Business Speech INAG 110Jorge Montero Vallejo

Revolutionizing Education:

MOOCs and other free online resources

General Purpose: To inform about free online educational resources.
Specific Purpose: To describe and explore new resources that the current
progress in technology and intercommunication is allowing us to have: the
Massive Open Online Courses and other free websites for tutorial videos.
Thesis: Nowadays just by having connection to the Internet we can have
access to massive amounts of quality educational materials, video lectures,
free courses and more; and all these things could be of great importance
even for our personal formation and orientation.
Audience: Parents with children and kids being educated
I.- Introduction
A. Attention getter: I would like to invite you to close your eyes, to
forget everything. Imagine that somehow you are now a new person, that
you are going to start from zero again, that you are happy and have all
the enthusiasm to start anything. Now a voice comes to your minds and
asks WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN? Doesnt this sound like paradise
or like a perfect world? Since always, learning and education have been
topics linked to obstacles, difficulties, and hard work. Now, with the
progress of technology learning anything can be possible, it is up to us.
And this is for real!
B. Reason to listen: And if it is for real, we should know how this is
possible! In this presentation I will teach you, parents, how to have access
to these powerful sources of knowledge and how this can be fruitful both
for you and your kids in school. Never is late to study and learn
something new, to find help when being desperate in college and taking a
course with a horrible instructor, to gain knowledge even if you are
thousands of kilometers from universities. Now its not only not late, but
also its not impossible.
C. Credibility: The sources that I am using for this presentation are
websites with purely educational purposes and even some of them may
already be known by some of you. But the most important source of
credibility besides that it's my personal experience as someone who has
used these resources and got actual benefits from them.
D. Overview of steps: In this presentation we will discover what new
ways of learning are available today, how big their importance can be and
towards the last part we will visit some very useful websites to see how
they work and their common structures.
II.- Body
1.
What type of platforms and/or interfaces will I tell you
about today?
a)
The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses): This is the most
popular platform for online education and probably the most useful too.
The websites conducting the courses offered here work
in partnership with big universities around the world (from Harvard and
MIT to the University of Tokyo and The National Autonomous University
of Mexico). They offer actual courses in a lot of different subjects, and
by that I mean that they present an actual structure for every course.
You find a syllabus, a table of content, quizzes, tests, organized and
divided video lectures, and some more things also given in a college
course. But the difference now is that they are for free, you only need

Business Speech INAG 110Jorge Montero Vallejo

to create an account and thats it! If you want a certification of
completion for a course, you would then need to pay a symbolical
amount of money.
Nowadays, according to a massive study realized at
Harvard and MIT, coursera has more than 12 million registered
students with an average of 75 000 students registering for every new
released course
b)
Free Online Video Lectures: this is a more informal platform
given by actual high school teachers, tutors and even college professors.
These are mostly used to complement the learning
taking place in a physical or in-person classroom, and can be found in
YouTube channels or playlists, or they might have their own websites.
Students use them to have a help in understanding the concepts
taught in their classes.
If you go to any college class and ask about tutorial
videos, you will find that about a 90% of them use them. In fact, it is
very probable that your own kids even in high school use them. The
sooner we are aware of these resources, the better for our kids.
2.
And what can we get from this?
a) Achieving of new skills in a open and free way. Lets first
talk about the most immediate benefits of these resources.
Having an unrestricted access to an online education is
an innovative way of promoting the idea of an equal and free education
to everybody but now at higher levels. An article published by The
Boston Globe compiled several testimonies from people telling their
stories about how these available courses improved their life conditions
and skills.
And also since these courses are carried out by very
talented educators or by important educational institutions, the
standards for a quality education are not only being placed at a higher
positions, but also lots of boys and girls around the country (guys at
middle and high schools, even in elementary schools) are finding
effective ways to learn by visiting these websites where they are
understanding things better and at their own paces.
b) The online courses as vocational guides: taking an open
online course may help our kids figure out what career they should
follow.
Most MOOCs offered online dont require you to have
advanced knowledge or formation in any area, unless they belong to a
specific sequence or series. This eliminates most of your restrictions to
the courses and enables you to have an actual experience at no cost
and with no compromises.
This experience may be fundamental in the path of
figuring out what career or profession our sons or daughters may follow
because they will have actual experiences with the topics, applications,
and real material of the subject they might want to explore. In fact,
according to an article published by the Harvard Gazette, most

Business Speech INAG 110Jorge Montero Vallejo

students registering for a MOOC do it just for curiosity and because
they just want to try the material.
3.
Short visits to some popular websites:
a) Coursera.com and edx.org are the two most famous MOOCs
websites because of the massive amount of offered courses and their
quality (technical aspects):
Coursera.com: Coursera appeared in 2012 and it was
founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, both from Stanford
University. We will explore in class one course offered by this website to
have an idea of the typical structure of this new educational interface.
EdX.org: It was originally founded by MIT in cooperation
with Harvard University, but they both are currently also collaborating
with coursera. It also appeared in 2012. We will also briefly explore this
website in class.
b) One can actually find complete playlists on specific topics for
every course (specially in science and mathematics) on YouTube.com but
we will explore two especial sources of tutorial videos that have their
own websites:
FlippingPhysics.com: this is a very cool website where
you can learn about all the topics in physics, from very essential
physics to the more complex topics in Calculus-based physics. The
general purpose of this site is to offer a platform for flipped classrooms.
I have used this website for my physics classes and it has helped me a
lot.
LearnersTV.com: this is a website with lots of links to
video lectures for every possible course, from philosophy and English
literature to Pharmacology and Life Sciences. It also offers access to
study notes and educational animations.
III.- Conclusion
Overview: Today in this presentation we learned about the latest online
education sources that are now available for our personal use (mostly at no
cost), we have seen the two most popular platforms, we have also discussed
about what uses can we give to these learning tools in terms of formation
and guidance, and finally we also explored some of this popular websites to
see how interactive and easy to use they are.
Closing statement: We might not be very conscious of what we have just
seen but this is more than just a new way of learning. What we have seen
today is an actual new revolution for education, a radical change of our
current system, or maybe just the invention of a new one. But the
implications of this innovation are not only technological or educational, this
is also something of great social importance and impact for our alwaysdeveloping society. Coursera and EdX are putting quality materials not only
to our disposition, but also to that of thousands of other people around the
globe. This is a great proof of how technology and communication can work
hand in hand for the progress and innovation of the world. I hope you,
parents, enjoyed this presentation and guided tour today.
References:
Ho, Andrew, and Isaac Chuang. "Massive Study on MOOCs." Harvard
Gazette. Harvard University, 1 Apr. 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.

Business Speech INAG 110Jorge Montero Vallejo

<http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/04/massive-study-onmoocs/>.
"MOOCs: Ensuring Equal Access to Education for All - The Boston
Globe." BostonGlobe.com. The Boston Globe, 10 Apr. 2015. Web. 25 Apr.
2015. <http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2015/04/09/moocsensuring-equal-access-education-forall/YyPTrN0CivJyBYNvHs2eLM/story.html>.
"How MOOCs Are Taking Local Knowledge Global." Knowledge
Wharton. University of Pennsylvania, 17 Apr. 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2015.
<http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/how-moocs-are-taking-localknowledge-global/>.
List of available websites for these purposes:

Edx.org
KhanAcademy.com
Coursera.com
Udacity.com
NovoEd.com
MathTV.com

Futurelearn.com
Flippingphysics.com
LearnersTV.com
iTunes U (Apple application)
MIT OpenCourseware

Open Yale Courses

Academicearth.org
Freevideolectures.com