Saw this on my Yahoo page. Top online course instructors in education-obsessed South Korea are making upwards of $4 million a year. According to the report, these educators are like rock stars who have money and status. Because of the scalability of internet classes, some of these instructors make more than professional baseball players. In the days before the web, there would be no way to get 50,000 paying subscribers for a single teacher. The web has enabled these teachers to reach more people than ever before.
What I find a bit interesting about this phenomenon is that many American schools give away online training for free. You can go to elite schools like MIT and Harvard and take online classes taught by top professors in diverse subjects like physics, English, and even wine tasting. It’s interesting how these teachers in Korea have succeeded in turning internet lessons into a paying enterprise. More power to them, of course; I’m just curious about how they managed to avoid the market pressure that seems to encourage information to be free.
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I agree with everything you said. About #1…I think...
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Wow…. That’s crazy. I always thought teachers were underpaid, but damn, only in America I guess.
I think we need a web product to sell to these people.
These teachers have built up a mysterious thing called “good will.” It may have been easier since education is valued in South Korea. Going abck to good will, one can create good will in a name for handbags, baseball and yes, even education. We have rock star professors in the West. Alan Dershowitz, the late Charles Whitebread, Steven Hawkins, Cornel West to name a few. The more good will one builds, the more people are willing to pay to have that name or branding much like they wuold pay for a Prada bag or a baseball signed by Ichiro.
Stephen Levitt, I guess, is another. Suze Orman teaches people about finance. I guess Mr. Rogers for the little ones.
Maybe we just need some for the high school/elementary school years. It would be a lot healthier than watching Miley Cyrus.
Bah! Looking at her makes me want to vomit. I’m going to teach my neice that Miley Cyrus is the grossest, dumby dum-dum poop head!
Yeah, I need in on this gig. Think I could teach online courses to Korean students from home here in Florida? I’ll teach them conversational English?
Hey, it’s worth a shot. Maybe you and MN could have our own web show. Hey, my English is good, but if the price were right, I’d sign up!