[8863] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Reduced Rates for Schools
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John [Francis] Stracke)
Wed Dec 8 15:34:48 1993
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1993 14:00:35 +0500
From: francis@avalle.insoft.com (John [Francis] Stracke)
To: tenet.edu!cstout@netcom.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Connie Stout's message of Wed, 8 Dec 93 11:59:19 CST <199312081759.AA08223@abernathy.tenet.edu>
Connie Stout (cstout@tenet.edu) wrote:
>REDUCED DISTANCE LEARNING RATES AVAILABLE FOR SCHOOLS
[...]
>Following a unanimous vote by the three PUC Commissioners, public or
>private educational institutions -- from primary schools to institutions
>of higher learning -- will be able to utilized distance learning and
>interactive services for their student's benefit.
[..]
>increase availability of technology allowing school instruction
>transmitted from one site to one or more other sites.
>
>The State of Texas has estimated annual savings of $1.4 million based
>solely on access to the Texas Education Network (TENET). Other, similar
>distance learning programs could also benefit, utilizing real-time
>interactive voice, data or electronic transmissions for distance learning.
What exactly are schools going to be getting here? The ability to have
a teacher give classes to students around the state? Leaving aside the
question of how many teachers (and students) could handle a classroom
situtation without physical presence, how exactly does that save
money? You're not cutting staff costs much, if at all. In most states
(is Texas one?), you've got to have a teacher in the classroom at all
times, babysitting. Moreover, each school is going to require a
network manager to keep the link running, and competent network
managers are simply not going to work for the starvation wages
teachers get; they'll cost probably about two or three times as much
as an entry-level teacher, about 1.5 to two times as much as an
experienced teacher. (Rough figures off the top of my head; maybe
Texas treats its teachers like human beings.)
The optimal situation would be centralizing undersubscribed courses
like calculus, putting a good teacher in the virtual classroom and
cheaper ones in the distant sites; if the good teacher gets twice what
an entry-level one does, then you've got a good teacher in N
classrooms for (N+2) times the cost of having entry-level ones, plus
the cost of the manager, plus the cost of the link. (Note that
"entry-level" and "good" are not opposed, but it takes time to find
out if a teacher's good.) If you put all the distance learners at a
given school into the same room, you can cut costs--the cost of your
babysitter and your link don't go up (assuming the link can carry it
all)--but then you've got to keep the different classes from
disrupting each other. It gets messy.
I think the distance learning people are likely to discover the same
thing the CAI people keep finding: with today's tech, there's no
financial justification, and rarely any educational justification, for
technofixes. Anyone fixing our educational system is going to have to
start by treating teachers like professionals; bringing in the
machines will just turn them into factory workers. (Will anybody
notice the difference?) (I worked for a CAI outfit; it was supposed to
help the schools that couldn't afford good teachers, but any school
that could afford our CAI could afford great teachers--the problem was
that they couldn't believe the teachers were worth the money. And the
CAI system was worse than most human teachers. CAI is AI-complete.)
/===========================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke | My opinions are my own. |
|InSoft, Inc. |==================================================|
|Mechanicsburg, PA | Please do not look into laser |
|francis@insoft.com | with remaining eyeball. |
\===========================================================================/
