This is an animated version of a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.
Prologue For those who have been following trends in higher education, the term MOOCs (pronunciation: muk) is not foreign anymore but for some people it is still kind of clouded in mystery. A simple google search using ‘MOOC’ as a keyword turned up 2.4 million hits and when searched using the full acronym ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ it gave a massive 24 million hits! Mind-boggling indeed! If the number of hits can be used as a simple measure of popularity then perhaps we can surmise that MOOCs is a phenomenon that have a potential to disrupt the education world and will bring about significant impact on achieving “ Education for All ” movement of the United Nation. This article is my attempt to deciphering and demystifying MOOCs. Note that this is my personal view on MOOCs (not that of USM or CDAE) and I must say that I’m inclined towards supporting it because I liked its underlying philosophy. That said, I'm not a MOOCs cheerleader or its fan boy — I keep an open mind on this ev...
Everyone is reflecting...Me? Well, 2015 has been an interesting year. Interesting indeed! I always enjoy being in the circle of academics and work together with them. They are all great people...some with their ego 😊 . The academic world is always very exciting. Every day is different. There's no dull moment. No routine. We don't make much money like those people in the business world (but good if the government would revise our salary scheme hi hi). We pride ourselves to take on the responsibility to nurture the future nation builders. We are shaping the young mind that would become the potential leaders of the future. A lot of people looking at Malaysian Higher Education and simply judging the quality of our university by the so-called world ranking. It's not that simple. As for next year, well, the economy doesn't look very promising. Now academics have more things to think about, apart from teaching (I want to repeat, teaching, teaching, teaching), research, super...
I would like to share an interesting fact: According to a survey of 2,000 people conducted by Microsoft Corp in Canada, an average human attention span is 9 seconds; the goldfish has an attention span of 8 seconds! The survey also showed that the average attention span of humans has fallen from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight seconds. Here’s another fact: According to a study by MarketingProfs, the new millennials cannot think more than 140 characters at a stretch! Maybe this is the reason why Twitter limits the tweet to 140 characters only. These findings are significant and perhaps worrying especially for educators that have to deal with the millennial generation in their classroom. Imagine the challenge to hold the attention of students (or participants in a training environment) in one hour face-to-face class. The challenge is even more profound for online courses. We have to accept the fact that we are living in the world full of distraction. What kind of distraction? The smart de...
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