Education, CD-ROM and the Internet
Instead of buying such raw materials today, we generally buy finished goods. Because these goods are mass produced, they are higher quality and lower cost than the goods we would produce ourselves. There is, however, one glaring exception. When it comes to knowledge, what we buy is a collection of many disconnected facts and ideas which should carry a prominent label: "Assembly required."
Students are expected to take the lessons learned in school and apply them outside of school, just as a farmer might buy at a store seeds to sow in the fields so that eventually the crops will grow. In an agrarian economy, this idea fits. In an information economy, this idea is just plain stupid. It is much cheaper and better to buy a fully assembled knowledge product, take it home and use it.
Applied Knowledge
There should be no disagreement about where knowledge is used. Like food, clothing and shelter, knowledge is required for life. SAT scores do not measure the successful application of knowledge—only its accumulation. A better measure of usefully applied knowledge is individual wealth, especially at retirement. Knowledge is not an end, but a means to an end—the pursuit of happiness.
What knowledge contributes to wealth and happiness? The exact answer obviously varies from person to person, but so do the answers to questions like "What food provides nourishment?" and "What clothes are warm?" Just as mass production meets individual physical needs, mass-produced knowledge products can meet individual knowledge needs.
Schools were designed at a time when books were scarce and information relatively constant. If information was not memorized by the student, it would not be available later. Today the situation is reversed; we are buried in information which is constantly changing. The critical skills now involve more process than product. Knowing how to ask questions and find answers today can be more valuable than knowing the answers to yesterday's questions. In short, schools helped students to Know. Now people—not just students, but all people—need the ability to Learn.
Internet and CD-ROM: The Virtual Book
School textbooks rarely serve as a guide to learning later in life because they are given back to the school for the next year's students to use, and because they go out of date. CD-ROM and Internet technology, taken together, solve these problems.
A CD-ROM, containing the equivalent of dozens of books, costs less than one dollar to reproduce. At that price, each student could receive his/her own copy to keep. The discs never wear out, they take up almost no space and weigh next to nothing. CDs are proven vehicles for entertainment; they can be even more effective in education.
The Internet contains the latest information in every field of knowledge and currently costs less than $10 per month to access. When the information on a CD-ROM is at risk of going out of date, the CD-ROM can point to sources for the latest information, just as a book's bibliography points to other sources of information in print. Again, the Internet is proven technology, developed by the defense industry and academia to support research.
Delivering inexpensive knowledge products via CD-ROM and the Internet obviously requires computers. Most multimedia computers cost over $1,000 today, but computer game consoles costing only a few hundred dollars demonstrate what is possible, or what soon will be possible. As Nicholas Negroponte wrote, "Congress worries about the information-rich versus the information-poor, but most of its members probably don't realize that computers can cost less than bicycles."
Personalized Learning
Think about the classroom learning experience. Does it have any advantages over personal instruction? The most obvious one, and the historical reason for creating the classroom, is cost. Assign one poorly paid teacher to manage the maximum number of students possible and the per-student cost comes out to a mere $5,574 annually for 1,260 classroom hours, or about $4.50 per hour (1993 U.S. Average).
In comparison, a CD-ROM can provide over 6 hours* of personalized instruction at a cost determined by development cost, replication cost and volume. If development costs are $30,000, and 1,000 copies are sold, the break-even unit price could be $31. If 10,000 copies are sold, the price could be $4. With 100,000 copies, it drops to $1.30, or just over ten cents per hour if used only once. Since they never wear out, CDs can be used over and over again. A single CD, shared by a group of 28 students, could have a per-pupil cost 100 times less than that of classroom instruction.
Online Sales and International Development
The average multimedia CD-ROM development budget in 1994 was reportedly $400,000, and 96% of the developers surveyed were unprofitable. Developers evidently expected to produce blockbuster products and had trouble keeping costs under control.
The Internet may provide some relief on both fronts. Finding an educational CD-ROM on a retail store shelf is about as likely as finding a textbook there. The stores have room only for high-profit CDs, such as software and games. Direct, online sales can make a unit price of $4 feasible on an educational title by cutting out several links in the distribution chain and eliminating most packaging and inventory costs. (On many CDs sold in stores, the box cost more to make than the CD inside!) This means an educator with only a $30,000 project budget might stand a chance of finding customers with such a low-price product, especially since the World Wide Web offers a global marketplace.
Some development projects can also take place internationally over the Internet. Lower cost labor in countries such as India can help to reduce development costs. India has some excellent teachers, the world's largest film industry (measured in terms of films produced annually) and a huge population in need of mass education. English language CDs from India could be sold over the Internet as well, so the price, rather than a few dollars, could be just a few rupees.
School Comes Back Home
Before the public school movement, children learned at home. The quality of the education was only as good as that of the parents and grandparents, but at least the children learned the skills their parents were using to survive. When children went off to school for part of the year, the expectation was that they would learn lessons both at school and at home. Instead, with no children at home to take care of during the day, the parents also went off—to work. As a result, the children were separated from working adults, so that today nearly all learning takes place at school, all work is done outside the home and whatever is left of the family gathers in the evening to watch TV.
Unfortunately, this is a recipe for incompetence. Kids come out of school almost totally unprepared for work, never having seen it or experienced it. A simple remedy is not to fix the school, but to simply avoid putting children in the school in the first place. This is what the home school movement is all about. Of course, you can't have kids at home without at least one parent at home as well, so most families are stuck without the economic means to make homeschooling work.
For the families who do homeschool, however, it can be very rewarding. Children thrive on the personal attention and parents can take pride and a share of responsibility in their children's accomplishments. Now technology can also help out. CD-ROM and the Internet deliver unparalleled access to knowledge from the home, better than that available in most schools.
The type of products homeschoolers buy are not toys. Homeschoolers hold conventions, such as the one held annually at Disneyland, where thousands of families gather to shop for curricula. The home school parent looks for knowledge products that work. Market efficiencies, which some reformers have suggested should be used to improve the public schools, bring learning effectiveness into sharp focus here. Either these products really do what they are supposed to do and kids like them, or they don't sell.
The measure of success, again, is not grade point average, but quality of life. Learning to live well, to love and care for others, is not taught in schools. These most important of life's lessons will not be learned directly using high technology either, but inexpensive products which deliver knowledge in the home may help to provide time for parents and children to learn together.
Footnote
* Voice instruction, recorded in 16-bit, 11kHz sound files, consumes 22,000 bytes per second. There are 21,600 seconds in 6 hours, so 475,200,000 bytes is required for six hours of recording. A CD typically holds 600,000,000 bytes. Voice compression technology may make it possible for current CDs to hold over 100 hours of instruction. New CD technology has also been demonstrated which promises to store another ten times as much data.
Related Resources:
Mathematics and Science Education
Santa Fe Educational Foundation HomepageReport Card
Special Interest Group on CD-ROM
Applications and Technology
CD-ROM
FAQ
The Linux
CD-ROM How-To
CD-ROM
Technology in Education