Fired up by reading and blogging on “Minds on Fire” last Friday, I wanted to share a few more of my thoughts and readings on learning and technology.  While we’re hard at work refining our beta release, there are always several core principles and values animating our efforts from behind the scenes. And we’re always trying to educate ourselves at every step of the process. 

Earlier today I came across a blog post called “Most College Students to Take Classes Online by 2014.” In it, David Nagel of Campus Technology cites recent research by Ambient Insights and writes about the striking shift occurring in the American educational system as innovative learning technologies become more mainstream. By 2014, writes Nagel, “only 5.14 million students will take all of their courses in a physical classroom, while 3.55 million will take all of their classes online, and 18.65 million will take some of their classes online.”  In short, the vast majority of students will soon do some of their coursework online and there will be almost as many students doing all of their coursework online as are studying solely in the classroom. On the one hand, with the current momentum of the OpenCourseWare movement and the rapid ascension of web-based schools and courses, these figures are unsurprising.  Nonetheless, as many web-based learning technologies are still in their infancy, this rapid adoption is truly astonishing. At mindfish, we’ve believed for sometime that web technology has the power to revolutionize the learning process. If these figures hold true it seems that this idea will become accepted by more and more learners in the very near future. 

To be continued as I ruminate further...