photo: Avatar
"Each year, 600,000 first-year college students take calculus;
250,000 fail.
At $2000/failed-course, that is half-a-billion dollars.
-MIT Professor Woodie Flowers
From Chris Dixon's blog:
As elegantly produced as movies
and
as engaging as great novels
and
as engaging as great novels
"As elegantly produced as movies and as engaging as great novels MIT professor Woodie Flowers argues that higher education's current approach to online learning is misguided:
We decided to assume that the world could hardly wait to see our huge pile of PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, classroom locations, teaching assistant lists, and other assorted bits of information about our courses.
Instead, universities should produce new learning materials specifically for the online world:
In their highly developed form, learning materials would be as elegantly produced as movies and video games and would be as engaging as a great novel. They would be 'smart' to both accommodate the learners' varied styles and yield data to facilitate their continuous improvement.
Each year, 600,000 first-year college students take calculus; 250,000 fail. At $2000/failed-course, that is half-a-billion dollars. That happens to be the approximate cost of the movie Avatar, a movie that took a thousand people four years to make. Many of those involved in the movie were the best in their field. The present worth of losses of $500 million/year, especially at current discount rates, is an enormous number . . . . even a $100 million investment could cut the calculus failure rate in half.
Online courses are to offline courses as movies are to plays. The marginal cost of
delivering online courses is minimal. The potential audience is everyone with a
smartphones and an internet connection - about 1.5 billion people today and growing quickly. There is no reason we shouldn't be investing as much to produce online
courses as we do to produce Hollywood movies."
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Kyle Peck
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Stephen Downes
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Kyle Peck