How do you measure the success of an innovative learning experience? One of the key indicators is the degree of commitment from learners.
This is obviously true in the classroom and the number of school dropouts reminds us that this is not easy to achieve. This is also true online, and at least as difficult to achieve as the availability of interactive tools doesn’t mean that they are fully used for this purpose.
Over the last few weeks we have been evaluating the hundreds of proposals we received for the first round of the Open Education Challenge. The process is complex, as each of these proposals is evaluated simultaneously by two evaluators. The quality and passion that are present in each proposal is remarkable. Key concepts that I thought were only shared by a few experts are widely spread across this new community of ‘education entrepreneurs’. (more…)
One of the many lessons learnt from the first round of Open Education Challenge applications has to do with our responsibility to sustain and widen an education entrepreneurship community.
Why not exclusively proceed with the selection of the ‘10 best European startups’ and just work with them as planned?
Having received 611 applications has made the OEC much more than a ‘competition’. The 611 entrepreneurs from 74 countries that submitted a project in less than 2 months send a powerful message: education entrepreneurship exists! This powerful movement can’t be seen as an extension of the ‘traditional’ startup incubators. It should be one of the main drivers of change for our education systems.
Are you too old to go to school? Are you too young to innovate?
Pierre Dubuc and Mathieu Nebra, co-founders of Openclassrooms, created their first start-up when they were 11 years old (although they had to wait until they turned 18 to register it). They are now one of the main publishers of MOOCs for web skills in French. Xavier Fontanet, on the other hand, started selling his strategy courses for entrepreneurs on the Apple app store at the age of 64, and made them into digital bestsellers.
Innovation in education is very simple: it is about sharing the right knowledge with the right people using the right tools. It is not about age. (more…)
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.
Last week, Nelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, launched “the Startup Manifesto campaign for entrepreneurial excellence” and we are all invited to sign it.
Among the various recommendations that have been made to sustain economic growth, two of them directly concern the education world:
– Make teachers digitally confident and competent to rise to the challenge.
– Teach our children the principles, processes and the passion for entrepreneurship from a young age.
The changes we are envisioning for the classroom may take place at this very moment, in a garage near us, and no longer in the Ministry of Education offices.
The notion of “education entrepreneur” challenges our understanding of an education system, ruled by core curriculum standards and a cohort of dedicated civil servants that decide on behalf of the teachers, students and families what is good to be taught in the classroom and how it should be taught.
In recent years, we have seen acclaimed professors jumping from their “academic pedestal” and into to the start-up world. Udacity – one of the reference points for MOOCs –was cofounded by a research professor at Stanford University. So was Coursera. We could read these stories as fairy tales where the professor we once knew was almost magically transformed into a CEO. But fairy tales aren’t real.