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Actually different teachers around the world could put up their videos on the same topics.

And the students can go figure out which teachers they understand better.

Then teachers can spend more time on trying to teach the students who still have problems understanding stuff. Or figuring out if the students really understand stuff or even have mastered the topic.

Might take another 20-50 years before that'll happen.

I've been working on the tech for that for a while. (Plus in-class interactivity to incentivise using it.)

And I've just reached the point where I'm looking for some other teachers to help try it out. (Forgiving early-adopters to begin with, of course) Get in touch if you're interested!

The big issue is the difference between "education" and "schooling" which John Taylor Gatto goes into.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Iâ(TM)ll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?"

Or John Holt.
http://www.holtgws.com/whatisunschoolin.html

It relates to, but goes beyond, this article:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/01/03/2040253/when-getting-rid-of-college-lectures-makes-sense

The article on Eric Mazur is misrepresentative -- according to him. He doesn't "get rid of college lectures", he turns the lecture time interactive. Similar to what the Intelligent Book tries to make easy, but Mazur's "Peer Instruction" requires much larger changes to your teaching design. You can do large changes with the Intelligent Book if you want to, but it's not required -- you can do something as simple as just putting the live polls in to your existing course, and ask the class questions to spark discussion (that has long been shown to be pedagogically very effective).

I think the John Taylor Gatto argument is founded on a misconception. The "command-type economy" is nowhere near as command-type as you think. Most organisations are not well-understood hierarchical factories, but poorly understood complex dynamic systems. For instance, half the problem in running a hospital is that most of what the doctors and nurses are actually doing isn't documented and varies enormously from ward to ward. At every student employment fair I have seen every employer I have spoken to has valued precisely "self-reliant resourceful readers and critical thinking" over every other skill. And universities -- at least the ones I've encountered (which admittedly have all been world-top-50) -- generally don't do schooling. They take comparatively little care to train students in content that is useful to jobs as the academics that take the classes feel offended by the idea of becoming trainers dancing to an external employer's tune.

"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand.

Not true. Educational technology can happily reside in the classroom. "Online" does not necessarily mean "physically remote" or "after hours". Ubiquitous includes class-time.

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The Intelligent Book.

Wait tell they figure out that they can get a guy in India to do the lecture on video for 1/2 the price. Then we will outsource the professors as well.

No, no -- when the professors figure out they can get good lecture videos for their classes for free, they won't bother each writing their own lecture slides on the same dang material. They'll be MCs and curators -- presenting others' material and spending more of the lecture time actually interacting with the class. And the world will be a much better place all round for it. (Lecturers are generally promoted for research not teaching, so the best way get them to improve their teaching is if it also saves them time.) Seriously, if you were an AI lecturer this year, would you spend another hour writing your own ten PowerPoint slides to give a basic introduction to particle filters, or would you just show your class Sebastian Thrun's videos about it from ai-class and then talk with them about it? The second option gets you a clear understandable explanation in much less preparation time, and moves your class onto more interesting more advanced discussion faster...

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The Intelligent Book
Twitter: @wbillingsley

There's a happy medium that uses a lot less staff time. I'm trying to push this out in the Intelligent Book (sorry, gratuitous plug). And that's to make the lecture interactive, without having to redesign the whole course. The first few slides are my same slides from last year to give you a quick intro to what we're talking about today. But my next slide is a quiz that happens on the main screen and you interact using your phone/iPad/laptop and there's a live Twitter-like on the lecture screen as well as spoken class discussion. The slide after that is a video from Khan academy, and still the discussion is live on the lecture screen. The one after thatis a handy simulation I found at another site, and still the class discussion goes on with the question "what'll happen if I increase the value of this variable?"...

A very small part of My PhD looked at this (but with "collaborative textbooks" rather than wikis) -- see Chapter 4. Adding a very simple metadata-based navigation layer over the top of the wiki is pretty easy, clean (doesn't confuse users), and seems to do the trick. The wiki itself shows in an embedded frame. Of course, I had to go further and let students do difficult number theory proofs backed by machine reasoning systems within the book, but you won't have to solve that problem!

I'm (gradually) putting this fairly simple but useful part of the software into an online resource at www.theintelligentbook.com, though it's in my spare time and the system is down at the moment. I'll put my contact details back up there shortly in case the question-asker wants to discuss it technically.

This is a good idea. Base it on a standard description of each concept like an old fashioned text book, but also allow:

- Discussion threads with students and teachers. (moderated, Slashdot style?)

- Contributed examples, again by students and teachers. You could do something like the PHP documentation, where the best contributed examples are prominently displayed at the bottom of the relevant page.

- Interactive tools to illustrate particular concepts.

- Copious linkage to similar resources.

A successful project like this could easily spawn similar projects for the other sciences.

We're trying to do just this sort of thing with the intelligent book, but not just with examples but also exercises that actively help you work through them. (The demo at that link should come live next week, though in a pre-alpha state for an early publicity event.)

Essentially, it's me gradually turning my PhD thesis from a PhD into a publically available tool, and for all subjects, not just maths.

I guess that makes this post a shameless plug, but it is at least for something that is directly on-topic.

At Cambridge University, I've been developing a system called the Intelligent Book, that changes the idea of "an online textbook" into something that might genuinely be more useable and useful than a paper book, and much less cost/effort to write. (Though a paper book certainly can be printed from it.) This has some implications for the textbook market if it does take off, because online collaborative/interactive materials provided by a university tend to be free to students, and increasingly to the wider public.

The public demonstrator is not yet online, so this link just goes to parking, but if you want to revisit it later, it will be gradually going up at http://www.theintelligentbook.com/.

It came out of my PhD, completed a year ago, which in turn was part of a joint project with MIT.