A BigGovernment post today titled Napsterize Education by Morgan Warstler describes what we can do to transform education. The transformation would be similar to what happened to the music industry: it was changed from top to bottom. Warstler is an internet tech and biz pro who knows the online learning business. What follows is the second half of his Napterize Education post. His conclusion is “demand it!”:
Imagine online colleges where you only pay a couple of bucks when you have a question or need to have a test graded. Imagine college that comes free when you buy a new $500.00 55? LCD TV at Wal-Mart. Imagine being able to test similar lectures from hundreds of professors to see which one is best at conveying information to visual learners, kids from the ghetto, or you when you are sixty. Imagine needing only a fifth/tenth/twentieth of the college professors to teach three times as many students.
The truly talented faculty who survive will be high paid rock-stars with staffs. Like Paul Krugman without a beard or inflation fetish.
Sure, if your kid needs to have the good old college experience and put himself (and you) $150K+ in debt, then by all means you can send the lad off to the glories of keggers and Marxist re-education.
But if he’s an over-achiever, he can start taking college courses about whatever interests him when he’s in ninth grade, or working as a convenience store clerk at night, or sitting in jail, or if he just doesn’t understand the shitty professor you are PAYING for him to sit in class with right now.
Why, in a copyable economy like public education, doesn’t every child deserve the lessons of the world’s premiere teacher in every subject?
This information wants to be free. And the best way to make that happen is to make it legal to copy and profit from the improvement of it. Moreover, it is a public good. Our tax dollars pay for it. It is ours. We want it hocked for pennies on every street corner. There is no better example of Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction.
National and state Republicans, get cracking. Promise to make in-class recordings in every public university legal and distributable under a Creative Commons license that allows commercial application.
In ten years time, every state budget will be in balance. The very best video lectures will improve daily, educate millions online, and thousands of liberal academics will have to go get real jobs.
I kid you not.
A small change to your state’s rules about recording in the classroom, can save your family thousands in taxes and hundreds of thousands in tuition.
Demand it.
