First of all I would like to thank Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti of busuu as well as the team at IE Business School who took the time and made the effort to set up a survey and then shared its results with the public.
Data is still a scarce resource in education 2.0 and getting some from one of the most successful startups is really valuable. So, let’s take a closer look on the outcome.
The idea for this quick poll comes from Darien Brown of YongoPal.
Based on the vivid discussion on Vikrama Dhiman’s post on the seven reasons why online education might never take off, Darien suggested that I should poll the teachers amongst my readers on which platforms / services they have set up a teacher account.
Although I am the initiator of the E-Teachers Conference I would like to share my personal point of view of the evening mixed up with some comments I got in chats and via email.
Let me start with a general overview.
I opened the ETCon with my provocative theme “Lesson Slides and Virtual Classrooms. Do we really need them?”. The presentation had three parts: thoughts about slides, thoughts about webmeetings and thoughts about users.
Basically I explained that both slides and webmeetings are not “education natives” meaning they were developed for the corporate world for a whole different use. I also mentioned the problems involved using lesson slides like boredom and information overload and with webmeetings like weak internet connections and overstrained users.
In the part about the users I mentioned the different kind of user types today, the digital natives, settlers and immigrants and that most of the potential customers today belong to one of the last two groups.
My conclusion was that on Monday I did not really need a virtual classroom to teach but that I see potential for the future when the majority of potential users won’t have infrastructural problems to use them anymore.
