[MUSIC] So welcome to our course, What Future for Education. What I want to do with you in the next few minutes or so is just give you an outline of the course, tell you the kinds of things that you can expect to do in this course, and the sorts of themes that we'll be exploring over the next few hours, weeks, months, however you decide to study the course. The title is What Future for Education. And I want to be clear up front, that doesn't mean that we'll be talking about technology. Because we're not assuming here that the future for education should be any one thing. One of the key themes to this course is that when people talk about education, they talk about education as though they already know what the future should look like and how the future should be. And what we think is that there are some assumptions about education that we really need to explore and go into some of the theories about education in order to really understand what kind of future we would like education to have. And so that's the way that we have designed this course, to enable us to explore some of these areas about education and to think more deeply about it. So the course is designed around six units, sessions, blocks, weeks, however you want to study them. Each week we take a different theme, and all of our activities and all of the input is around that theme. Each of the weeks is structured very, very similarly. So we start off with a reflective question. This question is there to warm you up, to get you thinking about the theme, and to get you articulating what your current assumptions are about that particular theme. We'll then give you some inputs. There will be some videos between me and my colleagues. There will also be some readings and some additional artifacts and things for you to look through. Once you've had an opportunity to engage with those, then we have what we're calling a discussion. That discussion will be in two parts. First of all, we want you to start the discussion, and that means setting down your initial ideas. And then we want you to develop the discussion, and that will normally mean engaging with somebody else's ideas and moving them forward, thinking about them in a different way. And we hope that that opportunity to express what you think, but also to engage with what others think, will take you to a different level of understanding. The final stage is a reflective stage, and what we hope you do then is think about what you've learned during those activities and how you're somehow different at the end of that week than you were before. So that's the general kind of learning approach to this particular course. One of the things that we'd like you to do throughout the course is we're encouraging you to use any form of social media that you feel comfortable with. With that, what we want you to do is take that conversation within the course and the people studying the course, but also outside the course as well. So we want you to engage with people who've already taken this course before, what they've thought about the sessions, but also people in the future who will come on to the course later on and will also be contributing. And also one of the beauties of social media is, of course, we can involve a wider audience, other people and ideas that are also out there about education. In the last week, we take a slightly different stand. We look at some TED talks in the last week, and that week is where we get you to do your final assessment for this course. And what we're asking you to do there is to develop your own TED talks. Don't worry, there's a lot of guidance that we've put down on different ways that you can do that and ways that you can use different technology to help you to do that. But then what we hope you will do is engage with some peer assessment where you look at other TED talks that other people in this course have done and offer them some feedback. So we hope however you decide to study this course, that you find it engaging, you find it challenging. And we hope that by the end you'll be different in your ideas of what future you think education can have than you were at the beginning.
