Review

https://www.ted.com/talks/anant_agarwal_why_massive_open_online_courses_still_matter/transcript?language=se#t-681096

Many organizations ae offering online courses to students all over the world, for free. Anybody who has an Internet connection and the will to learn can access online courses from excellent universities and get a credential at the end of it. Man says about theirs online courses:"We are taking what we are learning and the technologies we are developing in the large and applying them in the small to create a blended model of education to really reinvent and reimagine what we do in the classroom". 

 Education really hasn't changed in the past 500 years. The last big innovation in education was the printing press and the textbooks. Everything else has changed around us. From healthcare to transportation, everything is different, but education hasn't changed. At edX and a number of other organizations, they are applying different technologies to education through MOOCs to really increase access to education. 155,000 students from 162 countries enrolled in this course. And they had no marketing budget. Now, 155,000 is a big number. This number is bigger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 150-year history. 7,200 students passed the course. Now these large numbers are just one part of the story. 

 Man speaks of the generational gap. He says:"Оur millennial generation is built differently. Now, I'm older, and my youthful looks might belie that, but I'm not in the millennial generation. But our kids are really different. The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology".

 About studying we used to he says that you have them (children) watch videos and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms, in their bedroom, in the dining room, in the bathroom, wherever they're most creative. Then they come into the classroom for some in-person interaction. They can have discussions amongst themselves. They can solve problems together. They can work with the professor and have the professor answer their questions. Two high school teachers at the Sant High School in Mongolia had flipped their classroom, and they were using this video lectures and interactive exercises, where the learners in the high school would go and do these things in their own homes and they would come into class and they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work.

 One idea is active learning. The idea here is, rather than have students walk into class and watch lectures, they replace this with what we call lessons. Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises. So a student might watch a five-, seven-minute video and follow that with an interactive exercise. Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education. You teach by asking questions. The second idea is self-pacing. Wouldn't it be nice with online technologies, they offer videos and interactive engagements to students? They can hit the pause button. They can rewind the professor. They can even mute the professor. So this form of self-pacing can be very helpful to learning. The third idea that they have is instant feedback. With instant feedback, the computer grades exercises. Your computer is grading all the exercises. And your grades come back two weeks later, you've forgotten all about it. The next big idea is gamification. All learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on. They would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it. Fifth is peer learning. So here use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook-like interaction not as a distraction, but to really help students learn.