January 20, 2013

E-learning, the Skills Training Angle

I'm summarizing an article in The Straits Times on January 19, 2013: "Teaching Know-How, Vocational Skills Can Trump Varsity Education" by Ayesha Khanna.

Why Vocational Training?


  1. New technologies happen, and spawn new industries. e.g Robotics, Big Data
  2. Workers need to acquire new skills to "manage robots and analytic products."

How We Can Do Vocational Training


  1. Vocational education can provide "critical thinking skills" too.
  2. We need to digitize vocational learning.

Possible Digitization Tools


  1. demonstration videos
  2. interactive games
  3. simulations
  4. "haptic touch sensors"
  5. holographic and gestural interfaces

My Concern 1


Somewhere in some MIT Technology review articles, I've read that humans should specialize in what machines could not do:

  1. Taking initiative, this includes entrepreneurship as well
  2. Asking/ formulating the questions, defining the problems to solve
  3. Programming the machines since they cannot program themselves right now or in near future

My Concern 2


Then, I 'am a bit worried about costs in producing educational games, simulations etc.

No comments:

Post a Comment

A Tip for Job Search: Gold Rush Skills

  If you need to make some money very quickly, what would you do? Your answer points to the kind of problems you can solve. They give you so...