Why Online Learning, A best Option to Choose?

VLE- LMS, The Best Option to Choose.

 

Need to do things differently … Stay Hungry Stay Foolish!

There is a lot of hype and talk about Sixth Sense & Google Glass these days, but do you all recollect the inspiration to all this? It is not so long ago that the first touch screen phone became available. No one ever imagined that a phone would, one day, be able to answer queries, making the personal computer obsolete. The belief behind the envisioning that technology would improve human lives was ahead of time, and much of this results from Steve Jobs. The Iphone was a mere thought of creativity, innovation, crafting a sensation in a niche market resulting in a willingness and, ultimately, a need to buy the product. This is all because of the ability that Steve Jobs had to create with passion something different.  It would have been no different if he had worked in education.   He took something that had been established for years yet, with creativity and lots of innovation, he did it differently.

Image edited on mac using iphoto

Steve Jobs may be gone, but we still have the opportunity to connect with his dots of ideologies, fearlessness, creativity and innovation. I suppose we have not forgotten his speech; time’s most famous graduation speech and favorite for many given at Stanford University, Connecting of Dots. I take this opportunity to write below a few of his ideologies and connect them to business and society.

Fear making mistakes

The basic thing that stops us finding practical and scalable solutions in the education system is fear; fear of making mistakes; fear of failure; where failure is not seen as a learning process but as a result. Fear of making mistakes pulls us back and stops us to exploring more. This fear doesn’t allow us to come out of our comfort zones. In education teachers, academic officers and IT tech fear that implementing new thing could endanger their jobs. Steve Jobs had an attitude that we all need (especially in our developing world) “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to all to admit them as quickly as possibly and get on with the improvements”. This is all we all need. We remember Steve Jobs success and achievements but how many of us know about his termination and his garage office and failures?

Motivation is Important

We, with rising competition, have become so materialistic that we only think about benefits. We have become so result driven that we do not value good intentions and reward motivation. Motivation is very important for any living being.  In education we are so much driven by outcomes and test scores that we fail to inject enough fuel to ignite the fire of creativity. We do not reward students on their efforts and creativity.  Rather we punish them on their failures, because of being ‘brave enough’ to try something different. This has unintentionally demoralized students, resulting in a hesitation when it comes to  trying something new.  They then conform to expectation and they cram up the exact reading advised by lecturers. Their imagination stops creating. Our education system needs to adopt Jobs’ model to motivate and bring imagination.  

Fear from Failures

Most of us may remember NeXT, a company established in 1985 by Steve Jobs when he was forced to leave Apple. We could see his visionary ability as he was the one who brought technology into classroom. It may have been way ahead of its time but now we see how right he was. He could not achieve much success from NeXT because of less financial benefits. This may have been because forward thinking was so ‘out there’ that many could not see his vision, or even match it, and others were unprepared to take the risk with him. He brought a revolutionary learning mechanism, an online university option. Steve Jobs brought NeXTcube workstation that inspired the first webserver. His innovation laid the foundation for first web based browser software. We would be missing the point of imagination, innovation and creativity if we talk about the financial success NeXt had.  It could not be the STAR of the matrix simply because of the reasons mentioned above.

The Paradigm Shift

We actually engage in a very myopic view of education by just focusing on the results and outcomes. We are missing the opportunity to innovate. It is very sad that now, after nearly 30 years, there are still institution have not adopted an online learning tool for their student development. It is not only teachers, and Institutions, who should be blamed but also the education system, where they engage teachers in more administrative tasks than improving training skills and learning need. A sincere shift is required. 

We must think what are we giving back to the society.  What new things could we engage in?  Where can we be the trendsetter? This is what Steve Jobs did. In 1995 when the first cell phone was launched no one dreamt of the revolutions like biometric screen, fingerprint, motion, senses, genius technology, and a complete desktop computer in a phone. Steve Jobs thought of this and he wanted to give it to the people. He gave us the technology to enable us to search the nearest store faster than it took to reboot an hibernation laptop.; now all you do is browse from your talking device, i.e, your cell phone, a complete communication device. It was Steve Jobs’ ideology and imagination that laid the foundation and inspired the concept of Google Glass or Sixth Sense or other such devices.

Let’s connect the dots and do things differently!