Online Education

Online Education

Good morning, everybody

In today's lecture, we will talk about online education

You know, in some parts of the world

It is not that easy for people to receive education

And even in the United States where education is available

It might not be within reach

Thus, online courses provided by those world-famous universities

Can bring the best quality education to as many people as we could around the world

And for free

First, let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into online education

The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom

And design content for an online format

You can break away from

For example

The one-hour lecture format

You can break up the material

For example, into short

Modular units of 8 to 12 minutes

And each of the short units introduces a coherent concept

Students can deal with this material in different ways

Depending on their backgrounds, their skills or their interests

So, for example

Some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material

That other students might already have

Other students might be interested in a particular topic that they want to pursue individually

So this format allows students to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education

And allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum

Second and perhaps one of the biggest components of our online education is that

When we need to have students

Who practice with the material in order to really understand it

There's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this

A study in Science last year, for example

Demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice

Where students are just supposed to repeat what they've already learned

Gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests

So, we need to build in much more meaningful practice questions

Now, fortunately

Technology has helped us to provide the students with feedback on those questions

We can now grade a range of interesting types of homework online

The third component is what is called collaborative learning

Students could collaborate in different online courses in a variety of ways

First of all

There was a question and answer forum

Where students could pose questions

And other students could answer those questions

And what is really amazing is that

Because there were so many students

It means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning

Somewhere around the world there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem

And he might answer that question

And so, in many of the online courses

The median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes

So in a word

If we wanted to offer top quality education to everyone around the world for free

What would that affect us?

Three things

First, it would establish education as a fundamental human right

Where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills they need

Second, it would enable lifelong learning

It's a shame that for so many of us

Learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college

By making this amazing content available

We would be able to learn something new every time we wanted

Whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives

And finally

This would make a wave of innovation possible

Because amazing talent can be found everywhere

To sum up today

We have talked about some features of online education and it's benefits

We are sure that online education will have a promising future

In the next lecture

We're going to learn how online education has changed people around the world.