There's getting to be so much education available on the Internet that I don't feel there are enough hours in the day to stuff into my head even the things I'm most interested in. It's a shame how much time I wasted in school.
I'm interested to see what kind of market can be developed in selling education now, with so much of it free. Of course the credentials are irrelevant to me, but not to a big potential market, so it should be feasible to charge for those.
7 comments:
Internet was the best education and self change experience since sliced bread and death.
Most of the price in education will be like martial arts. Quality of instruction, ease of pricing and access, and the ability to communicate concepts to improve learning.
Most will be average. Some will be psychopaths. While most people will hear, word of mouth, about the masters and those that are very good at explaining things.
A problem with traditional teaching methods in martial arts was that even if the teacher was good, they either couldn't or wouldn't transfer that knowledge to the students. So all you got was a credential card, worth about as much as you put into it.
I have learned a lot on the web- how to run a lathe and mill, all with the advice of people who combined experience is in centuries.
This semester, for the first time I have had students asking me if I knew of any you tube videos showing them things we had asked them to do, but that they were having a tough time grasping immediately (like orthographic projection drawing). I suppose I'd better have some recommendations in the future, or else I'd better make some!
I reversed the standard orthodox curriculum, where it was about 90% lecture and 10% work or homework. Out of 60 minutes, lecture was now 6 minutes and work was 52 minutes.
All the homework and problem solving replaced the lecture. Not watching people do it, but actually doing it and figuring it out for themselves. Then the 10% lecture would be interspersed to answer questions and deal with individual issues, while the rest of the class worked at their own pace or particular issues. That's so the geniuses aren't told to watch the slow ones take up their time, and the slow or average don't feel lost because the geniuses already know all the answers (so they are the only ones capable of asking questions).
Then at home, is where they get the rest of the lectures via video, where they just repeat it all the time, like their personal music ipod of speeches and video.
The orthodox method only made sense in that the originator of the methodology, the teacher, couldn't be accessed most of the time. He had to live his own life, so the only way students could access him was in the class room or lecture hall. To make it more efficient to distribute information, the teacher then got stuck in a mass communication model, where each student was averaged out in favor of dealing with them in total, rather than in particular. Explaining one thing to one student for 30 minutes, when you have 100 students is not going to take up your lunch hour. It's going to take up more than that.
Martial arts in Japan, for the importation of karate from Okinawa, got into the same degradation of education through mass market appeal. While the Okinawan masters could easily teach a single student or a set of 5 or 10, in 10-20 years, the art itself. Trying to teach 100 students, and 300 students at the end of the month, the same thing in 20 years wasn't going to work. They got partial knowledge. They either figured it out for themselves or they traveled the world gaining experience so they could develop their own art and self. But the ones that stayed inside the dojo for 10 or 20 years, or branched out in America and Europe to teach, may or may not have gotten any real idea of Okinawan karate to begin with.
The North and South Korean Taekwondo suffered a similar episode of knowledge discontinuation. The ancient and traditional lineage and art got lost or killed by various wars and invasions. WTF and ITF (I think that's what they called it) became competitors, even though both had to import Japanese karate teachers to teach them the Korean roots. That didn't work, so TKD borrowed a lot of karate stuff, that was already diluted, and explained it away as being traditional knowledge to save face.
America's education system right now is inferior to either incidence. Or rather superior in the amount of degradation people can intentionally and unintentionally cause in their generations. It truly is an amazing human artificial feat.
I hear from relatives in NYC that many restaurants there require a Bachelor's degee- Master's preferred- for being a restaurant hostess.
Talk about a useful education...
Useful for union bosses hiring child sex workers and college campuses grooming girls for organizations, yea.
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