The Hottest Course on iTunes (and the Future of Digital Education)

This is prob­a­bly due to the pub­lic­i­ty this course got in Wired Mag­a­zine; this past issue was my first and I got it for free two. It’s an awe­some mag­a­zine.

Can we final­ly come up with an eco­nom­ic mod­el for edu­ca­tion that is free for par­tic­i­pants?

All of this foot drag­ging is counter pro­duc­tive. We owe it to our­selves and to future gen­er­a­tions to fig­ure this out.

Edu­ca­tion is the pre­miere project of our time. We can­not fail.

Any­one work­ing on this? Or too busy try­ing to fig­ure out how to lock or un-lock pro­pri­etary con­tent?

Many US pub­lic libraries have a good stock of Teach­ing Com­pa­ny cours­es on CD. You can cer­tain­ly learn a lot with­out pay­ing by bor­row­ing them.

The ques­tion of how to get a rev­enue stream from a pod­cast has not yet been clear­ly answered. The Inter­net gen­er­a­tion is used to high­ly tar­get­ed Google ads, so in my opin­ion, the ran­dom 30 sec­ond “spot” ad before a pod­cast is not a long-term work­able for­mat. One of the ways to think about it is to con­sid­er the pod­cast the ad itself. You get peo­ple inter­est­ed in your con­tent and then you sell a more sub­stan­tial prod­uct to those you attract. In terms of this pod­cast, a book is a good exam­ple.

In my opin­ion, I think the legit­i­mate edu-pod­cast cours­es need to be uni­fied under an umbrel­la. Once they do that, they will pose a sig­nif­i­cant threat to busi­ness mod­els like that of The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny. Before that hap­pens though, you pay the Teach­ing Com­pa­ny $129 because you know you are going to get a qual­i­ty prod­uct. There is no clear­ly labeled free option yet.

I found it a bit dis­s­a­point­ing that Lars Brown­worth fails to men­tion he pulls a sig­nif­i­cant amount of mate­r­i­al word by word from John Julius Nor­wich’s three vol­ume Byzan­tium work.

Despite this bib­li­o­graph­i­cal omis­sion, how­ev­er, it is very well read and includes a lot of addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion and pro­vides a splen­did intro­duc­tion to the Mid­dle Ages’ most cru­cial civil­i­sa­tion.

any changes com­ing ?