Wednesday 1 May 2013

Founder of Wikipedia says boring university lectures 'are doomed'

The boring university lecture is going to be the first major casualty of the rise in online learning in higher education, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in a new BBC article.

The custodian of the world's biggest online encyclopaedia says that unless universities respond to the rising tide of online courses, new major players will emerge to displace them, in the way that Microsoft arrived from nowhere alongside the personal computer.

This highlights the importance of the MOOCs (massive open online courses) that have signed up millions of students, using video-lectures supplemented with interactive information, that can be used at any time on a tablet or laptop.

Wales also suggests the future model of higher education will be to allow students to use recordings of lectures - and to use the teaching time to discuss and develop what students have been watching, .

The Khan Academy
This change in the role of the ‘classroom’ echoes the approach of Sal Khan who set up the Khan Academy, a rich and fascinating online source of over 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, all free of charge.

Khan suggests that ‘homework’ should consist of viewing/studying relevant videos, and ‘classroom’ sessions be devoted to practical application and problem solving issues arising from the homework…

Application to NAMs
This is equivalent to pre-workshop distribution of material so that NAMs come to a bespoke workshop ready to apply the process to their categories, customers, competitors and live trade issues, using real ammunition...

(NamNews are currently using this approach to help clients develop and implement finance-based trade strategies, email: bmoore@namnews.com  for details)

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