Start from what we know: Wikipedia showed how a vast resource of reference material (as of December 2012, equivalent to 1736 volumes) can be built collaboratively, improving and expanding over time, so that tens of thousands of contributors produce material which hundreds of millions consume each month, on an annual budget of under $50 million.Thus, collaboratively created on-line material has a 1000x multiplier, or "reach," compared to in-person instruction with one teacher per student or class (1x to 200x) and costs in the 10 cents per user per year range. The Wikipedia system was built on wiki (edit in place web page) technology.

Now consider that we have technology to generate speech from text. Computers can talk. Given a script to follow, computers (including mobile computers such as smart phones and tablets) can provide explanations and verbally respond to users. Khan Academy showed how one teacher could deliver hundreds of millions of lessons through recordings. What can we achieve with a collaboration of thousands of teacher/authors, speaking as one through anonymous computer-generated voices? This system requires a way to edit presentations in place: SlideSpeech.

SlideSpeech uses text, which is collaboratively editable, searchable and translatable (unlike video). Like Wikipedia articles, SlideSpeech presentations can expand and improve over time, so quality can continually increase, even as the quantity of material grows exponentially.

This video explains how the system works. (YouTube 2:33)

Please visit the SlideSpeech website to access the system.