What if students did what teachers suggest? Well, there are actually teachers on-line creating business opportunities based on that simple idea. It is about global spread impact, just with the help of a digital contact. Though; it would be extremely difficult to achieve, without it. You can start off with a simple SMS to them.
There is a common, but rarely spoken of, idea within the system for education floating around. It goes something like “teachers; do not mess up with students’ private life, and students; do not mess up with teachers’ private life”.
Try to send your students an interesting SMS on a Sunday evening, then you see what I mean.
I have actually tried. They got heavily surprised when I did. But they smiled when I brought it up in class the next day, and I do think it created a nice environment for that whole day. It was an interesting experiment to do. At least; they did not get offended.
On the other hand: if you instead are a student, try sending an SMS to teacher on a Saturday night in order to talk about an interesting and important issue you just stumbled on, then you also see what I mean. Few students seem to even have tried. I guess that in itself tell us something.
Then why do we, actually, separate students and teachers life like that? If we assume learning to be for life, why not let it also be?
In this article you can read about professor Eesley at Standford. Some years ago he got an email from a former student saying something like “thank you for my company”. But Eesley did not remember the student at all, and here is where the fun part of this story begins.
It was a student that had taken Eesleys MOOC-course some months earlier. During that course he met other students. In the end they formed a company. I guess it goes without saying the course was about technology entrepreneurship.
These students, that came from al over the world, had taken the same online-course given by Eesley and finally they formed a company – but none of them had never met before. They would most likely never have met if the course did not exist.
Eesley was about to visit a Chilean accelerator and when the former student got to know about it he got so excited that he sent that mail to Easley.
There must be, at least, a ton of business opportunities open for educational actors to exploit here. One could for instance recruit Eesley, support him to upscale his online-course, and ask him to start sending some SMS.
Disruptive Education 