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Posts tagged with "learning"

Dec 19

Meta-Education

Did you see the headline? Stanford professors this fall opened up their class on AI from 175 local students to 23,000 global students. On locally-proctored exams, most global students scored similar to those students paying $40k/year at Stanford. In speaking on the issue, author Michael Feldstein of Cengage Learning remarked:

If individual professors can begin to certify student competence, that begins to unravel the entire fabric of the institution itself.

This sounds all very exciting and familiar to me. 5 years ago I presented down at the national Educause convention a crazy vision for a meta-university framework that could radically alter the structure of HiEd by allowing professors to become their own university, moving from cogs in an outdated institutional machine, to knowledge entrepreneurs in a modern learning universe.

This change in teaching could have a ripple effect of moving students from paying exorbitant all-or-nothing university tuition entrance feeds that have risen 4x faster than cost of living, to intelligent, self-directed learning agents who pay by the feed from the best university in the world. 

Open education and massive open online courses are not new, but it is good that we are finally seeing acceptance of their possibilites, even within the scope of the current university walled gardens. Considerations…

  • Our world has a lot of challenges to face, challenges that need educated global citizens to adequately address. 
  • Time/attention is our highest currency, currency that is wasted continuing to force single-channel sage-on-the-stage grandstanding inherent in traditional lecture hall formats vs nonlinear lecture captures and and anytime learning via podcast/rich media formats. 
  • Keeping the world’s knowledge locked up behind tuitional door charges that produce smart graduates in lifelong indentured servitude to student loan debt is not an effective means of aligning future generations to be truly invested in their world’s success.
  • What if optimal learning environments were not traditional single-channel classrooms at all, but intelligent learning gyms combining exercise and education to enhance learning capacity and physical health?

The world has needed a new contract of higher education for decades. We all know it, yet we continue to let real reform be side-tracked by hot-button side issues. Luminaries like Ken Robinson has preached the value of radical learning revolutions for years now.

Here is one lifelong learner glad to see it finally coming. 

Posted 5 months ago

4 notes

education, learning, technology,

Dec 12
Codecademy is a great concept: teaching basic programming concepts through successive action, each step building on the last. I signed up today by simply typing in a few lines of code, moving through a few lessons, & eventually being prompted to create an account. Great way to reduce barriers to entry. The potential for this type of learn-by-doing concept is incredible, but as you move into successfully more complex material the issue still comes back to lack of intelligence in online learning systems. The value a skills instructor is more than just a standardized progressive workbook, but an intelligent partner in your learning. The system needs to learn about you in the process of you learning about the material. Where are you having trouble? What steps are not making sense? How can I rephrase this (in word or metaphor) to make it more apparent what you are trying to learn here?  We have a lot of increasingly intelligent systems, but few are used to truly provide greater opportunity and value to the world just yet. Facebook/Google learn about your online actions to better advertise to you. Standardized SAT/entrance exams learn about your answers to better increase the difficulty of your test-taking. What about intelligent systems that actually adapted to you for the purpose of expanding your personal potential? What about systems that knew your limits and pushed you just a bit beyond them? Intelligence is more than memorization and foundational knowledge, but adaptation of knowledge to person, place, or a society at large. We need more of this kind of intelligence in the world.  At last November’s CT Forum on The Great Education Challenge, Joel Klein former Chancellor of NYC Schools mentioned how the future of learning will increasingly be less about standardized learning classrooms, but individualized learning systems made possible through technology that adapts to the student. Mass personalization vs mass production of education. As someone who often fits in his education between a hundred other daily obligations, the possibilities of adaptive, nonlinear, anywhere education is indeed intoxicating. Hopefully sites like Codecademy are intelligent enough themselves to know how much further they have to go to be truly modern, effective learning systems.

Codecademy is a great concept: teaching basic programming concepts through successive action, each step building on the last. I signed up today by simply typing in a few lines of code, moving through a few lessons, & eventually being prompted to create an account. Great way to reduce barriers to entry. The potential for this type of learn-by-doing concept is incredible, but as you move into successfully more complex material the issue still comes back to lack of intelligence in online learning systems. The value a skills instructor is more than just a standardized progressive workbook, but an intelligent partner in your learning. The system needs to learn about you in the process of you learning about the material. Where are you having trouble? What steps are not making sense? How can I rephrase this (in word or metaphor) to make it more apparent what you are trying to learn here? 

We have a lot of increasingly intelligent systems, but few are used to truly provide greater opportunity and value to the world just yet. Facebook/Google learn about your online actions to better advertise to you. Standardized SAT/entrance exams learn about your answers to better increase the difficulty of your test-taking. What about intelligent systems that actually adapted to you for the purpose of expanding your personal potential? What about systems that knew your limits and pushed you just a bit beyond them? Intelligence is more than memorization and foundational knowledge, but adaptation of knowledge to person, place, or a society at large. We need more of this kind of intelligence in the world. 

At last November’s CT Forum on The Great Education Challenge, Joel Klein former Chancellor of NYC Schools mentioned how the future of learning will increasingly be less about standardized learning classrooms, but individualized learning systems made possible through technology that adapts to the student. Mass personalization vs mass production of education. As someone who often fits in his education between a hundred other daily obligations, the possibilities of adaptive, nonlinear, anywhere education is indeed intoxicating.

Hopefully sites like Codecademy are intelligent enough themselves to know how much further they have to go to be truly modern, effective learning systems.

Posted 5 months ago

education, learning,

Jan 12

Randy Komisar on Learning from Failure | No Map. No Guide. No Limits. #in

Posted 2 years ago

startup, business, learning,