Increasing The Competitiveness of Arabic Language: Some Unusual Alternatives
Arab visitors to the small Mediterranean island nation of Malta may hear a familiar language. Maltese is derived from the language of the Fatimid Empire that ruled south Italy from the ninth through twelfth centuries. Maltese is written in the Latin script and has many imported words, but its grammar is North African Arabic. It […]
Today’s World Needs a New Kind of Literacy: Emotional Literacy
As parents in a hyper-competitive world, we are on a constant quest to give our children an edge. We want to equip our kids with EVERY possible skillset mentioned in the titanic guide on achieving success in the 21st century. But this mission is doing more harm than we realize. Our children are reeling under […]
Your Education…is Live: There is a Time for Real-time Online Teaching
Distance education used to include synchronous teaching. China’s Radio and Television university was a live broadcast system, using radio and television to reach students at diverse locations. In 2015, the Open University system enrolled 3,503,872 students. In some other places such as Saudi Arabia, where gender differences may pose cultural challenges for teachers and students to […]
Promising Practices in Equity and Project-Based Learning
One-third of American workers are now engaged in some kind of freelancing, or project-based, work. Our lives are increasingly being organized around gigs, short term or longer term projects. Even if young people decide against joining the gig economy and land long term jobs with stable employment, they are likely to do most of their work in projects. […]
Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives: the Best Way to Tackle Education Quality?
This article is part of a series on innovative solutions to tackle the main challenges of Latin American education (part 6 of 7). Across Latin America, there is broad agreement on the region’s education challenges. Everyone from corporations to unions point to poor early childhood development, high school dropout rates, worryingly low student performance even as enrollment rises, reduced […]
Implementing a Personalized Learning Environment
This article is part of a series on personalized learning (part 6 of 6). Personalised Learning has been defined with different shades of meaning by different theoreticians and implemented by researchers for well over a century. Early examples include the work of Helen Parkhurst and the Dalton Plan, implemented in some US schools from 1914 onwards, which […]
The Buffet of Learning: Design for Personalized Learning
This article is part of a series on personalized learning (part 5 of 6). Other than the technological tools that are now easily available, what is exactly personal about personalized learning? I have heard about iterations of self-directed learning, differentiated learning, and individualized learning. These terms, overlapping at times, distinguish in time (for instance, having accelerated learning […]
Minerva’s Lessons for Latin America
Today, the discussion around innovation is a serious matter. At the heart of the debate lies the question of scale: how to spread what really works? Regarding higher education, the Minerva Schools at KGI is one that deserves some attention. Let’s take a closer look at its innovative approach, and how the big idea can be […]
You Get What You Measure: Assessing Personalized Learning
This article is part of a series on personalized learning (part 3 of 6). “What you measure is what you get”, Kaplan and Norton wrote in their seminal article about the Balanced Scorecard for Harvard Business Review in 1992. In designing personalized education, we risk starting from the wrong end, by focusing on the technologies to use, […]
Can Technology Fix Personalized Learning?
This article is part of a series on personalized learning (part 2 of 6). Educational professor Dr. Don Ely once famously asked: “If technology is the answer, what is the question?” With renewed interest in personalized learning, we should be cautious of the techno-centric tendency. In China, billions of dollars are being pumped into various online learning […]