Daphne Koller: What We’re Learning from Online Education #TED

Daphne Koller talks about the potential of distributed education and massive open online courses.

Daphne Koller:

There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning. Because the data that we can collect here is unique. You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students. So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not? And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like, what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them?

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Getting Technical at the Library

Did you know that there are more public libraries offering free technology training than there are businesses offering technology training?

Libraries rule.

Library resources support learning new technologies.

“More libraries—5,400—offer technology training classes than there are computer training businesses in the U.S. Every day, 14,700 people attend free library computer classes—a retail value of $2.2 million. That’s $629 million worth of computer classes annually (based on 286 business days per year)” (ALA, 2009; OCLC, 2010; ReferenceUSA Business & Residential Directory; Geek Squad).

For more public library factoids, please visit OCLC‘s How Libraries Stack Up: 2010.