Teacherpreneurs and education reform

What happens when the "sharing economy" meets higher education?

The progression of where online learning started and how it has grown is really quite staggering, especially since it has only become a discussion staple for most of us pretty recently. The handy infographic below gives us an interesting timeline of digital learning, shows some of the different categories that digital learning comprises, and offers up some interesting statistics on the number of people participating in online learning and the growth that it has seen over the years

The startup said it's closing in on a million students and serves up more than 8,000 courses. But the real stunner is the money earned by the site's top instructors.

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.

“Flipped schools,” where students watch video lessons at home and do “homework” in class, are showing early promise in improving learning.

Udemy, launched in 2010, reports that its top 10 instructors have generated more than $US5 million in revenue so far. Many others are taking in sums that would be unheard of for a high school teacher and impressive for a university professor. A class on IT certifications and training has earned its teacher $US260,000 in a little less than two years. One on video, animation, and multimedia has brought in nearly $US150,000 in the same period

Introducing Open Badges:a new online standard to recognize and verify learning. Free and open Mozilla Open Badges is not proprietary. It’s free software and an open technical standard any organization can use to create, issue and verify digital badges. Take your badges everywhere Collect badges from multiple sources, online and off, into a single backpack. Then display your skills and achievements on social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more. Knit your skills together Whether they’re issued by one organization or many, badges can build upon each other, joining together to tell the full story of your skills and achievement. Full of information With Open Badges, every badge is full of information. Each one has important data built in that links back to the issuer, criteria and verifying evidence.

“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.