Paul, could you explain here or through a private e-mail what your company Matygo is doing and how it is a catalyst? The tagline on the blog is a tease :).
I rewrote the tagline earlier today, I'll take that as positive feedback. :)
A catalyst speeds up a reaction, sometimes essentially so. The coming education revolution is going to be much larger than any single organization but we think we can help bring it about a little bit quicker. Sal Khan is definitely a catalyst in this respect.
We do this through two complimentary features sets:
1) Learning about learning. These are tools to track student progress, judge the effectiveness of different techniques, etc... Think an education effectiveness dashboard. By providing high-quality information we can shorten and improve the feedback loop by better understanding what works and what doesn't.
2) Online learning delivery. As a starting point, think an LMS like Instructure/Moodle/Blackboard, etc... but designed to work with the previous point - try new things and measure. The key here is enabling teacher creativity. It's all well and fine for us to implement and measure new tools in house but that's not fast enough (and gives us no particular advantage). The Instructors on our system need to be able to easily implement their own thoughts on how to improve teaching (and then see the results). They are much smarter than we will ever be about this. We need our instructors to see this 'LMS' as their playground for teaching experimentation. And, of course, when one of them makes a breakthrough they will share it and everyone will be better off.
Innovation is experimentation that results in an improvement. We help teachers experiment and judge the success of their experiments, shortening the feedback loop and increasing the rate of innovation. This is what we mean by "be a catalyst".
Very interesting. Anything having to do with disrupting the current model excites me to no end.
Have a few more questions if you don't mind:
1. What's your motivation for doing this?
2. Is there a particular level of education (or type of subject) you're targeting? Would you find the product more geared towards being effective in some subjects than others, or generic enough for any?
3. Is UBC somehow part of this project?
4. Could I play with it (I'm in no way affiliated with UBC)?
