Education For The Times ...

There is no way anyone could say that the new paradigm of social computing has not changed the way education can be delivered. New ways of reaching out to students have been opened, and this is not just for universities, but also for studetns, a new, different way of doing things.

If OCW was a step into things which werent explored, then this initiative ... Academic Earth ... seems to be the next step. There are two aspects of this that need to be looked at. One is that this is bringing the finest minds from some of the best universities together, and creating a repository of knowledge which can be shared easily with anyone anywhere who can connect to the internet. This was something we couldnt even have dreamt of when we were stusying at school, or college. OK, so that goes to show i am over the hill, but even so ... this is quite an amazing concept. What is also interesting is how students could actually leverage the power of the community ... so, for example, a student taking the course on Newtonian Mechanics by Prof. Shankar knows that this course has been rated A+ by 46 others. Which gives quite a nice indication of how the students perceive the course. This used to happen when we were in college, too. I remember, for example, when we joined college, everyone (from our branch) knew that the exam on Turbo-Machines in the VIIth semester had been the downfall of many a students (so much so that Prof. Roy was one of the dreaded ones), but that used to happen with a particular radius. The community, for this example, was the college students, while for Academic Earth, the community is anyone who wants to, or has studied, a particular course.

Question ... whats the next step? Co-creation of courses by community? One point there, though, is that the community couldnt get the expertise of the Professor to this co-creation exercise, which means that the role of the community primarily has to be to enrich the experience of all the people taking a course, either through direct, or through indirect interactions. Any thoughts what the next step could be? Please do leave your thoughts ...