Learning Curve: Part 1 Online Free
Beatris Ninh
"If corona doesn't kill us, distance learning will," Shiri Kenigsberg Levi, an Israeli mother of four, exclaimed in an online rant about her frustrations with online learning. Her comments have been translated into more than 20 languages and shared widely around the world.
"We are seeing an explosion of education shifting online, but it all happened so fast, and so many institutions were not prepared that much of what we are seeing isn't effective online learning," says Jennifer Mathes, interim CEO at the Online Learning Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to virtual learning in higher education. "People were caught off guard at the college and elementary levels."
Before the coronavirus pandemic, the global education technology sector, which includes online learning, was growing about 15.4% a year, with big name companies such as Google and Microsoft investing heavily in the industry, according to Kenneth Research. The United States is the largest market, with rapid growth also in India, China and South Korea, according to a report by ICEF Monitor, a market research firm focusing on international education. Factors such as convenience, geography and the need to work while studying are driving most of the growth in online learning, especially in the higher education sector, the report noted.
"But the global education sector has been one of the last to embrace digital technologies," said Rob Hutter, founder and managing partner at Learn Capital, which invests in online and other educational technology companies, adding that only about 3% of all spending on education worldwide goes toward digital initiatives.
The growth of online teaching and learning have been held back by concerns about cost; lack of reliable access to digital devices and high-speed internet connections, especially among poorer families or countries; and widespread attitudes that online learning was inferior to traditional learning methods, Mathes says.
"I feel kind of bad saying this, but oddly this pandemic is definitely a tailwind for us," says Chip Paucek, co-founder and CEO at education technology company 2U, whose stock price has climbed in recent weeks. He says that Australia and the U.S. were best prepared for the massive shift to online learning because both countries have a large amount of online degree and enrichment programs. But how effective the teaching and courses are really depends on the school.
The adjustment has been challenging even for Harvard Business School, which runs a regular online program, but also had to quickly move all of its in-person courses virtually. After a last-minute training class, faculty are now trying their best to manage 90-participant class discussions on Zoom to continue the school's famous case study method of learning.
"It hasn't been easy," says Patrick Mullane, executive director of Harvard Business School Online, who helped the business school migrate classes online. "And after this is over, I don't think it will ever all go online. There is something unique and special about being in residence." Mullane also points out that maybe the situation will force employers to take online degrees more seriously. "This could push us a little further into making online more mainstream because everyone graduating this year is doing so, at least in part, online."
"It has raised the level of inequality, between the kids with devices and the internet and those without," says Alex Urrea, managing partner at Eduscape, which offers consulting and training for online and blended learning for educators in the U.S., China and Europe. "I can't tell you one place in the world where this is not an issue."
"The pandemic is quickly showing the side effects of institutions and policymakers treating online education as a crisis-management tool," says Vivian Vasquez, professor at American University's School of Education, who has studied online learning. "Things may have unfolded differently if online education had been previously treated as a vital part of teaching and learning."
Enrolment process was reasonably quick and uncomplicated. Process to verify identity was simple and neat. Customer service answered my enrolment questions rapidly and were very polite and friendly. Selection of courses is excellent. The online learning platform is not the most intuitive but it does effectively present the course materials. My course materials were current, relevant and interesting. The course was delivered in an engaging format. Objectives were clear for each lesson. My tutor was fantastic at communicating with me and provided really constructive, useful feedback. I plan to take further courses from Learning Curve Group, and definitely recommend them to others who enjoy independent study.
I was thinking Visual Studio would have the smallest learning curve, but when I open a test GUI app, I see a bunch of foreign looking stuff like carats (^) all over the place - I found online that these mean "handles", which I have trouble even understanding the definition or purpose of ("sort of like pointers but not really" is basically how I've read people define them).
So every option has a big learning curve - and ideally I'd like to know which one minimizes the time you have to spend learning the toolkit/framework itself. Since I'm likely never going to be making money from the programs I create, the time I spend learning a specific toolkit would be pretty costly. I just want to be able to make a functional program using the C++ knowledge I have, but in GUI form. At the moment it seems if I want to make a GUI app, I'd have to spend way more time learning the GUI framework I'd use than writing the functional part of the app itself.
Third, take advantage of the design tools (Qt Creator, VS's form building and so on). Don't start by trying to read through all the code they generate: get your own small programs running first. Otherwise it's too hard to know what matters for a basic program and what doesn't. The details get lost. Once you've got the basics down though, Do use them as references to learn how to do specific effects. If you can get something to work in the design tools, then you can look at particular code they generate to be able to try on your own hand-written programs. They are very useful for intermediate learning.
I've never used Qt, so I can't speak to its simplicity, but I doubt the difficulty is on a vastly different scale than that of wxWidgets. However, what I can say is that no matter what API you use (wxWidgets, Qt, WinAPI, etc) your code will be "locked into" that particular platform, so don't worry if you feel that learning Qt will lock you into the Qt platform (because the same thing will happen with any of those APIs).
This tutorial is enabled by DataShop, which is the world's largest open data repository of transactional educational data collected from online learning courses, intelligent tutors, educational games, and simulations. The data is fine-grained, with student actions recorded roughly every 10 seconds, and it is longitudinal, spanning semester or yearlong courses. As of October 2012, almost 400 datasets are stored including over 90 million student actions which equates to over 200,000 student hours of data. Most student actions are "coded" meaning they are not only graded as correct or incorrect, but are categorized in terms of the hypothesized competencies or knowledge components needed to perform that action. DataShop allows researchers to import data in order to use the provided analysis tools, and to export data from the repository to perform additional analysis. Researchers have analyzed these data to better understand student cognitive and affective states and the results have been used to redesign instruction and demonstrably improve student learning.
The parents and grandparents don't speak English, so at first, the family struggled a little to help its two elementary school students through online learning while the older siblings kept up with their high school and college studies. But Eh Moo and Saw Kler have gotten more independent, needing little help during the school day, their older siblings say.
Here is a brief description of a cost reduction strategy used in a fuel cell company. A Wright-based learning curve was used to determine the economic order quantity and to aid in the negotiation of the lowest possible, but fair, part price. A win-win negotiation strategy can build upon openness and trust. However, doing the homework upfront will go a long way in the negotiation process. Competitive benchmarking of suppliers is an important step to narrow down the list of potential suppliers. Should-cost analysis should be carried out on 20% of parts that make up 80% of the system cost. The analysis takes into account the production method, the amount of material used, the various processing times, and the estimated profits. While this analysis may provide a good understanding of the variable costs, the fixed costs may vary widely among suppliers. A typical classification between variable and fixed costs is shown in Table 1.
The objectives of this paper are organized primarily as follows: a literature review of the relevant learning curves is discussed because they have been used extensively in the past to model the simple concept known as the economies of scale; a generalized learning curve model adapted for purchasing and cost reduction negotiations is introduced; the model is then used to fit supplier quotations of parts through a least squares percent error method; the results are used to shed light on the supplier pricing strategies and cost reduction negotiations; and finally, the purchasing experience and cost reduction results are discussed.
Kara and Kayis [7] examined five learning curve models along with simulation to estimate iteration cycles and project completion time in concurrent engineering projects. Kull et al. [8] compared four learning models and validated various forms of power-law learning for the online web-based ordering experience. Gunawan [9] found learning rate to be 96% in sheet metal lean manufacturing operations. Boone and Ganeshan [10] and Liao [11] examined productivity and performance improvements in service organizations.
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