I just spent an hour or so, listening to brief lectures on TED. TED (www.ted.com) provides a forum for interesting speakers to talk about their work, passions, and potentially unorthodox propositions.
I'd like to point out two things about the TED lectures. First, I never attended a TED conference, I've enjoyed these online. The second is that they were delivered by passionate people, who found the opportunity to present exciting, cared and had thought through their subject of discussion to make each lecture compelling. Occassionally, I happened on a lecture that wasn't interesting to me, and the lecture was still enjoyable, but when the subject was of interest, the lecture was gripping.
Cast back to my undergraduate years at university. Five courses per year for 4 years, equals a potential of at least 20 lecturers. Some enjoyed teaching; others saw it as an obstacle to their research. Three of them stood out as TED type lecturers. - passionate, informative, invigorating. Through my undergraduate program, one professor got (and it wasn't the first time) a standing ovation at the end of his 2nd year course delivery. Surprisingly, that was a course in social theory - Hobbes, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx - not exactly most student's main stay. However, Cyril Levitt, was a compelling speaker. The point is, three in 20 is not the best ratio, for getting an undergraduate excited about an academic program.
Look today. This is a sample of the findings from www.ratemyprof.com. The courses and schools are relatively speaking irrelevant - at the highest cost schools there are poor professors, and at the smaller public schools there are highly acclaimed speakers. In this subject, 21 professors were rated:
• 5 Star professors, 7
• 4 Star professors, 5
• 3 Star professors, 0
• 2 Star professors, 4
• 1 Star professors, 5
Separate the politics of academic freedom from the reality that students (the customers) are paying the university (the vendor) to educate them, and you quickly realize that from a vendor perspective, there is ample room for improvement. An examination of 10 entry level courses across disciplines revealed that while 56% of students ranked their teachers 5 out of 5, 32% ranked those teachers as 1 or 2 out of 5. From a classical business to consumer perspective, 32% of customers found dealing with the vendor unsatisfactory.
The focus on entry level undergraduate courses is deliberate. For the most part a freshman course's content is fairly standard. The courses are preparatory or introductory in nature, building the foundation on which more advanced studies can take place.
As a student, what would you prefer; to take the course via video with an interesting, engaging professor, or have a near 50% chance of a poor teacher in a live setting? If my experience with TED (and the less than interesting prof's that were inflicted upon me) is an indication I'd rather have the video opportunity.
What if universities collaborated to provide freshmen with the most motivating, captivating and exciting teachers at their disposal? For example, school A delivers Introductory Political Science / Anthropology / Linear Algebra / Organic Chemistry lectures using videos of School B's more engrossing professor. Or even more simply, the introduction to psychology course is delivered to all students via video on-demand by the Professor with the highest student rating last year.
Live video in an HD environment with lower bandwidth requirements carried over the university's network can make this a reality. And it could generate significant benefits.
From a university perspective:
- Lower per student cost for freshman course delivery.
- Distance based learning expansion.
- Student choice.
From a faculty perspective:
- Decreased teaching burden for those not particularly adept at teaching.
- A more motivating work environment, by removing unenjoyable work tasks.
- Differentiated compensation streams for education and research contribution.
From a student perspective:
- More captivating lecturers.
- Distance support.
- Replay of recorded lectures.
- The potential for a lower cost price point for courses attended via video.
If one of the educational goals of a university is to inspire students to reach higher, then delivering excellent classes assumes importance. If I look back, even at my graduate courses in Social Theory, the value of a motivated teacher remains clear. And, conversations with faculty have only reinforced that point of view.
With the availability of lower bandwidth, high definition video, to an array of end-points using standard protocols, rethinking how best to serve the educational needs of freshmen becomes reallity.
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