Netflix University: Why Not?

Or how I got my B.A at Oracle and my MBA at Amazon (paid for with a Bitcoin corporate scholarship)

Let’s be honest. For the past five centuries, few institutions have been more successful at resisting change than higher education, with the possible exception of the church (pick your flavor). By and large, the primary mode of education – the celebrated lecture – has remain untouched (with the exception of Powerpoint) for the past 500+ years, despite what science and psychology have revealed of human learning, cognition, and development.

In fact, the very word “lecture” means to read in Latin, a vestige of the way education was delivered pre-Gutenberg. Furthermore, the verb — “delivered” — in the last sentence suggests a model of education as transaction – a commodity to be sold and consumed — despite what we know about student-centered learning, informal learning, and project-based learning.