Open source learning and free online education

Please visit Richard Baraniuk conference at Ted.com, about open source learning: he is professor at Rice University and he explains the vision behind Connexions, his open-source, online education system. It cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share and modify course materials freely, anywhere in the world.

TED SPEECH ABOUT OPEN SOURCE EDUCATION

Moreover, please find attached the translaton of part of my blog post about on-line education and the same matter, with a list of great places for open learning.


Finally, please read this great post about MITx FREE ON-LINE EDUCATION a great initiative of MIT to allow free online courses to anybodywith an internet connection, in addition to the existing MITOPENCOURSEWARE offer (with more than 2,000 free courses) I already reported in my previous post.


The big difference will reside in the fact that MITx courses will have interaction with educators and an assistance title issued by an MIT foundation.


I hope this would inspire you and increase your sharing actitude. 

¿Education online or Face to Face?

It is impossible to explain processes and the dissemination of knowledge that some business schools are carrying out since a long time, to those who imagine a business school as something like the experience they had while studying at old style universities: repetitive classes, with tyrants teachers using the same notes year after year, with memory processes, and so on.

None of this takes place or has any meaning in the institutions where I collaborate: Students learn from the environment, their classmates, debate and discussion, from the high performance environment that we are able to crate together: the materials are meaningless without this process.

And that is precisely what leads to an intelligent and sane person to pay $ 150,000 for four years of education at MIT, where many of the materials used during the courses are available for free on the same network (MITOpenCourseWare ).

The explanation lies in the massive use in classes of the "case method", a variation of the Socratic method which can stimulate the brain to develop by itself, with the help of the classroom environment, discussing a case based on a real company.

When we think of online education, our mind automatically goes to clichés associated with the self-study materials that a student goes solo, to multimedia lessons that are prepared once and used for thousands of people, one after another.

Again, none of that has to do with what happens in the EOI online learning and other business schools, where there is always a work group, a group discussion, a teacher who is intervening and moderating forums: this environment acts in a similar manner to the face to face method.

Of course we use blogs, wikis, video, podcasts and all the paraphernalia that offers on-line universe, so the experience is diverse, multi-sensory and certainly memorable, but the teacher's presence is essential in his role as moderator, director of the timings of the program.

In my opinion, a well-planned online session can be superior to a Face to Face class in terms of depth of analysis, richness of interaction, quality of material contributed by each stakeholder.

Education is at a very interesting point: Seth Godin believes that the impact of technology in education will be higher than many other industries are suffering, such as newspapers.

Online education makes the world flatter and it is our duty to give it a try to give an opportunity to existing talents, anywhere, anytime, anywhere.

Finally, think of the experiment carried out by a professor at the New York State University with 64 students in class; he divided them into 2 groups of 32 each by chance and the first group was given a normal class, recording it.

The other students were sent a podcasted, recorded class and all 64 students did the same test: Guess who got better grades?

Those who had received the recorded class, among other things, because they had the power to hear again the most difficult passages.

Those who attended the class taking notes, got second place and then everyone else.

A class with a teacher is only useful if there is debate, discussion and entropy at top level, from teacher to the class and vice versa, if not, better to record a podcast. The same thing happens to students who do not participate in class discussion, which generously share their knowledge, experience and know-how.

Also for these students would be better to see the recording of the class every time they would like: by not participating, they have not broken the dynamics, they have not changed the course of lesson, have not guided the class to their areas of interest.

"I-tunes University” is very popular among students worldwide and you can find there cases and teaching materials for free, published by the best institutions in the world.

Please find attached (in alphabetical order) the sites where I find very valuable information to compare my programs, find new case studies, articles, etc..: There are even entire courses with Sylabus, class notes, cases, grade, etc.

Carnegie Mellon http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index/.shtml

Harvard http://athome.harvard.edu/archive

IE Business School http://openmultimedia.ie.edu/index_e.html

Johns Hopkins http://ocw.jhsph.edu/

MIT http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Stanford http://itunes.stanford.edu

UC Berkeley http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Umass Boston http://ocw.umb.edu/

Yale http://oyc.yale.edu/

Many colleagues and I believe that the best place for our class presentations power points is "Slideshare.net" or "Authorshare" and "Vimeo" and Mediateca EOI the best places for videotaped lectures: thus everyone with an access to the Internet can train him/herself as they wish.

A world of better trained people, by themselves, by me or my colleagues will surely be a better world for me and my children, is not it?.

Please visit Ken Robinson conferences at Ted.com, especially this: "Bring on the learning revolution!"

Let's be different.