Eclectic Technology

If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line or even...

The next question that is asked is "What's been the single biggest innovation in education?

Anant Agarwal, the head of edX (MIT/Harvard joint "effort to stream a college eduation over the web, free, to anyone who wants one."

How would this change education? This post explores this issue looking at how online courses have the potential to disrupt education and what the long term impact may be.

We've all been told of the importance of education and how education leads to a better life. But it's not only our lives that are impacted, but the lives of those around us change as well. Check out this infographic which provides information on how higher education impacts employment, lifelong earnings, health and much more. 

Prof. James R. Stone argues that the U.S. needs to organize learning opportunities to provide rigorous, world-class technical education to the many disengaged youth now suffering through ever-increasing academic requirements.

Many now question the value of attending college and others believe it is necessary. This article is an excerpt from a book called "Better Than College" and details six propositions to consider as make this choice, including:

* College is just too expensive

* Higher education and college are not the same thing

*You can give yourself a higher education without college

Take time to read this article and you may rethink how you view "higher education". 

If Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, needed a higher education, he certainly would sign up for edX, the new 60 million dollar, collaborative learning platform proposed by Harvard and MIT.

"edX, is taking a different approach to changing the world through online education – they are going to study it and learn from it as they try to change it."

Active learning may overthrow the style of teaching that has ruled universities for 600 years. If this is true for universities might it also apply to secondary schools? Eric Mazur, a professor at Harvard, shares his story of how discovered that his success as a teacher “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.”