A totally new model for education.

Scott Page, one of my dissertation advisors and a genuine polymath, is teaching a class on Model Thinking next semester.  The class sounds very nifty, but it's the way that it's presented that blows me away.  I'm convinced we're at a watershed moment.

Scott's class is one of a couple dozen or so follow-up classes to the Stanford AI class that attracted 140,000 students.  They're being delivered using a totally new model of education.

• They're free.  Yes, free.
• They're scalable -- any number of students can sign up.
• They're taught by rock star scientists and professors -- people at the cutting edge of their fields.
• They're graded. Students submit work (multiple-choice, mostly) and get grades and a certificate of completion at the end of the course*.

This combination is completely new.  There are already plenty of lectures and how-to videos on YouTube (free and scalable), and the Teaching Company has been publishing lecture series for quite a while (many of them taught by leading scholars), and the Kahn academy has been experimenting with new ways of deploying content and structuring classes.  But no-one has done all these things together.


This is just the latest in a series of innovations that are going to turn education -- public, private, higher, you name it -- upside down.  Why settle for a half-prepped lecture from a busy assistant professor when you can get the same content--better--online for free?  If you're the teacher, why bother to prep the lecture when someone else has already given it?



* Yes, yes. The grading is pretty rudimentary, but it can't be that long until smart people figure out how to do better.It's a problem I'd be interested in working on.