Pushing New Frontiers

I managed to stumble across a new blog this week entitled “2¢ Worth”  A fun little title if you ask me.  The post that jumped out at me was entitled The Changing Landscape of Education.  The post was about the MIT OpenCourseWare Initiative that allows students from multiple campuses in higher education to access a wealth of information and resources, straight from the horses mouth so to speak.   The professors who participate in this give access to video and audio clips in addition to lecture notes and assignments.   This is not new to students at the University of Illinois, but the interesting thing about this “initiative” is the access they have given to college-prep students mainly in AP courses.   The reason why I am excited about this is because we may see a trickle affect from this.  If the program were to extend to the regular education high school students and even through special education, we would be seeing great steps forward.  <<Steve Rosenbaum, I don’t think this is the doing of your “middle 70% who are “waiting and hoping the whole thing will go away. Real change happens not when you silence the critics but when you engage the middle 70%”  In-concrete passive idealism is not a result of this remarkable forward progress.>>  If, and hopefully when, this reaches Special and Regular Education, the format for this will clearly need to be revamped.  I don’t think that these students will effectively utilize audio clips.  But the use of digital assignments and interactive and entertaining videos could be.    The youtube generation of learners may finally have a venue for learning that will fit their needs.

Tags: education, MIT, technology