111–120 of 126 posts
A lot of things have been tried in education, and although some of them were probably just people trying to make a quick buck, I believe that most of them did it to genuinely improve something for others.
It’s truly fascinating how people quickly join echo chambers and often neglect thinking critically about the opinions they propagate. In computer programming, as an example, 1970s and 80s research points to many problems and dangers of wishful thinking guiding the inclusion of programming on early stages of the school curriculum. To this day, many efforts bypass these alerts and focus on engagement rather than learni…
The author seems to miss the boat super hard on > 6. "Everyone Should Learn to Code" Her argument seems to be that teaching more kids to code, will result in more people ending up in a toxic tech industry. This may be true. But the tech industry will never, ever change until we expose more kids to engineering as a choice. If we can cause a greater number and diversity of children and young adults to consider engineer…
Completely agree. The author glosses over the fact that half of coding is just pattern recognition derived from seeing something written a certain way many, many, many times over. It's not far-fetched to consider that exposing kids to an hour of code daily could make transitioning to a programming career much more feasible in their later life (whereas without this exposure, programming might seem like untouchable bla…
I don't understand, what's the point of writing such an article? It doesn't seem to add any value, it might even contribute negative value with spreading cynism and pessimism. A lot of things have been tried in education, and although some of them were probably just people trying to make a quick buck, I believe that most of them did it to genuinely improve something for others.
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Eduction without physical classrooms aka correspondence education is a really old idea. Using the internet to host videos, is a take on using TV to broadcast videos to remote area, which is a take on doing the same with radio. And as the name suggests before this people would get degrees via mail with known examples going back to 1728. Though coupling this with formal degrees only dates back to the 1840s. https://en.…
Taking something that exists, and making it hugely popular or more accessible (think ride sharing or house sharing ala AirBnb) can be disruptive. I'm not talking about who invented it. I'm talking about how disruptive it is. Seems like others disagree which is fine, but for me personally, online education has been a game changer that I've greatly benefitted from.
It's free if you don't have a degree and you meet the means test. In 2000 they had virtual courses on Second Life. Since 2006 they joined the Open educational resources movement and begun offering courses that are free for everyone via the inernet.
Instead of buying more/better equipment, teachers, or technology why hasn't anyone tried to buy a better student? I'm fairly certain that if you paid elementary students cash for better grades you would see a huge jump in achievement for the average student. A small amount of money to us feels like a huge amount to a kid, and there are plenty of studies showing that rewards increase performance for basic and mechanic…
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Taking something that exists, and making it hugely popular or more accessible (think ride sharing or house sharing ala AirBnb) can be disruptive. I'm not talking about who invented it. I'm talking about how disruptive it is. Seems like others disagree which is fine, but for me personally, online education has been a game changer that I've greatly benefitted from.
More accessible seems seems like an good argument, but I disagree that more popular is a disruption as the option already existed. Anyway, I was looking to get an online masters in 2000 and there where several to choose from. On the other hand Coursera was founded in 2012 so I fail to see the disruption. Better marketing?
I do think popularity and marketing both matter. Amazon was not the first online store. Linux wasn't the first or only OS. Neither was Microsoft the first windowing OS, not even close.
Does popularity / marketing matter for education? It might. When someone says they took a course on Coursera, or at Oxford that means something to almost everyone. Very often education serves a dual purpose: 1. Actually learning the thing. 2. Being able to put a signal on your resume that gets you past certain barriers.
While I understand I only met a small fraction of the people trying to "disrupt" education, my experience with Ed-Tech was that the absolute wrong people were behind it. I interviewed at Coursera in 2012, and much of the interview focused on my academic background. Every round I'd sit down with an interviewer and they'd look at my transcript and say, "hmm what happened here!?" as they would point to my C+, the only g…
Having worked in and around EdTech in both industry for longer than most I meet.. a few themes seem to arise regularly that explain why so much of EdTech is stuck in the past., including hiring: - academic institutions generally have leadership inept at understanding technology - when academics try to make decisions by committee about technology when they are not competent in tech, it rarely works out - few academics…
What do you mean? Almost all math you learn in college were invented in the last 500 years. I think the last big things in math which they teach in undergrad were invented 50 years ago, so it is still a bit stale, but not that stale.
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Maybe im just mediocre but it doesnt seem like a big deal. Sometimes you get a shit teacher and check out. The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's is real alarming
> The kind of ass kissing and begging that I saw among my peers that got all A's My technique was to learn the material :-)
I spent years working in ed-tech, at more than one company on this list, and know people at many others. There were two overarching lessons I took from my experience. The first is that a successful educational product needs to deeply and intimately understand pedagogy and materials -- teaching and learning techniques and how they vary between students, and what kinds of materials are suitable -- deeply , I mean like…
Do you have any resource suggestions for moving the needle towards the goal of learning pedagogy and materials deeply and intimately?