Bill Gates on the future of education

Gates talked a lot about the issue throughout the Q&A session, and his hypothesis is simple: Education in the United States is broken — it has the highest higher-education dropout rate among rich countries — and MOOCs can help fix it. In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested a lot of money into the education field (to the chagrin of some experts), including strong support of Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, startups such as the Khan Academy. (source infra)

Bill Gates on the future of education, programming and just about everything else — Tech News and Analysis: "But, Gates acknowledged, we’re also a way out from online education achieving its full potential. We need to develop better understanding of what makes a good online course (“just sticking a camera in front of someone … who has a captive audience [won't cut it]“) and how to replicate non-lecture experiences like lab time and study groups. We also need to figure out how to supplement the cognitive and social development that comes along with attending school in person (although, he noted, MOOCs might also be able to help teachers focus on these things).

“We’re at the beginning of something really quite profound,” Gates said, “even though the temptation to oversimplify it is really quite great.”"

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