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'In the Knowledge Economy, We Need a Netflix of Education' (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: When we want to acquire useful knowledge, we have to search the web broadly, find experts by word-of-mouth and troll through various poorly designed internal document sharing systems. This method is inefficient. There should be a better solution that helps users find what they need. Such a solution would adapt to the user's needs and learn how to make ongoing customized recommendations and suggestions through a truly interactive and impactful learning experience. Before Netflix, Spotify, Reddit and similar curated content apps, you had to go to numerous sources to find the shows, music, news and other media you wished to view. Now, the entertainment and media you actually want to consume is easily discoverable and personalized to your interests. In many ways the entertainment model is a good framework for knowledge management and learning development applications. The solution for the learning and development industry would be a platform that can make education more accessible and relevant -- something that allows us to absorb and spread knowledge seamlessly. Just as Netflix delivers entertainment we want at our fingertips, the knowledge and learning we need should be delivered where and when we need it.
Just look at Coursera, EdX, Code School, and others.
Are they free? No, but neither is Netflix or Hulu.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
Called the Khan Academy.
Great site with lots of topics.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Isn't that what online services like Khan Academy are already offering? I haven't used it and don't know much about it. But it seems to me these education outlets already exist.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
EdX, Udemy, Lynda, etc.
Not to mention, there is value in learning how to research.
Just like there are Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple providing entertainment for a fixed fee. There are training sites that do the same. Lynda is merely one of them.
Critical thinking is more important than finding the answer in google or adding on a calculator.
It's called a public library. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Netflix, Spotify, and Reddit curate in such an oppressive manner that I cannot imagine such a model being good for anyone who likes to direct his own habits. And for one who doesn't like to direct his own habits... education curated in such a manner sounds downright dangerous.
Netflix and Spotify (ostensibly) show you what they think you want to see. The curation is perhaps somewhat accurate but I end up feeling like a browsable index would suit my needs far better than having so much content hidden, even inaccessible, behind what they divine my "tastes" to be. As an example: Netflix no longer displays a category for anime on my account because it has decided I don't like anime. Simply not true! I want that category back! Their curation makes my self-direction more difficult because they have forced me to spend extra effort locating the content I really want to see.
Imagine this applied to education: You want to learn about Japan? Well our AI doesn't think you really do, so we'll present options to learn about how great USA is instead! How is this good?
And Reddit? Well... Reddit is curation by an angry mob. Has OP ever even been to Reddit?
In short: Make educational content easily available? Absolutely. Use some fancy AI or groupthink to do so? Probably not the best approach.
https://www.khanacademy.org/
I used to buy many expensive tech books. But I have not purchased a book in years.
;)
I also do not think it is based in education apps, the whole education method is obsolete. The information is grouped in subject matter sites.
In the tech world I just use google and type in my question and the answers are in sites like Stack Overflow, W3C Schools, etc.
The education model using the old style teaching ways is over, but those in education don't know it yet.
Most of what is taught in schools today are things that really are not needed and even the things related to the subject are out of date.
The current education system should stick to the RRR's and make sure students know how to learn and have the tools. Education through grade 12 is free in the US. Those who don't want to learn never will, those with the drive and interest can get all the specifics they need from the net. Providing they have the basics for learning.
As for Collage, the (i know this will go over badly) only reason to go to collage is to get credentials so you can work for someone else. In the future will it be more than that? Just wondering
Just look at Coursera, EdX, Code School, and others.
Are they free? No, but neither is Netflix or Hulu.
Do any of those have solid expert panel discussions?
Real lawyers write in C++
What Netflix et al are doing is to see what you have been watching, find something that kinda fits the bill and offers it to you. That makes sense, because if I'm interested in subject A and watch relevant content, it's likely that other content that deals with subject A will be to my liking and I'll enjoy watching it. If I'm on a Doctor Who marathon, it's likely that I enjoy SciFi, so suggesting Star Trek makes sense.
Because when people do what they like, they stay in the same category. People usually have interests that focus on a narrow field.
This is not necessarily the case when you're trying to teach or learn. And we're not even talking about a broad curriculum that you'd be dealing with in a general education in a high school, where anything from literature and drama to math and geometry would apply.
Take IT. A rather narrow field when you compare it to what could be considered the total knowledge out there waiting to be learned. Even here you have a very, very wide range of topics. Hardware design (that alone with its many facets would warrant writing its own paragraph), Software design (same deal), theory (from Big-O notation to database normalization), statistics, electronics, logic, mathematics... and let's be honest here, they intersect heavily with other studies.
Trying to do the same "see what the person was watching and let's find out what else he wants to see" is probably going to end up with results ranging from hilarious to cringeworthy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I love this "streaming app" on my roku. It's $20's a month which is a little high for my taste but even though I do not really use it as much as i'd like (at least not yet). I have taken some chemistry courses from Georgetown and one of the Photography courses and I really enjoyed both of them. I still pay because its sort of like a donation each month because I think it is a good idea and I want it to succeed.. I also do the same with Curiosity Stream. Cheers
Khan Academy has some great series. The depth varies quite a bit between subjects - last time I checked, the math parts were much better developed than the biology ones - but it has some really useful stuff.
What I'd like to see are more comprehensive trade school education resources online. Yeah, I know there are instructional videos on YouTube, but they tend to be for quick things (some exceptions, obviously) and it's not always easy to find the good ones.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
This is what frustrated me so terribly about public schooling.
"Hurry up and wait for the slow kids."
Was worst in grade school, got only slightly better in high school, and college was simply more-of-same.
Even afterwards, classes for various forms of certification are just DREADFULLY slow.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
If I'd had something like Netflix to absorb information from, I might have done a lot better in school (blew out testing, but classwork destroyed my GPA).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I was about to write about TED talks too. It took a lot of posts before someone finally mentioned them.
#DeleteFacebook
For me, it's not much about the speed but the way schools worked in 1980~1990. Just learn and learn and learn, then try to apply what you just learned. I'm more of a learn-as-I-go guy so school was just a horrible learning experience.
#DeleteFacebook
"the knowledge and learning we need should be delivered where and when we need it."
The premise of this is fundamentally flawed. Knowledge is not an on demand need. Much of the purpose of modern education is to learn how to think and learn how to learn. Only a small subset of learning are skills that can be delivered on demand. There are plenty of sources on where I can get a video on how to fix my dishwasher. Learning the background of heat transfer, metal phase change, and how to measure and cut metals for welding is not an "on-demand" domain and should not be taught as such.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
a web search engine.
Preferably not yet another search system where the majority of your search results are merely the same question from one or two different users with a whole bunch of responses that are nothing more either than "Me too" posts while quoting the entire original post, or replies quoting the entire post and then a one line response encouraging the OP to fucking use Google (it is almost like many do not seem to understand where the search engines get their results).
Oh, and let us not forget the many search results that do not seem to even have any of your search terms in it when you do click on the result.
This space unintentionally left blank.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
I got a citation (not the good kind) for looking at the other children when I was done with my work, instead of putting my head down on my desk and waiting quietly. Literally. LOOKING AT THE OTHER CHILDREN IS BAD MKAY. Never mind that even by third grade I was a head taller than all the other children, and putting my head down on my desk caused me back pain.
The system is out of order.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm still not too sure what was the objective of the original article (on TechCrunch), but it appears to be confusing some stuff there. It appears whoever wrote it also never had any experience in online learning, which is just weird.
We already have plenty of similar platforms for education as Netflix is for entertainment. Lynda.com, Khan Academy, Coursera, EdX, Udemy, Udacity to name a few. Kinda egregious that the article talked about none of those despite them being as popular and ubiquitous as Netflix.
But what the article is really talking about is an AI powered platform that aggregates all sorts of educational information that's far more focused on specific tasks, and tools for getting in contact with real instructors and whatnot.
That's not Netflix for learning... that's basically online classes. And they exist too. They could be helped with some new tools for material aggregation, but in the end it'll need to be curated in some way, so it'll only extend what online courses are.
You don't go to Netflix to search for specific bits and pieces of entertainment... you get served a pre-selected and pre-curated range of movies. They are either missing the point or making a very bad analogy.
It's just another weird article talking about the miracles AI will supposedly make happen, but with a very shallow understanding of what it's talking about...
Like many people said we have online platforms that provide this (Coursera, Khan, etc), but they are all inherently flawed. This is because they are all using passive learning methodologies. Passive learning is reading a video, sitting in a lecture or watching a video. Passive learning is provably less effective than active learning which is learning by doing. The highest form of active learning is an expert tutor. What we really need is a digital tutor. A cloud based A.I. system that will teach a student using mastery level techniques.
What they mean is that you need to ignore the majority of the information, just like the majority of the content is not available.
Also that content changes. Bit like how we always have been with war with Eurasia.
At every time in history there was an overload of information. "History?" I see what I did there. Nice example. I went from one country to another in Europe. The historic facts where the same, the history lessons where not. I did not get a lot of facts in one country and I did not get them in another.
Methods of education where different. The books where different. For that last one you do not even need to go to a different county. Just go to a different school or get a different teacher.
The downside of Netflix is that everybody gets the same things. That is not a good thing when you talk about education. We already have way too many people that are pushed through the schooling system as if they where sausages.
Different methods for different people is not a bad thing. To me Netflix is not a good thing as it reduces the variation, not enhances it. It dumbs it down, not enriches it.
This because Netflix operates worldwide, not just on a local level.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
https://www.mooc-list.com/
came up near the top of the list. I'm sure there are other resources.
Have gnu, will travel.
We need to get rid of state mandates for public education. Before you freak out, notice I didn't say 'Get Rid of public education' I said 'get rid of mandates'. I would much rather put my kid through Coursera, Khan Academy, Liberty Classrom, or "Ron Paul's Home school Curriculum" but if the state I live in mandates my kid still go to what is essential a prison for 8 hours a day to be taught a bunch of falsehoods like "World War II got us out of the great depression" and "Alexander Hamilton was a great founding father" or "The constitution is a living document" then all the great "Netflixes of education" in the world won't help. Kids get burned out by bad "education" systems and then think learning isn't fun.
As already commented there are already dozens of different online "Netflixes" of learning.
What we need is a meat space hands on "teaching on demand" service. You can throw youtube videos and engineering books at me all day long and I may eventually learn. What we need is a hands on skilled trade teaching service. The "hands on" learners are the ones getting left behind in the push for everyone to go to college and learn online.
Oh my deity! Get over trying to find a silver bullet for education. It's a waste of time. There is no "knowledge economy", it's called "education" and "information". And we need a Netflix/Uber/Killer App for education like medicine needs a jackhammer for neurosurgery or penicillin for steel smelting. The success of one concept in one area does not imply that the framework would work in another environment.
Case in point: Coursera, Khan Academy, MIT lectures, and the like have done NOTHING to affect the education of the masses because the barrier to entry is too high for the masses and, most importantly, you must have continual will and commitment to seek these classes out and take them seriously to get a full education out of them. That's not to say that these concepts are without function. I've taken a couple Khan Academy courses and loved them... but then again, I have a 4-year degree and care enough to post on Slashdot. My wife watches stuff on Craftsy, but she is like me. In fact, all these programs are great for people who already have access to quality computers, broadband internet (mobile and wired), time, space, quiet, solitude, and SELF-STARTING WILLPOWER.
Look, education is hard. Like really, really hard. As a teacher, you have to gain trust, build relationships, and inspire before you even get down to the required curriculum. You have to react to individuals on the fly and remember how people change. You need to be sensitive to nuance in character, communication, and culture. No app can do that. No piece of software will build that trust.
Educating children is hard work. It takes time, effort, and passion (which dies with burnout). If you want to find a killer app to fix education, make one that magically properly funds our K-12 education so that teachers make a living wage appropriate for their region and hours of work, reduces class sizes to 20 children per class, and guarantees healthy food for everyone working or learning on a K-12 campus. Do that and watch education improve.
Because a "Netflix of Education" is going to do nothing for the masses. It's just a really nice idea to give Futurists happy thoughts about the next decade while ignoring the problem at hand.
You want to know what the Economics of Knowledge looks like today? It's a twenty-something college graduate who can't find a job, holds decades worth of debt, and is still living at home with Mommy and Daddy.
The "Knowledge Economy" is nothing more than a greedy capitalistic bitch of an education system who works hard to convince you that a fucking mortgage worth of college debt is still worth it. Let's hope whatever engine replaces that method of teaching will at least be financially sound, and not result in crippling debt for the consumer.
LOOKING AT THE OTHER CHILDREN IS BAD MKAY.
They probably assume that kids doing that are trying to copy the answers. I sure would! There was plenty of that at my school.
We need to break down the ivory tower monopoly.
Even community colleges have credit transfer issues even in state now some go there as it's easier others do it as it can cost way less.
ITT , UOP, devry and have tried in some ways but they still got sucked into the system and did a poor job at the GEN EDU / accreditation parts while doing better at the real skills parts.
Tribeca Flashpoint College is good but it started mainly with just being 2 years (now they do have 4 year plans) but they have the same accreditation / credits transfer issues that other tech / trade schools have.
full sail is very hands on but has a very high cost with the same accreditation / credits transfer issues.
Also do doctors really an full 4-5 years pre med? why not let them do an 2 year gen edu and then start med school?
Willpower is the key, as you point out. The resources are there already (Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware, etc). The problem is the lack of folks ability to sit through it and do the work, and lack of talented folks willing to do quality teaching. I've noticed that the farther you go back generation-wise, the more folks seem used to doing hard study and work. When I see this "Gimme a Netflix for Education" crap, I don't see see the problem as one of access, but a lack of ability to apply themselves. Most people I know with highly specialized skills didn't acquire them via some cushy interactive video, they learned via experience, hard work, and self-motivated study & research.
If you've already turned your work in, then what are you going to copy?
like we had in the 80s and 90s before Reagan/Clinton. We don't need more info. Kids are awash in info. The internet means that with a little to no cash you can get practically everything you need on any subject up through the 400 college levels. Math, Engineering, Medicine. You name it. There's hands on stuff you can't learn otherwise, but 'Netflix for education' won't help there.
This is just another cynical attempt to justify the continued cuts to education. Works too.
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If I need a quick and dirty introduction to a subject, I would grabbed a Dummies book. When I was the lead tester for Backyard Football, Backyard Baseball and Backyard Hockey for the Nintendo GameCube/GBA at Atari, I grabbed the Dummies book for each sport, got up to speed to understand each sport, and used it as a reference during testing.
Knowledge and experiments need reproducibility. If Alice finds/asserts some fact, then Bob needs to be able to find it or establish it in the same way, or he won't be convinced. If information is "personalized" such that different people see different things, this will foil reproducibility. No one will believe anyone else. No one will be able to find/confirm what anyone else is talking about. Everyone will be in a little Matrix-like silo being unable to talk to others.
We already have this problem with customized ads on walled-garden social-media sites. We can't ascertain what political advertising or propaganda is being seen by our fellow citizens. We can't verify that apartment or job listings are violating nondiscrimination laws or not.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Declara is far along the path to developing the capabilities this article describes. They have active networks in Australia and Mexico and have one under development in California called Collaboration in Common. References to Coursera and Khan miss the importance of developing informal professional learning exchanges that take place around a team effort to create something. They also do not follow personal needs and interests and introduce content and expertise based on a person's current interest and focus or make it east to collect and share what they know or discover with others. Declara is not the only effort to make progress to support informal learning networks, Amazon Inspire will be launching later this year with a focus on K-12 education and CLANED is under development in Europe.
Is it you?
Netflix of knowledge? What fucking moron came up with that analogy. Seriously? Your brain cells could go no further than Netflix. And I hate to break it to you, that's what the fucking World Wide Web is!
TED talks are mostly trash. They are more of a motivational pitch to advance the speaker's career with some pop science. The only good TED talk is "2070: Paradigm Shift."
Teaching models are changing, thankfully. Now we have the mobile technology that is inexpensive enough that each student can have a device, and there is interactive course material that adapts to the student's comprehension and provides the instructor with feedback on the student's progress.
It makes me jealous, actually, that the students that want to learn can do so at their own pace that doesn't involve just sitting there reading the text while the instructor deals with the mouthbreathers and kids with behavioral issues. More and more instruction is actually occurring out of class, and class time is being used for coaching and group activities.
There are a few times here and there I've found teachers to be handy to the learning process, but for the grand bulk of the time I've spent working on college degrees they were not necessary. Most of it was on me to read and digest the material, practice working problems, and preparing for the tests.
The only place where I found teachers to be useful was helping you to develop a stronger work ethic and to help you push your boundaries. That kind of training and coaching does not require a university setting (and cost)
Before Netflix, Spotify, Reddit and similar curated content apps, you had to go to numerous sources to find the shows, music, news and other media you wished to view.
The Pirate Bay was the one stop shop, not Netflix and Spotify. We should probably copy TPB's model and use it for education and not the grossly incompetent Reddit, StackExchange, etc.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Educating children is hard work. It takes time, effort, and passion (which dies with burnout). If you want to find a killer app to fix education, make one that magically properly funds our K-12 education so that teachers make a living wage appropriate for their region and hours of work, reduces class sizes to 20 children per class, and guarantees healthy food for everyone working or learning on a K-12 campus. Do that and watch education improve.
Apps are not merely a replacement for teachers any more than you can just hand a kid a book and expect them to teach themselves. Unlike books though, apps are interactive and dynamic, and can be programmed to provide content that matches a student's comprehension level. What's more, apps also can provide useful feedback for instructors on where students are struggling and need coaching or encouragement.
You're right that education is hard. Just throwing extra money at schools, without improving teaching methods and efficiencies, is wasteful though. Small class sizes and proper nutrition is needed, but it isn't the solution to a one-size-fits-all type of instruction. Ideally every student would have a personal tutor, but the most realistic approach is to give the instructor means to be the most effective, freeing them from tedious work and rote instruction so that they can give students the individual attention they need. Apps can be a very useful tool for that.
https://www.hslda.org/laws/def...
five states are listed as being tight with the regs
Yeah, I really hate those.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Trawl. You trawl for information. Is this stuff really that hard?
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
I never trust the number of stars users have voted on. It's worthless.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
I'm not sure where to start with this one; so I'll go with the classics and mention the "library", a convenient institution that has provided both a professionally selected collection and access to a very broad range of material(sometimes only by request, if it's an obscure thing that needs to be inter-library loaned). You might have heard of them; they've only been around for longer than most contemporary nation states.
As for the "cry, cry, searching the web is hard and things aren't centralized!!!"; you would propose Netflix as a solution? The one that routinely loses stuff from its catalog because of rightsholder spats and the desire of competitors for exclusives? Netflix manages to both be non comprehensive and discourages you from stepping outside the app(particularly important for educational material, where you are more likely to be depending on the system because you don't necessarily know what reference material is most suitable: with entertainment it doesn't matter as much because either you find some something else that amuses you; or you know that something is missing and go elsewhere).
A decentralized; but relatively easy to search, cross-reference, open in multiple tabs, etc. system might not be quite as elegant as the hypothetical ideal universal resource brilliantly executed by a rightsholder so benevolent that they would't gouge you for a brilliantly executed universal resource library; but that ideal doesn't exist; and seems unlikely to; which leaves the more or less open, if eclectic, option more appealing than various incomplete closed systems; often also badly designed.
And, if your proposal is "But we should use magic standards to stitch all the content together at a high level!"; that's been tried for ages(DoD ADL efforts are early 90s, at latest) and while SCORM and friends are less fictional than the 'semantic web'; trying to make "learning management systems" play nicely with things their vendor didn't specifically design them to still really sucks.
Content-agnostic HTML and hyperlinks may be inelegant and dumb as rocks; but it has the virtue of actually working while the 'elegant' approaches are busy trying to solve millennia-old epistemological problems so they can wrap the results in XML. Don't go there; just don't.
same for me. I got bumped out of the AP courses because there wasn't enough money for them.
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>Just as Netflix delivers entertainment we want Netflix streams content and I cannot pay the content creator directly. I can pirate mkvs with much higher bitrates given to the codec within, use them on any player and edit them how I please. I do not want the educational version of that.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
As someone with ADD, being told to just stand there and hold my dick COMPLETELY destroys the learning experience, because it becomes so disjointed.
I bolded the part that really throws me. I completely agree with you. You have accurately described the problem.
Not that anyone will hear you or that anything will change. :(
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen