I forget where I heard this but I heard it recently: the one thing that scales proportionately with student numbers is student numbers. And this is the key to understanding how new educational technologies scale. Not though industrialization, not through enterprise architecture, but by tapping students themselves to create the scale. This I think is what's behind MOOCs, what's behind drive-by creatrivity and the DS106 phenomenonon, and what's behind Michael Feldstein's really useful observations in this post. As he writes, "if we can create a world in which the average community college student asks her professors what their credentials are to teach their classes, then all else becomes possible in educational reform." I can just imagine to myself some monks looking at a room full of specially trained scribes reading and writing text in the old languages and asking, "Yes, but will it scale?"
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