MOOCs & Natural Teachers

No sooner than I mentioned the idea of natural teachers and MOOCs comes a reply forma  colleague at WAOE:

John -

We're on the cusp of giving the natural teachers a way to collaborate on leading others through material. 

Just as Wikipedia allowed crowd-sourcing of reference material, a tool like SlideSpeech will allow crowd-sourcing of learning material. 

Consider the Learning Creative Learning MOOC today:

10233 members organized in small groups by time zone/location

As you say, all they need is a platform.

SlideSpeech is a platform which uses text-to-speech for making interactive web/mobile presentations, so multiple authors can work together to create lessons which 

1) speak with one voice

2) are searchable (since the voice over is text and the text is searchable)

3) can be collaboratively developed and improved over time (check out a bit of this video which produced this presentation)

As noted in a post to the EdTech Google group:

"If you are not surprised by A. G. (the awesome kid who created this)  math skills, then let me tell another thing about him. A.G. is from Venezuela. English is his second language and he teaches math like Salman Khan from Khan Academy.  We arrived to a point where is possible to imagine that the next wikipedia of educational content for children may be made by kids."
http://bcontext.com/bfile/solo/fqydpr/?width=507&height=422

SlideSpeech homepage

SlideSpeech interactivity tutorial

SlideSpeech Google+ community (check out the presentation for the Fountainhead Schools in Gujarat, India)

Please contact me for more information.

Regards,

John Graves

john.graves@slidespeech.com

Natural Teachers and MOOCs

So five years in Thomas Friedman notices what is going on.

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.

I generally think Friedman is a dope but here he is right, if about 5 years behind.  I come from a family of academics, but I am a black sheep who went into business.  Yet by staying studiously outside the credit system I work when I want, for how much I want, and have absolute academic freedom, not in any way curtailed, which no University professor can claim.  (There are always things even a tenured professor cannot say, even though true.)  I have all of the teaching I can stand, plus a couple of books selling on amazon and a articles cited dozens of times daily.

Course flipping is Socratic dialogue on steroids: watch the lectures as homework, do the homework in class...  this is the future.

But I see something I don't think anyone else has noticed.  When there are 40,000 people taking the course, yes there is no access to the sage on the stage, but among the 40,000 there must be 4000 natural teachers.  What is missing is a way for those natural teachers to assume a means of leading a dozen or so others through the material.

Another WAOE gig?  Some means of identifying the natural teachers in a class and giving them a platform?  Pose this to the Panasonic group looking for something to fund?

John Spiers, MA

Black Sheep Enterprises

Student Loans Slow Moving Train Wreck

Here is a data round-up on student loan debt.    here is the summary:

Higher education is an important investment among young

workers for better jobs and higher income, but it is

accompanied with a growing student debt burden

OK.. we see the train wreck in progress, and what to do about it.  As far as I can see, the only entity that is addressing the problem in any meaningful way is SeattleTeachersCollege.net.  Wait, wait... that's me!

That may sound a little nutsy, but the fact is education is NOT a business, and it is NOT a state function.    Education is an economic event, but it is not a market event.  So it falls into that category best served by co-ops, with those who "fall through the cracks" being assisted by charity.  Neither the market nor the state should ever get involved with charity.

No putative "education leader" understands this, so there is no solution on the horizon, except SeattleTeachersCollege.NET.

At some time and place, the right group of people will gather, this will launch, and become the way education is delivered.  An education at least as good as anything Harvard or Stanford puts out, but one as student can pay for out of his own pocket, what we had only 40 years ago, but was inherently unstable since it was state-provisioned.

Analysis ofStudent Loan Debt by

Testng Google Hangout