Thread by @bjfr

EdTech history is so important, because some ideas repeat over and over. "Video lectures are the new textbook" 9/9/2020 from @mattyglesias in @voxdotcom & circa 1913 from Thomas Edison. But here's what's striking about this argument in the current moment... #failuretodisrupt

The claim is that if we build really good online microeconomics courses, then everyone will use them and education will be better. That was the 2012 MOOC argument, one of the 3 big bets of MOOCs...#failuretodisrupt

But people did build them. Maybe more than a dozen of them from top universities like MIT, Penn, Queensland, Illinois, and UC Irvine. It's probably a few million dollars of investment in this one subject area, microeconomics. #failuretodisrupt

And as far as I can tell, very few people want them. There are Microeconomics instructors at nearly every college around the world who are currently creating their own bespoke online/blended, and that seems to be exactly what students and teachers want... #failuretodisrupt

There is no groundswell of demand that I can detect of people saying "but wait, these other MOOCs/recorded lecturers are much better, let's just use those." We could be doing video textbooks right now, and we are not. #failuretodisrupt

MOOCs/recorded lectures/large-scale online courses are not currently competing against normal, functional university teaching. They are competing against pandemic/emergency/bootstrapped teaching. And they are still not making any sizable dent in market share. #failuretodisrupt

My bet is that on the 200th anniversary of Edison's claim that we are a decade away from video textbooks, we'll still mostly be using bespoke human lectures and printed texts, and people will still be claiming that video textbooks are right around the corner. #failuretodisrupt