PierreAntoine Ullmo

Category: Education Today

Education Today

  • Investing in education

    Investing in education
    Investing in education. ©Sergey Nivens

    Why invest in education? Why invest now? Where should we invest?

    Asking these questions is already a sign that much has changed on the education scene. Education is no longer a matter reserved for public authorities or free from real life constraints. The world is spending more on education than ever before. Education is the answer to parents’ desire to guarantee a future job for their children and to companies’ needs for more innovation and better skilled employees. Education is the key to building better lives for hundreds of millions worldwide and responding to challenges such as climate change, sustainable development and gender equality.

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  • Ask provocative questions to change education

    It is time for change education.
    It is time for change in education.

    Boosting innovation in education was one of the main objectives of the first Erasmus+ call for proposals that has just been published.

    But what do we mean by innovation in education? And what are the keys to making innovation in education possible?

    Innovation in education is often considered as the development of curricula that will provide students with “the knowledge and skills necessary for a knowledge and entrepreneurial society.”  This is the core of the Knowledge Triangle designed by the EIT (European Institute of Innovation and Technology).

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  • The first European incubator for innovation in education

    open education challenge

     

    The PISA results released last week (see my last entry) tell us about the urgent need to transform our education systems in most European countries.

    We must now decide whether this much needed innovation can be brought about from inside the system, or if it must be the result of a “disruptive” process led by committed individuals and “education entrepreneurs” from all over Europe.

    My conviction is that education practitioners, technology geeks  and web entrepreneurs will be determinant to change. They have the ability and willingness to invent tools, content and devices that will benefit learners and trainers, alongside students and teachers. For the first time, technology seems robust and user-friendly enough to enable real innovation in the classroom.

    But what kind of innovations are desirable, and for what kind of learning?

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  • Opening up education to children: a lesson from PISA

    PISA results and education inequalities
    PISA results and education inequalities

     

    For those who travel in Europe on a weekly basis, the publication of the OECD PISA results just confirmed the heterogeneity of European education systems. This is what you could have read in the press while crossing Member States borders: that Swiss students are the best in Europe at maths; German students have improved their maths scores once again; Italian students have improved in maths; and that Spanish students keep falling short in maths. A more in-depth reading would also have told us that Finland has fallen from the podium, Sweden had entered a period of turmoil… The only certainty we can take from last week is that Singaporean students again emerge world beaters in international assessment.

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  • My dream school

     

    The Specialists' Academy by Miguel Gallardo
    The Specialists’ Academy by Miguel Gallardo

     

    10 years ago The Guardian held a competition, “The School I’d Like”, asking children about their dream school. To paraphrase one of the winners comments, “If schools let children feel inspired by what they do, then education would really work.”

    How do we recognise the unique strengths of all kinds of learners? How do we “re-engage the disengaged”? (more…)

  • Why will Europe be the leading force for innovation in education?

    Cretaive thinking in the classroom based on Hanoch Piven's work - www.pivenworld.com
    Creative thinking in the classroom based on Hanoch Piven’s work – www.pivenworld.com

    Why do we want innovation in education? What do we want to transform? Which changes do we want to achieve? What visionary practices can innovators bring for the future of education?

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  • This world today is a MOOC

    Donna Hightower © all rights reserved
    Donna Hightower
    © all rights reserved

    “This world today is a MOOC”. Today’s entry isn’t a tribute to Donna Hightower’s hit, but a reflection on what we say about MOOCs these days.

    Some MOOC oracles already declare the end of the wave. John Daniel for instance, who endlessly tours the world to speak about higher education and MOOCs (30 conferences this year so far!) has positioned himself as a “disillusioned” MOOC believer. He predicts that “the media interest in MOOCs has passed its peak and MOOCs have a past rather than a future”. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

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  • Technology in the classroom: lessons learnt from a mountain bike ride

    laptop
    Technology in the classroom.

    What is the relationship between a marathon mountain bike ride and a classroom experience?

    Last weekend, I spent the whole day mountain biking in the country side near Barcelona. For 120 km, our group of 14 bikers rode through small trails, many of them hard to find, and we came back at night using headlamps to find our way through the woods. Another rider and I had brought a GPS. We started following our tracks, sharing indications that appeared on our screens, looking for consensus each time we had doubts or different interpretations. Following GPS indications is not as simple as it may seem, especially in a group. It requires technology understanding, interpretation skills and consensus. Working with technology in the classroom requires the same ingredients, and consensus is hard to reach. Students using tablets in the classroom may be tempted to “follow their own track”, i.e. make individual use of technology. The teacher in the classroom is, like any GPS holder, challenged by another GPS holder to find the right trail.

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  • MOOCs for a happy few

     

    Why do MOOC students disengage?

    A first striking piece of evidence about MOOCs – and related experts – is that we can all talk about them but very few know exactly what they are, even fewer have registered for a MOOC, and almost none of us have completed one. Let’s have a look then at the terrible completion rate of MOOCs .

    Only 1% of enrolled students completed the first-year college MOOC on physics at Georgia Tech. In an interesting blog post published last September, Karen Head from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology asked herself: is retention an accurate measure of success?

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  • The end of eLearning

    the new EU Open Education portal
    The new EU Open Education portal

    Do you remember eLearning?

    Back in 2000, the European Union launched its “eLearning action plan” to enhance the use of “technology serving lifelong learning”. By adding an ‘e’ to learning, we thought we could invent a brand new vision for learning. But it didn’t happen. Technology was simply not good enough, and our minds not ready. We ended up creating more, or less, user-friendly online training courses that were commercialised by training companies as a substitute for traditional courses. But learning remained mostly untouched, still based on a top-down relationship between teacher and learners. The classroom — even in its virtual definition — was still based on a conventional concept well described by Sir Ken Robinson in his popular TED conference.

    We desperately needed a vision for the future of learning. Said another way, we had to “open up education” and get rid of the ‘e’!

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