Alex Tabarrok, economics professor and co-founder of the online Marginal Revolution University, comments on Online Education and Jazz
If MOOCs were going to be "everybody watch the same lecture and then take the same exam", that would be of some value, and the use of a great teacher could increase that value greatly...but that's not what's happening. On places like CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings you can learn who is teaching what and how, and how well it worked...you can learn about online courses, yes. But at the same time, when you interact with software like that of the Khan Academy, that software is learning about you. In fact it can pay more individual attention to you than any human teacher can, outside of the traditional 1-1 ideal, and it can eventually improve on that 1-1 ideal because it can try out different approaches on millions of students -- different explanations, different experiences suggested by thousands of different teachers and students. It can note which works for whom -- and it can compare you to more somewhat-similar students than any 1-1 human teacher can ever make notes on.
Will it ever outdo human teaching in every respect? Gee, I dunno. But it can certainly outdo human teaching in many respects.
Or then again, maybe not.
there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience...It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience... and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.I think that's true, but I think that maybe he's missing part of the point of his own work and that of other online services: online teaching environments and live teaching environments both offer opportunities for interaction, and for student improvisation. Online teaching can (and probably will) get better with time, the techniques are reasonably cumulative. The approach of, say, the Berlitz LP records that helped me learn Spanish fifty years ago is still available online -- it is now supplemented, not entirely replaced, with the game-like approach of Rosetta Stone which one of my sons used recently, to help get ready to go to Nicaragua with some old friends from HCS. Live teaching from a great teacher is not cumulative in the same way (I was a worse teacher than most of my teachers, no matter how hard I tried.)
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
If MOOCs were going to be "everybody watch the same lecture and then take the same exam", that would be of some value, and the use of a great teacher could increase that value greatly...but that's not what's happening. On places like CourseTalk | MOOC Reviews & Ratings you can learn who is teaching what and how, and how well it worked...you can learn about online courses, yes. But at the same time, when you interact with software like that of the Khan Academy, that software is learning about you. In fact it can pay more individual attention to you than any human teacher can, outside of the traditional 1-1 ideal, and it can eventually improve on that 1-1 ideal because it can try out different approaches on millions of students -- different explanations, different experiences suggested by thousands of different teachers and students. It can note which works for whom -- and it can compare you to more somewhat-similar students than any 1-1 human teacher can ever make notes on.
Will it ever outdo human teaching in every respect? Gee, I dunno. But it can certainly outdo human teaching in many respects.
Or then again, maybe not.
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