Thursday, October 22, 2009

The Fate of the Incompetent Teacher in the YouTube Era

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.

13 comments:

  1. The obvious follow up question is, then:

    Assuming that there exists a library of free, high-quality educational materials, how do you best modify the educational system to make use of it?

    How much change could be accomplished within the current system? How much would require radical redesign, and would the gains be worth the cost of any such radical change?

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  2. thank you - enjoyed the post - we are nearly there with the 'open' educational content, but the big challenge is to, somehow, let the learners know what is available to them (+signpost) and help, support and motivate them (teach?) as they use them .

    They need someway of 'knowing' what is is that they need to learn. Struggling a bit with this at www.slideshare.net/JPallis001 with personalisation and curriculum mapping - thank you. Your post reminded me to get on with again!

    John Pallister

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  3. Thanks for the comments!

    @Bill: One thing that can be done now is to train awakened teachers to become "guides on the side" -- trustworthy filters -- who recommend content and suggest pathways to learning. This puts us on a transitional stage to personalized self-organized learning.

    @John: To let learners become aware of what is available and support them is a job for the growing cadre of awakened teachers. I think you are on the right track.

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  4. Hi, Sebastian I enjoyed your post- sometimes good teacher are hard to find, but now you could search for them in the net. Good Luck, Jeanette Delgado (History Teacher)

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  5. I've heard the idea of online videos revolutionising education a few times but when thinking it through always fell upon two sticking points. Perhaps you could give me your take on these issues?

    1) Perhaps an oversimplification, but it seems your argument is as follows:
    ~
    IF a person can access a better resource THEN they will use it.
    Online lectures offer a better resource than bad teachers.

    Therefore, everyone with bad teachers will use them to improve their learning.
    ~

    My question is: what about books? It seems to me that books also have the two qualities of potentially offering a better resource and being widely available. Yet, even with a few hundred years of adaption time they haven't replaced teachers.

    What is the difference between an online lecture and a book which will cause the revolution to happen in the former when it didn't happen in the latter?

    The use of animations? That it's easier to watch a movie than to read a book and so there is a lower threshold? That online videos are 'free'? What is the magic dust that makes it work?


    2) On http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html?page=0%2C4 in the paragraph which begins "Watts wanted to find out whether the success of a hot trend was reproducible." there is a discussion of work by Duncan Watts which examines what causes things to become popular online.

    This study suggests that at least for music over the short term, popularity is only mildly correlated with quality. Do you think this tendency towards group-think weakens the case for online lectures viciously pushing towards the best teaching ever?

    Here's a simple example of this group-think which you might be familar with given you work in computer science.

    Whenever a person posts on Hacker News or Reddit Programming asking for advice on how to learn programming a standard response is to point them at "How to Design Programs", "Dive into Python" or "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". It seems highly unlikely that every person making these recommendations has exhaustively examined all introduction to programming books and weighed their relative merits before coming to a decision. It seems rather more likely that they heard about it somewhere, had a look and thought the book was ok, and are parroting the recommendation on without comparison.

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  6. Thanks for the comment, toposphere.

    1) I make no claim that books will be abandoned. My argument is actually as follows:

    IF a person can access a better resource THEN they will use it instead.

    Online lectures offer a better lecture experience than bad teachers.

    Therefore, everyone with bad teachers *who actually draw a benefit from lectures* will use online lectures to improve their learning.

    I have no doubt that people who like to use textbooks will continue using textbooks, regardless of the available quality of lectures.

    I know many people for whom books have indeed replaced teachers. The only reason they pay attention to a teacher is in order to know what's going to be on the exam. This is how I dealt with below-par teachers, myself.

    2) Yes, recommendations will have a component of social trend and a component of genuine quality.

    Here's what I think. In areas where it is easy to assess quality of learning (e.g. university physics: if you can solve the problems, then you've learned), quality will sift up because there is a clear incentive towards spotting high-quality teaching.

    In areas where it is harder to assess quality of learning, much content will make it to the top, in popularity terms, only because (1) they are the first resource available for free; or (2) they are entertaining / fun / etc. Which I think is sad, but inevitable.

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  7. Thanks for sharing Salman Khan's videos, that's great stuff.

    I'm not following the rest of your logic though.

    To copy the other comment:

    IF a person can access a better resource THEN they will use it.
    Online lectures offer a better resource than bad teachers.
    Therefore, everyone with bad teachers will use them to improve their learning.


    I don't see how it follows that bad teachers will be "exposed" and quit. The tide appears to be coming IN not going out. There are more teachers out there, and bad teaching doesn't hurt so much any more. Bad teaching is more hidden, and the bad teachers, rather than losing their job, are getting more crutches to use, and becoming more like babysitters than providers of learning experiences.

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  8. @edtechdev: If/when a funding crunch comes into the system, one can expect babysitters to be overtly acknowledged as such. At that point, that distinction will de facto imply they are no longer in the business of teaching. They won't quit, just switch lines of work.

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  9. I recognise that I am part of the 95% who don't give scintillating performances in large lectures. I have occassionally hit that top 5% quality, but mostly I'm in the top half on a normal day. However, I'm not worried for my future because my future is not in competing with the Khans of the world, but in showing my small seminar classes how find, pick, customise, contextualise and use those Oscar-award grade mini-lectures, and other RLO, to build their personal knowledge, how to apply the stuff they find out there. I lecture history, and outside of my own immediate research, most of my teaching is already about showing students how the research of other historians fits together, and how they can mkae use of it.

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  10. I once had a bio-anthropology teacher who was so incompetent that I couldn't even stand to be in her classroom. So many students dropped her class that she could no longer afford to kick anyone out for poor attendance, so I stopped going. I showed up only for the three tests we had to take, and the final exam. I got an A in the class just from skimming the text book.

    Teachers like her should not have jobs. The education system definitely needs an overhaul. I love the image of teachers as rock stars. It's totally possible if you think about it. I mean, look at all the celebrity chefs we have now. The food world certainly was not like that before Julia Child. She was a teacher too, for that matter. We have plenty of great cooking classes on tv for free. Who can say education can't/won't follow the same path?

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  11. Here's the question though: There are great "natural" teachers / explainers / facilitators out there. How do we reward them? I think the tip-jar, long-tail model doesn't really remunerate the amount of time, study, practice, etc that goes into it. I say this as someone who's thought about going into tutoring / teaching for a while. It's great advertising to do a series of YouTube videos, but what is it that you're 'selling'?

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  12. You're selling public good. Sal Khan recently got 2 million from Google to pursue his dream and pay more people.

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