When Teachers Go Viral
Here’s the future of college: Most degrees will be granted online, the best teachers will become rock stars, and eventually students become largely untethered. They will demand that universities let them mix and match courses from any school [..].
It appears that the best way for colleges to generate revenue online will be the freemium model. Anyone can view videos of the courses and perhaps participate on the message board at no charge. To get class credit and a teaching assistant to hand-grade the work that can’t be graded via software, you’ll need to pay. To get the teacher to grade your papers, you’ll have to pay much, much more. But as Pat Quilter of Quilter Labs says, “Who knows? Maybe students would actually take courses, life-long, to learn, instead of just to get a degree.” [..].
If the universities are smart they will share this revenue with the teachers. Most American students won’t choose the pay-for-office-hours option, but it will be a high-priced add-on that will still generate significant revenue from wealthy Chinese and Russian parents who are accustomed to paying obscene amounts in bribes to officials at every level in the bureaucracy just to get baseline services. In Shanghai some kindergarten teachers are demanding $10,000 “gifts” for school admission. How much do you think those parents will pay for the top MBA faculty[..] ?
It’s the rock star teachers that will prove to be the most interesting case, and by far the most lucrative for the university. All online classes will be reviewed and scored at closely followed ratings sites whose popularity will dwarf that of the fatally flawed but currently influential US News and World Report’s college ratings guide.
The hottest teachers will go viral within a year or two at Ivy League schools, and in three to five years at less prestigious institutions. Their classes will burgeon in popularity among paying students. The universities will be forced to hire armies of teaching assistants to grade work [..]
For evergreen subjects like statistics, history, or literature some teachers will remain popular after they die or quit teaching the course. There will be diminished value because they won’t or can’t score papers or participate on the message boards. Highly rated teachers assistants will have long twilight careers as known disciples [..]
As it becomes clear that rock star teachers can pop up anywhere, prestigious universities will lose some of their mojo. Previously unheralded institutions will get bumps in their popularity. We all know that Texas A&M has an awesome agricultural department, but who’s to say they don’t have right at this very minute employ the best statistics teacher on the planet? What if by coincidence they also the best computer graphics teacher in the Western states because her husband will always be an Aggie and refuses to move to Palo Alto? [..]
[Then ] the logical way to get the highest quality education will be to cherry pick rock star teachers regardless of the school you’re enrolled in. You might get a killer art history prof at Yale, a machine learning prodigy from Stanford, and that up-and-coming American Lit chick out of Guangdong. Universities will obviously resist because they won’t want their monopoly power to be challenged, because they will have honest disagreements about standardization, and because above all else they will fear becoming commodities. Getting a degree will be like visiting a food court where you can get Ethiopian bread, Mongolian beef, and chicken nuggets if you brought the kids.
Eventually the market will win out. Just as AOL and CompuServe and Microsoft were forced by consumers to use Internet protocols in the 1990s, you will be able to assemble exactly the degree you want. Currently to get to the meat of your English Lit degree you’re often force fed a shedload of impenetrable courses because a tenured bureaucrat decided in 1989 that deconstructionism might become an enduring political movement.
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Nice.
My $0.02, it will be beneficial for teachers, universities to leave all the course material on the Net, available at all times (also good for public). There will be no “enrolling to the course” to view material, the class will not “start” or “end”. The class will always be on. Money (or whatever its replacement is in the post-industrial world) is made for certification, for grading and additional help.
The evaluators dont even have to be associated directly with the teachers and universities either, evaluation / certification could be a whole different, parallel market. A student could follow an ML course from Stanford, have his knowledge evaluated in Shangai by an evaluator who is known for evaluating that course, and is local to the student.