WGU was a customer when I was at Learning Objects, they always impressed me visionary and outcome oriented. glad to hear a positive anecdote more than 10 years later.
I think many people have very positive experiences and data, at scale, speaking to the kind of success Edtech can have.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
I saw a blog post a few years ago about a Canadian dude getting an exception to go to WGU. You might just email WGU and ask if you can get an exception.
VSerge|1 year ago
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
Here's a 5 minutes vid the center for Game Science published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdrraeJyhoQ Some numbers here: https://dragonbox.com/about/algebra-challenge
cwoolfe|1 year ago
quacksilver|1 year ago
tombert|1 year ago
https://miguelrochefort.com/blog/cs-degree/
jackbravo|1 year ago
BJones12|1 year ago