Online Education's Advantage
I'm a big fan, and hope the best for Marginal Revolutions new online class, as Alex Tabarrok notes:
Little 20 minute expositions of some fundamental principle, by a teaching all-star, would seem to dominate your average professor. I hope this progresses enough so that my kids can safely skip college and learn what they need online. I'm sure there will be alternatives for them to learn social skills and form valuable cliques and like-minded aquaintences.
My only beef with MR's course is the subject: developement economics. If there's one subject that defies economic analysis, it's development, as there's no consensus on what ails Africa, or Haiti. What are the odds they have something useful to say about how to make an average poor country better? Economists didn't support Konrad Adenauer when he brought West Germany out of ruin after WW2, or any other economic success story. Instead, look at the post colonial stagnation cheered on by Western elites who thought there's a 'third way'.
Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said” makes sense for a live audience. If 20% of your students aren’t following the lecture, it’s natural to repeat some of the material so that you keep the whole audience involved and following your flow. But if you repeat whenever 20% of the audience doesn’t understand something, that means that 80% of the audience hear something twice that they only needed to hear once. Highly inefficient.
Carnegie’s advice is dead wrong for an online audience. Different medium, different messaging. In an online lecture it pays to be concise. Online, the student is in control and can choose when and what to repeat. The result is a big time-savings as students proceed as fast as their capabilities can take them, repeating only what they need to further their individual understanding.
Little 20 minute expositions of some fundamental principle, by a teaching all-star, would seem to dominate your average professor. I hope this progresses enough so that my kids can safely skip college and learn what they need online. I'm sure there will be alternatives for them to learn social skills and form valuable cliques and like-minded aquaintences.
My only beef with MR's course is the subject: developement economics. If there's one subject that defies economic analysis, it's development, as there's no consensus on what ails Africa, or Haiti. What are the odds they have something useful to say about how to make an average poor country better? Economists didn't support Konrad Adenauer when he brought West Germany out of ruin after WW2, or any other economic success story. Instead, look at the post colonial stagnation cheered on by Western elites who thought there's a 'third way'.
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