Facebook and Google Plus Rants --- E-learning

E-learning is a truly virgin soil. No one has conquered it. It is at a free-for-all Wild West land grab stage.

E Learning Web Sites

http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/1/khan-academy-checkbook-scaling-to-6-million-users-a-month-on.html

    But YouTube is not interactive and a big part of what they want to do is present a learning tree to users, give quizzes, manage results, etc. So they first tried a self hosted Java based site, which was crushed under the load. ...

  The more control you get the more likely you are to shoot yourself in the foot and do something wrong ...

  They don’t carry pagers, don’t worry about replication, don’t have to restart instances, and don’t apply OS patches. There are a lot of things they don’t have to do with GAE. ...
  
  Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops-related ...

    To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard. ...

  Offload as much work as you can to somebody else ie. GAE.     ....

  At a group size of 2 - 5 people don’t focus on scalability issues. Focus on features. Make your product great. Get people coming back to it.     

   Keep things simple both technically and in the product until you know absolutely what you need to build. A lot of the features they’ve built to solve and edge case turned out to cause real problems in the long run. It’s hard to turn things off once you build them.    

  Be lazy. Use other people’s tools. Until your business is doing really well don’t be afraid to use other people’s work
 

E Learning

I watched the Khan app just 1 or 2 min and reached that conclusion. I regretted my hasty conclusion. Now I have seen
 http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/depth-first-traversals-of-binary-trees/934024358
and
https://github.com/Khan

And I arrive at the same conclusion, with a higher degree confidence. I have a blog, but why bother promoting my blog.

Superior E Learning and Feature Release

A current online learning app typically has about 500 features. Combine the best/top 5, you get about 900.

I can easily think up 20,000 features.

But will users find all of them desirable? e.g. Vary your lessons according to learner's learning/cognitive styles? What does NLP say about a student looking up/down or right/left? We can capture user's eyes and gesture with Kinect, or some other game SDK's, but should I?

So, I number such features Feature Number 10,001 etc. What does Vygotsky say, Shaolin monks say, Feynman say, James Watson say, Carl Jung say ...... ?

Ok, Features Number 12,001 and 3 and 4.

A journey of 20,000+ features starts with 3 features, huh, so lonely! So exciting!

Whatever it takes, anything within morality bounds, ... I can and will dance, sing, talk, cajole, threaten, plead, .... code, test, deploy, design, debug, refactor, prefactor, re-architect, .. ok ... ok till it becomes World Class!

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.

Role of IT and Software in Education, Learning and Training

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This is the voice of the customer.

Things we now have but  didn't a few years ago:

1.  iPad, iPhone, Facebook, Bing. 
2. 3GL, 4GL programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, Scala etc. 
3. multi-core, virtualizations, ec2, data centers, etc either. 

Technologies -- hardware as well as software -- are making headway by leaps and bounds.

But what about the applications, the products? Why are they lagging behind so pathetically?

Let's narrow our interest to just learning applications. Are they making a real difference to real people's lives? Have they tackled the fundamental desires, whims, needs, wants, concerns, worries, anxieties, fears, insecurities of the potential users of such applications and services?

Fundamental Questions

1. How can such an application help companies achieve and retain their competitiveness, save them time, effort and money?
2. How can such an application help teachers increase their effectiveness, save them time and effort?
3. How can such a service help trainers increase their productivity?
4. How can such a product help students and learners raise and keep high scores?
5. How can such an application help employees and professionals solve their problems in a better way?

Fundamental Issues

What does a student expects from her/his education?

What does a trainee wants from her/his training?

This has not changed much throughout our history e.g. Read Ma`ha`ba´ra`ta, or Journey to the West, or Arabian Nights.

Industrial Revolution liberated us from the limitations of our physique and we thus no longer marvel at derricks and cranes moving heavy containers.

Isn't I.T. Revolution supposed to release us from the limitations of our minds and memories, or at least enhance our learning, thinking, reasoning and problem-solving abilities?

The revolution is not over, it's just unfinished.

If you want to carry on with this revolution, please join us.

e-learning in Singapore : OpenlySolved and NotesAcademy

I'm recommending the two websites from Singapore. I like them for their spirit of generosity and public service.

OpenlySolved

The following is the direct quote from the OpenlySolved website.

OpenlySolved is a digital library of living documents (living documents are documents that are continuouslybeing edited and refined) containing fully-worked solutions to problems found in commonly used mathematics textbooks in Singapore  ...

Conventional textbooks typically provide only the final answers to the problems. While these answers are useful for the better students, who can use them for verifying that their own answer is correct, they are not helpful for the weaker students who may not even know how to begin solving some of the questions. These students need help learning mathematics on their own, and what is useful is the detailed solution process, not merely the final answer. This is what the solutions in OpenlySolved provide - the detailed steps involved in solving each problem - not merely the final answer - all at no cost. Register (for free) to access the solutions and to discuss the topics.

OpenlySolved is also a community of people that use textbooks. It is hoped that the members of this community will get together in the forum to discuss the solutions, highlight any errors in the textbook, and help one another learn. Although some initial solutions have been provided, it is hoped that the community will solve the remaining questions, and make the solutions available to all the other members ...

Lee Chu Keong, Founder,OpenlySolved

P.S. Who am I? I am a lecturer at the Nanyang Technological University. I am grateful for what I make through teaching, speaking and training. It is enough.
 

NotesAcademy

The following is the direct quote from the NotesAcademy website.

"NotesAcademy is an online platform for students to share their studying material, techniques and tricks with one another. Everything on the website is available to anyone completely free of charge"

"Our mission is to facilitate sharing, collaboration and cooperation amongst students, in order to allow students around the world to excel and realise their full potential."
 

The following nine subjects are available currently: 

• English
• Mathematics
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Biology
• Social Studies
• History
• Geography
• Literature

I like both of them. I wish both huge success immediately.

The Crisis in Higher Education, Nicholas Carr, MIT Technology Review

The Crisis in Higher Education, Nicholas Carr, MIT Technology Review reviews many e-institutions such as Coursera, edX, Udacity, Open Learning Initiative, University of Phoenix etc.  Many professors, educators have valid concerns about MOOCs(massive open online courses).  The article shows no way out. I point out one way out here. Many more ways out may come in my upcoming posts.

The promoters of MOOCs have a "fairly naïve perception of what the analy­sis of large data sets allows," says Timothy Burke, a history professor at Swarthmore College. He contends that distance education has historically fallen short of expectations not for technical reasons but, rather, because of "deep philosophical problems" with the model. He grants that online education may provide efficient training in computer programming and other fields characterized by well-established procedures that can be codified in software. But he argues that the essence of a college education lies in the subtle interplay between students and teachers that cannot be simulated by machines, no matter how sophisticated the programming.
 

Alan Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois, raises similar concerns. In an e-mail to me, he observed that the work of college students "can be affected in dramatic ways by their reflection on the rhetorical situations they encounter in the classroom, in real-time synchronous encounters with other people." The full richness of such conversations can't be replicated in Internet forums, he argued, "unless the people writing online have a skilled novelist's ability to represent complex modes of thought and experience in prose."
 

In theory, this "flipped classroom" will allocate teaching time more rationally, enriching the experience of both professor and student.

Here, too, there are doubts. One cause for concern is the high dropout rate that has plagued the early MOOCs.
 

The greatest fear among the critics of MOOCs is that colleges will rush to incorporate online instruction into traditional classes without carefully evaluating the possible drawbacks.
 

The Way Out I Promised

A Myanmar saying goes : "With the fish's oil, fry the fish." The answer comes on page 92 of that same magazine. How Authors Write By Jason Pontin on October 24, 2012 :

The technologies of composition, not new media, inspire ­innovations in literary styles and forms.
 

The Atavist's authors have not been moved, as Baker was, by the creative possibilities of a new technology. Writers are excited to experimentation not by the media in which their works are published but, rather, by the technologies they use to compose the works.