> "Having a scholar teach and engage his or her own students in person is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her own students," the professors wrote.

I beg to differ. Lecturing has been demonstrated to be a flatly terrible method of instruction/learning, and I see minimal difference between watching a professor 50 feet away versus on a screen. When the educational method is so poor that a minimal number of students learn anything from it they couldn't learn studying textbooks on their own, digitizing it can hardly make it much worse.

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l...

This article illustrates the flaws with lecturing and, by proxy, with the current efforts made by MOOCs, Khan Academy, and so on. Ironically, this is not new information. People like Maria Montessori developed teaching methods more than a hundred years ago by studying children and constructing tools, classrooms and methods of instruction around how they learned.

From the linked article -

> Mazur's physics class is now different. Rather than lecturing, he makes his students do most of the talking.

> At a recent class, the students — nearly 100 of them — are in small groups discussing a question. Three possible answers to the question are projected on a screen. Before the students start talking with one another, they use a mobile device to vote for their answer. Only 29 percent got it right. After talking for a few minutes, Mazur tells them to answer the question again.

> This time, 62 percent of the students get the question right. Next, Mazur leads a discussion about the reasoning behind the answer. The process then begins again with a new question. This is a method Mazur calls "peer Instruction." He now teaches all of his classes this way.

> "What we found over now close to 20 years of using this approach is that the learning gains at the end of the semester nearly triple," he says.

Maria Montessori recommended teaching children in age groups of 3 years at a time (3-6 year olds in one classroom, 7-9 in another, etc.) The final stage of learning material is when you can teach it to others, and requires a greater mastery; hence, a classroom that spans ages/grades provides opportunities for older students to instruct younger ones and strengthen their own knowledge of the material.

This is effectively what Mazur has rediscovered and applied; by having students debate among themselves, the ones that are correct and hence, have a better understanding of the material, can explain to the others their reasoning behind their choice, as well as improving their grasp by having to defend against questions from the others.

Montessori also developed a wide variety of tools and "works" for students to use, allowing for a kinesthetic learning experience (something I would consider vastly more effective than lecture or video at younger ages, and of continuing importance even through college) - note that when Mazur's students largely got the question concerning gravity wrong, even after learning the mechanics of it in lecture, he resorted to practical demonstrations. There are few better examples of this than the Binomial Cube, which is introduced in Montessori preschools(!)

http://www.montessoriworld.org/sensory/sbinoml.html

Preschool students are not expected to understand the math behind the cube, which is after all algebra, but the work is meant to prime them for when they do encounter it several years down the line, as well as providing a physical construct that the math can be related back to at that point.

Which brings me to my final point: rather than trying to move traditional, ineffective methods of instruction online, edtech really should be aiming to maximize the learning capabilities of computers, which can allow things and methods of learning that simply aren't possible in the physical world. For example, the binomial cube, as good as it is, is still a fairly complex concept; a computer representation of it could extend it by allowing a student to reshape pieces in a 3D space, or provide values for the x, y and z variables and see how the cube transforms. This would allow for an even more powerful and intuitive understanding of how the pieces, sides and full cube relate to the binomial equation; and its manipulation that you could only do in a virtual environment.

That said, I don't really expect this to happen any time soon. Newspapers are still being dragged kicking and screaming into the digital age; I'd guess genuinely effective new teaching methods will similarly take years to come together. (It might be useful to start by discarding the concept of a "class" and look to MMOs for inspiration - material created for people at a variety of levels of understanding, with no real required time frame, where students can form groups to tackle difficult concepts/projects, or mentor others...)