Professor Mark J. Perry's Blog for Economics and Finance
NY Times -- Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
Dr. Mark J. Perry is a professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of the University of Michigan. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University near Washington, D.C. In addition, he holds an MBA degree in finance from the Curtis L. Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. In addition to a faculty appointment at the University of Michigan-Flint, Perry is also a visiting scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
4 Comments:
I wanted the online lesson plan for M&M sorting but before I could hit the send button the dog ate them.
College students are also no longer held hostage by a poor English speaking professor. My calculus class, taught by a Russian immigrant, was pure torture twenty years ago. No there are on-line sites, and you can order a course from the Teaching Company:
http://www.teach12.com/teach12.aspx?ai=16281
I actually retook calculus using Michael Starbird as my clearly-speaking, organized, DVD-based professor last year, and found out that it WAS the quality of the professor and the material that was presented, that mattered.
If a teacher is buying a lesson plan are they really a teacher? I am not a teacher, lecturer or professor but it seems to me that the lesson plan has to fit the material being learned; textbooks used: the classroom layout; budgets for field trips; and the general abilities of your students.
In other words the lesson plan needs to align with the situation presented to the teacher for this particular class. Why would a teacher buy a lesson plan? This is a big part of what they are supposed to get paid for.
Given that MIT has decided that course outlines and in many cases actual lectures are made freely available the question how long until free beats pay? The question then becomes why not go completely virtual with education and eliminate the residency requirement? Then the best teachers will teach large groups of students with local recitation sections to go with it. (Take the lecture model of large universities a step further).
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