Stupid Questions January 2015

Gondolinian

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

I have a developing opinion that I'm not quite sure how to word.

It seems that schools all over the world are teaching the same lessons, but are all trying to recreate the wheel. I sense that it'd be more efficient if a bunch of effort and resources went in to each lesson, and that lesson was made available for everyone.

Elon Musk gave a good analogy (paraphrasing)

"Consider The Dark Knight. It's amazing! They put a ton of resources into it. Got the best actors, directors, special effects etc. Now imagine if you took the same script and asked the local middle school to reproduce it. It'd suck! That's education."

I sense that there is some sort of economic logic/terminology that applies here and that better articulates what I'm trying to say.

My attempt at explaining it a bit more formally. Consider a lesson on mitosis. Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it'd be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students. Given that the lesson can (largely) be delivered via software, it's non-rivalrous (my consumption doesn't take anything away from your consumption), and thus can be distributed to everyone at no marginal cost.

Anyway, I hope I did a good enough job explaining such that someone can recognize what I'm trying to say. I'd be really happy if anyone was able to help me further my understanding.

You may be interested in the term 'inverted classroom', if you're not already aware of it.

The basic idea is that it's the normal school system you grew up with, except students watch video lectures as homework, then do all work in class while they've got an expert there to help. Also, the time when the student is stuck in one place and forced to focus is when they're actually doing the hard stuff.

There's so many reasons why it's better than traditional education. I just hope inverted classrooms start to catch on sooner rather than later.

(Edit: I know t... (read more)

3NancyLebovitz11y

Could that kind of thing be a loss in the long haul? You're able to create the superb lecture (assuming it's actually superb) because there are a large number of teachers whose knowledge about lecturing you can draw on. Use those superior lectures enough, and you have many fewer experienced teachers as new subject matter gets added.

4[anonymous]11y

One issue with the chain of logic: The value proposition of school is NOT the lectures. It's other things: 1. Good teachers who can individualize instruction (software cannot do this yet, even state of the art like Knewton is rudimentary compared to a good teacher) 2. Signaling (Everyone knows that if you learned at harvard you've already been preselected, nobody knows this about random person watching a video online) I agree in large part with what you said, but the two issues above need to be solved.