I have done quite a lot of workshops in the last year. I seem to be becoming a specialist in distilling large subjects down to a very manageable size. I have a 3-day MBA workshop, a 2-day finance and accounting workshop for non-finance types and yesterday I did a 3 hour lecture on entrepreneurship which included everything except the financial modeling and capital raising parts. I like these short format presentations because the subject is boiled down to its essence, which suggests to me that much of formal education could be done more efficiently.
This post from The Chronicle of Higher Education highlights a for-profit project called Floating University. A collaboration of Harvard, Yale and Bard, Floating University plans to offer an entire undergraduate program in 14 video lectures on "big ideas". While positioned as a single course, at a cost of $500, I think it is another example of education moving toward more efficient approaches.
