Up until recently, learners have had little freedom of choice as far as teachers went. If you were stuck with a bad teacher, you pretty much had to suck it up. You simply didn't have access to alternatives.
I remember being taught thermodynamics by a completely incapable teacher. I'm convinced everyone who sat in that class still has mental scars from the experience.
Not even the best students understood what he was saying. Whenever someone asked him a question, he would just go back one page in his notes and repeat himself word-for-word.
We quickly learned not to bother inquiring.
But what could we do? It wasn't like there were a half-dozen other teachers laying around, standing ready to provide a perfectly comprehensible explanation of the law of entropy at the snap of a finger.
Fast-forward to today, and that dream scenario is exactly what we're getting incredibly close to. Look at Salman Khan. He's the real deal. For a few years, the guy has been delivering a steady stream of clear explanations on hundreds of topics relating to mathematics, physics, finance and a few other fields.
His YouTube channel has more than a thousand videos. Each is about 10 minutes in length, which translates to a pretty thick stack of DVDs. Do you need to learn about the ideal gas equation? Khan's got it. The law of cosines? No problem. Moving pulleys? Check. Collateralized debt obligations? Sure. You name the topic, chances are it's already available, or will be soon. For free.
At this very moment, students all over the planet have just discovered Khan's treasure trove, and they are dancing around in their rooms, feeling blessed to have found someone who explains the subject they have to study this year in a way that they can understand.
Think about it. Even assuming, conservatively, that Khan's calculus videos are only slightly above average, roughly half the students taking calculus this semester would save time and pain by watching his lessons instead of paying attention to the mediocre teaching happening in front of them.
And I'm not talking about students who don't have a teacher, or eager minds who are stuck in a class below their ability level. The latent demand for this kind of stuff is huge.
"But these are just videos, not a real flesh-and-blood person you can interact with!" True. But I maintain that a great video compares favorably with a live, but bad, teacher in a classroom setting. You can't interact productively with a bad teacher anyway.
The Snowball Effect
Now, one of the great things about clarity of explanation is that most people tend to recognize it pretty quickly when they see it. Students who stumble upon Khan's videos remember him. They will go back to him; they will recommend him to their friends.
It is important to note that, thanks to YouTube's bandwidth, Khan's teaching scales very well. He has nearly 25,000 subscribers as I write this.
At some point, he will be helping a quarter million people learn.
Expect a similar dynamic to play out in every blackboard-teachable field with a standardized curriculum.
How fast is this going to happen? Well, Khan is already becoming famous. Last year CNN gave him airtime to explain the financial crisis. Why him, and not an economics Ph.D. type, you ask? Because he is understandable, and because some genius at CNN figured out that at least some of their viewers were able and willing to learn a little bit in order to understand what is going on.
So, for a change, instead of viewers being fed stodgy, professional-sounding but indigestible prose from a self-important expert, for several minutes there was a guy on TV with a pink tie and amateurish-looking drawings finally giving a simplified, but clueful explanation of the financial crisis and possible ways to get out of it.
In a fast-changing world, people are beginning to recognize the value of explanation.
Teacher Fame Goes Global
Good teachers have always had some measure of fame at the local level. Let's not kid ourselves: within a school, the students know who is a good teacher and who is no more illuminating than a wet pack of matches.
The net takes that to a whole different level. Eventually everyone will know who the good teachers are, and will be able to tune into them. They will be rock stars.
But what will happen to the bad teachers then?
There's a quote by Warren Buffett that I like to bring up from time to time: "It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked."
Well, the incompetent teachers have indeed been swimming naked, and in a world where learners are free to tune into many other, competent teachers, it will inevitably show. When you have something to compare to, bad becomes tangibly bad.
Very well then. There can't be so many bad teachers anyway, right? Well... It only takes one extremely talented biology 101 teacher to raise the bar for all biology 101 teachers. In effect, the top 5% of teachers stand to make the other 95% look bad, if they put themselves to it.
Some of the poor teachers will look so bad that their students will simply laugh and walk out if they can, or tune out if they can't. They will only show up in class to get evaluated.
Of course, this kind of behavior will bring some questions into sharp focus, among them: "What good is it to pay an incompetent teacher to come in and give lessons that nobody actually listens to?"
Education systems typically move very slowly, so I don't expect incompetence to be magically chased all of a sudden because of the sudden availability of zero-cost, high-quality explanation.
Thus, it will be interesting to see exactly in what way the pressure coming from students (and their paying parents) will collide with institutional inertia.
Who knows? It could be that quite a few bottom-of-the-barrel teachers will have to find a new line of work.
I won't miss them.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
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