What developing an online course taught me about education

Answer: That I am lazy

Don't get me wrong. I take teaching seriously, put enough effort and energy in my delivery to secure good ratings, but my good ratings are more due to the latter than to the former.

I spent the last four months putting my usual MBA course into an online format. Should have been trivial. I have been teaching and researching private equity (PE) for over fifteen years. It is the only thing I know, I literally spend 24/7 on it.

There was just this one problem: I was not allowed to lecture.

I can teach my PE course with no notes, no slides, just a pen and a paper and talk for 20 to 30 hours, covering all I know and all I think there is to know about my topic (PE), can answer any (most?) questions. And this is how I have delivered my lectures for fifteen years. Is it because it is the most effective method for students? No. It is because it is most convenient to me. I talk, they listen. I'll ask them some exam questions to make sure they listened and those who remember best get the highest score. Period. It is not a trivial thing to do. Plenty of teachers get bad ratings, and fail to convey much to students. I get good ratings, and convey something to some students, not a huge lot though. That's because I am lazy.

The word lazy is not used here in the usual sense I guess. I work 70 hours a week and been doing so for twenty years. I simply overweight my effort towards tasks that are more rewarding and more rewarded (research in particular).

After twenty years of teaching at the university level (actually 22, I started when I was just 22 years old, a few weeks after landing at LAX, barely speaking English... late apologies to my students...), what did I learn about effective teaching in 22 years? Probably not much. I kind of knew it all along, having stayed at school for too long (28 years in total!) Every teacher knows what is most effective for learning. We just do not do it because we are lazy.

How many people can listen to someone talk for 1.5 hours? I cannot. I stop listening after about 3 minutes, sometimes I make it to 5 minutes. How can I expect my students to listen to me for over an hour?

Do I ever listen to anything for more than 3 minutes? Yes, actually, but it is not a lecture. I watch documentaries, and documentary-like things like John Oliver, Jon Steward, Trevor Noah...all these things teach me something and I stay tune.

What would effective education look like then? How about a 30 hours documentary, broken down into 30 episodes, like a TV-series, with a key learning point each time, with all the special effects, humor, and importantly, the pace of a top documentary. One or several academics specializing on the topic write most of the script, another team helps to make it more punchy, funny, engaging and here you are, the best of two worlds.

You need these top academics because documentaries as they currently exist are typically short on the content side. The people making them do not master the topic, they have not spent 20 years studying the topic, they may get fooled by the interviewees because the interviewees are more knowledgeable. But people making documentaries know a thing or two about creating an engaging content. They also have a budget that goes with it. Put all these people together and it is a killer. And in any good documentary no-one talks for more than 5 minutes in an uninterrupted dialogue, no lecturing, only action.

And now put all these points together to imagine what education ought to look like:

On a topic like mine (PE), I can think of, say, five academics (on their own or in a team) in the world who could develop the ultimate content. There would be some variations because everyone has some personal views, feelings, experiences that shape how they view the same topic. In the old days each team would have written a book about all they know about this topic. Now, they would work directly on the movie version of the book.

There can also be some interactive elements to these documentaries (quizzes for example, or possibility the option to click to hear more about something and less about something else). On the website of the documentaries there can be forums where people ask questions, debate with one another, just like we do for most newspaper articles out there.

Movies/documentaries are expensive. But if there are only five in the world, it is cheaper than the current number of courses on PE -- maybe 1000 each year! Think of all these huge lecture theaters where students are cramped in, trying to take notes... we would save billions in both real estate and salaries...and students would be better off (they would have clean notes and an engaging content). And the debate about student selection (which is vivid in some countries) can be put to rest: Anyone can follow any course in any university. No selection at entry. Content is available to anyone with what? $50, $100, let's say at most $500 a course.

The only other thing I can stand is small group Q&As. But we know that concept well in my university. In fact, Oxford invented it: it is called tutorials. In the world just described, tutorials would be very natural. After watching the documentary, participating in forums etc, students would sit with a tutor to discuss and think more about the content. Here, however, there would be some selection and some extra cost. And we can have reunions of the fans of a given documentary so students can network, just like they do at university.

I cannot think of any job that has not changed over the last 500 years (well maybe another one, but probably a poor benchmark) -- teachers still stand up in front of a crowd and talk and talk and talk. I am loving it! I do! I want to lecture! But that's not really fair on the audience, is it?

There are strong forces against any changes in education, but it's got to happen.

The online course I designed is not the ultimate thing and it is not as cheap as I would like it to be, but it is a big step in the right direction and a huge effort given where we all are (and our financial means). The course has lots of videos, quizzes, a bit of reading, some interactive graphs etc. I spent about 300 hours working on it directly (plus the hundreds of hours on related research)

It is the beginning of something really big.