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Online Education and the Market for Superstar Teachers
I have argued 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. The full online model is not here yet but I see an increasing amount of evidence for the superstar model of teaching. 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.
I do not think GMU is unique in this regard--my anecdotal evidence is that the market for professors is rewarding great teachers with higher wages and higher placements than in earlier years.
The online aspect, which enhances the market for superstars, is also growing. Here from a piece on online education in Fast Company are a few nuggets on for-profit colleges which have moved online more quickly than the non-profits.
Today, for-profit colleges enroll 9% of all students, many of them in online programs. It's safe to assume they'll soon have many more....for-profits are the only sector significantly expanding enrollment -- up 17% since the start of the recession in 2008....the University of Phoenix, which with 420,000 students is the largest university in North America.
Interesting explanation for why for-profits still lag:
Since there are no generally accepted measurements of learning in traditional higher education, the proxy for the value of a diploma on the job market is prestige. Rankings like those of U.S. News & World Report depend on reputation; spending per student, including spending on research; and selectivity -- a measure of inputs, not outputs. On all these measures, for-profits come up short.
But how long can we expect the inability to measure to protect academia when there are big profits to be made? Robin Hanson would argue that most of what is going on is signaling, i.e. that prestige is what is being bought and sold and not prestige as a proxy for some other measure of quality. No doubt there is some truth to that but there are plenty of fields, dentistry, engineering, computer science where measurable quality matters as well.
It's true that the university equilibrium has lasted a long time but that doesn't mean it can't break down very quickly.
Addendum: Bryan Caplan laughs but Arnold Kling has the right idea.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on December 8, 2009 at 07:25 AM in Economics, Education | Permalink
Comments
A 'superstar' teacher making online material with TAs doing the human interaction seems similar to a textbook writer with teachers for human interaction.
Posted by: Zamfir at Dec 8, 2009 8:20:29 AM
As the years pass, more and more for-profit university graduates will be doing the hiring in the workforce. They have no prestige problem with graduates from those universities.
Posted by: Diesel Mcfadden at Dec 8, 2009 8:37:49 AM
Just wait until we have the first person with a degree from an online university running a major corporation. Or large bank. Or in the White House.
Then we'll see the tables turn.
Oh, btw: Do you believe we'll see the military academies go all online?
Posted by: anon at Dec 8, 2009 8:44:52 AM
Signaling Value of Education = (Bricks & Mortar Tuition) - (Online Tuition) ?
I can imagine some online classes MUST be better than a regular university class too. U of Phoenix has a Quality Assurance program (b/c they are a business). My university has very little of this - no one knows what goes on in the classroom.
Posted by: Mo at Dec 8, 2009 9:22:12 AM
i might have considered becoming a teacher if it was just a matter of explaining things to a room. it's not, though. i think zamfir got it right. learning from a textbook and learning from a lecture where you can't ask questions are pretty much equal in aggregate, with some people helped more by lecture and others by book.
re: hiring these superstars, if what you are doing is putting their lectures on video or internet, why wouldn't renting the product be cheaper than giving a lifetime of tenured security to the person? the answer is probably: copyright, intellectual property, and licensing fees. meaning that the professor in question will have to bargain away their intellectual property as part of the deal.
now what's missing are systems (computer or people) who can teach by interaction where interaction is necessary. that's a whole lot of cases. i used to follow this closely about ten years ago and the answer was that it was too hard. but maybe it's getting better?
Posted by: babar at Dec 8, 2009 9:33:30 AM
Why do people seem to think that if the current equilibrium breaks down, we would still end up with something that resembles "school"?
Posted by: josh at Dec 8, 2009 9:36:58 AM
I think the textbook argument is valid except that we are moving toward a multimedia world.
Textbooks that include online content, including video full lectures, will become more common.
Online drills are often better for the student, with immediate feedback.
But will that raise or lower the salaries of professors who will act as TA's at the local college?
For basic intro classes how much does it matter. At many colleges they just farm out those classes to adjuncts and grad students.
Posted by: DanC at Dec 8, 2009 9:50:02 AM
For the record this guy is the best teacher in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Greenberg
Posted by: Chris at Dec 8, 2009 9:50:47 AM
I have a friend who is a professor both at a state university and at DeVry institute. She claims that her DeVry students are on average, far more motivated and far more demanding of her, in that they push her to be a better teacher, questioning her analysis and ideas more. In her opinion, this is because the DeVry students are footing their own bills, or working along side schooling. They don't have time or money to waste, and since prestige isn't important to them, they don't seem to have any myths about the prestige of their profs being related to profs' teaching ability. It isn't an online education that they prefer, either. They want a teacher to interact with, but with advances in telepresence, the for profits will probably get there first.
The personal experience of university will continue to matter for people whose parents want them to meet a good mate. That's what the prestige counts for. But as parents discover that hardworking, intelligent, financially stable prospective mates got their degree from DeVry, they will be more likely to go there.
Posted by: Allison at Dec 8, 2009 10:18:12 AM
Agree with DanC. Having taught as an adjunct in a graduate business school and at a law school, and working with some brickas and mortar faculty who are doing online and multimedia, I think the textbook/online interactive quiz/assessment is where the world is going both in the brick and mortar world and online. For younger people, in place education is probably necessary, but, for graduate students (at least in business school) a mix of online and in person is the direction of the future...something like 1/3 online/quiz/ a prep lecture for the class lecture, 1/3 lecture with interaction, with break out into teams to apply and get feedback, and 1/3 team and individual projects with inclass feedback.
I think profs who just give a lecture can be videotaped; profs who engage a class, ask questions, summarize and probe...that can't be done too well online. You can have a mix of both in the same course.
Posted by: Bill at Dec 8, 2009 10:19:44 AM
OK, dumb question, but how would you measure teaching ability? I'm all for rewarding excellence in teaching, but I don't see any obvious way to evaluate it.
Posted by: Jack at Dec 8, 2009 10:21:20 AM
DanC, I am not sure how important multimedia is. For a very large amount of courses, it's in principle possible to become very proficient from textbooks alone. That has been possible for decades if not longer, but there has been no general move towards courses without face time. Not in the US, but nowhere else either, so I don't buy a culturally-specific status effect of traditional classes.
Now, if multimedia was the big barrier that books can't pass but online education can, you would expect that those face time moments are filled with the multimedia the books currently can't offer. But often lectures actually use graphics from books and not much else, yet they still attract students who could stay at home reading the book.
Also, there is a suggestion here that future professors could do the jobs TAs currently do, and that they would then accept TA conditions. But currently, good TAs are smart and capable people who only accept those conditions as a step towards real jobs in the future. I doubt you can abolish those real jobs and still have a supply of good TAs wiling to work for TA wages.
Posted by: Zamfir at Dec 8, 2009 10:23:42 AM
These comments make me wonder what type of educational experiences their authors have had - they must have been quite poor. Sure I've seen (and delivered myself) poor classes and teachers, and these exist both in the classroom and on-line. But anybody who is serious about teaching knows that a mass-delivered "superstar" is not the same thing as a good teacher. Tapes of great courses have been offered for decades and the lectures are quite good - but not the same thing as a good educational experience.
I tend to agree with the commentors that favor a hybrid model where we reduce the classroom time, but make the interactive classroom a necessary and better used part of each course. But I reject the idea that technology is the main impetus to the changing the nature of higher education. It is a lack of imagination to concentrate solely on the delivery of education and not the content. Interdisciplinary team-teaching offers qualitatively better opportunities for learning and technology has little directly to do with innovations along these lines. But these comments would suggest that people still believe that education is about conveying a set body of knowledge from one group of people to another. If anything, technology appears to be reinforcing this limited and jaundiced view of education. How about a little creative thinking and imagination?
Posted by: dale at Dec 8, 2009 10:38:30 AM
This depresses me. I like the diversity model. Lots of teachers and lots of students. Works well with children and parents, etc. World will be very boring if all learn from the same source...
Posted by: jk at Dec 8, 2009 10:43:51 AM
how does any of this relate to teaching a basic skill like essay writing?
Posted by: babar at Dec 8, 2009 11:19:47 AM
re: mil academies online
already Norwich is largely on-line, with VMI and The Citadel following suite. Online seems a perfect answer, as their student base can be in, say, Vermont @ norwich one moment and iraq the next.
Posted by: farmer at Dec 8, 2009 11:28:46 AM
Yes but...
As mentioned above, who's to say that universities will a. survive altogether, b. be the best adapted for the move towards footless learning. Indeed, those multemedia classes are pretty inexpensive to put together, why should a super start professor accept to share his revenue while he could perfectly move towards independence and merely sale his package to various universities (like textbooks).
So universities could quickly be taken out of the picture, at least as primary providers of knowledge. However star-ridden any given university is, I'll still be better off building my own professors portfolio on my own, in which case the university would be brought to the level of a mere aggregator and supervisor of my effort.
Posted by: Ben at Dec 8, 2009 11:43:18 AM
Sadly, I don't think the on-line/tv presentation/non-direct interaction model of learning is going to succeed with any but the 10% of students who are self-motivated and self-disciplined and who would have succeeded given a course outline, reading list, library, and office hours.
It simply appears human nature that most people will not put the effort into learning unless they physically see someone putting the effort into teaching them.
As for measuring learning outcomes - good luck with that. It's proving almost impossible at the primary school level. At the university level? Beyond impossible.
After all, what is it exactly that the university should be teaching you?
Most computer science university grads will tell you that the technical skills (languages/operating systems, etc.) that they learned in university weren't particularly applicable to any job they've ever had. Yet they were still the right person for the job.
You can test for "has the skills to be productive tomorrow". It's awfully hard to determine what it is that makes "has what we want to have in our company for the next 20 years".
Posted by: Tom West at Dec 8, 2009 11:44:52 AM
I would highly recommend John Sperling's biography. University of Phoenix is doing for education what Wal Mart did for retail. It's not going to take over, but you are going to know that it's there.
And UoP's returns have been much better.
Posted by: David G at Dec 8, 2009 11:51:54 AM
Whatever happened to those "programmed learning" books that were going to revolutionise everything back in the 60s?
Posted by: dearieme at Dec 8, 2009 11:57:05 AM
As a PhD who loves to teach, I support this trend :)
Posted by: David Zetland at Dec 8, 2009 11:58:17 AM
We will still need signals in the future that are easily understood; as easily as a degree from Princeton is understood today. Thus the real prestige in the future will belong to the testing companies, not the teachers. "You got a 450/500 on the LIPSM exam? Wow!" No one will care how you acquired the knowledge and skills necessary to do that.
Posted by: Brock at Dec 8, 2009 12:03:29 PM
Phoenix and a few other for-profit institutions were frequent recruiters at the NH community college I attended, and what struck me was the much higher tuition for a much smaller selection of classes - yes, they did offer the 3rd/4th year classes needed to get a four year degree, but the degree was in some nondescript area like business, and nothing that was either practical, nor nothing that was in the tradition of the classic liberal education.
The argument that the technology is offering or delivering the promise of "the master teacher for all" falls flat in my view when the technology isn't delivering slightly worse for substantially less cost, or delivering the same for less, or significantly better for the same price. Or alternatively, offering the unique widely for a standard price.
Instead what I see is the educational equivalent of selling today a 486 computer running W98 for $800 with a few proprietary office programs.
Let me know when any school offers Intro to Sculpture, Masters Class in Water Colors, Stage Craft, Organic Chemistry, Microbiology, Soil Mechanics, Materials Testing, Plastics Mold Design, etc., on line....
Posted by: mulp at Dec 8, 2009 12:07:16 PM
I would like to see the on-line universities compete, but this article is disheartening.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aqq.wwZ7wKlI
Sounds like the Univ of Phoenix's is built to maximize federal aid revenue and it can be argued they are exploiting their students. In fact, this article sounds an awful lot like the sub-prime crisis.
Posted by: elvin at Dec 8, 2009 12:18:34 PM
Alex, could you clarify whether you feel this would be a net positive or negative for our society? Should we encourage this trend?
My initial thought is that it would be a positive for society in that it would lower the cost of "quality" eduction and (hopefully) lead to lower income inequality.
However, decidedly negative for the "average" professor; and money-managers for university endowments.
Disclosure: Have two degrees from a high prestige 40k/year Ivy-league institution.
Posted by: Master of None at Dec 8, 2009 12:20:28 PM
universities have been around for a long, long time. just like in every other endeavor, you need the relevant people to congregate in person and interact to get much done. i don't true centers of knowledge/learning are going anywhere very fast. in fact, i suspect the move to online learning will just make the signaling of a trad education even more impressive.
Posted by: dj superflat at Dec 8, 2009 12:25:59 PM
Master of None, I agree with you. Good for society overall but bad for the average professor who will lose status, pay and independence.
Posted by: Alex Tabarrok at Dec 8, 2009 12:30:19 PM
A couple of quick thoughts:
1. I suspect that those students who can excel in an online university environment will have demonstrated that they have the skill set to excel in online savvy workforce. They can juggle tasks; communicate well through email, tweets, & social networking; evaluate the abundance of on line information; and collaborate with others in remote locations. It is only a matter of time before employees recognize this.
2. How much of the success in education is due to 'super teachers' vs. 'super curriculum'?
Posted by: David S at Dec 8, 2009 1:10:23 PM
Online classes are a sham. No student who cares about who his professor is for any reason higher than "who's easiest" would pay for such a thing.
Posted by: Noah Yetter at Dec 8, 2009 1:37:22 PM
I agree with Tom West: 10% of (young) students are self-motivated and self-disciplined. That's human nature and it will not change. There will be a niche for online learning, but most young students can't handle it.
Posted by: Paul Johnson at Dec 8, 2009 1:53:13 PM
Whoa... I think we are neglecting the social aspect of education - and I am NOT talking about learning to play nice with others.
As a professor teaching second year students in a biomed program, I tell them to find a spot in a lab if they want to follow a research path. Being around people actually talking the talk for hours and hours each day is a great way to learn - in fact, I believe that humans are "programmed" to learn this way (yes, subject to dispute).
I can't imagine the number or types of class experiences that can compensate for this type of experience.
Similarly, being around other students at similar levels who are motivated has an enormous effect - the students talk over the material at lunch, etc, correct each other's mistakes, get new ideas... This is fundamentally why I believe that e-learning can only go so far.
Posted by: Mark at Dec 8, 2009 2:13:22 PM
Questions have never been as easy to get answers for than they are now- and you don't even have to ask a living person.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at Dec 8, 2009 2:31:59 PM
I am surprised how little discussion there is about the lack of student accountability in on line classes. At some point the media will come to realize that there is massive cheating in on line courses and there will be a major scandal.
Posted by: ANON at Dec 8, 2009 3:07:24 PM
If we're moving to a 'superstar' model of on-line recorded video lectures with TA's in teh classroom around the country, wouldn't we be better off hiring actors for the videos? Wouldn't undergraduates get more value from the Twilight stars explaining the principles of econ than one of our not-fit-for-video mugs?
Posted by: Tim Haab at Dec 8, 2009 3:31:13 PM
In the short-term, no-credit online courses will be used to support or develop brands of all kinds, including high-end Hansonian signallers and University-of-Phoenix remote suppliers. Some courses will showcase pedagogy; others, expertise in a particular field. Watch for schools to exercise more control over content and production values.
Posted by: Greg Lee at Dec 8, 2009 3:37:33 PM
Education is the only industry I know where lower productivity is a prized attribute. Example: A school that advertises smaller class size is, in effect, advertising that it generates lower unit output (educated students) per unit labor (a teacher).
I believe that the trend in online teaching is the first indication of a coming productivity revolution in education. The best teachers will be able to lever their teaching skills across larger and larger groups of students. Good open education source materials even further lever teacher productivity.
And, like all productivity revolutions, the ultimate outcome will be an increasing inequality in compensation, where the most productive teachers make much more than those of average productivity and much, much, much more than those in the lower productivity quartile. This will obviously be resisted, just as it is in every industry that undergoes a productivity revolution, but ultimately you can't fight the power-law distribution.
Posted by: TheRadicalModerate at Dec 8, 2009 3:50:39 PM
I don't think these for-profit places will replace major universities since state universities never replaced the Ivy league places. Wall St. will always hire graduates from Ivy league places almost exclusively.
A for-profit degree will always be worth less than your *first* 4 years work experience. If you need a night school degree later, fine. A for-profit degree may also be good deal if you are poor and dumb. If you are poor and smart, get a scholarship for a more prestigious place. A few poor & smart people will continue succeeding as IT, software developers, etc. without degrees, btw.
I think state schools have become unsustainably dependent upon adjunct and TA labor already. Adjuncts and TAs are so prevalent now only because society says the humanities are not important enough to warrant respectable salaries. *But* now math and physics departments are using armies of TAs and adjunct lecturers too! Anyone who knows that much mathematics is wasting their talents by adjunct teaching.
To rephrase, society prefers that humanities professors tell their students "No, never become a writer, artist, academic, etc., just get a job." Otoh, we'll see a shit storm when mathematicians and physicists start saying this because fewer mathematicians means losing many economic battles with Europe and China. Who invented the atomic bomb, cryptography, etc.?
I suspect congress will eventually pass laws mostly barring schools with federal grants from hiring lower wage adjuncts in the sciences. All Ivy league schools would lobby *for* this legislation, only the state schools will oppose it, but the scientists themselves will support it. There will also be massive pressure to partially replace TAships with better preparation for industry jobs. UCLA's math dept. recently won an award from the AMS for doing exactly that.
In any case, our obsession with hiring PhDs for teaching effectively high school level classes has always been rather ridiculous. A master's degree more than suffices for teaching undergrad calculous classes. We expect that a PhD qualifies you for research or high level industry work, not teaching. Of course some PhDs must teach, since upper level undergrad courses are potentially very tricky. Sure, you need a PhD teaching Quantum Mechanics I, but not for just AP Calculous.
For most people, teaching is best used as a brief stepping stone towards far deeper understand of critical core material. Georgia Tech has been hiring undergraduate students as TAs for math and comp.sci for over 20 years. Why not institute a 1 semester TA requirement for the honors programs at high level state schools?
Posted by: Jeff at Dec 8, 2009 4:02:34 PM
Alex,
I wish your prediction of an impending online market for superstar teachers would come true, but I doubt it. I feel like I have a unique perspective on this issue: I currently teach online classes for the University of Phoenix and I have 3 degrees from Ivy-caliber universities.
First of all, Jack's question of how do you measure teaching ability is spot on. I'd like to think that I'm an excellent teacher. I do receive very positive feedback from my students but this is a shaky metric. I bet if I gave them all As then my feedback scores would be even higher.
I know I'm far better than the large majority of college professors I ever had (although, no doubt, I'm dumber than most of them). Traditional univerisities do not select teachers for their teaching skill; they select them for their research skill, right, the potential of the professor to "advance the study" of their area of expertise and bring prestige to the school. The correlation between research skill and teaching ability is, I would guess, non-existent. Don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest school snob you'll ever meet (throughout my career I have found that, on average, the people who went to East Tennessee Juco are no where near as competent as those who went to MIT. . .), but one thing going for the online universities is that they select teachers only for their teaching skill and not their research ability.
Teaching doesn't pay jack. Let me be more specific: the teaching part of teaching (subtracting research efforts) pays jackshit. I wish an online market would develop for superstar teachers, but how do you measure teaching ability and who would pay the teachers the fat salaries?
Posted by: Ben at Dec 8, 2009 6:51:40 PM
Alex,
I wish your prediction of an impending online market for superstar teachers would come true, but I doubt it. I feel like I have a unique perspective on this issue: I currently teach online classes for the University of Phoenix and I have 3 degrees from Ivy-caliber universities.
First of all, Jack's question of how do you measure teaching ability is spot on. I'd like to think that I'm an excellent teacher. I do receive very positive feedback from my students but this is a shaky metric. I bet if I gave them all As then my feedback scores would be even higher.
I know I'm far better than the large majority of college professors I ever had (although, no doubt, I'm dumber than most of them). Traditional univerisities do not select teachers for their teaching skill; they select them for their research skill, right, the potential of the professor to "advance the study" of their area of expertise and bring prestige to the school. The correlation between research skill and teaching ability is, I would guess, non-existent. Don't get me wrong, I'm the biggest school snob you'll ever meet (throughout my career I have found that, on average, the people who went to East Tennessee Juco are no where near as competent as those who went to MIT. . .), but one thing going for the online universities is that they select teachers only for their teaching skill and not their research ability.
Teaching doesn't pay jack. Let me be more specific: the teaching part of teaching (subtracting research efforts) pays jackshit. I wish an online market would develop for superstar teachers, but how do you measure teaching ability and who would pay the teachers the fat salaries?
Posted by: Ben at Dec 8, 2009 6:52:02 PM
I think Ben is right, although there is some compensation for teaching ability.
What matters more than writing, however, is getting grants and research money. It pays for administrator salaries and graduate research assistants.
Follow the money.
Posted by: Bill at Dec 8, 2009 6:56:33 PM
I went to what most consider a top school. I learned a great deal from the TA's. But that was in large part because that is where I did the problem sets. Technology can now substitute for some of that feedback.
Listening to a lecture is often necessary but rarely sufficient.
Posted by: DanC at Dec 8, 2009 7:35:08 PM
You write: "my anecdotal evidence is that the market for professors is rewarding great teachers with higher wages and higher placements than in earlier years." I'm curious to learn more about your evidence. My data set (as an academic economist also) includes zero observations on such events (i.e., the academic market being more than indifferent to good teaching).
Posted by: PR at Dec 9, 2009 1:52:37 AM
thanks for all
Posted by: erotik shop at Dec 9, 2009 6:17:56 AM
thinking about this again, i don't understand this "superstar teacher" concept.
i understand that some people (controlling for effort etc) are better teachers than others. but what is the marginal benefit of a "superstar" teacher over a committed teacher in, say, the top five percentile of teaching ability? and then how is it that this difference can't be bridged through some cheaper substitute, like more effort or computer tools or exposure to newer and differenter or more real-world stuff?
and if someone put out a good video or computer program, its value is only as good as my ability to make my own that does as well or almost as well.
the only thing i can think of is that AT is relying on the existence of rentier income supported by a very anti-competitive copyright / intellectual property legal regime combined with preemptory legal action by the big universities to pop the little ones in line.
or what?
Posted by: babar at Dec 9, 2009 9:26:05 AM
oh, i left out one point.
if you want to increase productivity of education, the people who really _should_ be getting the $ are the ones who can figure out how to do that with the 20th-90th percentile teacher being the predominant employee, because that is and always will be the most common case.
Posted by: babar at Dec 9, 2009 9:27:59 AM
Fascinating post, Alex. I think the bigger question is whether this will lead to high-level knowledge, about all manner of arcane subjects, being diffused more widely than is now the case. And if this happens, will this have an attendant social-mobility effect, i.e. will it enable more people, from a wider array of backgrounds, to move into fields that were previously closed to them. Also I wonder - as does Bryan C. - what if any effect online learning's rise will have on the dominance of four-year colleges, and specifically the top tier of four-year colleges, in the education market.
I'm not sure I know the answer to either question. But I suspect that while online learning will indeed grow in importance, inside and outside universities, it won't lead to either a "democratization of knowledge," or a change in which institutions dominate higher learning. I've written about this in more detail at http://bit.ly/7tmclz - I'd love to know your thoughts on my analysis.
Posted by: Andy at Dec 9, 2009 12:42:14 PM
If superstar teachers handle the formal instruction, doesn't that give the non-superstars more time to focus on imparting knowledge in smaller educational groups?
Posted by: Adam at Dec 9, 2009 1:58:11 PM
This whole discussion seems to miss the point of University. To a large extent, they are not about learning traditional skills, or mastering a particular body of knowledge, but about the replication of a hierarchical social system built on the personal relationships one creates at University. If you give any reasonably smart and motivated person four years of space and access to a library (and internet facilities) they will come out much better informed and 'educated' than they went in. What will be missing is the network of contacts and social skills one learns in a classroom (and out of it) that go on to underpin how one then behaves in the workplace. The problem with the Phoenix model, and online education in general is that it does not even try to address the core function of a University. And until it does, we will never have a major CEO (or President) with a degree from there - not through lack of smarts or knowledge, but through lack of embeddedness.
Posted by: Tim Hitchcock at Dec 9, 2009 2:36:42 PM
My take on distance education: learning is at least as much a social process as an intellectual process, at least at the undergrad level.
Teaching is a 'personal selling' job. And with current communication/information technology, distance interactions don't have the emotional-social bandwidth.
Somewhat strangely, I think the proper analogy here is religion. Television has enabled some super-star preachers to reach massive audiences. But many religion consumers need the 'personal touch' of having a live human being in front of them.
Posted by: MikeD at Dec 9, 2009 5:41:47 PM
WE Have to stop "credentializing" and start teaching creativity and thinking skills. See ncf.edu in sarasota, fl
Posted by: cantubury at Dec 11, 2009 2:02:54 AM
