Many to One Education

Economist Arnold Kling provides Many-to-One vs. One-to-Many: An Opinionated Guide to Educational Technology

The attempt to achieve large scale in college courses is misguided. Instead of trying to come up with a way to extend the same course to tens of thousands of students, educators should be asking the opposite question: How would I teach if I only had one student? Educators with just one student in their class would not teach by lecturing....
To put this another way, I believe that the future of teaching is not one-to-many. Instead, it is many-to-one. By many-to-one, I mean that one student receives personalized instruction that comes from many educators. To make that work, technology must act as an intermediary, taking the information from the educators and customizing it to fit the student's knowledge, ability, and even his or her emotional state.

I'd tentatively say he has a large part of a point here, but...hmm. The MOOC model, whether it's carried out for higher education or K-12, doesn't have to contradict his many-to-one ideal; if there are 100,000 students finishing a MOOC, then they all have something in common (they have passed "Intro to Calculus" or "Designing a Rocket Stove" or "Baroque Music as a Commentary on Galileo" or "Origami Polyhedra" or whatever it is.) That likely means that they have all done reasonably well on a series of (peer-graded + machine-graded) quizzes, exams, and projects. It means they share some kind of assessment. It doesn't mean that they have all gotten there the same way; it doesn't mean that they have all done what Stanford students do.

But I'm not disagreeing with him about what's important; education needs to be more customized, more personalized, not less, and specific MOOC proposals may try to save money by going the wrong way. (And I hereby propose that the "normal" course length should be a quarter, not a semester. Or maybe a week. Break everything into Pieces! Hulk SMASH!). And he's at least two-thirds right about tablets.

Or then again, maybe not.