At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey looks at the collapse of newspapers and sees higher education on the same trajectory. I’ll defer to Carey on what the Internet might do to higher ed, but I suspect that as long as there is market value in the credential of a name-brand university degree in addition to the actual product of education, elite colleges needn’t worry about filling their freshmen class. You can only take the newspaper analogy so far: nobody ever got an interview at a job fair merely by being a reader of The New York Times.
It seems to me there is a bigger opportunity, however, to use technology to radically improve K-12 education. While not every child goes to a great school or has a great teacher, it seems reasonable to suggest that it’s easier–and faster–to get every child in front of a great teacher online than to get a great teacher in every classroom.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, has just launched YouTube EDU, a service that puts college lectures online. Great idea. But how about K-12, Google? Why not incentivize teachers to create first-rate videos by splitting advertising revenue from each viewing? This could create a new source of income for low-paid teachers, and a rich trove of material for students. While it obviously wouldn’t be a substitute for good classroom instruction, it could certainly supplement bad classroom instruction. Such a resource would also be a boon for differentiated instruction and enrichment during school, homework help or tutoring after school–and a great resource for homeschoolers or parents whose children are trapped in failing schools.
When you think about the enormous waste of teaching capacity that takes place every day — millions of teachers preparing lessons for audiences of two dozen kids — it seems a shame not to have a mechanism to capture great teaching and distribute it broadly for all students. Tomorrow, thousands of teachers will teach their kids how to add unlike fractions. Undoubtedly there are some real gems among them, some that could produce an “aha” in tens of thousands of kids. In YouTube, the free distribution channel already exists. Why not take full advantage of it?
This is so RATIONAL. Why isn’t it already being done? Why aren’t state departments of education recording and disseminated videos of the state’s best teachers? How great it would be to have an in-service that consisted of watching one of these well-done lessons! This has the potential to make a huge difference in improving education. Imagine –we could put an end to the for-profit, charlatan-ridden education consultant and presenter industry.
There are no shortage of lesson videos on YouTube, but the quality is wildly uneven. Plus, you have to do a lot of hunting around among the flotsam and jetsam of YouTube to find stuff. With all those billions of innovation dollars floating around now, it seems like low hanging fruit to make this happen.
I suspect YouTube videos might lend themselves better to higher education than to K-12, as higher ed. courses tend to include both lectures and discussion sections. Videos of excellent teachers might be useful in K-12 classroom–but real-live teachers would certainly have to use such videos in moderation. Surely we want teachers and students to interact.
Why not use videos of excellent teachers as prompts for professional development? Teachers TV in the UK operates on this principle–The UK government supports an entire satellite channel that aims to record and broadcast examples of exemplary teaching.
I’m not against this idea, but I don’t see any great benefit. To assume that a great teacher can be put on video is to take what I call the “performance perspective” of teaching, the idea that the essence of teaching is something like a theatrical performance. I tend more toward the “management perspective” of teaching. By this perspective the teacher manages the actions and efforts of the students so that they do the things that are necessary for learning. A video cannot manage the actions and efforts of students, at least not with feedback and adaptability.
Having a library of good teachers on video is very much like having a library of good explanations in a collection of textbooks. It is indeed true that the explanation of a given topic in one textbook may be very good and the corresponding explanation in another text book may be bad. But that doesn’t mean that it’s worth the time and effort involved to find the best explanation of every topic from a wide variety of textbooks. And it can be even more costly in time and effort to somehow put coherence into a collection of presentations from a variety of resources. And, of course, a video offers no more feedback or adaptability than a textbook does.
A “rich trove” of videos could be a welcome addition to the world of teaching, but still have very limited impact. The internet is a fabulously rich trove of resources, but will not replace the guidance of a teacher.
I have elaborated on these ideas here.
I agree with Claus. I don’t think k-12 videos may help benefit the education of children, yet college level education may be different. So much of what we teach (especially to young children/adolescents) revolves around the child seeing and doing. We need children to participate in discussion and elaborate on what they are learning to be successful.
Now, are we offering these videos as “extra help” to students; videos that take a classroom lecture a step further in explaining the content? Or are we replacing classroom lectures with online video education?
Well, I’m not suggesting kids sit in front of YouTube instead of a classroom, that said I don’t think the classroom has a monopoly on learning. Kids are certainly able to get some value out of other means of instruction (that is why we have them read, after all). The usefulness of online lessons would increase as children get older.
As a lesson sharing resource alone, as Ben suggests,it would be priceless. Right now I’m reading Jay Matthews book about KIPP. He describes various chants and songs by Harriet Ball, a teacher who mentored the KIPP founders. After the umpteenth reference to KIPP students “rolling their numbers” (a Ball innovation), I wanted to see it for myself. Alas, it’s not on YouTube. I’ll bet a lot of teachers would like to see things like that and possibly adopt them.
The potential for differentiation is also huge. My brighter students in the South Bronx would have benefitted enormously from a few advanced math lessons that they were ready for and I would never had the time to plan and execute well.
Every year, one of the better 5th grade teachers in my school would come to me to be reminded how to add and subtract unlike fractions. Odds are my kids parents didn’t remember either. So much for helping with homework. They could go on YouTube to learn it and teach it to their kids.
In short, it’s great PD, great for differentiation and as a homework helper. All that and we haven’t even discussed it as a means of direct instruction.
A lot of this is already happening. Pick a subject and look on YouTube. It’s probably there. What’s missing, however, is organization and quality control.
There are hundreds of good videos about math and related topics at the Khan Academy, the apparently volunteer project by an MIT graduate. See http://www.khanacademy.org/
By the way, when I come to this blog, my browser warns me that this is an “attack site,” and when I click for more information, I get the following text:
Might be worth checking into.
I like the potential of using You-tube to demo for parents. I can’t tell you how many times I have recoiled from helping with math because I didn’t know what approach the teacher had taken to teaching the concept. A quick YouTube explanation would have been helpful to both of us–as a review of what was taught in class and and explanation to the parent.
The Teachers TV example is also online. You can see it here: http://www.teachers.tv. It’s really for teachers–and possibly also for parents, Margo–but not really for students.
At age 67, I remember excitement in the 1950s that TV was going to revolutionize education, bringing an expert teacher into each classroom. What happened to that idea?
As Brian said “…the teacher manages the actions and efforts of the students so that they do the things that are necessary for learning. A video cannot manage the actions and efforts of students, at least not with feedback and adaptability.”
Computers can be much more interactive that a TV set and so have more potential.
So far I think the greatest beneficiaries of lessons on YouTube are homeschooling parents who have time to seek out what their children need. Classroom teachers with many children and significant bureaucratic demands cannot do it so easily.
Good job. I will try that.