“The future is about blending,” she says. “Our online learning courses are traditional, computer-based courses, as you would expect, but we have what we call walk-in clinics. So if someone wants to chat through an issue, they can find a locally-based instructor, pop in, ask questions, get the human interaction.”
Via: BBC News: The millionaire couple who could teach you a thing or two
It’s easy to take online learning for granted, whether it’s finding how to do something on YouTube or following a free online course from a university.
When educationalists write about Moocs – massive open online courses – it is often about the technical achievement of being able to deliver chunks of higher education courses to millions of online learners. Or else it’s about the economics of universities taking their wares to a wider audience or delivering extra content for their existing students.
But Moocs – a few years after the initial hype about these digital courses – are now teaching people who would otherwise be unable to access lessons.
More than half of employers fear they will not be able to recruit enough high-skilled workers, according to a survey by the CBI. The employers’ organisation is warning that a skills shortage is ‘threatening to starve economic growth’.
“Firms are facing a skills emergency now,” said CBI deputy director-general Katja Hall.
“It’s all about understanding what students do at school and how to solve complicated problems using the latest methods,” said Nur Hidayah Ismail, the principal at Genius Young Minds tutorial centre. As a previous school teacher in a state school, parents kept asking me for help to coach them. I saw there was an urgency because they don’t know how to coach their child at home,” she added. “When I resigned I thought I needed to help as parents were out of touch with the syllabus.”
Read more: BBC News: ‘Back to school’ for parents in Singapore
The biggest ever global school rankings have been published, with Asian countries in the top five places and African countries at the bottom. Singapore heads the table, followed by Hong Kong, with Ghana at the bottom. The UK is in 20th place, among higher achieving European countries, with the US in 28th.
In Latin America, the regional rankings of these international tests taken by 15 year olds in maths, reading and science, are headed by diminutive Chile, ahead of economic powerhouses like Brazil and Mexico. But most countries remain off the ranking completely.
Read the full article here: Latin America’s wake-up call on global school tests | BBC News
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