MOOCs and Online Education for the Greater Good

World Education University

A university that grants a degree at no cost, a free education. You must be dreaming right? Nope, not if the World Education University has anything to say about it. It is introducing a new massively open online course (MOOC) business model with a twist bound to disrupt higher education. The leaders at the new, tuition-free university come from low income backgrounds and pride themselves on providing a quality education.

WEU is based out of Palm Springs and opened on 1 December, 2012.

WEU is unlike most other universities in that it focuses on training its students to become “an army of humanitarians". “Right up front, we require [that students] agree to an ‘I will give back’ pledge,” Scott Hines, one of the founder of WEU, said. “It’s very short, simple, and broad, and says you’ll take this gift of free education and agree to do good work with it.” Hines said that this “pay it forward” mission is ingrained into every course of study.

It has seven schools or departments: Education, Psychology, Engineering, Health Sciences, Legal Studies, and Business.

The university operates as a degree-granting university through third-party evaluations and exams at Excelsior College in Albany, New York that range from $40 to $400.

Accreditation

Some may ask about the ability to verify students and academic honesty in the completion of exams for credit. WEU plans to use keystroke authentication technology, which will eventually move to full facial recognition.

Personally, I feel accreditation bodies could be a thing of the past, maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually. As with everything else, the Internet is slowly but surely exerting its influence on education.

This is especially apparent in the programming world where coders and Web developers are picking up their skills in open source forums and Code Academy. MOOC's were a hot trending topic in 2012 and looks set to gain even more pace.

Will accreditation still be the marker of skill and knowledge that employers are looking for?

 

"Official education" that is certified with a qualification aside, there are tons of information and learning out there on the internet that can be used to improve yourself. Ultimately, isn't our goal in partaking in education to learn and to make ourselves better human beings? With that said, here are some site with great learning opportunities. They are all FREE, and setup by people who want to make the world a better place.

http://www.noexcuselist.com/ - A huge range of topics from cooking to coding

http://documentaryheaven.com/ - Documentaries to watch online

http://stackexchange.com/sites# - Group of question and answer websites on topics in many different fields

http://lifehackninja.com/how-to-learn-a-language-using-the-internet/ - Guide on learning languages online

https://www.khanacademy.org/ - Educational organization. The website supplies a free online collection of micro lectures stored on YouTube teaching a broad range of school subjects

http://www.codecademy.com/ - Online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in programming languages like Python, JavaScript, and Ruby, as well as markup languages including HTML and CSS.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Free e-books on a broad number of subjects, also has foreign language book translated to english

 

Spread the awesomeness people. Let's work towards a world without retards!

 

Netflix - TV and Movies at Your Fingertips

Piracy is a commonly debated topic among Internet users. The rights and wrongs, the pros and cons. Many pirates I know (not being one myself, obviously), have said they would buy the content that they download, if it were as readily and easily available as the files they download on pirate websites. Well pirates, look no further than Netflix.

It is an American provider of on-demand Internet streaming media available to both North and South America, the Caribbean, United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. Yes, I am talking about a product that is not available in my own country, Singapore. It is a pity, but it is a shining example of good e-business. 

an easy to use, clean interface

                               

Netflix was founded in 1997 in Scotts Valley, California by Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings. It introduced the monthly subscription concept in September 1999, but then dropped the single-rental model in early 2000. Since that time the company has built its reputation on the business model of flat-fee unlimited rentals without due dates, late fees, shipping and handling fees, or per title rental fees.

 

Netflix initiated an initial public offering (IPO) on May 29, 2002, selling 5.5 million shares of common stock at the price of US $15.00 per share. On June 14, 2002, the company sold an additional 825,000 shares of common stock at the same price. After incurring substantial losses during its first few years, Netflix posted its first profit during fiscal year 2003, earning US $6.5 million profit on revenues of US $272 million.

It even has its own awards ceremony, The Flixies.

These categories make wayyyy more sense for the typical TV viewer

    

Netflix doesn't only have the most popular serials and movies. Their selection is extremely broad. Being digital has its perks, and its selection is definitely wider than most, if not all physical shops like HMV. It even provides a platform for independent films to be sold, selling and distributing them through a division called Red Envelope Entertainment. Recently, it even debuted original content on its website. The hour-long political drama House of Cards debuted in February 2013, it was widely praised and well received.

It has had its ups and downs, but is still going strong today, and long may it continue to be an example to others who are afraid their content will get pirated. Don't pursue the pirates, just put your stuff on Netflix.

 

Facebook - In Decline?

As it was with Friendster and MySpace, after every wildly successful period, comes the inevitable decline of a site. Queue Facebook users leaving by the millions. The social network has very little room to grow in a market that is already highly saturated. The question for Facebook executive Mark Zuckerberg is how steep a slide is the hill that Facebook is on, and how it can be halted, rather than improved.

As we can see from the graph above, Facebook has had unprecedented growth in the past few years. Latest statistics tell a different story though, below is a chart of the 10 countries that have lost the most users in the month of January 2013.

It remains to be seen whether this is a mere blip or a trend that will continue. Either way Facebook feels the urgent need to improve their service and to keep competitors at bay, especially after it's disastrous initial public offering last year.

Zuckerberg thusly announced the "Graph Search" service on Facebook in January this year, as the first major product since the company's IPO last May. Zuckerberg described it as Facebook's "third pillar", after the newsfeed and timeline. It allows people to get information on Facebook by acting as a search engine. The function will initially let users search four categories – people, places, photos, interests – and gradually expand to cover all content. Initially it will be a limited rollout, but it is definitely something that aims to compete with Google's search engine. Zuckerberg describing it as something that could be a service all on its own. It encourages users to add more friends more quickly, and if users are active in their social network and expanding it, they will more likely stay active on Facebook.

Graph Search has an interesting premise, and is likely to provide the site with a much needed injection of new content. I believe that it is merely delaying the inevitable, as a company like Facebook can only be successful to a point. This is not to belittle its achievements but people get bored, and even faster now in our fast-paced world, where there are so many things to do. Facebook, enjoy your run while it lasts.