The April 2012 edition of Wired magazine contained a fantastic piece on the recent Stanford Education Experiment. The article talked about the furture of traditional in-person lecture based education and the ways in which on-line courses are changing higher education. After reading the article I started to think about education around me and how it has changed. My 15 year old daughter participates in a free on-line math tutoring program that utilizes smart board and interactive chat technology. She loves the convenience of it and her grades are improving (thank goodness!). At work, we have had decent success with an on-line learning portal for Summation training. Lawyers and law clerks can log onto the site, select a course module and work through the sessions at their own pace. The Wired article talked about Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, a website that provides more than 2,800 tutorial videos in subjects like math, science and economics. It was said in the article that Bill Gates referred to the Khan Academy as "the future of education". Khan himself believes he is growing a "global one-world classroom". In my opinion, ILTA and it's educational programming feels a lot like a global one-world classroom. We may not be Stanford University, but we're definitely onto something!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/all/1#HelpDeskandUserSupport