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Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Superstar Teachers
Over at Marginal Revolution Alex Tabarrok is arguing that: “universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities. ... At GMU some of our best teachers are being recruited by other universities with very attractive offers and some of our most highly placed students have earned their positions through excellence in teaching rather than through the more traditional route of research.”
Comments
So superstar teacher = manager of countless TA drones in cubicles behind computer monitors? This is incoherent on the face of it. You don’t need superstars to do that, just middle managers.
I’m not sure how it’s supposed to work, Jonathan. I’d think you’d need the teacher to create the charismatic lectures and the other course materials. Now, whether the superstar teacher also manages the TA cadre, or whether an assistant does that, or a middle manager, or whether the middle manager rides herd on both the superstar and the TA’s, I don’t know.
Meet our new superstar trumpet professor, Dizzy Gillespie! (Show some youtube videos of Dizzy).
Meet our new painting instructor, Jackson Pollock (show video of Pollock painting.)
With this model, you wouldn’t even have to have instructors that were living and breathing. Are superstar teachers inherently superstar lecturers? If so, and you can simply record the lectures, you would need only ONE instructor for calculus, say, for the entire English-speaking world. Just find the person who can explain a subject the best and you need no other lecturers.
Scads of university lectures are already out there, & from top notch schools. See, e.g.: