know this isn’t your exact proposal, but it uses many of the features you mention and it can be immediately grafted into the existing public school system with a single change of curriculum and the creation of some videos. It’s the low hanging fruit for education.)
Is the following a correct restatement of your point?
We already have regional or state standardization of (some) subjects, exams, textbooks, and homework assignments (which are often given out of textbooks), and (in MOOCs and in computer-facilitated learning) actual lessons. All of these things have increased in use over time. Should we go even further in that direction and also standardize individual lesson scripts, in grade school as well as college? Is anything stopping or delaying this development apart from sheer inertia?
Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it’d be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students.
That would not be very efficient, because 100 employees working on the same (small) task would be inefficient, might get bogged down in politics, and the quality of the result would be dragged down to the level of the average employee (everyone-must-contribute mentality) or below it (designed-by-committee issues).
Naively, we might expect the following to be a strict improvement on current practice: let each employee build their own lesson, then discard 99 of the results, and let all 100 employees teach the best lesson any of them built. (Of course you’d need to try out all 100 lessons first to figure out which one is the best.) This is an extension of the current standardized curricula and textbooks to lesson plans and maybe to actual lessons a la MOOCs and computer teaching software. If instead of 100 employees you take all the employees across the world, and you let small self-selected groups work together, the result might be promising.
On the other hand, a teacher needs to adapt the lesson to the class. They need to understand it well enough themselves to teach well, to answer questions and help students with particular problems. They need to encourage or even force students to pay attention, study, and not interfere with one another. All of these things can’t be standardized because they require realtime reactions to student behavior.
I don’t have any answers here, I’m joining you in asking the question.
Is the following a correct restatement of your point?
Somewhat. I’m not saying that lessons should be standardized in the same way that textbooks and exams are currently standardized. I don’t think enough resources are being applied towards textbooks and exams (considering how widely used they are, even a small improvement would have a big effect because it’d be multiplied by the amount of people it touches).
My central point is, “I sense that there is a more abstract economic principle behind what I’m trying to say. Can anyone help me to articulate/understand it?”.
That would not be very efficient, because 100 employees...
You’re right. The 100 employees example was bad.
On the other hand, a teacher needs to adapt the lesson to the class.
I agree. I don’t think that lessons can be so good that we don’t need teachers (yet). I think that there will still be holes in the students’ knowledge after/while going through the lesson, and the most efficient way (right now) to identify and address these holes is to use a human.
Thank you! I think that’s getting closer to what I’m thinking. But it isn’t quite the same thing.
The superstar effect seems to be explaining a phenomena, whereas I’m trying to make an argument as to how resources can be allocated most efficiently. The superstar effect says, “you see these high salaries among, say singers, because technology has enabled them to reach large audiences, and technology has enabled consumers to easily listen to the best singers” (please correct me if my understanding is flawed).
I’m trying to do something similar, but from what I understand, slightly different. I’m trying to answer the question, “Why is this more efficient? Why is there an opportunity for firms to create and capture value?”.
I sense that equilibrium is a relevant concept. You invest in the resource until the marginal benefit is ⇐ the marginal cost. Investing into a resource that serves a large market has a large marginal benefit because the effects are multiplied by the size of the market.
Edit: I spent the whole day thinking about it and at some point the thoughts started flowing, so I wrote up a post. Thanks again for referring me to The Superstar Effect!
I have a developing opinion that I’m not quite sure how to word.
It seems that schools all over the world are teaching the same lessons, but are all trying to recreate the wheel. I sense that it’d be more efficient if a bunch of effort and resources went in to each lesson, and that lesson was made available for everyone.
Elon Musk gave a good analogy (paraphrasing)
I sense that there is some sort of economic logic/terminology that applies here and that better articulates what I’m trying to say.
My attempt at explaining it a bit more formally. Consider a lesson on mitosis. Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it’d be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students. Given that the lesson can (largely) be delivered via software, it’s non-rivalrous (my consumption doesn’t take anything away from your consumption), and thus can be distributed to everyone at no marginal cost.
Anyway, I hope I did a good enough job explaining such that someone can recognize what I’m trying to say. I’d be really happy if anyone was able to help me further my understanding.
There’s two problems here. First, we have duplication of labor in that we have something like 1% of the population doing essentially the same task, even though it’s fairly straightforward to reproduce and distribute en masse after it’s been done once. This encompasses things like lesson plans, lectures, and producing supplementary materials (e.g. a sheet of practice problems).
This leads into the second problem, which is a resulting quality issue: if you have a large population of diverse talent doing the same task, you expect it to form some sort of a bell curve. As noted above, we can take any lecture, tape it, and broadcast in en masse fairly easily. When we choose a system where each student is subjected to their instructor’s particular lecture, a relatively small portion of them get an excellent lecture, a very large portion get an average lecture (rather than an excellent lecture), and a relatively small portion get an execrable lecture (rather than an excellent lecture). If you’re really ambitious, you could even get the top, say, ten lecturers together and have them collaborate to make a super-lecture, and then get feedback on that particular unit, so they can improve the superlecture into a super-duperlecture.
(IMO, this is still a suboptimal way to do things. Try that process on textbooks (which are much easier to write collaboratively), and instead of getting feedback on hour-long chunks, get feedback on section-sized chunks (which, depending on the subject, can something like one-tenth the size). A good textbook is also cheaper to write, cheaper to distribute, more updateable, and better didactic material to begin with.)
It’s worth noting that there’s still a few wrinkles. Most importantly, there’s really no such thing as a “best” lecture, lesson plan, problem set, or textbook; the “goodness” quality depends, not just on the lecture’s content, but the intended audience. Think of this as a callibration issue. For instance:
Last I checked, MIT uses Sadava as their introductory biology textbook. If you dig around the reviews, you will find endorsements of another introductory biology book by Campbell that claim it’s “SO much easier to understand. It’s better organized, more clearly written”. When I found myself needing to relearn introductory biology (this time with Anki so I actually retain the knowledge), I tried Campbell, since that’s what my high school used, but gave up not halfway through the first chapter, frustrated by the difficulty I had understanding, the poor organization, and unclear writing; I find Sadava, however, to be much easier to understand, better organized, and more clearly written. Is the quoted reviewer lying, perhaps paid off by Big Textbooks? Perhaps, but a much better explanation is that Sadava is more technical; it’s much closer to the “definition-theorem-proof” feel of a math text. This makes it a fantastic text if you’re most students at MIT (or a typical LWer), but much less so if you’re in the other 99% of the population. This also solves the callibration problem: write two (or more) supertextbooks.
(This also neatly explains why MIT sometimse seems like the only school that uses good textbooks and why SICP only has 3.5 stars on Amazon.)
A second wrinkle is individual attention, which I tend to be dismissive of (if the textbook is good enough, you shouldn’t need any individual attention! And it’s not like the current education system, with its one-way lectures, is very good at giving very much individual attention), but if we’re optimizing education, there probably is more individual attention given to every student. However, because of reasons, I suspect that most of it should come from students in the same class, not staff. Also, it belongs after the reading.
A third wrinkle is a narrowing of perspectives. In any particular domain, there’s usually several approaches to solving problems, often coming from different ways of looking at it. In the current system, if you wind up on a team and come across a seemingly intractable problem, there’s a good chance that someone else has happened across a nonstandard approach that makes the problem very easy. If we standardize everything, we lose this. This is somewhat mitigated by the solution to the callibration problem, wherein people are going to be reading different texts with the different approaches because they’re different people, but we still kind of expect most mathematicians to learn their analysis from super!Rudin, meaning that they all lack some trick that Pugh mentions. The best solution I have is to have students learn in the highly standardized manner first, and once they have a firm grasp on that, expose them to nonstandard methods (according to my Memory text, this is an effective manner for increasing tranfer-of-learning).
A good writeup. But you downplay the role of individual attention. No textbook is going to have all the answers to questions someone might formulate after reading the material. They also won’t provide help to students who get stuck doing exercises. In books, it’s either nothing or all (the complete solution).
The current system does not do a lot of personalized teaching because the average university has a tightly limited amount of resources per student. The very rich universities (such as Oxford) can afford to give a training personalized to a much larger extent, via tutors.
Yeah. I’ve taught myself several courses just from textbooks, with much more success than in traditional setups that come with individual attention. I am probably unusual in this regard and should probably typical-mind-fallacy less.
However, I will nitpick a bit. While most textbooks won’t quite have every answer to every question a student could formulate whilst reading it (although the good ones come very close), answers to these questions are typically 30 seconds away, either on Wikipedia or Google. Point about the importance of having people to talk to still stands.
Also, some textbooks (e.g. the AoPS books) have hints for when a student gets stuck on a problem. Point about the importance of having people to help students when they get stuck still stands, although I believe the people best-suited to do this are their classmates; by happy coincidence, these people don’t cost educational organizations anything.
I’m tinkering with a system in which a professor, instead of lecturing, has it as their job to give each of 20 graduate students an hour a week of one-on-one attention (you know, the useful type of individual attention), which the graduate student is expected to prepare for extensively. Similarly, each graduate student is tasked with giving undergraduates 1 hour/week of individual attention. This maintains a professor:student ratio of 200:1 (so MIT needs a grand total of… 57 professors), doesn’t overly burden the mentors, and gives the students much more quality individual attention than I sense they’re currently getting. (Also, I believe that 1 hour of a grad student’s time is going to be more helpful to a student than 1 hour of a professor’s time. Graduate students haven’t become so well-trained in their field they’re no longer able to simulate a non-understanding undergrad in their head (an inability Dr. Mazur claims is shared among lecturers) and I expect there’s benefit from shrinking the age/culture gap. Also, no need to worry about appearing to be the class idiot in front of the person assigning your grade and potentially not giving you the benefit of the doubt on account of being the class idiot.) (Also, it has not escaped my attention that this falls apart at schools that are small or don’t have graduate students. And there’s other problems. Just an idea I’ve had floating around that may be enough in the right direction to effect a positive change.)
As for your point about quality I sense that it’d be inefficient to just take the lectures at the top of the bell curve and distribute them. I sense that it’d be more efficient to pool resources and “have them collaborate to make a super-lecture, and then get feedback on that particular unit, so they can improve the superlecture into a super-duperlecture”.
Could you elaborate a bit on this?
Note: I agree with you about the wrinkles and I think they need to be accounted for. This may be oversimplified, but I think of it as a spectrum of how much you pool resources. The wrinkles explain why it isn’t best to simply pool all resources. However, I think we both agree that right now we’re hardly pooling resources at all and that we should be way more towards the side of pooling. I sense that talking about the wrinkles may be distracting from the core point of “why do you receive gains from pooling”, but if you disagree please do what you think is best.
The argument goes “paying 20k camera-people for one year can replace 2M full-time equivalent jobs next year, which can either go into something more useful without changing anything else (1). Of course, once you’re going to do that, you’d do well to look into seeing what elements of anything else could be changed to make it even more awesome.”
If we optimize properly, I believe we wind up open-sourcing textbooks, somewhat like Linux. We have a core textbook, which has recieved enough feedback to make sure that everything is explained well enough that students generally don’t come away with misconceptions, but because they’re open source, every time you need to write for a particular audience, you have something to work from. LaTeX also supports comments, which makes it easy to include nonconventional perspectives for interested students (i.e. the ones who really need them).
But, yeah, pooling resources. Definitely something we should do more of and WHY HASN’T THE FREE MARKET SOLVED THIS 10 YEARS AGO?
(1) Fermi estimate is as follows: Cursory search indicates Harvard offers a bit over 3k undergraduate classes. Round it up to 5k to include secondary school and the few undergraduate courses not offered at Harvard (for instance, I can’t find an equivalent to 8.012.) Multiply by 4 for different levels, and we arrive at 20k camera-people needed to tape all these courses. (It’s actually less than that, since most courses are one semester.)
Cursory Googling indicates there are 3700k teachers in America; add in other English-speaking countries and eliminate primary- and graduate-level teachers should bring you to 4M teachers (I’m guessing that we add more teachers from English-speaking countries than we lose from not considering primary- and graduate-level teachers, since most classes are at these levels.) Assume that half their teaching job is replaceable by the videos we’ve created, and we’ve freed up the equivalent of 2M full-time jobs.
This is very much a Fermi estimate, but I feel I was liberal enough with the camera-people portion (we’re only hiring them a few hours a week!) to say that the cost of getting high-quality video of all secondary and undergraduate courses is 1% of the savings it should theoretically yield every year in the future. This upper limit goes down once we start writing textbooks instead of taping lectures, especially since most secondary and undergraduate courses already have very good textbooks to work from.
One issue with the chain of logic: The value proposition of school is NOT the lectures. It’s other things:
Good teachers who can individualize instruction (software cannot do this yet, even state of the art like Knewton is rudimentary compared to a good teacher)
Signaling (Everyone knows that if you learned at harvard you’ve already been preselected, nobody knows this about random person watching a video online)
I agree in large part with what you said, but the two issues above need to be solved.
I agree that other things like personalized attention and signaling matter. But I think the lessons and lectures do matter a lot (enough to be talked about anyway). And I think that getting into that other stuff now would be going down a deep enough rabbit hole such that it’d be unproductive for this conversation.
It might be worthwhile to distinguish between lesson content and the student experience.
For instance, if a million students watch the same video lecture on mitosis, have all of them had the same experience? Of course not. Different students have had different backgrounds. Some understand particular analogies that the lecturer makes better than others do. Some are colorblind and have more difficulty understanding a particular animation that is used.
And then there is the context in which that lecture is presented —
Ten of those million students are watching the lecture in a seminar classroom; and when one student gets confused, they pause the video and discuss it. Another ten students are watching the lecture in a different classroom; and when one student gets confused and looks out the window, he or she is punished for being inattentive.
Some students are watching at home on their laptops, and pausing the video to look things up on Wikipedia. Some are listening to the lecture as they drive to work or mow the lawn.
Five other students don’t watch the lecture at all. They agree to read the Wikipedia article on mitosis and whichever linked articles or sources they think might be interesting. Then they meet at a coffee shop and discuss it.
True, but I don’t see how that relates to the central point. Do you think that individual differences are large enough such that the gains to be made from specialization aren’t large enough to justify the investment I’m proposing?
I wasn’t refuting something or even disagreeing; I was elaborating on something else that is worth attending to in order to meet (what I suspect to be) your goal. This isn’t a refutation; it’s a “yes, and also …”
Part of what schools all over the world are doing is not just re-creating lesson plans, but providing specific student experiences. They may sometimes be doing this by deliberate design, and sometimes by following rules that are not terribly good, and sometimes pretty much winging it.
And just as some lessons might be better than others for learning (and thus, worth replicating rather than reinventing), some student experiences might be better than others for learning as well.
Oh ok.
Could that kind of thing be a loss in the long haul? You’re able to create the superb lecture (assuming it’s actually superb) because there are a large number of teachers whose knowledge about lecturing you can draw on.
Use those superior lectures enough, and you have many fewer experienced teachers as new subject matter gets added.
Interesting point. I don’t know. Some thoughts:
I still think that there’s a place for teachers. I agree with richard_reitz that individual attention is overrated. That if lessons were good enough there’d be much less of a need for teachers to diagnose holes in students understanding and tutor them. And that there isn’t really too much individual attention in todays system anyway.
However, I think that even with these great lectures, there will still be holes in students’ understanding, and that using a human is the best way to diagnose and address them. Like Sal Khan has talked about, I think that if these lectures were available, it’d actually free up teachers to spend more time providing personalized attention. I suspect that there’s enough of a need for this such that teachers will still be employed.
I agree with you, I think you’ve explained it well, I think many other people in education are thinking along the same lines, and I think that’s sort of the idea with Khan Academy, Vi Hart, ASAP science, and all those other youtube things with fast-talking voices and sketches. The whole process could definitely do with a little more up-scaling, budget, and legitimacy as a lesson plan.
What you (and many other folks in education) are talking about is basically the function that textbooks fulfill- it’s just a matter of incorporating new media.
You may be interested in the term ‘inverted classroom’, if you’re not already aware of it.
The basic idea is that it’s the normal school system you grew up with, except students watch video lectures as homework, then do all work in class while they’ve got an expert there to help. Also, the time when the student is stuck in one place and forced to focus is when they’re actually doing the hard stuff.
There’s so many reasons why it’s better than traditional education. I just hope inverted classrooms start to catch on sooner rather than later.
(Edit: I know this isn’t your exact proposal, but it uses many of the features you mention and it can be immediately grafted into the existing public school system with a single change of curriculum and the creation of some videos. It’s the low hanging fruit for education.)
Is the following a correct restatement of your point?
We already have regional or state standardization of (some) subjects, exams, textbooks, and homework assignments (which are often given out of textbooks), and (in MOOCs and in computer-facilitated learning) actual lessons. All of these things have increased in use over time. Should we go even further in that direction and also standardize individual lesson scripts, in grade school as well as college? Is anything stopping or delaying this development apart from sheer inertia?
That would not be very efficient, because 100 employees working on the same (small) task would be inefficient, might get bogged down in politics, and the quality of the result would be dragged down to the level of the average employee (everyone-must-contribute mentality) or below it (designed-by-committee issues).
Naively, we might expect the following to be a strict improvement on current practice: let each employee build their own lesson, then discard 99 of the results, and let all 100 employees teach the best lesson any of them built. (Of course you’d need to try out all 100 lessons first to figure out which one is the best.) This is an extension of the current standardized curricula and textbooks to lesson plans and maybe to actual lessons a la MOOCs and computer teaching software. If instead of 100 employees you take all the employees across the world, and you let small self-selected groups work together, the result might be promising.
On the other hand, a teacher needs to adapt the lesson to the class. They need to understand it well enough themselves to teach well, to answer questions and help students with particular problems. They need to encourage or even force students to pay attention, study, and not interfere with one another. All of these things can’t be standardized because they require realtime reactions to student behavior.
I don’t have any answers here, I’m joining you in asking the question.
Somewhat. I’m not saying that lessons should be standardized in the same way that textbooks and exams are currently standardized. I don’t think enough resources are being applied towards textbooks and exams (considering how widely used they are, even a small improvement would have a big effect because it’d be multiplied by the amount of people it touches).
My central point is, “I sense that there is a more abstract economic principle behind what I’m trying to say. Can anyone help me to articulate/understand it?”.
You’re right. The 100 employees example was bad.
I agree. I don’t think that lessons can be so good that we don’t need teachers (yet). I think that there will still be holes in the students’ knowledge after/while going through the lesson, and the most efficient way (right now) to identify and address these holes is to use a human.
It looks like your point could be summarized, in economics jargon, as: education is now a field where the superstar effect should apply.
Thank you! I think that’s getting closer to what I’m thinking. But it isn’t quite the same thing.
The superstar effect seems to be explaining a phenomena, whereas I’m trying to make an argument as to how resources can be allocated most efficiently. The superstar effect says, “you see these high salaries among, say singers, because technology has enabled them to reach large audiences, and technology has enabled consumers to easily listen to the best singers” (please correct me if my understanding is flawed).
I’m trying to do something similar, but from what I understand, slightly different. I’m trying to answer the question, “Why is this more efficient? Why is there an opportunity for firms to create and capture value?”.
I sense that equilibrium is a relevant concept. You invest in the resource until the marginal benefit is ⇐ the marginal cost. Investing into a resource that serves a large market has a large marginal benefit because the effects are multiplied by the size of the market.
Edit: I spent the whole day thinking about it and at some point the thoughts started flowing, so I wrote up a post. Thanks again for referring me to The Superstar Effect!