If you read the New York Times Book Review or similar publications, you’ve probably noticed advertisements for “The Teaching Company,” which sells audio recordings of college lectures. They’ve been around for a while and imagine NYT advertising space isn’t cheap, so there must be a market here. I’ve always been vaguely tempted to buy one, if only to pick up some of the stuff I missed while chronically skipping class as an undergraduate. But I haven’t, primarily because it’s expensive: they charge $270 for CD recordings and $199 for Internet downloads, which is a lot of money for a product with a marginal cost of production of essentially zero. I downloaded two albums by The Submarines from EMusic yesterday for less than ten clams total–that seems like a better deal.
Putting the Teaching Company Out of Business
Fortunately, there’s now an alternative to giving The Teaching Company two hundred dollars. You can give Yale University no dollars for something better. The Open Yale Courses Web site, which debuted late last year, offers a raft of well-produced, full-video lecture courses in a variety of subjects, for free. This is a growing trend in higher education, and it raises a lot of interesting questions. Such as: How can Yale give away a product it’s selling to its students for $50,000 a year? The answer, of course, is that Yale isn’t giving away the credentialing part of higher education, which is the key to maintaining the exclusivity on which all elite colleges are based. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today.
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03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.
Three statements to which I respond:
1, “it’s expensive: they charge $270 for CD recordings and $199 for Internet downloads.”
My response: often these titles are reduced drastically. I just looked at the _Experiencing Rome_ DVD, and it has been reduced from $374.95 to $99.95.
2, “which is a lot of money for a product with a marginal cost of production of essentially zero.”
My response: surely you do not think that nationally renowned professors do this for free?
3, I looked at the Yale site, specifically for lectures in the area of classics (concerning ancient Greece and Rome). I found one course. Contrast this to the TC, which has more than a dozen.
You really should check out some of the TTC courses, they production value of these courses combined with the professors makes it a pretty good deal, especially when they are on sale. Right now they are giving away two free audio lectures at http://www.teach12.com/Olympics. Thanks for the information on Yale, I’ll check that out too!