centreforelearning

Find What You Actually Want to Learn About First things first, you need to figure out what you're actually interested in.

Figure Out How You Learn Best Full sizeWe all learn a little differently, and while we're fans of learning by doing, you can't always do that with everything.

Learn By Doing Whenever Possible Full sizeIn most cases you're going to learn best by doing. That means practicing programming by actually making a program or learning a new language by speaking it. If you're having trouble getting over the learning hump and sticking with it, you might simply need to provide better context for the process.

You can prepare a post and schedule it to appear later by adding a date and time in the future before you post it. You can schedule a post up to 6 months in advance in 10-minute intervals.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

What new opportunities do you see for apps in the developing world? Nobody focuses on the problem of creating apps for somebody whose monthly income is $200. Those people are not part of the computer age or the Internet age; most of them are not literate. So we run app competitions in India to try to get people thinking from that perspective. The winner of our last competition was a group of students who designed a commerce app for “fruit walas,” the guys who run around with carts selling fruits and vegetables. These students created a graphically intuitive way of running a small vegetable business. There are something like five million fruit walas in India, so if you had an app for them, there could be a lot of money to be made.

As MOOCs cast their eye to the developing world, very minor tweaks matter a great deal, such as the ability to allow students to download, rather than only stream course videos. But even more major ones are coming, including edX’s plans to start open-sourcing its platform in the next few months, which could allow even more universities to post online courses, and software programmers around the world to experiment with customized interfaces.

“We need to make sure we are making tools that make it easy to create new content, so it’s not only someone at MIT or Stanford who creates.” Relevance, as he notes, is one of the biggest motivators for students.

One of the major challenges for MOOCs—which so far mostly come from U.S. universities—is to tailor the content of courses to a diverse worldwide audience with any number of combinations of language, educational, motivational, and cultural backgrounds. Critics fear the rise of big box education from only a few elite institutions in Western nations, and worry these may not fit the different learning styles in different nations.

Recent efforts by organizations like Coursera, edX, Udacity and Khan Academy have produced thousands of educational videos logging hundreds of millions of views in their attempt to make learning freely available to the masses. While the presentation style of the videos varies depending on the author, they all share a common drawback: videos are time-consuming to produce and cannot be easily modified after release. With that in mind, we present VidWiki, an online platform to leverage the massive numbers of online students viewing videos to iteratively improve video presentation quality and content, similar to other crowdsourced information projects like Wikipedia. Through the platform, users annotate videos by overlaying content on top of the video, lifting the burden on the instructor to update and refine content.