Category Archives: Uncategorized

High over America…

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I’m in an airplane right now. It has wi-fi. What am I doing?

Needless to say, I’m on Reddit. Image after image of cats never seems to get old.

But what productive things could I be doing with my time if there were other options? If I were taking an online class with Rukuku, I could be using this time to learn something. This is the perfect example of a situation where online technology excels at delivering convenience. One can fully utilize time that would otherwise be considered idle.

Alas: instead of taking advantage of a couple of hours of free time, I’m taking a break from cat pictures by writing this post, looking down at the faint glimmer of some tiny Kentucky town, and asking the flight attendant for another beer. I guess that’s not too bad, anyway – but I could be doing all of this while learning something.

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!

Socioeconomic barriers

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On this blog, we’re always talking about problems in education that need solving. One of these is the socioeconomic gap in access, quality, and achievement. What specific issues should stakeholders in education be aware of in solving this problem? Here are some examples:

High cost

Sure, in most countries public education is funded by the taxpayer, so it’s ostensibly free. Unfortunately, this isn’t the whole picture. Even in the developed world, public education is often of low quality, requiring learners to supplement their instruction with expensive, resource-heavy private services. And outside of primary school education, the world is full of people who want to learn something but aren’t able to because of prohibitive costs.

Poor access/low quality

In low-income areas of developed countries, as well as those in the developing world, access to quality education is in short supply. Good teachers are few and far between, and other educational resources are even more scarce.

Lack of relevance

As we discussed in our commentary on curricular problems and in our last post, the things that are being taught in public schools are often irrelevant to the learners. For example, often people who require instruction in a trade will receive an abstract education that is of little use in advancing their career aspirations. There are no services broadly available to effectively and cheaply educate interested people in a subject they find relevant or necessary to their life or career advancement.

In our next installment, we’ll be talking about the ways in which online education technologies can help to address these issues.

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!

 

Is there any correlation between per-student spending and performance?

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It sure doesn’t look like it; otherwise the United States would be the unrivaled world education leader.

Here’s a very interesting infographic comparing spending to a few indicators of student achievement:

[IMG source: http://blog.socrato.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/us-schools-vs-international-spending-education-infographic.jpg]

 

Could it be that there are other, much more influential factors at play?

Check back this week for a continuation of our discussion of the culprit(s) behind the lagging education system in the US.