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Education is Everywhere

Posted on January 14, 2017 by admin Posted in Education Leave a comment

What it is: With the availability of the Internet, everyone can learn more anywhere they happen to be, often for free.

In the old days, education was expensive and limited. That’s because you needed a teacher, a classroom, and the ability to physically show up at the classroom at the same time as the rest of your classmates and teacher. The time restriction kept many people from learning because they had to work, and the physical restriction kept many people from attending classes that were never offered nearby.

Fortunately the Internet has changed all that. You can literally study any subject you wish online either for a fee or for free in many cases. There’s absolutely no excuse for not learning more. If you’re not learning anything new, it’s not because it’s not available to you but because you either don’t know it exists or you’re not willing to find it.

Apple offers iTunes University as a way to learn from famous colleges all over the world absolutely free. Beyond iTunes University, there are plenty of other colleges and online sites offering free or paid courses. The goal isn’t to necessarily work towards a degree but to work towards simply learning more about any topic you may be curious about.

By simply following your own interests rather than an artificially structured curriculum, you can maintain your curiosity and interest while gaining knowledge in the topics that interest you the most. Learning is available to everyone. It’s unfortunate that so many people either don’t know about these free educational opportunities or simply choose not to learn due to faulty beliefs that learning must be hard, difficult, and boring.

To get started learning online, simply focus on topics that interest you the most and find a short course that can help you learn just a little bit more than you know today. The more often you pursue learning, the more you’ll make it a regular habit and continue learning more on your own either through books, online courses, or meeting people face to face. As noted public speaker Jim Rohn once said, “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”

To find some free online courses, click here.

Online Learning Platforms

Posted on August 7, 2016 by admin Posted in Education Leave a comment

What it is: Online learning platforms allow anyone to teach courses over the Internet.

Our current form of education is largely obsolete. In the old days, books were scarce so whoever had a book would read and lecture to a group of people who didn’t have that book. Those people would then take notes based on what the lecturer told them about the contents of that book.

Nowadays, books are mostly affordable so the main reason for the lecture format is antiquated. Of course, having an experienced teacher offer additional insights on a topic, along with the ability to ask questions, is still valuable. Yet the major limitation of classroom learning is that everyone must meet at the same place. If someone can’t make that time or lives too far away, they’ll miss out on the class.

That’s why online learning is far more popular. Not only can you learn at your own pace and schedule, but you don’t have the limitation of being trapped in a class for a fixed amount of time. The drawback of online courses its hat you also don’t get the friendship and support of your fellow students either. For that reason, online learning is best for self-motivated people.

Another problem with the current form of education is that only certain people are certified to teach. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make them good teachers. In the meantime, great teachers may not be able to teach because they lack the proper credentials.

So online teaching allows anyone to teach and attract students from all over the world who want to learn on their own schedule. If you’re interested in learning any topic from math to playing a guitar, you can find an online course. Even better, if you have knowledge in a special field, you can offer your knowledge to others through an online course and make extra money for your efforts.

One of the more popular online course platforms is Udemy, but there are plenty of others such as SkillShare or MindBites. Although the details may vary, the main idea behind all of these online course platforms is that students find a course they want to take, pay for it, and follow through the lessons that include video instruction from the teacher.

While you can’t get ask questions to the teacher verbally, you can write messages to the teacher and other students so there’s a limited form of contact with others. The growing number of online course platforms points to the growing need and demand for online courses.

So if you’re just interested in learning something new, often for the price of a book, you can start taking an online course. If you’re interested in making some extra money from your skills, put together an online course and start selling it today.

Online teaching may not ever replace traditional classroom instruction, but it can greatly supplement traditional learning and in many cases, replace it altogether.

Online courses aren’t for everyone, but for the vast majority of people, it’s a viable, low-cost, and convenient way to learn something without the drawbacks of traditional classroom education. Apple offers free college courses through iTunes University but if you’re interested in either taking courses or creating your own online course, check out this list of online teaching platforms.

The Flaws of Online Education

Posted on April 21, 2016 by admin Posted in Education Leave a comment

What it is: Online education has been touted for its ability to bring education to anyone regardless of location.

In the old days, education was limited. If you wanted to attend college, you had to move to that particular college. Even worse, colleges taught certain classes at certain its of the day, which meant if you wanted to take a class, you not only had to live near the classroom, but you also had to make time to attend that class, usually during the day. This kept working adults out of college for the longest time.

Online education promised to change all that. Not only could online education provide education to anyone who had Internet access, but it gave that person the freedom to watch videos of classroom lectures on their own schedule. Whether you worked at night or during the day, you could get an education in practically any subject whenever you wanted.

However, online education has one huge drawback. It requires massive motivation to finish. When you’re all by yourself, learning on your own, it’s easy to get discouraged and give up. That’s why completion rates for online courses are horribly low. That’s also why some online programs are looking to open physical classrooms.

To encourage more people to complete courses, Udacity, one of the pioneers of online education, is experimenting with physical classrooms where students can meet with a tutor and fellow classmates. The idea is that learning with others and meeting regularly with tutors and classmates makes learning easier so you don’t feel so alone and isolated, and you can get help from others.

This brings back the question of education in general. What’s the best way to learn, online or offline? The answer seems to be a combination of both. Purely online learning is great for highly motivated students, but risks making students feel isolated. Offline learning in a physical classroom requires setting aside time and moving to the location of the classroom, but offers support to help you et through the course.

Most likely the combination of the two will prove most effective. Online learning can help students learn on their own time and convenience, while regular offline meetings with people in your immediate area can help encourage students to complete their courses.

What likely won’t happen is that offline education alone will make a magical comeback. Nor will online learning completely replace and dominate education. There’s a place for both online and offline education, and definitely a place for a combination of the two. What matters most is that students can get the education they want at an affordable price with the best possible chance of completing their courses.

Taylor Swift Exclusive on Apple Music

Posted on December 14, 2015 by admin Posted in Marketing, Music Leave a comment

What it is: Taylor Swift has given Apple Music an exclusive on her “1989” documentary of her world tour.

The one business you don’t want to be in is the commodity business because that means you have to compete on price. When you compete on price, it becomes a race tot he bottom to see who can make the least amount of profit and still survive.

This commodity mentality is what has killed PCs and Android manufactures. Because to lower costs, manufacturers cut expenses. That’s why PCs come with bloatware so the manufacturers can make extra money while the customer suffers from the hassles of deleting this bloatware.

In the music world, songs are a commodity. If you can get the same Taylor Swift song whether you buy it from iTunes or someone else, what’s the difference? It basically boils down to convenience and that’s what’s been keeping iTunes going. Now with Apple Music, Apple has licensed the exclusive right to Taylor Swift’s “1989” documentary of her world tour. Because this is exclusive only to Appel Music, that means anyone who wants it must buy it from Apple Music. While they’re buying this from Apple Music, chances are good they’ll also buy something else from Apple Music too.

By using this Taylor Swift exclusive, Apple Music separates itself from the commodity of other music sellers. The key to keeping Apple Music out of the commodity business is whether they can keep attracting these exclusive deals with artists and whether these exclusive details benefit the artists and Apple. If only one benefits, then there’s no point in keeping these exclusivity deals going.

Avoiding the commodity business is what separates Apple from their competitors. If you want to buy a PC, you can buy one from Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell, or even Microsoft, but if you want to buy a Macintosh, you can only get it from Apple. If you want to buy an Android smartphone, you can buy one from Samsung, Huawei, LG, or Sony, but if you want to buy an iPhone, you can only get it from Apple.

Avoiding the commodity trap is how Apple keeps their profit margins high so they can use that money to fund more of their projects like the rumors Apple Car, CarPlay, HealthKit, HomeKit, and Apple TV. Right now, none of these other projects generate a significant amount of cash, but they will likely do so soon. That makes spending money on them now a great investment since they’ll likely blow up into a huge money maker sometime in the future.

Any company will quickly get into trouble if they fall into the commodity trap. The way out of the commodity trap is to offer something that people can’t get anywhere else. For Apple Music, that’s exclusivity deals with popular recording artists. As long as Apple keeps separating themselves from their rivals in ways that rivals will find hard to match (exclusivity deals, 64-bit processors, Force Touch trackpads, etc.), Apple will be in fine shape. The moment there’s no difference between an Apple product and a rival product is the moment to start worrying about Apple’s future.

Online Learning

Posted on October 12, 2015 by admin Posted in Business, Education Leave a comment

What it is: Online learning lets you learn any subject over the Internet.

In the old days, education meant sitting in a classroom while a teacher lectured. If you didn’t live near that classroom, too bad. You couldn’t get an education. If your schedule wouldn’t let you attend the classroom at a specific time when the teacher held the class, too bad. You couldn’t learn what you wanted. Education in the old days was tied to a physical location. If too many people wanted a particular class, there was a chance you would get bumped out.

Fortunately there are other ways to get an education beyond just sitting in a classroom. In fact, sitting in a classroom is probably the least effective way for many people to learn. To help bring education to people unable to attend classes, correspondence courses appeared. By receiving lessons by mail and sending in assignments by mail, you could learn on your own time with a minimal of hassle. While correspondence courses could never mimic the interaction of a classroom, it could let you study and learn at your convenience.

Despite the drawbacks and limitations, attending a class in a physical building is still the most common way people learn. However, online learning threatens that monopoly.

Like correspondence courses, online learning lets you learn on your own time, at your own pace, from the comfort of your home. Best of all, you can watch videos of instructors demonstrating different topics. Unlike real life lectures, videos let you pause, rewind, and review as often as possible until you fully understand the topic.

To help spread online learning, Apple offers iTunes University where notable universities such as Oxford, Stanford, and MIT offer free courses on practically any subject you wish to study such as Java programming, world history, or conversational Japanese. Online learning offers new opportunities for both students and teachers alike.

Students can find the online courses they like and either learn for free or for a nominal charge. Unlike traditional schools, online learning won’t limit you to specific subjects. The whole world’s knowledge is literally at your fingertips as long as you have an Internet connection.

For teachers, online learning offers new opportunities to reach out to more students than a local classroom. Now you can teach people in Taiwan, South Africa, Sweden, or Costa Rica all without leaving your home. Even better, teachers can record a single class, charge students a fee, and earn royalties from their online courses.

If you’re interested in running your own online course, you can review several online teaching platforms that charge a monthly fee plus a percentage of the tuition you charge individual students. To review different online teaching platforms, click here.

The Internet has given us cat videos and Kim Kardashian pictures, but can also give us video lectures from the best teachers all over the world whether they have college credentials or not. Remember, just because someone has a Ph.D. doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good teacher. Sometimes the best teachers don’t have any academic credentials at all but have a passion for teaching their favorite subject, so they’ll be a far better teacher.

Learn from the best by learning online. It takes self-discipline, but if you can demonstrate that you can complete online courses regularly, you’ll demonstrate more self-discipline than many kids who attend traditional colleges.

Online learning is the future. The question is will you take advantage of it or not?

How to Get Smarter

Posted on July 4, 2015 by admin Posted in Education Leave a comment

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What it is: “The Smartest Kids in the World” studies how different countries tackle the education problem and what works for each country.

Author Amanda Ripley interviewed several teenagers who left America to attend schools in other countries. By doing so, she got some insight into what American schools are doing right and what other countries are doing right. Not surprisingly, she found that foreign exchange students were surprised at two aspects of the American educational system.

One, Americans placed a huge emphasis on sports to the point where athletics often took precedence over academics. Two, Americans spent far more on technology in the classroom than any other nation in addition to spending the most amount per pupil with little results to show for all this spending.

In South Korea, high schools are known as pressure cookers where students attend school during the day, then attend private tutoring sessions at night, often until midnight. Then they repeat the process all over again. Such forced education wears out students. Despite their high academic scores, such students quickly drop back down once they escape the Korean high school system.

Oddly, one of the top achieving nations in education is Finland. Despite schools in poor areas filled with immigrants, Finland’s school scored near the top. In America, schools often blame poverty and immigration for low test scores, yet in areas in Finland where they had high poverty and a high immigrants population, they simply spent more money on helping all students to the point where many poor students were scoring equally well as students in far wealthier schools.

The key to Finland’s success hinged on the simple idea that if you expect more from students, they’ll often rise to the challenge. Finland’s schools didn’t accept the excuse that poor kids or kids who didn’t know Finnish should do poorly in school. Since they expected poor students and immigrant students to perform just as well as rich Finnish kids in other schools, the kids did actually that.

The basic idea behind Finland’s success is that when you put kids in an environment where success is expected, nearly all of them will succeed. For those on the verge of failing, Finland simply pours massive resources at the child until the child catches up. The expectation is always that the child can catch up, and given the peer pressure that comes from being surrounded by other students who are succeeding, the students generally live up to their expectations.

Jim Rohn, a famous American public speaker once said that you are the average of the five people you hang around the most. That means if you’re hanging around five people who are super achievers, you’ll have to be a super achiever too to fit in with them. If you aren’t, they won’t want to hang around with you any more.

So if you aren’t being challenged in school or by your classmates, it’s time to find new friends. If your local school isn’t challenging you, then visit iTunes University where you can get a free college (and high school) education from schools such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Oxford. Not only will college-level courses challenge you to think and learn about different topics, but they can often make you realize how exciting the world outside of your own region can be.

By expanding your mind with offerings from all over the world through iTunes University, you can virtually hang around other people who may be just as intellectually curious as you are. If you want to dream big, the best chance you have of achieving your dream is to hang around other people who have big dreams of their own.

By providing free college courses through iTunes University, Apple helps make education fun and accessible to everyone. The more people learn, the better off society will be. The less educated people are, the less productive they’ll likely be. So given a choice between improving yourself and striving to reach your dreams, or settling and accepting your current situation filled with people who have low expectations, which path do you think will get you where you want to go?