1.5 billion learners out of school: A global educational crisis

by | Wednesday, April 01, 2020

The scale of the COVID19 crisis and its impact on global education is hard to comprehend. UNESCO has a website (COVID-19 Educational Disruption and Response) providing almost real-time data on school closures. It is shocking to imagine that in a mere 45 days we have had schools close in over 180 countries, affecting 1.5 billion learners! As Yuval Harari wrote in The world after coronavirus:

In normal times, governments, businesses and educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal times.

We are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! I am part of an ongoing conversation on the silverliningforlearning website devoted to better understanding the present we are living in and the future that we will be emerging into.

Below is a short promotional video for this project with data and animation showing school closures across the world from the UNESCO site above.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

eduPUNKing a course website!!

I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it. A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows: Edupunk is an approach to teaching and...

The distance education revolution

TCRecord this week features an article by Gary Natriello titled Modest Changes, Revolutionary Possibilities: Distance Learning and the Future of Education. As the abstract says In this essay, I take stock of the developments shaping distance learning and consider the...

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

Good-Evil Ambigram in Pub Med!

My Good-Evil oscillation ambigram design is easily one of my most popular designs - having made it to multiple publications, websites, covers of magazines, on the TV Show Brain Games... and now it has made its way into a medical research journal Frontiers of...

Visual proofs

I just came across these lovely visual mathematical proofs. For instance consider the following sequence: 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... = 1 and then see the following image on the blog!! How cool is that!!!! I had posted about something similar earlier (see visualizing...

OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education: Bucharest, Romania

OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education: Bucharest, Romania

I have been in Bucharest for the past few days participating in the OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education. It has been great fun, meeting lots of new people, developing frameworks around AI and education and more. A few resources and photographs from the...

London Underground Map

One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...

Summer Institute for Superintendents, presentation

I was recently invited to present at the 2009 Summer Institute for Superintendents at the beautiful  Crystal Mountain Conference Center in Thompsonville, Michigan. The yearly institute, which began in 1999, is co-sponsored by the MSU College of Education and the...

STEM Ed & Robotics: A foreword

STEM Ed & Robotics: A foreword

Vikram Kapila is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Vikram and his research associate Purvee Chauhan recently published a book titled STEM Education with Robotics: Lessons from Research and...

Value in an age of free…

What happens when an economy "built on selling precious copies" suddenly confronts the world of the Internet - a world based on the "free flow of free copies?" Kevin Kelly confronts this issue in a recent post titled, Better than free. As he says, "how does one make...

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