Re:Request for Education Startups
by graniter on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @01:02AM
(#15336319)
Yes I used those terms intentionally because I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching. There are good teachers, but we don't have a good way to scale them. The industrial revolution provided a way to replicate and scale good manufacturing. So maybe we can learn from that. I don't mean that education should be done like manufacturing, just that the lessons of how to scale may apply.
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Scaling teachers is often called team-teaching and coaching, i.e. training more teachers to be more effective. Effective teacher-teacher relationships are a good predictor for effective teacher-student relationships. Broadcast one-to-many relationships aren’t effective for bidirectional factors crucial to education such as feedback or empathy (this is where people are different to mass production or say entertainment).
> I think the current problem with education is being able to scale good teaching.
Well, I don't think that's the only problem with education.
Scaling good teaching, huh. Tackling this with direct technology is difficult, things like message boards for teachers are a bit crude.
So perhaps another way of approaching it is better training and support for teachers - and this is where tech can be used as support. Example, shadow a well-respected teacher with a camera, and post regularly on YouTube while encouraging open discussion.
Actually there is a lot of this content already (check out "Blended Learning" on Coursera, for example) so perhaps the real problem is actually aggregation and distribution.