Education - Entrepreneurialism, Real World Learning, Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing

Week 11 - Entrepreneurialism, Real World Learning, Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing

Well I have to start this weeks blog with a bit of a confession - I really like being on time and organised, however, this week I never made it to class or did the flipped learning requirements. There was loads going on in my life and it included a 3 day school camp etc. So I’ve got some good excuses and I’m now backtracking and have spend a little time catching up so this one has been done in retrospect of the class.

I watched the Crowdsourcing Video, basically crowdsourcing is about connecting with people online to solve problems and produce things utilising people’s time expertise or resources. Crowdfunding is about raising capital funds from many people who donate a small amount of money towards what is required. This is becoming quite popular and is how real problems can be solved and makes use of how connected we now are with other people via the internet etc.

These are examples of how we can utilise technology to solve real world problems which is one of the key 21st century skills we would like our students learn as per the ITL research mentioned in previous blog posts. Authentic real world problems should involve real people, solutions for a particular audience (not the teacher or student etc), have specific/explicit contexts, and involve real data. We should be designing these sorts of learning experiences. There are many online tools that could be used:

Zooniverse - is a large people-powered platform for research problems are solved by enlisting volunteers to help out. People work with scientists to view, record, analyse, process and answer very large amounts of data that would not be possible by the scientists doing the research alone. The first project, Galaxy Zoo, received 70,000 classifications per hour and more than 50,000,000 classifications in the first year (Graham et al., 2015).

OpenIDO - This is another online site where people can connect and design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges.

Hacking NZ Education - a crowdsourcing platform set up by The Mind Lab by Unitec to collaboratively brainstorm ideas of what the future of education in New Zealand could look like.

Along with problem solving skills it is vital that students are supported to develop skills in enterprise and entrepreneurship it may help them to setup their own enterprise and take part in global enterprises which is part of the NZ Curriculum (2016).

Aileron (2017) suggests the following skills are vital for being an entrepreneur - resilience, focus, invest for the long-term, find and manage people, sell, learn, self-reflection, self-reliance. If we design learning around solving real world problems I have no doubt that students and teachers would develop these skills and dispositions as part of the journey. Lots to ponder and think about and I guess the challenge is to explore some of these tools with the students in class to see if there are any problems they would like to get involved with that are relevant to the learning in our classes.

References
Aileron. (2017). The Top Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs. Forbes.com. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/aileron/2013/11/26/the-top-skills-every-entrepreneur-needs/

Graham, C.G., Cox, J, Simmons, B, Lintott, C, Masters, K, Greenhill, A. & Holmes, K. (2015). Defining and Measuring Success in Online Citizen Science: A Case Study of Zooniverse Projects. Computing in Science & Engineering, 17(4), 28-41.

The NZ Curriculum Online. (2016). The NZ Curriculum: Vision. Ministry of Education. Retrieved from http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum