Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! | Video on T. EdX Online Learning Project Announced By Harvard, MIT. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have joined forces to offer free online courses in a project aimed at attracting millions of online learners around the world, the universities announced Wednesday. Beginning this fall, a variety of courses developed by faculty at both institutions will be available online through the new $60 million partnership, known as "edX.
" "Anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world can have access," Harvard President Drew Faust said during a news conference to announce the initiative. MIT has offered a program called OpenCourseWare for a decade that makes materials from more than 2,000 classes available free online. It has been used by more than 100 million people. Harvard has long offered courses to a wider community through its extension program. The MITx platform will serve as the foundation for the new learning system. "Fasten your seatbelts," Hockfield said.
Move Over Harvard And MIT, Stanford Has The Real “Revolution In Education” Lectures are often the least educational aspect of college; I know, I’ve taught college seniors and witnessed how little students learn during their four years in higher education. So, while it’s noble that MIT and Harvard are opening their otherwise exclusive lecture content to the public with EdX, hanging a webcam inside of a classroom is a not a “revolution in education”.
A revolution in education would be replacing lectures with the Khan Academy and dedicating class time to hands-on learning, which is exactly what Stanford’s medical school proposed last week. Stanford realizes that great education comes from being surrounded by inspiring peers, being coached by world-class thinkers, and spending time solving actual problems. So, last week, two Stanford professors made a courageous proposal to ditch lectures in the medical school. Skeptical readers may argue that Khan Academy can’t compete with lectures from the world’s great thinkers. [Image via the University of Waterloo.]
Parag Khanna maps the future of countries. Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies' | Video on TE. Amory Lovins: A 50-year plan for energy. Bill Strickland makes change with a slide show | Video on TED.co. Homaro Cantu + Ben Roche: Cooking as alchemy. Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America. A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens.
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.