There's no reason a class can't have the same material presented two (or three or twelve) different ways for multiple audiences.
There's no reason a class needs a "start date" and an "end date." We can grow classes to be about communities, not authorities. None of us are as smart as all of us.
We shouldn't copy the Boring Ole' Lecture Format (and especially not "camera up my nose while I write on paper") when we could be doing so much more.
You're right, and I hope we'll see more innovation in this area, but I don't think it's reasonable (or a good idea) to expect Stanford professors to try to attack two very hard problems at once at this stage:
- Scale traditional educational techniques (lectures, homeworks, schedule) to a class size of 100,000 people
- Come up with an altogether new way to teach and assess students by taking advantage of the web
It's probably a good idea to figure out the bugs in solving the first problem before tackling the second.
I disagree. The start/end date concept facilitates working together with others in a study group setting. Everyone is at the same part of the class, and you can benefit from learning together. Finding a real-world study group for material with no start/end date is significantly more difficult. One of the best ways to learn is to work through material with others in a group.
If the lectures were coupled with wiki-style video annotation, over time people could curate Q&A. This would be fantastic study material and it would be embedded at the most relevant moments of the lecture. It would get better with each new question and would be available to everyone forever.
So - people still learn together, just not necessarily concurrently.
There's no reason a class can't have the same material presented two (or three or twelve) different ways for multiple audiences.
There's no reason a class needs a "start date" and an "end date." We can grow classes to be about communities, not authorities. None of us are as smart as all of us.
We shouldn't copy the Boring Ole' Lecture Format (and especially not "camera up my nose while I write on paper") when we could be doing so much more.