Category Archives: Technology in education

Breaking Barriers

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As we outlined last Wednesday, there are several significant barriers preventing low-income people and other disadvantaged groups from accessing quality education. How can new technology address these deficiencies?

1.      Technological advancement will lower the input costs of education. The traditional teacher-classroom education model is no longer the only game in town. With intuitive and flexible online platforms, teachers and learners will be able to meet in a virtual environment, drastically cutting costs. Before, this transaction would have had to incorporate the cost of transportation, a brick-and-mortar location, and materials, but now it only has to address the cost of hiring a great educator. Both the student and the teacher benefit.

2.      Online platforms will allow a teacher to interact effectively with a greater number of students. Currently, a major limiting factor in the efficiency of education is class size. Thoughtfully designed online learning platforms can eliminate the constraints of the physical classroom while preserving (and even enhancing) the teacher-student relationship. This will further hack away at the major barrier to entry for many people – cost – while improving quality.

3.      Online education technology will also bridge the quality gap by increasing accessibility. The beauty of learning online is that teacher and student can interact from anywhere in the world at any time. People in areas that are remote or lacking in quality teachers will be able to connect with great educators around the world – educational demand and supply will be connected in a dramatically new and more efficient way.

The possibilities are truly exciting.

Please check back with us all next week for more about educational problems and solutions!

The history (and future) of online education

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Infographics are a wonderful way to organize information in a useful and visually pleasing way.

Here’s one about the history of online education. Though slightly dated, the data allows us to pretty confidently extrapolate where this trend is going in the future.

Check back this later this weekend for more discussion of the hurdles faced by education, both traditional and online.

How are we going to motivate today’s learners?

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All ideas are on the table, and of them is gamification.

Learning in a packed college lecture hall does not seem to be most people’s idea of fun. I distinctly remember one day when I came into my Econ 101 lecture right after having been to traffic court: I couldn’t help but notice that the general excitement level was lower in front of the professor than it had been front of the judge.

What is gamification?

Gamification is essentially the application of game mechanics and game rewards to real-life situations. It’s based on the concept that humans have an innate desire to engage in reward-based activities. It’s used by retailers to engage customers, employers to involve workers, social networks to excite users, and so on, and it’s been shown to improve productivity and involvement across the board.

How can gamification be used by educators?

Education is particularly well-suited to this concept: gamifying learning can help to engage otherwise bored learners and push them to succeed by infusing some fun into the learning process. People instinctively look for payoffs, but the payoffs of education are typically long-term. Applying some features of a game to the educational process means that the reward structure will also include short-term gratification – something we all enjoy.

This is especially exciting in the realm of online education because of the vast interactive possibilities provided by a digital interface.

What do you think about the potential of gamification in online learning?

Let’s learn some geography!

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As I lamented in Friday’s post, we Americans aren’t terribly good at geography.

If our schools aren’t willing to change that, let’s take it into our own hands.

Sporcle is one example of an existing site that gamifies learning in a pretty cool way – especially when it comes to geography. My favorite basic quizzes are US States and Countries of the World.

At Rukuku, we think that new, interactive online resources can really help to fill the gaps that our school system leaves behind. That’s one of the ideas behind the solutions that we’re working on here. If you’d like to stay updated and have a chance at our launch, we invite you to sign up!

 

Things to consider

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If you’ve been following our latest series here at the Rukuku blog (or even if you just happen to be a living, breathing person), you probably know that the cost of education is too high.

But think about this:

  • What if educators and students didn’t have to worry about meeting at a location and wasting time getting there?
  • What if teachers and learners didn’t have to worry about acquiring the necessary teaching and learning materials?
  • What if the amount of students that an educator can meaningfully interact with wasn’t limited by the physical constraints of a classroom?
  • What if we currently have the potential to dramatically lower the cost of learning while greatly improving its quality?

If these questions sound hypothetical to you, they shouldn’t.

To learn more, please sign up for a chance at our exclusive, invitation-only launch. It’s coming on April Fools’ Day, but it’s no joke.