Teacherpreneurs and the education revolution

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“Udacity is thrilled to announce a partnership with San Jose State University to pilot three courses—Visualizing Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, and Elementary Statistics—available online at an affordable tuition rate and for college credit. This is the first time a MOOC has been offered for credit and purely online.” 

Stanford professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera last year to give anyone and everyone access to courses from top-tier universities -- for free, online.

A Wall Street Journal article that alerted “Consumers now owe more on their student loans than their credit cards.” was the catalist for Michael Karnjanaprakorn to think about a new way of approaching learning - so he co-created SkillShare with his friend Malcolm Ong.

Deanna Jump made history this week when she became the first
teacher selling classroom materials on Teachers Pay Teachers to top $1 million
in sales.

Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur and Stanford consulting associate professor, discusses the role of pattern recognition in entrepreneurship.

Following the lead from US based Coursera and edX, Open University, which has been in the "distance education" space since 1963, will launch FutureLearn in 2013 with 12 UK universities.

1 - Code Year - If learning computer programming sounds way out of your reach, best left to the geniuses of the world, you're wrong. According to Code Year, anyone can learn the basics of computer programming in just one year.

 

2 - W3Schools - The largest site on the Internet for Web developers, W3Schools is a fantastic resource for those interested in brushing up on their Web development skills—or learning them for the first time.

 

3 - TED - We're guessing most of you have seen at least one TED Talk by now. The nonprofit started out as a conference in 1984 with the intention of "bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design."

 

4 - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Brush up on your college-level writing and reading skills without paying an exorbitant amount.

 

5 - iTunes U - iTunes U hosts content from more than 800 universities and distinguished organizations. Stanford, Yale, and Oxford are on the list, as well as MoMA, the New York Public Library, Public Radio International, and PBS stations.

 

6 - Khan Academy - Sal Khan, former hedge fund analyst and creator of the nonprofit Khan Academy, has made over 2,700 free educational videos and aims to continue until the day he dies.

 

7 - Peer 2 Peer University - Peer 2 Peer University, otherwise known as P2PU, is a grassroots open education project. Creating a "model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education," P2PU uses the Internet to make educational materials openly available for free.

 

8 - University of the People - Affiliated with the United Nation's Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development, the Clinton Global Initiative, and the Yale Law School Information Society Project, University of the People is the world's first tuition-free, non-profit, online academic institution

 

9 - Academic Earth - Academic Earth, an online video education site, offers courses and lectures from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Princeton in a user-friendly platform.

 

10 - CK-12 - Intended for kindergarteners through twelfth graders, CK-12 is a non-profit organization whose mission is to reduce the cost of textbook material in the K-12 market.

1. Meaning is social constructed and contextually reinvented
2. Technology is everywhere (digital universe).
3. Teaching is done teacher-to-student, student-to-student, and people-technology-people (co-constructivism)
4. Schools are located everywhere (fully infused in society)
5. Parents view schools as a place for them to learn, too
6. Teachers are everybody, everywhere
7. Hardware and software in schools are available at low cost and are used (strategically)
8. Industry views graduates as co-workers or entrepreneurs

Massive open online courses—dubbed MOOCs—have lured venture investors and universities, who have put millions of dollars into companies that partner with schools or instructors to offer free courses.

Cutting out the middleman in higher education, or disintermediation, could be a boon for professors. If the approach pioneered by StraighterLine and Udemy takes off, adjunct professors in particular could have a new avenue to hawk their wares.

It may not be news to the 1.5 million college graduates struggling to find a job or toiling behind café counters, but Northeastern University researchers break it down: 53.6 percent of bachelor's degree-holders under age of 25 were jobless or underemployed last year, the highest percentage since the dot-com bubble of 2000. In the last year, college graduates were more likely to be employed as servers, bartenders, and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians combined. The class of 2012 is about to get a gigantic wake-up call.

Technology has enabled us to interact, innovate and share in whole new ways. This dynamic shift in mindset is creating profound change throughout our society. The Future of Learning looks at one part of that change, the potential to redefine how we learn and educate.

MOOCs enrich education for rich-world students, especially the cash-strapped, and those dissatisfied with what their own colleges are offering. But for others, especially in poor countries, online education opens the door to yearned-for opportunities. Most traffic came from five countries: America, India, Britain, Colombia and Spain. 

Online video education is a hot space right now, thanks to the likes of Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, StraighterLine, Lynda.com, CreativeLIVE (and many more), which are collectively on a mission to democratize education and bring affordable, online learning tools and courses to a global audience.

 

Finding ways to empower educators with technology and digital learning tools is becoming all the more important, and sites like TeachersPayTeachers that offer teachers supplemental compensation for the work they do every day (with the additional time-saving benefit of not having to reinvent the wheel every night, which then frees them up to focus on, say, how to personalize instruction) can play a key role in improving learning outcomes — and the system as a whole.

 

Like TeachersPayTeachers, Bali tells us that Udemy recently had its first instructor reach $1 million in sales, an important milestone in terms of demonstrating the value of the marketplace model — along with validating Udemy’s approach.

 

The million-dollar milestone and the redesign of its teacher-facing UI come on the heels of strong growth for the startup over the last year. Over the last nine months, the co-founder said, the company has been seeing steady 20 percent month-over-month growth. To date, instructors have published 5,000 courses on Udemy in subjects ranging from self-help and design to photography and programming, with 1,500 of those being paid courses — a number that has increased 7-fold since last year, Bali said.