EdTech Startups to Watch
lurnq.com
lurnq.com
1. It is easier to concentrate on a video of a lecture. My friends aren't sitting next to me, the recorded audio projects the information clearly, and noisy neighbours are no longer an issue. The recorded video means everyone can "sit close" to the lecturer, and the ability to pause, rewind and rewatch lectures means I'm more likely swallow it in it's entirety.
2. The ability to participate from any location and at any time means I'm never late and never hungover.
3. Getting your questions answered via email means it can be read multiple times verbatim. Plus the professor is likely to give you a more in-depth response when he can answer in his own time.
4. My couch, lounge chair, and bath are more comfortable than the lecture hall chairs I've sat on in the past.
I feel it's more appropriate to liken online courses to the electric car. They are a more efficient use of resources, and we'll need them if humans are going to overcome the (frighteningly) vast array of current and future problems.
To all those involved, great job!
I'm currently in Nepal, where I have spent some time teaching kids QBasic, one on one, so they can pass their grade 10 school leaving exam.
You read that right: QBasic. The curriculum and pedagogy here is so ancient, most students would be vastly better off learning from Khan Academy than from their teachers. Lucky students get the hell out of the country rather than study at a university here. Those stuck here would be better served with MOOCs.
And if you are a hacker, come join us and implement your ideas for millions of students!
For instance, I have a unique name, and I'm also generally private enough not to have ever subscribed to Facebook. I don't really care about anything I've have posted being traced back to me, but I do care about the reverse. I don't want some low-level HR person doing due diligence to take a shortcut and make a decision based on a regionally unpopular position on some political issue.
As such, there are real reasons to use personas, and I believe real reasons to generally minimize exposure of one's identity online. If you later have roles as a public figure, it can be a distraction to have uncontrolled material out there signed with your unique name.
When I'm helping another participant in a course struggle through a problem, or asking my own question that to me will later seem dumb, it's easier to use something more unique than 'anonymous' when having a conversation. Otherwise, I could just not ask dumb questions, but if they really aren't dumb at all, then the answer should be easy to find on Google.
I could use a pseudonym, an email address not linked to me in any other way, and if really paranoid, I could use the Tor network—but I'm not concerned about taking classes in secret, I simply want to participate as much as possible and as effectively as possible while opting out from contributing to the 'portfolio' of discourse attributed to my real-world identity. It would be naïve to pretend that the student dialogs are not interesting data for anyone to harvest regardless of user term, and that they will not eventually be as indexed and searchable as Markmail or Google's archive of Usenet.
Perhaps I'll never even refer to a certificate from a Coursera course I enjoyed, much less feel the need to display it, and I could use a handle rather than my name, but I can't help but suspect that most of the people using 'anonymous' in the forums are doing so for the same reason as me, or even just declining to contribute.
I really believe that it would be a great improvement if, like EdX, the name used in forums was different than the name attached to any certificates. And really, being a global program, and considering the attitudes with regard to academic honesty outside of the US, the certificates may not be very meaningful until there are proctored exams anyway. Furthermore I can't imagine how policing abuses by nicknames is any more difficult than people using 'anonymous', they're both linked to an account that is participating (or suspiciously not participating through quizzes and watching videos).