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The Revolution of Online Learning – Daphne Koller

In this video, Professor Daphne Koller discusses the importance of online learning and introduces, among other things, the difficulty of the right to schooling in South Africa, where education and learning are certainly not readily available. Koller also explains the high costs of higher education in countries where this is more readily available. Costs have nearly doubled since 1985, making education unaffordable for many people.

Based on this, Koller and Co-founder of Coursera, Andrew Ng, have made courses from top universities available online for free. This is as an act of service, but also to investigate how people learn best.

The professor brings astonishing results: The online courses were supplied by three major Stanford classes, each of which had the capacity of 100,000 people, or more. The same course offered at the university has a capacity of 400. If Andrew were to reach the same target group in a physical classroom, as in an online course, he would have to teach the same material for 250 years. Learn more about why you should invest in online courses here:

Let’s use video to reinvent education – Sal Khan

Educator and entrepreneur Salman Khan, also known as Sal Khan, talks about how and why he created Khan Academy. The academy consists of informative videos in several disciplines, but started as a mathematics-only platform.

The journey began in 2004 when he created video maths tutorials for his cousins. He then released some of the videos publicly, before the engagement around the videos increased. Twelve years later, Khan had his own company, with more than 42 million registered users from 190 countries.

Khan explains how to give students and course participants some kind of opposite teaching using video teaching in the video below:

Sugata Mitra – Build a school in the cloud

Professor of educational technology, Suga Mitra, has a slightly different angle on how learning should take place, and wonders how future learning will be. He believes schools as we know them today are outdated and that we may not need to go to school if we can look up topics in minutes. With his “Hole in the wall” experiment, he has proven how children can explore and learn from each other using a machine, resources and guidance from the cloud.

He says, among other things: “We need to look at learning as a product of self-organizing education. If you allow the educational process to be self-organizing, learning occurs. It’s not about making learning happen, but allowing learning to happen”.

Watch Mitra’s inspirational lecture on self-organized learning environments here: