Are the students going to get any kind of certifications after completing your online courses? Do you foresee your certifications to have the same public recognition as those awarded by traditional schools?
kareem
· 2 years ago
thanks for the comment, mary. certifications are something we're thinking about.
and if we DO offer certifications, hopefully we're big enough that they do carry meaning :)
kareem
jon
· 2 years ago
Great post. I think what's interesting is to tap into the latent potential of all the people who would love to teach but don't because they currently can't achieve the lifestyle they want as an educator. My guess is that for every teacher out there there's probably 10 or even 100 times as many people who would have considered teaching if the economic incentives were different. That's both a shame and a tremendous opportunity.
As for certifications, I personally think that is an area where there will be considerable upheaval in coming years. Think "open source" here and you'll have a sense of where this will probably go. In other words, it's highly likely that someone could come up with an exam that does a much better job of determining college aptitude than the SAT. If there were an economic incentive to create this (hint: there is) and if it was technologically feasible to administer this at scale (hint: it is) then something interesting will emerge.
Stay tuned...
Jody Baty
· 2 years ago
Turning teachers into celebrities, such as the food industry has done for the likes of Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson, is a pretty cool idea. In some ways we’ve already seen this. Who can forget sitting through Carl Sagan’s ‘Billons and billions’ lectures in high school? Or even the Mr. Rogers’ series for early childhood education.
It’s more difficult to name recent ‘Edu-stars’, however. Teaching and learning has changed significantly, even since Carl Sagan’s heyday in the mid-1980s. The idea of the ‘sage on the stage’ has fallen out of favour. There is a realization that real learning is a constructed process that it involves more than just one person (the teacher).1 The Rock Star model is part of the old paradigm of education where you have an instructor at the front of the room ‘talk at’ people until they understand.2 In the new world of distributed, collaborative education, it’s going to become more and more difficult to create Rock Star educators. This is not to say that there won’t be great teachers any more. But rather the great teachers are going to be those who are willing to step out of the way once in a while and let the students become the stars.
1. Kearsley, G. (1994, 1999). Explorations in learning & instruction: The theory into practice database. Washington, DC: George Washington University. Retrieved May 1999, from http://www.gwu.edu/~tip/
2. Bligh, D. A. (n.d.). What’s the use of lectures? Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
jon
· 2 years ago
Great comment Jody. One example of an "Edu-star" might be Al Gore. If I want to teach my high school class about global warming I could go out and do a bunch of research on the subject and read a lot of books, etc. At the end of the day, I'm never going to be able to teach the subject with as much authority or passion as Gore.
So I think a great alternative is to do the following. Rather than me teaching the subject I bring Al Gore into the classroom (through the magic of video) and let him teach. But I don't just stop there. What I do is spend my time and energy developing an environment around Gore's teaching the deepens the learning experience. For example, I foster discussion about the movie, create innovative assignments (such as having the students compute their C02 impact), etc. I become a facilitator of learning rather than the sole source of wisdom.
I went to b-school at UCLA and saw this happening there all the time. Professors would bring in guests who would teach from their experience and usually had much deeper knowledge in that area than the professor. We see the opportunity for this to happen on a larger scale through tech.
I think an ideal course on entrepreneurship would consist of Michael Dell or Bill Gates sharing their thoughts via high-definition video while a classroom teacher facilitates discussion, creates assignments and gauges mastery. I think that's the paradigm for education that we'll move closer to while certainly not entirely abandoning the existing model.
jon
· 2 years ago
P.S. I think your comment about stepping away to allowing students to become stars is bang on.
All Comments
and if we DO offer certifications, hopefully we're big enough that they do carry meaning :)
kareem
As for certifications, I personally think that is an area where there will be considerable upheaval in coming years. Think "open source" here and you'll have a sense of where this will probably go. In other words, it's highly likely that someone could come up with an exam that does a much better job of determining college aptitude than the SAT. If there were an economic incentive to create this (hint: there is) and if it was technologically feasible to administer this at scale (hint: it is) then something interesting will emerge.
Stay tuned...
It’s more difficult to name recent ‘Edu-stars’, however. Teaching and learning has changed significantly, even since Carl Sagan’s heyday in the mid-1980s. The idea of the ‘sage on the stage’ has fallen out of favour. There is a realization that real learning is a constructed process that it involves more than just one person (the teacher).1 The Rock Star model is part of the old paradigm of education where you have an instructor at the front of the room ‘talk at’ people until they understand.2 In the new world of distributed, collaborative education, it’s going to become more and more difficult to create Rock Star educators. This is not to say that there won’t be great teachers any more. But rather the great teachers are going to be those who are willing to step out of the way once in a while and let the students become the stars.
1. Kearsley, G. (1994, 1999). Explorations in learning & instruction: The theory into practice database. Washington, DC: George Washington University. Retrieved May 1999, from http://www.gwu.edu/~tip/
2. Bligh, D. A. (n.d.). What’s the use of lectures? Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.
So I think a great alternative is to do the following. Rather than me teaching the subject I bring Al Gore into the classroom (through the magic of video) and let him teach. But I don't just stop there. What I do is spend my time and energy developing an environment around Gore's teaching the deepens the learning experience. For example, I foster discussion about the movie, create innovative assignments (such as having the students compute their C02 impact), etc. I become a facilitator of learning rather than the sole source of wisdom.
I went to b-school at UCLA and saw this happening there all the time. Professors would bring in guests who would teach from their experience and usually had much deeper knowledge in that area than the professor. We see the opportunity for this to happen on a larger scale through tech.
I think an ideal course on entrepreneurship would consist of Michael Dell or Bill Gates sharing their thoughts via high-definition video while a classroom teacher facilitates discussion, creates assignments and gauges mastery. I think that's the paradigm for education that we'll move closer to while certainly not entirely abandoning the existing model.
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