Equalizing Superstars: The Internet and the Democratization of Education
Name
Acemoglu14-03.pdf
Description
Main article
Size
131.72 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Acemoglu, Daron
Laibson, David
List, John A.
Date Issued
January 17, 2014
Publisher
Cambridge, MA: Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Series/Report no.
Working paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics;14-03
Abstract
Educational resources distributed via the Internet are rapidly proliferating. One prominent concern associated with these potentially transformative developments is that, as many of the leading technologies of the last several decades have been, these new sweeping technological changes will be highly disequalizing, creating superstar teachers, a wider gulf between different groups of students and potentially a winner-take-all educational system. In this paper, we argue that, these important concerns notwithstanding, a major impact of the superstars created by web based educational technologies will be the democratization of education: not only will educational resources be more equally distributed, but also lower-skilled teachers will be winners from this technology. At the root of our results is the observation that for web-based technologies to exploit the comparative advantage of skilled lecturers, they will need to be complemented with opportunities for face-to-face discussions with instructors, and web-based lectures will increase the quantity and quality of teaching services complementary to such instruction, potentially increasing the marginal product and wages of lower-skill teachers.
Subjects
computers, education, inequality, Internet, non-rival technologies, online education, superstars
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