Showing posts with label E-learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label E-learning. Show all posts

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Lifting Up Billions Requires Technology

Imagine, you touch the glass screen, and the microfinance company gets to see your credit history tied to your figerprint. And you get a loan sent to your phone m-Pesa style. You make your minimum monthly payments over the phone. The phone cost you $30 to buy because you agreed to watch ads. And the internet connection to it comes from Google Loon balloons far up in the sky. By the way, the phone also lets you participate in MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. You have been educating yourself in the middle of nowhere. There was a voice based community of your "classmates" that you have never met. And the phone comes with apps that are as good as a good doctor for the basics.
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Saturday, December 29, 2012

Online Learning

This is tremendous news, although I don't understand why elementary and secondary education is not the primary focus of these online education disruptors.

The global implications of free online college courses are enormous.

Lifelong education for everybody everywhere with people moving at their own paces on their own schedules is the goal. The term high school dropout or college dropout is weird. Unless your internet access has been taken away by the unknown you can not drop out. It is not possible.

Beam online education to the inner cities. This disrupts the whole voucher debate in politics.

Online Learning and Upheavals in Social Networks
For all the attention lavished on the Web’s growth on mobile devices this year, one of the most interesting Internet trends is still best experienced on a desktop computer: online education.

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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Online Courses And The Global South

Juan Lindo, president of El Salvador, 1841-42
Juan Lindo, president of El Salvador, 1841-42 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Before I came to America for college, after high school, I had rented a room not far from the largest library in Nepal. I liked to read. One of the things I noticed at the library was there were all these chemistry journals from decades back. I had some idea of how fast knowledge changed and new research happened. I was flabbergasted that there were Masters students writing their thesis papers based on journal articles from 30 years ago that would not stand global level scrutiny. But it was happening. I had read somewhere, different countries live in different centuries.

Taking journals online, taking world class courses online fundamentally changes things. This below is a welcome report.

Online Courses Put Pressure on Universities in Poorer Nations
edX, the $60 million collaboration between MIT and Harvard to stream “massive open online courses,” or MOOCs, over the Web. ..... The University of El Salvador, located in San Salvador, is the only public university in the country. It spends $60 million a year to teach 50,000 students, and its budget is so limited that it can only accept about one-third of applicants. (By comparison, the University of Michigan, which has a similar number of students, spends $1.6 billion on its core academic mission, not including sports teams, dorms, and hospitals.) Protests over the shortage of spots regularly shut down the campus. Semesters don't end on time. The university doesn't appear in international rankings. ..... within 50 years there might only be 10 universities still “delivering” higher education. ...... One problem is out-of-date coursework. Martinez says computer science is still taught using the waterfall model, a programming approach that dates to the punch-card era. “A computer science student here spends the first six months doing flow diagrams, because that’s how we did it in the 1970s in El Salvador when we didn’t have any computers to work on,” he says. MOOCs, by contrast, are teaching a new technique known as agile software development in classes like edX’s CS169.1, which focuses on how Web-based programs such as Gmail are created.
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Monday, February 20, 2012

Blogger Khosla

Vinod KhoslaImage via WikipediaVinod Khosla: TechCrunch: The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile
a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities ..... the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically ..... raw computing power is taken for granted. ..... What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)? ...... AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, but they are meaningfully different. ...... I call them the “unhyped dozen” (to go with my energy investing activities, which I call the “clean dozen”) ...... (1) Data Reduction or Filters (Siri) (2) Big data or Analytics ... There will be countless new types of data streams .... Much has been written about big data and it and may be getting past the unhyped label! (3) Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram) (4) Education 2.0 (Khan Academy) ... “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. (5) TV 2.0 (6) Social Next (7) Interest-based networks (Twitter) (8) Health 2.0 (9) Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors.... The network of things is supposedly growing faster than any other network, social or otherwise. (10) Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr) ... Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real, removing the gateway of traditional editors and the tax of traditional business models. Where will this lead? Books, especially non-fiction, can become more interactive, crowdsourced (ck12.org), social and collaborative. (11) Utility Apps (Siri) (12) Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Etsy) .... Why does Tom Freidman need The New York Times to get readers ................. We as investors have seen Square take off at an unprecedented rate (so far) for a payments startup, but in terms of relative scale, even Square is dwarfed by Mpesa — it is 20% of Kenya’s GDP already (using a totally different model than Square). Meanwhile in India, their UID system could remake the concept of “cash”....... Tools and services that used to be inaccessible to all but large manufacturers are now available to everyone. Foreign factories that were impenetrable before are now an email away. Design software costing thousands of dollars per seat is freely available (or very cheap). Hackers are mixing all of these elements together and re-imagining entire industries from the ground up. ..... the next industrial revolution ...... “The under 25” who don’t know what they don’t know, mostly have not worked at what traditionalists would call a “real job” and are not afraid to try new things ..... the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!
The Clean Dozen
Artificial Intelligence
Teachers Or Algorithms

Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)

Vinod Khosla At MIT
When Vinod Khosla Took A Break From Tweeting
Vinod Khosla's Entry Into New York City
Vinod Khosla: For Profit Poverty Alleviation
Vinod Khosla's Green Tech Sweep
The Microfinance Fishing Net