Scott Young originally studied business but always wanted to try his hand at Computer Science. Scott has managed to cut his educational bill and do a four year MIT course in one through the use of cognitive science principles and effective productivity techniques.

This talk gives us an interesting perspective that maybe the educational revolution will come from the students “Hacking Education”.

Go on, get hacking!

What’s the take home message:

• From your own experience, you know that traditional ‘go to the lecture’ teaching is inefficient — I’m sure I fell asleep for half of my lectures; it took time to commute; my peers were noisy; the lectures were always cut short or sometimes no one turned up. Time spent at lectures is hugely inefficient and if you are in a large group there is very little student to teacher interaction. Students often find post lecture that there is a concept they do not understand and they have to work this out on their own. Now most primary schools I hope are not in lecture format but it does help up to understand how we could make our own professional development more efficient. Also it is a reminder for us that when you teach in a large group you are probably not engaging the whole class. The students can’t get you to rewind, pause or fast forward.
• Again if you want to be more efficient you can play lectures at 1.5x speed, this enabled Scott to cover 4 months of online lectures in 2 days.
• The best way to reinforce learning is to get instant feedback. Ask a question and then check the model answer immediately. This also enables the learner to self evaluate their learning.
• Learning is lifelong — by hacking education we can make it easier for ourselves during school and after school.

This post was cannibalised from http://iteachem.net by Chris Nickson under ‘Hacking Education’ I will be bringing you more posts from this site with a primary education theme.