DailyDirt: No More Classes, No More Books...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Oct 14th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The field of education is looking ripe for disruption as "distance learning" becomes more and more practical with internet connections and algorithmic grading systems. There are still plenty of bugs to be worked out for digital education, but it's coming. (And famous dropouts from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg seem to suggest some flaws in the traditional university system.) Here are just a few links on how schools are changing and developing new kinds of classes.

Massively open online courses (aka MOOCs) have the word "open" in their name, but these classes don't necessarily have to be open. Online classes can be closed and proprietary, and maybe massively "closed" online courses are less of a threat to public education? [url]
EdX, Coursera, Udacity and the Khan Academy are just a few examples of online schools. The ease of signing up for an online class also makes it easy to drop out of an online class, but that might not be a bad thing. [url]
University rankings often emphasize how many applicants are turned away instead of how many graduates are competent in their chosen field (or employed). In the future, colleges might get rid of the traditional September-to-June school year, change how long it takes to graduate, or allow all classes to be taken online without using heavy printed textbooks at all, but the cost of college is likely to stay the same: expensive. [url]

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Filed Under: certification, college, degree, distance learning, education, massively open online courses, mooc, university
Companies: coursera, edx, khan academy, udacity

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Anonymous Coward, 14 Oct 2013 @ 5:32pm

venture backed education...
I really wonder what the return on investment will be for the VC backed education startups... will they really create the next online Harvard?
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Oct 2013 @ 6:11pm

Can those universities compete with competent people who want to teach others?

I always saw schools as sieves, people who get the diploma are the ones that were able to at the very least be able to fake the knowledge and passed through the mold without much defects, it was the best we could do before.

Now you have public labs opening up everywhere people call those "hacker spaces", where true love for learning and churning out something is there from the beginning there are no politics involved yet.

Is like programmers, if you want to get a job as a programmer you have to show some credentials some paper saying you can do it, in open source you don't need to show anything but code.

Maybe education could be more like open source, instead of showing off diplomas people should show what they can do?
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Pixelation, 14 Oct 2013 @ 7:21pm

US Gov't can do no wrong.
We put the Japanese immigrants into concentration camps in WW2. Why not collect their data during this Secret war?
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Oct 2013 @ 4:37am

Education should be natural.

Like bees(students) around a flower(knowledge).

Over the years, Mitra got more ambitious. For a study published in 2010, he loaded a computer with molecular biology materials and set it up in Kalikuppam, a village in southern India. He selected a small group of 10- to 14-year-olds and told them there was some interesting stuff on the computer, and might they take a look? Then he applied his new pedagogical method: He said no more and left.

Over the next 75 days, the children worked out how to use the computer and began to learn. When Mitra returned, he administered a written test on molecular biology. The kids answered about one of four questions correctly. After another 75 days, with the encouragement of a friendly local, they were getting every other question right. �If you put a computer in front of children and remove all other adult restrictions, they will self-organize around it,� Mitra says, �like bees around a flower.�

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/

The Khan Academy and others are good places, along with hackerspaces(aka public lab, cooperative lab, lab club...)
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