Market Comes to School
Teachers prepare instructional content. Lesson plans. Lectures. Projects. And other kinds of things listed in this link. Teachers need instructional content. The same kind of stuff I just mentioned. That is supply and demand. Now somebody is trying to match this supply with this demand. Efficiently. With a website: Teachers pay Teachers.
The site allows teachers to offer their instructional products for sale. Other teachers can buy the products. There is a small membership fee. And some evaluation of the content producer. There is also an arrangement for rating of content and producers by buyers, so the arrangement is somewhat like e-Bay. The content can include documents and most kinds of audio-visual materials.
This is a promising start. The main problem a buyer will have is efficiently evaluating the content. It is of no use to know that there are thousands of documents available that could be what you want. A buyer needs to have appropriate materials presented as a small, refined set that can be examined in a short time.
Possibly the matching technology being used by Stumbleupon may be useful here. It seems to provide web pages to match the user’s interest. Each user rates whatever items he or she chooses to rate. The ratings are used to guide future presentations to that user. (Incentive to rate, incentive to return.) The ratings are also used to guide the selection of content for other users with similar interests and (probably) similar ratings. Thus the system could develop clusters of similar users whose ratings would improve the results for all in the cluster.
I have tried it and been surprised at the high quality of browsing results. I suspect that something like this technology, combined with the original plan in the website, could be the innovation that destabilizes the educational system. In my blog of 6-21-06, I suggested that we needed to understand what job(s) the customers want done by the school system. The teachers-pay-teachers website could offer a generic solution: Parents could make their own determination of want they want (as buyers do on e-Bay). Then they could search this market for products that satisfy their wants. I assume that these products would be homework help initially. But many such products can be delivered over the web and would be suitable for individual of group study. At that point the schools might just provide facilities and supervision. The unbundling of education.
The site allows teachers to offer their instructional products for sale. Other teachers can buy the products. There is a small membership fee. And some evaluation of the content producer. There is also an arrangement for rating of content and producers by buyers, so the arrangement is somewhat like e-Bay. The content can include documents and most kinds of audio-visual materials.
This is a promising start. The main problem a buyer will have is efficiently evaluating the content. It is of no use to know that there are thousands of documents available that could be what you want. A buyer needs to have appropriate materials presented as a small, refined set that can be examined in a short time.
Possibly the matching technology being used by Stumbleupon may be useful here. It seems to provide web pages to match the user’s interest. Each user rates whatever items he or she chooses to rate. The ratings are used to guide future presentations to that user. (Incentive to rate, incentive to return.) The ratings are also used to guide the selection of content for other users with similar interests and (probably) similar ratings. Thus the system could develop clusters of similar users whose ratings would improve the results for all in the cluster.
I have tried it and been surprised at the high quality of browsing results. I suspect that something like this technology, combined with the original plan in the website, could be the innovation that destabilizes the educational system. In my blog of 6-21-06, I suggested that we needed to understand what job(s) the customers want done by the school system. The teachers-pay-teachers website could offer a generic solution: Parents could make their own determination of want they want (as buyers do on e-Bay). Then they could search this market for products that satisfy their wants. I assume that these products would be homework help initially. But many such products can be delivered over the web and would be suitable for individual of group study. At that point the schools might just provide facilities and supervision. The unbundling of education.
posted by Selby Evans at 1:49 PM
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