A Free Online School

There. I said it. I let it out in the open. i just posted it in PTB as a comment in an entry about Sun Microsystems‘ chairman Scott McNealy vision about education which is congruent with mine. Read it his vision here and my comment here.
I dream of a free online school for grade school and high school in the Philippines. Eventually, this could take evolve into something bigger.. But let’s not get ahead of the dream shall we?

Ever since I’ve been introduced to eLearning and open-source, this idea has been bugging me. But I like the bugging part which drives me to think. It’s the “idea” part that I hate. I want it to become a reality.

My platform of choice is .

Open-source, free, evolving and widely supported. It’s fairly easy to post content and there is exelearning for offline content creation. There are other features and tools which make it an ideal platform but that may come on a later post.

As with every dream, there are several barriers to overcome. Lack of infrastructure and computers, engaging quality content, and questions like will it be acceptable to the public , hound the project. Not to mention the funding needed to build, maintain, support and expand. But if it was easy, we would not dream of it, would we?
These are daunting, real obstacles.But rather that focusing on why it can’t be done, I am focusing on why and how it can be done.
Here are several ideas, albeit disjointed:

1. Ask the input of Martin Dougiamas. He is the guy who started moddle and is still the prime mover of Moodle. I’m sure that he has ideas how to pull this off. He knows the right people to connect with. The Moodle developers and community will surely tag along with him. Hmmm, imagine what a good a word or two from him do.

2. Use a social, collaborative model, like Wikipedia, Digg or YouTube. I’m sure there is a workable model we can draw from their successes.

3. Make it a project/thesis of the education courses. While the mandatory actual teaching hours is essential for any teacher, it might do us some good if we can introduce our future educators to this new realm of learning. Think of this: If all 100 BS in Education graduating students of Philippine Normal University would create a one hour, one topic content, that would amount to 100 hours!

4. Ask ADB or World Bank to fund it. To do this, we need a business plan. I have a couple of people in mind from the Philippine eLearning Society (PeLS) who are working together to establish elearning in the country. They are adept in their respective fields and their share vision can take this project through the roof. (Can anybody help me draft the project/business plan please?)

5. Find “open-minded” people in DECS, CICT, DOST who will champion this initiative. The more people who are actively rooting for the success of this project, the better. Especially in the deparments which have a direct stake in this endeavor.
6. Find a good revenue model. Advertising, membership fees, sponsorships?

7. Ask for Volunteers. This could be the Gawad Kalinga of education. Volunteer your time, effort, resources, expertise. Instructional designers, teachers, coders, multimedia artists, testers, trainers, webhosting, etc.
8. This is the great equalizer. 24×7, cheap, renewable, easily upgradeable, a long-term solution to our education systems’ dilemma. It feels right, it is doable and non-partisan . Its success would translate to great economic benefit for our country and who wouldn’t like that?

What do you think?

Would you help make a dream come true?

Free eLearning

I love learning, especially if it’s free. Since I am a digital learner, my main source of learning is the internet - the treasure trove of free knowledge and information.

Next to website contents, e-books are my next best friend in the internet. Then came audio books. I also dabbled a bit with digital video which will gain more headway in two or three years.

Here are the link to free (e)Learning:

eBooks

Project Gutenberg - Public Domain Digital Library which contains text as well as recorded books and works.

Audiobooks:

Audiobooksforfree.com

Learnoutloud.com - Not everything is free but there are lots of free audio books that cannot be found elsewhere which ar available for free.

Academic

MIT Open CourseWare - MIT is making their courseware materials available to the public for free.

Other Open Coursware sites - Some other universities which are following MIT’s OpenCourseware initiative
UC Berkeley Webcast - Courses in audio format

Podcasts

StartupNation

Internet-based Business Mastery

Manager Tools

I’ll be adding more to the list.

How about you? Where do you get your free learning?

eLearning is Changing

According to Marc Rosenberg, author and expert. eLearning is evolving. He puts out 6

1. E-learning will become more than “e-training.”
2. E-learning will move to the workplace.
3. Blended learning will be redefined.
4. E-learning will be less course-centric and more knowledge-centric.
5. E-learning will adapt differently to different levels of mastery.
6. Technology will become a secondary issue.

I agree with him.

And on Item 2, for us less developed countries, may I add that it will become the great equalizer for education. eLearning is coming to the Rural Areas. The world is becoming flat and the playing field is continuously leveled.

On Item 6, with the rapid improvements in technology, this will cease to be an issue.

My personal take:

- eLearning will also lean towards developing different approaches for different learning styles and intelligences. One topic will have different version catering to the personality type of the learner.

- eLearning will take public education global - where countries pool their knowledge base and resources offered to all who want to have an education. Alliances of competing industries/companies will be formed to sahre this precious resource.

- The business model for eLearning will change. New avenues for revenue will replace the traditional content and system as the main source. Open-source will develop to a point that it become the de facto standard world wide.

Elearning for the Technology-Challenged

In the Philippines, only a small percentage of the population have access to a computer. Of these, only a small percentage have access to CD-ROMS and the internet.

If this is the case, building online courses would be useless for most households.

How do you reach out to the less-priveleged?

TV and Radio. But since radio and TV stations are costly, what choice do we have?

The VCD and to a cetain extent, the DVD.

I’ve been to many rural areas and have noticed that many households have TV sets and quite a number, VCD or DVD players.

VCDs as Elearning. Limited I admit, but a step forward.

As with movies, it should be entertaining: Infotainment.

Moodling: First steps: (L)AMP

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. These are the software you need to install in your system before you can run moodle. For Windows users like me (not by choice, mind you), we drop the Linux and we have AMP.

Actually, there is a download at www.moodle.org called EasyPHP Version 1.7. which takes care of installing AMP, as well as the setup instructions.

I got around to installing AMP with Easy PHP 1.7 easily. One beef I had though was that the buttons were not in English. This is a small detail that I could easily go around to. Besides, the instructions are pretty clear, up to this point.

When I got to around the setup, I got stumped when I was setting up the config.php file. I followed the instructions but had a message saying that i had an error in line 57. It was a bit frustrating. i got friend to look at it and at first, he was stumped. He made some changes and apparently, it was my folder name for EasyPHP. It was supposed to be EasyPHP 1.7, not just EasyPHP.

Did I find it easy installing. Yes it was easy.

Now the hard part comes. Preparing a course in moodle.