TEDxSalford

Free Education for All? We Are on Our Way

Education is expensive and inaccessible to the majority of the world’s population. Solutions making open source education accessible to everyone are much under the surface, but there is a lot going on.

In my previous post I talked about the fruits of crowdsourcing and presented some great projects tapping into its power. Projects like Duolingo and CAPTCHA are contributing to a new type of free, online database of knowledge, that is accessible to anyone. In this case, anyone equals a person who has a possibility to connect to the world wide web.

While some of us are downright drowning in the river of information like Michael described in his previous post, Staying Human in the Digital Age, the majority of the world’s population remains in an informational void due to lack of facilities. Crowdsourcing might be a significant part of the solutions provided to fill this void. Let’s take a look at what kind of solutions are being developed today and how they intend to change the consumption of information.

Connexions is another ambitious, global-scale project utilising the powers of crowdsourcing, in order to bring education to everyone – for free. Richard Baraniuk, the founder of Connexions, is working to change the landscape of education and educational publishing by offering free, open source database for educational content that anyone can customise and build upon. It allows teachers and lecturers around the world to share course materials freely. Once acquired, these materials can be tailored to meet the needs of any particular classroom. Check out on TED. This vast, interconnected repository of educational information isn’t a flawless system as there is still much work to do getting things right with IPR and quality control, but it is a beginning.

In Nicholas Negroponte’s talk you can hear about One Laptop per Child, a project to equip the developing world’s new generation by providing low-cost laptops.

As what comes to providing a broadband of adequate speed to each and everyone, AMD has taken over the issue with its 50×15 project aiming to bring internet connection to the 50% of the world’s population by 2015. The partners include public and private, local and global entities dedicated to accelerating digital inclusion around the world through affordable and sustainable Internet access and computing capability projects.

Also TED has recently launched a new website with educational, customisable videos, viewable by anyone, free of cost. TED-Ed aims to create a remarkable library of lessons worth sharing.

“Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they … can never be without some element of education.” (Nicholas Negroponte)

- Johanna Peltola