The mass creation of skills
The lack of skills has been previously mentioned as one key barriers to jobs creation and growth (http://daa.ec.europa.eu/content/more-manufactoring-general).
However, we are seeing today interesting initiatives that are educating thousands of people with state of the art skills at marginal costs.
For instance, Stanford University's course on artificial intelligence saw 25,000 users complete all required assignments and receive a formal certificate.
And there are some private ventures doing it as well, for profit. I myself have subscribed to www.codeacademy.com , which is helping people to learn to code. More than 400K people are participating to the Code Year initiative.
Needless to say, these are US initiatives.
What is happening in Europe on mass education?
I know some peer2peer initiatives like www.oilproject.org and schoolofeverything.com which are great but can't have the impact of the two projects above . Are there large-scale inspiring projects?
Should the EC promote such initiatives?
Group audience:
Comments
OER (Open educational content
OER (Open educational content).
On top of that, I would like to mention what is being done related to the availability to OER (Open educational content).
The availability of OER can help educators and educational institution to increase their effectiveness to design and deliver better course (via higher quality content, more up to date content, etc.), and in increase their productivity (via the re-usability of content).
For your information the European Commission is "sponsoring" some projects such as:
OpenScout http://www.openscout.net/
Very interesting thanks -
Very interesting thanks - link to OER?
But I was referring to examples of large-scale deployment, uptake and impact. Any such example?
A vary famous example is the
A vary famous example is the MIT Open Courseware Initiative http://ocw.mit.edu/
Other examples include Stanford, which make it available via Apple ITunesU.
The impact is not negligeable.
read for instance:
Stanford, Open University surpass 50M downloads on iTunes U
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/04/03/stanford_open_university_s...
You can find many information about OER:
* Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
* a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/open.educational.resources.oer
* OpenScout FB page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/OpenScout/143787052362296
etc.
Openness leads to Mass Skills
Openness leads to Mass Skills Adoption
Now this is an inspiring question, David. Indeed there are plenty of initiatives, sectors and practices that facilitate learning in scale.
My quick answer is that most of them are related to
- open education,
- e-learning,
- OER and Opencoursware, as Thierry mentioned,
- massive online open courses (MOOCs) and
- 3d virtual immersive environments.
I will provide more information, links and points of view in a separate post.
We will seek collaboration
We will seek collaboration with the largest enterprises in Europe to support especially the awareness campaign. Large forms like the telcos, computer manufacturer, insurance forms and others are on their way to invest in entering the mid market. Our initiative is a perfect door opener for them as well. And we look for financial aid from the EU Commission to help mid market companies with their initial investments to turn into digitally savvy businesses able to play in a globally interconnected world<a href="http://www.leather4sure.com/leather-jackets-2.html">big and tall dress for men and women</a>
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