The Game is Changing

The psychotherapy world has revolved around the therapist-patient dynamic since its inception in the second half of the 19th Century, much the same way that education has revolved around the teacher-student relationship. However, a study reported last week by the University of Zurich challenges the primacy of face-to-face psychotherapy by suggesting that online therapy is just as effective, at least with depressed patients.By shifting the rigidity of the time-space arrangement around therapy, a raft of possibilities opens up, including briefer, more frequent sessions, video archives, and better access for many patients. Could the same be true for education? Tyler Cowen--one of my favorite bloggers--and Alex Tabarrok think so, and explain why using the classic academic lecture as an example.

In putting together our [Cowen and Tabarrok] first course, Development Economics, we were surprised to discover that we could teach a full course in less than half the lecture time of an offline course. A large part of the difference is that online lectures need not be repetitive.Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said” makes sense for a live audience. If 20% of your students aren’t following the lecture, it’s natural to repeat some of the material so that you keep the whole audience involved and following your flow. But if you repeat whenever 20% of the audience doesn’t understand something, that means that 80% of the audience hear something twice that they only needed to hear once. Highly inefficient.Carnegie’s advice is dead wrong for an online audience. Different medium, different messaging. In an online lecture it pays to be concise. Online, the student is in control and can choose when and what to repeat. The result is a big time-savings as students proceed as fast as their capabilities can take them, repeating only what they need to further their individual understanding.

Craftspeople have always had to adapt to the creative destruction of changing technologies and markets. Maybe psychologists and teachers are next. Finally, because it is about time.