Pitch to NUS and gov.sg #6
Description
Open-Learning and Singapore
- This pitch is intended for a low to mid level technical audience.
Introduction
I'm Mikael Karon and I'm the founder of the open-learning initiative and a founding member of the open-learning foundation.
I'm going to tell you about open-learning, the first community owned and operated open learning ecosystem and how it can be leveraged to transform learning in Singapore and position its learning institutions as a world leader and innovators in ed-tech and online education.
First some things about me:
- I've been a commercial software developer for about 20 years, been coding for another 5 or so.
- I spent the last 3.5 years as a software architect at EF LearningLabs Shanghai, spent an additional 4.5 years or so before that in the ed-tech field
- I lived in Singapore from 2008 to 2012 where I co-founded a start-up providing development for high-transaction financial systems and betting platforms (p2p and sport book).
Problem
Teaching is at its best when knowledgeable teachers teach motivated students exciting topics. Alas this is not always achievable for a myriad of reasons:
- Some of the most interesting topics today are to current to have traditional learning materials created for them. Most of this knowledge is published as papers and discussed in blog posts or in discussion forums and mailing lists.
- The best and the brightest minds that are pushing the envelope in these ares as well as the cutting-edge engineers who create solutions in them and the tech-gurus who evangelize about it already have well paying jobs in the industry.
- Relocation of most of these people would simply not be feasible. We’re not able to do it with top-technology talent in the valley, and I doubt it can be done for learning, even if we wanted.
Solution
By leveraging the open-learning platform believe we can address all the aforementioned points and offer the students and teachers with a superior learning experience. To show this we propose to work together with Singapore universities to develop a course in front-end programming and enrol a limited set of students.
We've chosen front-end programming because:
- There's a global shortage of front-end engineers
- It's applicable in many fields (advertisement, education, commerce)
- It is one of the hottest and fastest evolving fields of in professional software engineering
Content authors and teachers would be sourced from top-tier companies as well as leading open-source projects and communities. This would ensure that we can live up to the claims "expert" teachers and "current" curriculum.
Benefits
Leveraging the open-learning platform offers some key benefits:
- We provide technologies that equip content authors with the proper tools needed for creating learning materials of a quality and at a level expected from a course of this type and caliber.
- We provide teachers and students with a flexible learning environment that can be extended and adapted to fit the topic at hand.
- We provide auditable and tamper-proof evidence during the whole experience that can be used as claims of learning by students as well as claims of teaching by teachers.
- We generate data on the learning experience that can be used to adapt content and methodologies to provide the best results as well as provide valuable insight into how knowledge is attained and possibly how its retention and speed of uptake can be improved.
Differentiators
How open-learning is different from traditional MOOC platforms:
- Traditional MOOC platforms focus around operating and providing tools for a learning institution while open-learning puts its focus on the ecosystem. In an ecosystem several providers compete by providing products or services on an open market thus encouraging innovation and cost reduction.
- Designing a system to be distributed and open from the get-go focused us on flexibility, transparency and security when we designed open-learning which not only gives a robust platform that scales but also provides us with a the head room needed to extend the ecosystem in the future.
- Built on the shoulders of giants with simple solutions to gigantic problems. The key technologies used in open-learning were all originally purposed for more complex problems and have simply been re-purposed to fit our needs. This gives us confidence in the flexibility and scalability of the open-learning platform.
Commercial
Although the main goals of the open-learning initiative and the open-learning foundation are focused on improving how we learn and making that universally available we've designed the open-learning ecosystem to allow for a multitude of commercial 3rd party products and services.
For example:
- Virtual assets market place
- RealTime communication services
- Data analysis services
- Content curation and discovery services
- Adaptive learning and guidance services
- Personalised course plans and content products
Note that although we're the the original designers of the open-learning platform and we'd expect to have first-mover advantage in several of these examples, this is an open ecosystem so we expect that there will be several companies developing competing offerings as the ecosystem matures.
Next
A meeting to further discuss and explain how the open-learning platform can be leveraged by Singapore and explore how we can collaborate to implement and execute the proposal.
Things we will talk about:
- Introduction of the open-learning initiative, foundation and campus
- Technical overview of the open-learning platform and projects
- Discuss the proposal and how it will impact Singapore and its students
About the Open-Learning Initiative
The open-learning initiative aims to change how we teach and learn by leveraging technology throughout the entire learning experience. We do this by developing and deploying the software, services and best-practices needed for the first publicly owned and community operated learning ecosystem founded on the principles of open-knowledge.
About the Open-Learning Foundation
To support the open-learning initiative we’re creating a non-profit foundation that will undertake the technical challenges to implement the technology for the open-learning ecosystem as well as the taking on the initial financial and operational responsibilities to operate, fund and seed this ecosystem with developers, students and teachers.