Live Online Video Classes Are ‘The New Face-to-Face.’ So How Many Students Can They Handle at a Time? – Ed Surge
An experimental university announced last week that its home-grown online teaching platform can now handle up to 400 students at a time via live video.
The announcement, from The Minerva Project, enters a longstanding debate about whether online education can drastically cut the cost of education by reducing the number of instructors needed to teach. The question is a philosophical one, as some people argue that a theory called Baumol’s cost disease, which states that some labor-intensive sectors do not reduce labor costs even when new technology comes in, explains why the cost of college keeps going up faster than other areas of the economy.
In some ways, the San Francisco-based company is arguing that high-quality education can be done cheaper thanks to technology in ways that have been elusive in the past. And Minerva is not alone, as other colleges these days are trying similar experiments with large-scale live online classes.
Minerva is a for-profit company that has raised more than $119 million since its founding in 2012, and it provides online-education services and curriculum. Its primary customer is the nonprofit university called Minerva Schools at KGI, which aims to offer a selective liberal-arts undergraduate education where classes are fully online, using video and interactive tools.