Business Speech INAG 110Jorge Montero VallejoRevolutionizing
Education: MOOCs and other free online resourcesGeneral Purpose: To
inform about free online educational resources.Specific Purpose: To
describe and explore new resources that the current progress in
technology and intercommunication is allowing us to have: the
Massive Open Online Courses and other free websites for tutorial
videos.Thesis: Nowadays just by having connection to the Internet
we can have access to massive amounts of quality educational
materials, video lectures, free courses and more; and all these
things could be of great importance even for our personal formation
and orientation.Audience: Parents with children and kids being
educatedI.- IntroductionA. Attention getter: I would like to invite
you to close your eyes, to forget everything. Imagine that somehow
you are now a new person, that you are going to start from zero
again, that you are happy and have all the enthusiasm to start
anything. Now a voice comes to your minds and asks WHAT WOULD YOU
LIKE TO LEARN? Doesnt this sound like paradise or like a perfect
world? Since always, learning and education have been topics linked
to obstacles, difficulties, and hard work. Now, with the progress
of technology learning anything can be possible, it is up to us.
And this is for real!B. Reason to listen: And if it is for real, we
should know how this is possible! In this presentation I will teach
you, parents, how to have access to these powerful sources of
knowledge and how this can be fruitful both for you and your kids
in school. Never is late to study and learn something new, to find
help when being desperate in college and taking a course with a
horrible instructor, to gain knowledge even if you are thousands of
kilometers from universities. Now its not only not late, but also
its not impossible.C. Credibility: The sources that I am using for
this presentation are websites with purely educational purposes and
even some of them may already be known by some of you. But the most
important source of credibility besides that it's my personal
experience as someone who has used these resources and got actual
benefits from them.D. Overview of steps: In this presentation we
will discover what new ways of learning are available today, how
big their importance can be and towards the last part we will visit
some very useful websites to see how they work and their common
structures.II.- Body1. What type of platforms and/or interfaces
will I tell you about today? a) The MOOCs (Massive Open Online
Courses): This is the most popular platform for online education
and probably the most useful too. The websites conducting the
courses offered here work in partnership with big universities
around the world (from Harvard and MIT to the University of Tokyo
and The National Autonomous University of Mexico). They offer
actual courses in a lot of different subjects, and by that I mean
that they present an actual structure for every course. You find a
syllabus, a table of content, quizzes, tests, organized and divided
video lectures, and some more things also given in a college
course. But the difference now is that they are for free, you only
need to create an account and thats it! If you want a certification
of completion for a course, you would then need to pay a symbolical
amount of money. Nowadays, according to a massive study realized at
Harvard and MIT, coursera has more than 12 million registered
students with an average of 75 000 students registering for every
new released courseb) Free Online Video Lectures: this is a more
informal platform given by actual high school teachers, tutors and
even college professors. These are mostly used to complement the
learning taking place in a physical or in-person classroom, and can
be found in YouTube channels or playlists, or they might have their
own websites. Students use them to have a help in understanding the
concepts taught in their classes. If you go to any college class
and ask about tutorial videos, you will find that about a 90% of
them use them. In fact, it is very probable that your own kids even
in high school use them. The sooner we are aware of these
resources, the better for our kids.2. And what can we get from
this? a) Achieving of new skills in a open and free way. Lets first
talk about the most immediate benefits of these resources. Having
an unrestricted access to an online education is an innovative way
of promoting the idea of an equal and free education to everybody
but now at higher levels. An article published by The Boston Globe
compiled several testimonies from people telling their stories
about how these available courses improved their life conditions
and skills. And also since these courses are carried out by very
talented educators or by important educational institutions, the
standards for a quality education are not only being placed at a
higher positions, but also lots of boys and girls around the
country (guys at middle and high schools, even in elementary
schools) are finding effective ways to learn by visiting these
websites where they are understanding things better and at their
own paces.b) The online courses as vocational guides: taking an
open online course may help our kids figure out what career they
should follow. Most MOOCs offered online dont require you to have
advanced knowledge or formation in any area, unless they belong to
a specific sequence or series. This eliminates most of your
restrictions to the courses and enables you to have an actual
experience at no cost and with no compromises. This experience may
be fundamental in the path of figuring out what career or
profession our sons or daughters may follow because they will have
actual experiences with the topics, applications, and real material
of the subject they might want to explore. In fact, according to an
article published by the Harvard Gazette, most students registering
for a MOOC do it just for curiosity and because they just want to
try the material.3. Short visits to some popular websites: a)
Coursera.com and edx.org are the two most famous MOOCs websites
because of the massive amount of offered courses and their quality
(technical aspects): Coursera.com: Coursera appeared in 2012 and it
was founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, both from Stanford
University. We will explore in class one course offered by this
website to have an idea of the typical structure of this new
educational interface. EdX.org: It was originally founded by MIT in
cooperation with Harvard University, but they both are currently
also collaborating with coursera. It also appeared in 2012. We will
also briefly explore this website in class.b) One can actually find
complete playlists on specific topics for every course (specially
in science and mathematics) on YouTube.com but we will explore two
especial sources of tutorial videos that have their own websites:
FlippingPhysics.com: this is a very cool website where you can
learn about all the topics in physics, from very essential physics
to the more complex topics in Calculus-based physics. The general
purpose of this site is to offer a platform for flipped classrooms.
I have used this website for my physics classes and it has helped
me a lot. LearnersTV.com: this is a website with lots of links to
video lectures for every possible course, from philosophy and
English literature to Pharmacology and Life Sciences. It also
offers access to study notes and educational animations.III.-
ConclusionOverview: Today in this presentation we learned about the
latest online education sources that are now available for our
personal use (mostly at no cost), we have seen the two most popular
platforms, we have also discussed about what uses can we give to
these learning tools in terms of formation and guidance, and
finally we also explored some of this popular websites to see how
interactive and easy to use they are.Closing statement: We might
not be very conscious of what we have just seen but this is more
than just a new way of learning. What we have seen today is an
actual new revolution for education, a radical change of our
current system, or maybe just the invention of a new one. But the
implications of this innovation are not only technological or
educational, this is also something of great social importance and
impact for our always-developing society. Coursera and EdX are
putting quality materials not only to our disposition, but also to
that of thousands of other people around the globe. This is a great
proof of how technology and communication can work hand in hand for
the progress and innovation of the world. I hope you, parents,
enjoyed this presentation and guided tour today.
References:Ho, Andrew, and Isaac Chuang. "Massive Study on
MOOCs." Harvard Gazette. Harvard University, 1 Apr. 2015. Web. 25
Apr. 2015. ."MOOCs: Ensuring Equal Access to Education for All -
The Boston Globe." BostonGlobe.com. The Boston Globe, 10 Apr. 2015.
Web. 25 Apr. 2015. ."How MOOCs Are Taking Local Knowledge Global."
Knowledge Wharton. University of Pennsylvania, 17 Apr. 2015. Web.
25 Apr. 2015. .List of available websites for these purposes:
Edx.org KhanAcademy.com Coursera.com Udacity.com NovoEd.com
MathTV.com
Futurelearn.com Flippingphysics.com LearnersTV.com iTunes U
(Apple application) MIT OpenCourseware
Open Yale Courses Academicearth.org Freevideolectures.com
