So you go to the school of hard knocks, yes, that will be the one with teachers and books, yep, junior, middle and high school, then off to those big centres of education called colleges and universities. But hey, is that just old school?
The options for learning online are extensive. Kids are searching YouTube for refreshers before a quiz. Going over the confusing math class from today that you needed help understanding. Kids find some of these 5-minute clips more informative than their textbooks. Some “smart” kids are even spending time online teaching themselves subjects unavailable at school.
2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that, on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction. Campus students have said that they prefer the online classroom not just because they save time by not driving to campus but because they can spend more time on the actual coursework since it can be completed at any time of the day that is convenient for them. We all know people learn differently, and video can be very engaging.
There are now even Academies, such as the Khan Academy, based entirely on YouTube videos. Now totalling 1,400, these videos are straightforward hand-solving problems with coloured pens on a blackboard; now, does that sound familiar or what? Mr Khan throws in some humour, and bingo, he has 13,000 people following him on his Facebook page and 1,750,000 youtube views, even sending cash as a donation to support it all.
Gone are the days of spending time on the phone trying to figure out biology question #17 on frog reproduction; even Microsoft Messenger seems to be slipping in usefulness. Teenagers are now updating their Status with the day’s events while chatting with 20 classmates on their Facebook Chat, solving the next batch of homework in a community Social environment.
But the question has to be, are YouTube Videos a reliable form of education? Is the content verified? Is it valid? How do you know the good ones from the bad ones?
@reighny Michael Hunter from Maelstrom Marketing, one of our listeners, fired me a tweet last week regarding all credible news sources now that everything is internet/sensationalism/conjecture. I.E. Digg / F.B. / Twitter / etc. And that News online is very opinion based. Everybody is a nuanced news source. When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.
When I was doing my research for tonight’s spot “I googled various subject matters”. I turn to the net to answer a lot of everyday questions. What I found Ironic was that when I googled “don’t believe what you read”, the first few articles were all about Newspapers and T.V. and not about the Internet or online content. The next were songs by Barbra Streisand and The BoomTown Rats.
With journalists and newspapers, does their credibility way more heavily on the content being of solid research and facts? Do we consider the National Inquirer a shining example of outstanding Journalism or The New York Times?
Wikipedia has over 15 million articles contributed by hundreds of thousands of contributors’ all critiquing each other’s comments. Studies show it’s more accurate than the 4000 experts who contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica (it was a tiny study). However, I can also point out that more than ten thousand definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary were from an American madman locked in a top security asylum in the U.K.
Websites such as http://www.udemy.com/ are now being created to provide teachers and instructors with a place to create and manage online courses. Course creators can upload their presentations and videos, pen blog posts and pull in content from other online services like YouTube Vimeo and Slideshare.
Perhaps the best way to kill two birds with one stone is for teachers to engage in the process and provide informed and researched content. And the world of online social learning can only get better.