Harvard-MIT's edX Brings Research Focus to Cloud Ed | Cloudline | Wired.com - 0 views
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While edX shares the common theme of scaling the online experience to very large groups, it adds an important component lacking from the various Stanford spin-offs, namely research.
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EdX partners will be doing more than putting content online, they will be studying how people learn in these environments in an effort to improve both classroom and online learning.
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According to this article, the most significant factor is not the scaling of online instruction (which isn't a new thing already) _but_ the ability for educators to study how people learn in various environments. Timely and accurate feedback is an essential component, not only for students, but also for educators, in improving the quality and relevancy of education for smaller groups. Personally, I think that the rise of massively open online courses (MOOCs) will ironically lead to a huge increase in the number of customized and localized courses tailored for niche sub-groups. Instead of seeing a huge dissemination of one-size-fits-all education, we will see an increasing diversity of different educational strategies, similiar to how the diversity of an ecosystem increases when its geographic size increases. It's a very exciting time for educators out there indeed...