Answer: Do what Bill Gates suggests–where possible, show students online videos of the best teachers in the world teaching their topics of expertise and then get the students and their teacher to discuss afterwards.

This is such an obvious thing to do–we have the online technology to allow it to happen. So why isn’t it happening more often already? There is no reason that I can see, other than it breaks with tradition.

He explains his idea in this extract from the CNET interview (Gates had recently bought the rights to the brilliant 7-part physics lecture series by acclaimed physicist, Richard Feynman and had made them available for free on the Microsoft Research Web site:

Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson

What do you hope people get out of these [Feynman Cornell] videos? Who is your ideal audience for them?

Gates: Well, I didn’t get to see these until I was about 30, and so I would love it if lots of young people saw them, and got a sense of the fun, and how science works, and what’s complicated, and what’s not. I hope some people who teach science are inspired by the way that Feynman managed to make it interesting without giving up the depth of how it works.

With super-high-quality material like this up there for free, I hope people see the potential, and that they’d benefit from this one in particular, and then it starts to push forward the idea if someone is great lecturer, then their work should be out there and available.

I’ve heard you talk about the way community college really should change, and really what we should be doing for some of these subjects that are somewhat universal is taking really the best explanations, the best lectures out there, and making those broadly available, and then focusing sort of the local learning around discussion and different sorts of things.

Gates: That’s right. Education, particularly if you’ve got motivated students, the idea of specializing in the brilliant lecture and text being done in a very high-quality way, and shared by everyone, and then the sort of lab and discussion piece that’s a different thing that you pick people who are very good at that.

People care about animals, and disease, and food, but many of the sciences are so abstract, and the amount of things you have to learn before you start connecting to those practical issues can be very daunting.

Technology brings more to the lecture availability, in terms of sharing best practices and letting somebody have more resources to do amazing lectures. So, you’d hope that some schools would be open minded to this fitting in, and making them more effective.

But, you’ve also got this huge set of people who like to teach themselves and like to learn things, and yet find science kind of daunting. And when a lecture is presented as well as this, it draws more people in to understanding science. And over time I hope there’s more like this, including some about science stuff that’s changed since the time these were done.

How big an impact do you think these types of things can have in terms of the overall problem of getting people interested in math and science? Is this type of thing enough, or do we really need to fundamentally do more, younger?

Gates: Well, certainly in fifth grade through senior year, most students aren’t yet motivated to want to learn a lot in general, and particularly about science and math. The big impact is anything that can help teachers do a better job, where teachers can either see other teachers doing it super-well, or they might incorporate some online things into the classroom experience. As you get older, and you’ve got people who are motivated more clearly, then it shifts where these online lectures can be a huge part of learning.

That’s where Feynman with his clarity of explanation and simplicity of explanation, and love of the subject, and humor around it is such an exemplar.

More  ideas on education of the future from Bill Gates:

Bill Gates: In Five Years The Best Education Will Come From The Web

Some excerpts:

“Five years from now on the web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world,” Gates said at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA today. “It will be better than any single university,” he continued.

College needs to be less “place-based,” according to Gates.