Future of Education is Digital!
During the first COVID-19 lockdown in Yangon, an Executive posted a status on how Physical Classrooms were better for learners than Online Classrooms. It was an acceptable point of view, given the current capability and experience of universities in Myanmar. However, the future of Education is digital. And it is undoubtedly better.
"Professor Ng collects information on everything his students do. This lets him learn what works best and design systems that automatically parlay it back into his class: improving his teaching, his student's comprehension and performance, and tailoring education to everyone's individual needs" - Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger and Kenneth Cukier
In a big-data world, i.e. "Online Classrooms", all interactions with the lectures such as when students watch them, where they press pause, fast-forward or abandon the video before it's over, whether they watch the same lesson multiple times or return to a previous video to review material, which pop quizzes, homework and tests they are stuck at, which forum post leads to students producing a correct answer on a test after reading it, which devices they are on (maybe time of day, weather, temperature, heartrate too, who knows!) are recorded and these data give immediate feedback and unprecedented insight into what works and what doesn't so that the lectures can be redesigned to be better. Pretty soon, through adaptive learning on the data, these “Online Classrooms” will be able to automatically present materials that are the best fit for the student’s specific need at a particular time, leading to a new era of highly personalized instruction. (Excerpt from Big Data)
On a personal note, I believe I learned better and more during a short time from MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) than from physical classrooms throughout my lifetime. Many thanks, respect and love to Professor Andrew Ng and coursera.org, within three months, I have learned, refreshed and improved on Financial Management, Marketing Management, Leadership and many more from top-rated universities (and his critically-acclaimed Artificial Intelligence course too!). This note is written after seeing this article about his father and feeling like writing something.