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Kathianne
11-28-2012, 09:35 PM
Perhaps of interest to Bob?

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506381/the-new-internet-teaching-stars/


The New Internet Teaching Stars

On the Web, even a teacher can become a little bit rich and famous.


By Conor Myhrvold (http://www.technologyreview.com/contributor/conor-myhrvold/) on November 28, 2012


Who is Calvin Hollywood? In the world of Photoshop instruction in Germany, Hollywood’s name towers above the rest.
A self-styled maverick of online Photoshop tutorials, Hollywood sticks to his strengths: retouching photographs, teaching others to do the same, and marketing himself. It’s an expansive and lucrative enterprise.

His business includes DVDs, live online webinars, and $30 downloadable courses that people can complete on their own time and schedules. To help generate Internet sales, Hollywood does appearances at shows like “Horror Nights,” a dance party frequented by people dressed as vampires and zombies. Hollywood says online teaching earns him as much as $16,000 a month.

The Web is starting to change education (see “The Most Important Educational Technology in 200 Years (http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506351/the-most-important-education-technology-in-200-years/)”) and perhaps nowhere are its transforming effects so apparent as among teachers. Teaching is among the worst paid professions (http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/does-it-pay-to-become-a-teacher/) in the U.S. (starting salaries are $30,377 a year (http://www.nea.org/home/12661.htm)). But the Web is rewriting the rules of supply and demand. For popular instructors like Hollywood, who reach beyond physical classrooms, teaching has never offered a greater chance to become rich and famous.

This effect of technology was dubbed the “Superstar Phenomenon” in a now canonical 1981 paper by the labor economist Sherwin Rosen. In his study, The Economics of Superstars (http://users.polisci.wisc.edu/schatzberg/ps616/Rosen1981.pdf), Rosen described mathematically how new media, like radio and TV, concentrated earnings among fewer performers or bestsellers. It did so by increasing the audience of stars, and because consumers flocked to the product they considered the best.


The Web, with its ability to broadcast video, live exercises, and interactive documents, is extending the superstar rule to teachers of everything from computer programming to probability analysis. One expected result, say economists, is that a small number of popular teachers could end up winning the vast share of teaching income. The Wall Street Journal, which discovered a guitar teacher streaming paid classes (http://online.wsj.com/article/the_game.html) for 1,500 people from his basement computer, concluded that although we will always need teachers, we may need “fewer of them.”


Because teaching is a performance art, online education is favoring those like Hollywood, who has a flamboyant style, or others able to connect with their audience. Salman Khan, the stock-picker-turned-tutor whose YouTube math lessons have been viewed over 200 million times (see “Q&A: Salman Khan (http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506356/qa-with-salman-khan/)”), was recently judged by Yuri Milner, the Russian Internet investor, as the world’s “first superstar teacher (http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelnoer/2012/11/02/one-man-one-computer-10-million-students-how-khan-academy-is-reinventing-education/).”

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