Saw the Smithsonian tv/ video show on various members of a club they call “American Genius”. Of special note here is Caroline Hoxby video portion, where she discusses research she did on students with potential that are overlooked for financial aid to our top US universities, for various reasons.
It struck me that identifying those low income students from usually low performing schools across the country, was defining a “market for quality online education”…as well as identifying students whom Harvard and Stanford might give scholarships to.
And it echoes the larger idea, that hooking up overlooked parts of the US population with top learning resources could release a substantial amount of economic potential. Another way to look at this then, is that Caroline Hoxby was aggregating demand which can be addressed by cloud tools and DLE.
(Caroline did research work on the charter schools in New York, which is controversial, and, among other positions, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, which a conservative think tank located on the campus of Stanford, who has some fairly extreme right wing individuals associated with it. Don’t know what the implications of that are for her qualifications as “genius” economist according to Smithsonian. But in this instance, her research seems quite useful in finding overlooked potential of US students.)