I would certainly hope so, in a sense that this being free and available to everyone can really help, especially poor and underprivileged, but also lifelong learners that can't attend a university.

On the other hand, making a good mooc is a massive undertaking and it's unclear where does the money should come from. IIRC the initial idea behind moocs was that the certificate is going to be prestigious and people would want to pay for it. But what happened was that far more people would drop off early, and those who complete rarely bought the pdf.

Also I don't think online remote learning can substitute offline on-campus. Even very immaterial things like CS or math can benefit from in-person interaction with professors, which also further depend on the personality of the student. Immersion in the studying atmosphere is much deeper (you being among other students) which, for me anyway, is a huge motivation boost. Then there is also networking and the baggage of useful acquaintances that you come with when you graduate.

As a former teacher, I 100% agree with you. Whenever I was explaining the same stuff 4 times in a row in 4 different classes, I thought "this would be so much more efficient with video". With the advantage that sick kids that stayed at home could watch the video, too. Or anyone who didn't pay attention could watch the video again before exams. And their parents could watch the video too, if they are curious.

And if more teachers would do it like this, and they would put their videos online, it means that if your teacher's explanation didn't work for you, for whatever reason, you can try another one. Having the same thing explained from 2 or 3 different angles would probably help.

The usual response is: "Teacher's job isn't just explaining; it's also making sure the kids understood properly, explaining questions, giving problems, checking the answers to the problems, etc." Yeah, so we could have 1/2 of the lesson on video, and another 1/2 solving problems and answering questions. Still an improvement over how things are done now. And a part of "giving problems, checking solution" could be done by a computer, by the way.

The part of the response I agree with, is that you cannot eliminate the helpers completely. No matter how well the videos would explain it, some students would misunderstand it creatively, and if there is no one to notice and fix the problem, the outcomes will be bad for a fraction of students. Also, for kids, someone needs to be there to make sure they actually watch the videos, and don't play with their phones during the lesson instead.

Khan Academy is fantastic! My daughter loves it, but she also sometimes gets stuck on a lesson, and needs to ask me. In principle, this could be solved by collecting feedback, and creating optional extra slow explanations for people who got stuck at some point. Like: if you didn't understand the short video, watch this long one.

The way we do teaching now is just... dunno, pretending that we live in 19th century and can't do better. It still works, but has a lot of problems. For example, if your teacher sucks, and you can't change schools easily, you are screwed; and I have heard stories about incompetent teachers.

(Also, all textbooks for elementary and high school should be open-source, and freely downloadable from one web page. With the option for volunteers to fix mistakes, add more explanations, make translations, etc.)

Not a good idea. One course to rule them all in a field creates a risk of massive amounts of people learning bad information and reinforcing it through sheer majority. Better for people to learn the same information in different ways and from different sources.

I guess I agree in the most extreme (singular case) which i assume would never happen. But I do think that there is an efficient set that is much smaller than 1000s of teachers 2x per year x 40 yrs. Maybe modify my comment ^^ to "dozens" or something like that, and that would naturally be multiplied by languages/countries as I see it unlikely there'd be massive reuse across those boundaries.

it would be more like different courses are best at teaching the same thing in a particular way that works best with a subset of people, so the top would be made of the set of courses that works with the majority of the population. The problem is that the way humans learn is not exactly understood, is it even a finite set? And what is its diatribution? Can it change through time/culture? Can it be identified in genetic traits? So if the learning methodology changes through time the best courses would also follow with it

No offense, but are you joking? This is an extremely cynical take.

You don't see any benefit to having one mega amazing course?

You think there's no way to overcome the limitation you mentioned (bad information) at all? How about a peer review process?

Why does it even need to be one mega course?

Millions of institutions exist. Even if you take 1% of them and tell them to create a freely available course, it's good enough. Beside, I don't understand how many public funded universities don't release everything they do or teach. It's just weird imo.

Why does education need to be expensive? Why should you have to pay for it?

It's one of those things that I don't understand the reason for being behind paywall.

+1 to the idea of having a few good math courses created by institutions. I think if I can save all that time on repetitive lecturing, it would make more time for discussion/experimentation based learning.

I’ve also wondered about why publicly funded institutions don’t publicly release their courses and other resources. When the COVID lockdown started, I naively hoped that we would get some more pure math courses since now universities are teaching remotely but haven’t really found any universities doing that. I’m tempted to reach out to my alma mater and ask if I can audit their pure math courses that they’re teaching remotely in the fall.

It definitely seems easier to find CS courses online than for pure math. Maybe because there’s a wider audience for that, I don’t quite know.

The discoveries from new fields will probably always have a ripple effect and indirectly improve our understanding of other fields.

Same as software libraries: we do invent new ways of doing the same thing from time to time.

Still, switching to using one of the few top courses by default would be a huge improvement.