Education Must Move to the Cloud

[Arthur Hanson]

If the US or any other country/company wants to stay on top must move their education/training to the cloud. Not leveraging your best training talent to its maximum is a tremendous waste of resources, both instructors and students. If EDA can be moved to the cloud, there is no reason education/training can't be moved to the cloud. This allows the maximum leverage for instruction and maximum use of time and effort for students/employees. This avoids waste on both sides and allows updating on the fly in the very fast and accelerating world we live in. With robotic and virtual labs there is no area that can't be handled online. Also with this model you can use adaptive education that matches each individuals learning style, further speeding up and improving the process. Learning something right the first time, cuts down learning something wrong, which from studies increases learning time in that particular area by 400%(3 times to unlearn it and once to ln it right). Also it allows updates on the fly and allows people to get to use to the platforms they will be using in their work, this applies to instructors and students. We are entering a new age and those that adapt the best will win. This will obvious require creative destruction of the obsolete and inefficient models of the past that have almost no leverage of valuable resources. We must convey this vision for many will not be able to accept how quickly the "Great Acceleration" is making the methods of the past very inefficient and obsolete. Selling the future will require having an entire organization truly accept a whole new world and fully understand the benefits that they and their organization will benefit from. It allows the very best leverage of instructors and students and creates an efficient mind set that is critical to any organization that is the leader. EDA moving to the cloud shows the power of the cloud model and the different world we are entering. Salesforce has also done this with their Trailhead program. Those that adapt will prosper and those that don't will suffer.

The cloud and the platforms built around it are literally radically changing every social and business structure we have been used to dealing with and education will be no exception. Our entrenched educational systems that are horribly expensive in time and resources will have to adapt or die like has happened in many other areas and is happening as you read this. This is a great adventure and one should embrace this future for if you don't make the choices and options others will and may not have your best interests at heart. Automation of many types has been coming for over a century, just the speed is now picking up very dramatically and mostly thanks to the semi sector which is the foundation of the tech sector.

The semi/nanotech sector has embraced faster, better, cheaper more than any other field and has embraced this ethos. Now is the time to spread it to other areas for the great benefits it can bring society and the world as a whole to deal with the many challenges before us. This is a key part of facing even what was considered impossible and realizing it is possible.

All this is just a whole new set of very powerful tools that will require a different mind set by instructors of all types. Those that master it will quickly separate themselves that those that don't, who like in any technological transformation will leave those that don't behind to function in an increasingly smaller world that will fall farther and farther behind as progress rolls past them.

 

[Tanj]

But, what does this mean? The quality and effectiveness of computer training is often poor, and the critical factors have to do with content creation and the versatility in tracking user variability. If only as much resource could be put into a curriculam as goes into a game, where games these days have enormous flexibility to adapt to the whims and sequence variations between users.

Putting that on the cloud makes sense only because that is the default delivery mechanism for all new content. But the enabler we are waiting for is the content, not the computer.

 

[Arthur Hanson]

But, what does this mean? The quality and effectiveness of computer training is often poor, and the critical factors have to do with content creation and the versatility in tracking user variability. If only as much resource could be put into a curriculam as goes into a game, where games these days have enormous flexibility to adapt to the whims and sequence variations between users.

Putting that on the cloud makes sense only because that is the default delivery mechanism for all new content. But the enabler we are waiting for is the content, not the computer.

Putting material from the very best professors and instructors would leverage their talent massively, instead of teaching a privileged few. They could be helped in this process by teams specialized in converting class room teaching to online teaching. This would allow the best of the best to further refine and tweak their teaching and having real time feedback that could help them improve their skills even more. It could also be set up so students could improve their online collaboration and be supplemented by live instruction. Even if it allowed a multiplier of just five, that would lower the cost and increase the reach dramatically. Also any education put in adaptive form will improve the results of any professor or teacher. This would have to be done by a separate team, but would leverage even the best of the best and improve education/training even more. The standard classroom/lab is not obsolete, but will have a much smaller place in the future of education/training due to its high cost and limited on the fly ability to adapt due to feedback limited by user base size. Automated and semiautomated education will prove totally superior in most respects when the ecosystem is fully developed.

 

[clhende]

I think that for the next decade or so, there will be both face-to-face as well as online education. While bandwidth and software is improving to give users a better experience, we're still a ways off from providing a compelling online experience.

Speaking of content, we have content at Semitracks that is online already. Perhaps it may not be sufficient yet, as many of you have been in the semiconductor industry for years. But for new engineers to the industry, this can be a great way to learn some of the basic ideas needed to be successful.

 

[cpetras]

Here's an example of an online offering 26 Reasons to Adopt the Ron Paul Curriculum Today (Not Next Term) . . . and 4 Reasons Not To