iPodia + EdX = global active learning

What is active learning?

Learning is naturally an active process when students are motivated to grasp both content and context of the concepts being taught. Standard lectures is largely passive, in which teachers do most of the talking to students who receive the contents in the classroom (i.e., traditional schoolwork) and then exercise the contexts outside the classroom (i.e., traditional homework) by themselves. In contrast, active learning is learner-centered; it calls for more participative engagements with teachers and collaborative interactions among students. Many believe that "flipping the current campus experience", by doing the schoolwork at home and the homework at school, is a viable way to realize active learning, whose effectiveness has been well proven by education researchers.

What is the role of iPodia in global active learning?

Globalization has opened many new possibilities for active learning. As more and more lectures are available online nowadays, doing the schoolwork globally (e.g., watching lectures by world-renowned teachers) at home has become a reality. However, doing the homework globally (e.g., collaborating with international cohorts on exercises) at school is still ineffective due to large physical and institutional gaps among universities. This is where iPodia comes in to create an integrated borderless learning environment where all students can engage in active learning by interacting with classmates and faculty located anywhere in the world without ever leaving their own campuses. iPodia complements online lectures to achieve global active learning by allowing students to watch online lectures at home before coming to the classroom to interact with their peers locally and far away.

What is the difference between iPodia and EdX?

EdX is a joint partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning opportunities to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online to all for free. Through this partnership, the two institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone. While EdX makes "doing the schoolwork globally at home" possible for learners, iPodia provides students the opportunities of "doing the homework globally at school" with classmates across the globe. They complements each other pedagogically, and both are needed for global active learning in the future.

What are the unique characteristics of iPodia pedagogy?

iPodia is a form of "blended-eLearning", where technologies empower the learners rather than replace the teacher. The characteristics of iPodia pedagogy are learner-centered, no-distance, and cross-cultural. iPodia is learner-centered as oppose to teacher-based, because it provides an innovative approach to realize active learning without institutional borders. iPodia is no-distance learning rather than distance education, because it uses the Internet to eliminate the interaction distance among participating learners. iPodia is cross-cultural in addition to cross-discipline, because it exploits cultural diversities among international learners as a source for global innovation.

iPodia complements EdX to make active learning in a global scale possible!

For more information, please visit the iPodia official website.