Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Anant Agarvald's speach was about distant educations, especially about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Agarwal shares his vision of blended learning, where teachers create the ideal learning experience for 21st century students. Many organizations are offering these online courses to students all over the world, in the millions, for free. 

"Education really hasn't changed in the past 500 years … from healthcare to transportation, everything is different, but education hasn't changed",- he said.

There are key ideas that he singles out:

active learning:  in 1972,  Craik and Lockhart, discovered that learning and retention really relates strongly to the depth of mental processing. Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material.

self-pacing: instead of attending lectures in classrooms, students can watch a few minutes video. They can hit the pause button, rewind the professor, listen over and over.

instant feedback: its essence is that students, entering their answer in the appropriate place must receive approval immediately. With instant feedback, students can try to apply answers. If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback. They can try it again and again till they recieve a little green check mark.

gamification: gtudents can build online laboratories for learning creativity and design. They can do this through online labs and use computing power. It can engage students much like they design with Legos. The learners are building a circuit with Lego-like ease. And this can also be graded by the computer.

peer learning: the teacher concluded that in this learning system, students can respond to each other's mistakes and this allows them to learn together by analyzing each other's mistakes.