I had this idea that what if Google was involved in a project where they would make online courses of educational material available for free. Not like bits and pieces of video lecture available from stanford or short video tutorials available from http://www.khanacademy.org/. But actual course material, perhaps starting from 2nd grade to all the way to graduate level courses. There will be a combination of texts and videos and it could be semi wiki like where, certain qualified people can update course material to keep it relevant and up to date.
It would probably cost them less than buying a video codec company, but might have bigger and far reaching effect.
Imagine a single site will all the educational material, regularly updated. The only difference from a formal education (other than social interaction) is a certification.
Cool idea. But why limit it to Google (or any single company)?
Take every topic taught in formal education -- from K-12 through undergrad and graduate school. Break it up into small 2-day to 2-week modules. Categorize each module in terms of its prerequisities and teaching style (creating a giant graph through which students can travel). Provide pre- and post-tests (or simply let students self-declare their mastery of earlier subjects). Put it all online.
Others are thinking this way, too. See David Gelernter's 'Tracks and Clusters' concept from the 2009 Edge essays:
(He adds to the online component real-life 'cluster rooms', where students working on similar materials gather for additional mutual in-person instruction.)
Great! David Gelernter wrote almost exactly the way I was thinking. Albeit, he presented it eloquently.
The reason I specifically mentioned Google because, it is the only company that is crazy enough to do something like this without expecting any direct profit in return. They also have the engineering muscle and deep pocket to make it possible.
I always felt, throughout my years in school, how inefficient our education system is. Not only in USA, everywhere in the world (AFAIK).
Imagine how much effect this will have on third world countries (with the help of cheap computers like OLPC) with course material translated to local language? Ok maybe it won't be perfect and some problems needs to be solved, but it will be better than having little to no access to high quality courses of higher education?
Hell, if I had couple of millions lying around. I would give it a shot myself.
Khanacademy has good resources for Primary and Higher Secondary level. A good online repository of aggregating all these education videos , may be playlist of courses would be brilliant.
Not stupid at all. A lot of people (myself included) think that education is eventually going to be free thanks to technology. The only missing item is going to be some $100k piece of paper that makes me/you > me/you.
I've made this prediction as well. Google will bring on experts in their fields to write books, class room material, teachers aids, supplements, etc for nth-12th grade levels and put it all on the internet. They'd probably provide no cost book binding etc and update it in a software like release cycle. States could adopt the Google model instead of the TBOE.
Even though Python is a very easy to learn language, I give this two thumbs up for google. Python is really a great amazing language, however I feel sometimes that's very underrated for most of IT people I know, it's not perfect but is powerful and beautiful.
On a related note, it would be great if Google allowed others to post education materials of length beyond 10 minutes in length, as well. For example, I want to post full-length videos of computer science conferences and talks but this seems to be impossible without applying to the YouTube Partner program, which requires traffic and credentials. Does anybody have such a contact at YouTube?
While these lectures are not for total programming newbies, they are very gentle if you know some other languages. He'll often contrast Python with Java, C++ and Javascript to highlight the differences.
It would probably cost them less than buying a video codec company, but might have bigger and far reaching effect.
Imagine a single site will all the educational material, regularly updated. The only difference from a formal education (other than social interaction) is a certification.
Crazy (stupid?) idea?