Web-Teach

I have been toying with the idea of creating a super teacher ever since I attempted to simultaneously teach English to 74 students at an art college. They were all at different levels, high on their own hormones and making one hell of a racket.

That day went down as one of the biggest mountains I’d ever climb in my teaching career and also the start of this mad idea to create a system that would allow universities, professional organizations, companies or educational bodies to participate in guided, structured lessons “managed” by a very few “real” teachers.

The problem of scale

Let me put this problem into perspective: La Sapienza University in Rome is, in according to the Wikipedia entry, “the largest European university”.  With 21 faculties and nearly 150,000 students, it’s simply massive.

Like all European institutions outside the UK, the English language must be taught to all of these students and chances are that “a good knowledge of English” or, worse still, “certifications” are now an intrinsic part of every single student’s curriculum.

Now in my experience, a teacher can deliver quality instruction to a maximum of 6 students at a time (that’s why French at school was so hard!). Anything above that and the time per student drops to the point where the course is either a self-learning one (i.e. extremely passive) so teacher input is minimal, or else the teacher simply can’t create enough direct student involvement to make the lesson worthwhile.

On this basis La Sapienza needs 25,000 teaching hours per week to cover all the students. And given that even the hardest-working teacher runs out of imagination after 40 hours per week, you’re still looking at a minimum of 625 full-time English teachers for that single University. When you consider the cost per lesson is anywhere from 30 Euros per hour, the cost of providing these students with a half-decent language education soon adds up.

 The rise of the super teacher

When I learned how to teach, I was lucky enough to work in a school that had a very rigid method. Each week, students would take home cassettes containing their course material, would study at least 30 minutes/1 hour every day and all the teacher did was read off specific exercises and questions the student already knew. If the student then passed a test, he or she was given the next set of cassettes and the study cycle continued.

There were several psychological factors at work here. First the intensity of the study programme forced students to set aside adequate time for the duration of the course, often at great personal or social expense. Then the actual cost of this method was very high and students were given a margin of about two weeks over the time necessary to study all the lessons to complete the course. The penalty for not studying was financial and it hurt.

Now I’m the first to admit that ultra-passive courses like this don’t do it for me. I am stimulated by debate and when there’s no time for independent thought, I get bored. Poor students. But that aside, what was the role of the teachers here? I don’t ever remember actually teaching anything at this school. I learned enough to move on but I never really taught. All I can think of was that we made sure the students didn’t slack, and that they kept their momentum high.  That, as I’ve mentioned before is what made a real difference to their long-term results.

I must have met thousands of students during my three-year stay at that school yet I remember just a handful.

Isn’t the same fundamentally the same for scalable projects on the Internet? Imagine an online course for those 150,000 students at La Sapienza. They’re all moving in the same direction but at different speeds, different moments of the day and, thanks to the power of the web, by studying different things. Their momentum - previously maintained by teachers like me - is now fuelled by their insatiable appetite for discovery of their favourite subjects while standards are maintained by programming an accepted margin of error before students are refused access to the next level. They’re very much on their own.

By scaling the problem, we can also scale the solution. If, for example the accepted margin of error produces a failure rate of 5% per lesson unit, that means that at any given time 7,500 students will repeat a lesson (or part of one). If the failure rate for the repeated lessons remains the same, then again, at any given time, 375 students will fail again. If, for the third and final attempt, we still have a failure rate of 5%, then 19 students will fail a specific lesson or part of one.

With just 100 lessons, it would be quite possible to get these students back on track with a team of five or six full-time teachers, thus cutting interruption/interaction time down to a minimum. Better yet, as the subject matter is so focused, a single teacher could provide additional video back-up lessons or even streaming lessons for these 19 cases and never even visit the University.

One University. One (super) teacher.

Before you start with the “interaction is fundamental” debate, I am aware of this and in a perfect world the content of each lesson would mimic the processes of a human lesson as much as possible. The argument here is scale.

Now scale it even more, schools, universities, professional organizations at a national, European or even global level… they all need language training so why not offer them what they need? After all, experience taught me that if my student was a lawyer, then he or she would invariably study legal English, just like an accountant would choose commercial English, or a young kid music, bankers leisure time and luxury objects. The subject matter changed every time, yet the method remained the same.

What can be so hard about applying that to the web?