I had the chance to spend some time last week with Lord David Puttnam, chair of our Open Education Challenge jury. Lord Puttnam is one of the most fascinating people you could ever hope to meet. He spent thirty years producing some of the best films of our lives, and then abruptly reinvented himself as an education expert. As education itself is also in a phase of reinvention, it is worth listening to him. (more…)
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.
Le Monde, the French daily newspaper, recently discussed in an article the French mania with MOOCs. A few weeks after its launch, the French MOOC platform FUN had already registered 226,000 students. The ‘best (non) seller’ among the 30 MOOCs on offer is ‘From Manager to Leader‘, with 36,000 registered students and a 20% completion rate. Its author, Cecile Dejoux, a teacher at CNAM, qualifies this success as a complete – yet pleasant – surprise: a serendipity!
We are just a few hours from the end of the first round of the Open Education Challenge. In less than two months, 500 applications have been submitted. This is new evidence of the changes taking place in education worldwide: each proposal we receive is a proxy for new contents and teaching practices, innovative devices, technological assessment tools… And a promise to give users the opportunity to learn what, where and when they want. The Open Education Challenge demonstrates that education is no longer limited to curricula and degrees – it’s about innovation, creativity and… entrepreneurship. (more…)
Education is the answer (photo credit – unknown)
Let’s dream for a while. In response to the mass demonstrations in Brazil, the government has decided to give priority to education, and has chosen not to hold the FIFA World Cup in June. What would happen with the stadiums that cost a fortune, starting with the mythical Maracanã that has just been remodeled?
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…)
$19 bn for a smile (credit – WhatsApp)
Is learning worth $19 billion?
Facebook just bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. Insane, isn’t it? Is chatting worth $19 billion? Is the possibility of sending a two word message (often badly spelled) worth $19 billion? Is a collection of emoticons really worth $19 billion?
WhatsApp converted a very simple idea – of sending and receiving messages – into a huge social and financial success. 500 million individuals depend on WhatsApp to remain connected to their beloved, their friends and their colleagues. Why? Because being in touch is essential to our lives.
And what about learning? Isn’t it that essential to our lives? (more…)
The most retweeted tweet of the EMOOCs 2014 conference was from Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera: “We hope to get to that future where students that’re so hungry, so eager, so desperate to get an education can get one.” (more…)
Graham Attwell makes an interesting review of the Open Education Challenge in his blog. He rightly questions the meaning of our phrase: “All projects are welcome; the only condition is that they must contribute to transforming education”.
What do we mean by transforming education? I would suggest three things:
– Trusting enough in the individual talents of teachers, educators, researchers and students to find innovative solutions for the future of teaching and learning;
– Thinking that innovation in education also means creating new jobs in the education sector;
– Considering education as a global issue that transcends borders, nationalities, skills…
An incredible project is changing the way MOOCs will be used to support innovation in the classroom. This is happening right now in Israel in secondary schools. It is launched in partnership with the Ministry of Education by the team of Yaacov Hecht, founder of the Democratic Schools, and also a very good friend that was with us in Barcelona for the last three days. (more…)