s been a year of incredible growth for MOOCs, and Coursera has evolved more rapidly than we could ever have expected. We hit (and surpassed) a triple milestone of 100 partner institutions, 500 courses, and 5 million students. The demand for quality online education resources is simply staggering.
As is typical for developments in technology that force us to rethink the status quo of an industry, this growth has been met with some pushback among skeptics. Within online education, we’ve seen this manifest in criticism of student retention rates and demographic biases. Its natural for early results to be judged against old guidelines and metrics of success for traditional education, but at Coursera we see the outlook for retention and demographic diversity differently.
Among our priorities in the coming year, we hope to shift the conversation around these two dimensions of the learning experience, redefine what it means to be successful, and lay the groundwork for products, offerings, and features that can help students navigate this new medium of learning to meet their own goals, whether that means completing dozens of courses or simply checking out a new subject.
Across all Coursera courses, average retention measured overall is approximately 4%. We can all agree that this would be incredibly low for a 50-seat, on-campus lecture.
However, considering that class enrollment on our platform is completely open, free, and requires no commitment (not unlike reading a book while browsing at the library, or marking a course in a university catalog), we need to reconsider whether it is a failure for thousands of students to complete a course while tens of thousands are browsing (as recently argued very convincingly by Kevin Carey).
When we’ve looked deeper into the intent of users, we find a much more promising picture: One early study of Coursera students found that of those students who said at the outset of a course that they intended to earn a Statement of Accomplishment, roughly 24% successfully completed the course. Surveys of students one month into a course are an even better indicator: Of the “committed” students in these surveys, 64% end up completing all the coursework. (Take a look at figure 4 here. We’ll also be publishing more comprehensive and up-to-date data soon in ACM Ubiquity.) And in our Signature Track option, which offers students the option to pay a fee of around $50 to receive a verified certificate upon successful completion of a course, retention averages around 63% overall, 88% among the committed students and can be as high as 99%.
Clearly, there is more to the retention story than just the baseline numbers.
Beyond retention, we’ve heard questioning of the extent to which MOOCs are living up to their goals of democratizing learning. Recent studies, including a few run by our university partners, indicate that, within certain classes and areas of study, some 80% of students have already earned some kind of degree. This observation is entirely unsurprising, given the significant bias in many of the early courses to the more specialized topics, and the overall phenomenon that early adopters of technology tend to skew toward the educated.
Additional context might be gained from the fact that 40% of Coursera learners are in the developing world. In many of these countries, the few top-quality institutions have very limited capacity relative to the overall demand, and many students are relegated to institutions that are significantly understaffed, where the quality of instruction is highly variable. In such cases, the achievement of a university degree is far from guaranteeing employment, and the high-quality education provided by MOOCs can be a significant factor in opening doors to opportunity--even among the college-educated.
Still, we are deeply committed to expanding our impact on populations that have been traditionally underserved by higher education, and are actively working to broaden access for students in less-developed countries through a range of initiatives, including: working with our Translation Partners to provide translated subtitles for videos, to enable non-native English speakers to learn; localizing our website, so as to make non-English-language students feel “at home” on the site; working with multiple partners, including the US State Department, to hostphysical “Learning Hubs” in locations around the world where internet access is limited; and launching a mobile app to enable students to download course materials for offline viewing in places where connectivity is an issue. As another example, when Coursera first launched, we had very low student enrollment in China. This fall, we began working with a Chinese internet company, NetEase, to help improve the delivery of video contentacross the internet firewall. Now, China is our second fastest growing country in terms of daily student sign-ups, just behind the US. http://c.open.163.com/coursera/home.htm#/courseraHome
MOOCs have come so far in just two years, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. As we tackle existing challenges and face new ones in 2014, we are humbled by the response that we have seen at Coursera in these early stages and encouraged by the potential to expand, improve, and innovate to bring our vision for the future of education to life.
…
Added by chris macrae at 7:04am on January 3, 2014
he Economist 1972 after first sight of 500 youth around a digital net
Happy 2013= Will the next decade be worldwide youth's most productive, collaborate and sustainable
2013's Future History Update net generation 2024 report: 1974-2024 of The Economist's Unacknowledged Giant
The 2 major crisis of opportunity and risk happened:as per our 1984 story of how to excape Orwell's Big Brother endgame
net generation - see Death of a great optimist - Matt Ridley
the end of superpower isms - fall of berlin wall jed to superpower rivalries between Cap & Com ISM being absurd for all peoples if not for those who wanted to continue top-down rule and oppression of peoples through fear -more
converging 7 wonders of job creation's most vital markets
havent yet freed 7 most vital market purposes of youth's next 3 billion jobs map
7 Youth economics- public servants, professions and peoples empower youth's most productive, collaborative and sustainable lifetime
6 banking for everyone's most productive future lifetimes and community-grounded grwoth
5 mobilising healthcare and celebrations of girl power
4 Job creating education and open technology smarter media
3 Millennium goals generated by bottom-up aid and grassroots foundations
2 Abundant clean energy food water flows through every global vilage
1 Borderless peace and cross-cultural Courage
MOOC search
1 lucknow curriculum
2 mit ashden bangla at 42 china and japan as creditor nations of asia pacific worldwide century
3 bottom up value chain curriculum - bangla social economy
4 nz www.thelearningweb.net , china 10 million families use learningweb.net ideas , moocs, competitions, free university for youth's 10000 greatest job creators
5 curriculum of free nursing college and nurses as most trusted community informaton networkers of 21st C
6 curriculum of cashless banking and of aflatoun financial literacy
7 multi-win models of Entrepreneurial Revolution, post-industrial revolution, replicating 30000 microfranchises , systemic valuation of transparency goodwill multiplying value exchange, sustainability as exponential - 3 billion new job map…
Added by chris macrae at 6:21am on January 4, 2013
ciples that define this script's inquiry - if they dont interest you- as they say in open space, move over to team up with a different living script whose principles postively flow for you
1 for the net generation to be youth's most productive and heroic goal accomplishing time on our planet we need a post-2015 millennium goals bottom-up summit - we call this microeducationsummit
2 in searching for the first 10 practice groups that need to converge on microeducationsumiit we believe that MOOC (Massive Open Online Curriculum) can win-win with every other practice group- one of the lessons from 15 years of microcreditsummit as the 2015 goals space was that it didnt iteratively build any curriculum of how bottom up and collaboration knowledge needed opposite way round development than al the top-down forces of financial services
3 this living script is arranged in 2 columns - left-side: the search for 1o practice pathways with MOOC an integral one - right-side notes on how cBRACas the world's most sustainable bottom up grassroots network has experiences that can help
under construction!!
1 MOOC LINKING IN 10 CONVERGENT PRACTICE NETWIORKS OF MICREDUCATION SUMMIT
2 Intersection of open-tech, banking for billions of people as different for banking for 1%, and education (in retorspect 1997's launch of mgoal summit around banking alone was 1 artificially separating 2 unable to track the graet innovation banagldsh had already starteed of mobilising the villages)
...BRAC AS METAHUB OF MOOC & MICROEDUCATIONSUMMIT
BRAC - runs over 50000 bottom-up schools - so world leading capacity in curriculum design
BRAC's accepted (eg by international aid organsiations from every hemisphere) world changing frameowrk is remapping value chains so all interactive players of production and demand are visible- this is a transparent step to "innovating reallocation of assets" so everyone who is hardworking and offering useful service can earn aliving wage in the sector. In animating Entreprejurial Revolution dialogues of net generation since 1972, the definition The Economist uses of entreprenurship is the same as waht BRAC does
BRAC has a glittering array of mobile tech partners including exciting colaborations across MIT youth
..
…
Added by chris macrae at 6:36am on January 8, 2013
es and networks
$100 laptop now 10 times more economical leapfrog - ethiopian conteint-wide elearning satellite http://www.yazmi.com
Koller's discussion of MOOC's progress is one of the parallel repors in our annual 2013 MOOC newsletter. Like Khan she keeps san francisco's claim to value the internet as the greatst learning revolution of all time alive
Discuss some of the most entreprenurial experiments students are doing with MOOCs 1 2 3 ..
…
Added by chris macrae at 11:53am on January 3, 2014
he ever-escalating cost of a traditional four-year degree education, more and more students are looking for ways to learn without necessarily incurring the costs of a traditional education (or a least a full four or five years of a college education). But beyond even all this, these platforms are a response to a much larger trend, which is the slow upending of traditional classroom-based education. With the torrid growth of Khan Academy, a non-profit provider of instructional videos for K – 12 students, and the increasing ubiquity of alternative “universities” such as TEDed and Lynda.com for lifelong learning, the availability of high-quality instruction at no or a low cost has never been higher. “Americans are going to start thinking about higher education not as, you know, a traditional college, necessarily, or even a traditional night school, but as something that’s sort of moves beyond these traditional barriers of time and place,” said Ben Wildavsky of the Kauffman Foundation in a recent NPR story. A secondary and more nascent trend is the concept of “credentials 2.0”, which is born of the need to document alternative learning accomplishment and mastery. While everyone recognizes the legitimacy of a bachelor’s degree from an accredited four-year college or university, evaluators don’t quite know what to do with claims that courses were completed via Khan Academy or edX or TEDed. While some provide certificates of completion – more commonly referred to as badges – others do not yet, and those that do may not offer versions that are downloadable or otherwise portable. In response, Mozilla has been at work building a badge platform called Open Badges specifically targeted at both traditional and non-traditional learning environments so students and lifelong learners have a way of verifying a course of study has been completed to a third-party evaluator. And companies like Pathbrite (where I am CEO) are building portfolio platforms that enable the collection and presentation of “artifacts” that can include earned badges, digital versions of transcripts and traditional diplomas, and all manner of work product demonstrating competency. Though MOOCs may sound gimmicky and faddy and even silly, they are the real deal. They’re spawning a supporting ecosystem. And they just may be the future of education…
Added by chris macrae at 11:33am on February 10, 2013
evolve into livelihoods..
unless you hold that thought you may undervalue the entrepreneurial revolution that moocs can be (which of course is what the PR lobbies of 99% of expensive bricks and mortar university intend) - you are unlikely to see how many of the 20 greatest anti-youth monopolies old education is spiraling
turn to one of the most oddly rushed assumption of the biggest mooc platforms: that they have nothing to openly learn from real free universities -some of which such as south africa's have a decade more experience than they have - see http://erworld.tv or search some combination of blecher and maharishi, google, branson, virtually free university
other problems moocs have relate to trust and collaboration - if there is any knowledge I value sharing most - I'd far rather see it there 365/24/7 on khan academy than go up and down according to the peculiar time rhythms of a mooc platform and the anti-collaboration ledge it requires of its students http://normanmacrae.ning.com/forum/topics/2014-dream-curriculum-for-khan-academy-and-open-edu-related
2014 sees the first mooc we know of that is designed around a curriculum that didnt exist before (september 2013) when a world leading chamge summit was hosted in new york
how can http://coursera.org/course/changetheworld starting jan 2014 be improved on?
next time a summit things of transforming into a mooc we'd suggest more youth at the summit and khan academy type production facilities everywhere available - that way youth and leaders may create some ola (let alone some 10 times more economic AHA)- the most valuable 9 minute or less training models viewed from how many youth viralise and action them
better yet such a change summit might feature the most collaborative ngos in the world where they too have implanted khan academy type labs into their everyday grassroots innovation and social labs
both of these ideas will be celebrated as millions of youth have 2 years to prepare for the greatest festival atlanta has staged since the olympics- an action learning festival of job creation and millennium collaboration goal re-editing that any capital with a job creating future for youth can link into http://youthcreativelab.blogspot.com http://erworld.tv htp:
Reclaim Open Learning
open.media.mit.edu/
Open like the web. Learning by everyone. For everyone. Reclaim Open Learning brings
together innovators who are building the future of higher ed. divide
2013 was also the year when obama pleaded for help - if you are youth and university-bound use the net to create a massive open online collaboration guide to which universities you rank as offering value for what- this will be 100 times more economic than anythhing DC government can ever publish on the subject
latest exceptional reporting research team dialogues at entrepreneurial revolution world
[1webs include blecher http://maharishiinstitute.org/ ; chowdhury www.women4empowerment.org ; foerster at www.newworld.ac ; javalquinto http://economiaynegociossociales.blogspot.com/2013/12/first-school-...
http://maharishiinstitute.org/ , CIDA since 1999 Taddy Blecher in Johannesburg has show that educators can create millions of jobs with youth - how can we help him with his work and how's this connect with your work;macrae family has argued since 1972 that the net generation can make tremendous human progress if and only if educators, economists and all who make the biggest resource integrate youth job creating into the way their worldwide purpose and impact is valued
…
Added by chris macrae at 6:18am on January 3, 2014
how to MOOC, .I would suggest items below plus any questions he wants to ask
If you see elements of this presentation which you yourself want more debate on please say
==============================================
MOOC Recommendation to BRAC
1 Most basic skill of MOOC is presenting training in 10 minute module vitually- what?
2 Simplest case to study is Khan Academy – why know about KA & Coursera?
3 Two questions to ask to maximise BRAC value chain of mooc and whole internet
3.1 -what 10 minute modules do millions of youth most need to interact
3.2 How do the 10 minute modules link together in a whole course
4 Recommendation- start up a 10 million youth-training-outreach
Lab wherever you do social labs or lead bottom-up practices .( Software to
start lab to produce same training format as khan is only $300 per licence)
5 What BRAC brand can scale that no other partner network can? How to
linkin to post 2015 millennium goals summits that value open job creating
education as critical collaboration multiplier
6 Debate – these recommendations come from 42 years of
other way round experiments in online learning thanks to Norman Macrae's
lifetime editorial interest in this future. Expensive (top-down) professionals
will advise different starting points to MOOC. Depends how much you want to
always be in editorial control of your own training content and how nearly
free you want hundreds of millions of youth interactions to spread.
Is this the curriculum Bangladesh, Chinese and Japanese youth need most? your view s of most needed free curricula welcome!!
-------------------------------------------
FAST TRACK-Someone like Taddy Blecher could give sir fazle eg a telephone
briefing on that fom leading practioner viewpoint. Someone like Japan Ambassador could
reconvene meeting on above with sir fazle and quadir brother and other
Bangla open tech wizards. If chemistry is good between sir fazle and say paul
farmer then they could both discuss how to mooc free nursing college. If its
good with say soros they could include aflatoun in a financial and currency
literacy curriculum. Sir Fazle should brainstorm which partners to mooc what
youth practice networks on first
OPTIONAL ADDITION
A former first lady of s.africa used to call dhaka the open university of microcredit.
Why not: one day worked youth can call BRAC the open university of everything
Since 1972 we have assumed a race is going on for peoples to free education
with big brothers who want the exact opposite. Currently MOOC is the
most urgent freedom challenge any entrepreneurial revolutionary can collaborate
around-by celebrating this now the triad of japan, china, bangladesh could live
up to dad's 1970s published vision in The Economist of Asian region saving
worldwide youth 1975-2075. My guess is Jack Ma may be a critical connector of
this but we need bangladeshi open tech wizards to brainstorm who…
.uk if your mission win-wins with friends of ours
It is agreed that
M stands for Massive
O stands for Open
O stands for Online
MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE
so MOO brings me back to 1972 when dad at The Economist and I shared life changing moment of observing 500 youth sharing knowhow around an early digital network - - an entrepreneurual revolution the rest of my dad's life was spent exploring as the west's leading pro-youth economist
1:54
entrepreneurialrevolution.avi by youtheconomics•
Editors at The Economist discuss Entrepreneurial Revolution (ER) and why Norman Macrae supported Bangladeshi Microfinance pioneers ... Part 1 in 2010s world series of ER parties celebrating 2010s as youth's most productive decade.
- see part of the curriculum of Norman Macrae- The Economist's Unacknowledged Giant here.
C can stand for Course or Curriculum or Collaboration
What does MOOC comprise of?
When you look at the Entrepreneurial Revolution going on at www.coursera.com, first you will see:
a deck of slides and a youtube-type commentary imposed over bottom right corner of the slides - this typically gives you a 12 minute guided tour - that is the basic molecule of MOOC - just as my dad's work from 1980 proclaimed: we are all knowledge nertworkers from hereon, so everyone can be a mooc provider
next, coursera adds to an integral experience- there are weekly quizzes to ensure that a current alumni community is continuing the same action learning joureny; there are discussion spaces so you can question whether this teacher has the mindset you really most wanted to be certified by -something that isnt obvious give 2010s is billed to be the decade where more knowledge becomes outdated than ever before, more diversity of testing brilliant global village service communities is to be valued than all human history/cultures spun geographically around separated peoples could begin to conceive
cousera is looking for a massive landmark -will this be celebrated in 2013? -what will be the most productive course to sign up a million youth simultaneously?; and how will that be judged- for example is it possible to design a million person course amongst whom everyone creates jobs and many of youth's 10000 most colaborative jobmakers are linked together
in 1984 our first book on the internet generation proposed making 2010s worldwide youth's most productive time by structuring capital to invest in youth co-producing their choice of most heroic goals ever identified by a single generation of our planet - we're searching out 100 leaders curricula that are aligned to the goal of 2010s being worldwide youth's most productive, sustainable and heroic tine at www.wholeplanet.tv - all we are fairly certain of- in an age that needs to be more communnally as well as individaully curious than ever before - is that those who mooc around sir fazle abed's family will be on one of the 100 most collaboartive job creating journeys that 2010s beings can embark on
- which other 100 people's curcicula vitae will youth celebrate that around - eg from the east Yunus and who ... from the west Mackey and who ... from the north berners lee and who .... from the south mandela and who ...
and where can 5000 annually celebrate this live and interpersonally- is the world ready for microeducationsummit ? - and if so where will that emerge from?
…
Added by chris macrae at 8:10am on January 28, 2013
like to help converge in the quest towards smart media and freeing education -however until end of march along with student competitions at MIT they take my diary priority as if sir fazle commits his name -and every area that www.brac.net as the world's largest mgoal action ngo - to microeducationsummit being the core post 2015 summit goals network then everyone who wants to linkin to the most exciting start of millennium races that my dad started mapping in The Economist in the late 1970s will join in
Following review from atlanta (during 50th martin luther king anniversary) written to inform People Map linking in JIM-E's treasure maps out of georgia stateand with over 30 worldwide partners for world's most active youth including spirit of girl guides and boy scouts intercommunity work of 21st C
you already know shafqat as connectors of bangladeshi wizard tech youth with other countries tech wizards
naila also does something parallel having spent more time in yunus branded tech companies grameen phones and grameen solutions than any of us but at the same time having invested her families wealth creation in telecentres for women and community building youth - her dad was bangladesh's leading civil engineer; when in bangaldesh she curently rents sir fazle's old house but currently she is mainly a neighbour of mine in maryland -naila is also a dircetor of a board that straddles 2 areas - orphanages as job creating hubs and staging twice a year events where 5000 people in dc without medical insurance swarm for a free health checkup- such pop-up gatherings can also be places to test which youth ideas can gain massive collabration traction
navneet who naila introduced me to on friday while all 3 of us were judging tuskegee (uni founded by a slave) and alabama's stat wides youth's entreprenurial competition is atlanta based and linkins massive orphanages for job creation across india; he is also a mentor of 100 day incubation of social revolution projects - lets ee shich run and which fail - very useful given atlanta and tuskegee now have over several hunderd youth ideas to do that from the most passionate effors of over 100 historically black universities entrepreneur students
tania is also currently a neighbour of mine in maryland- she was sir fazles chief brand officer when brac started to develop its brand around 2009 and then his chief of staff
hidde coordinators aflatoun curriculum out of netherlands and taddy connects all mandela partnership around taddy his invention of the free university format which also links in mahiriji empowerment training and is fuhest advanced in knowing what curriculum turn the energies of disadvantaged youth intoi rebiulding a nation's future
Rest of this mail starts to brainstorm 2 questions pivotal to our searches at http://bracnet.ning.com alos known as www.planetmooc.com
why is sir fazle most essential connector of 013
what cluster of portals are needed so that MOOCs leave no child's job creation education behind
ideas welcome as where to fly in and mobilise people who wish to link youth in
why is sir fazle most essential connector of 013
- from the middle east sir fazle is wise's leading connector at the education oscars and he is the most sought keynote at paris 5000 millennium goals conference convergences which happens every september
www.convergences2015.org
You +1'd this publicly. Undo
Convergences 2015 is happy to announce you the holding of the 6th Convergences 2015 World Forum from 17th to 19th September, 2013 in Paris, France. and where I hobnob with the confrence producer;
I also know sam daley harris who hosted microcreditsummit for 15 years until it destroyed its vision -sadly to keep a low cost delegate fee from 100 developing countries it became over-sponsored by big banks so the pro-youth economics curriculum that the world's great and good including queen sofia of spain and hilary clinton had been searching for linking in netgeneration youth between 1977-2010 got more and more obliterated as did actioning the deepest contextual practises of banking for the poor through every global village; fortunately now that arkasas chose to be the state to connect nursing with its share of obama 4 billion bailout fund on broadband for community -hilary can get back to turning arkasas into number 1 lab of 10 times more affordable healthcare if she is linkedin through celebrating optimal youth curriculum
more generally across youth investment banking in every vital service practice, cashless banking under sir fazle and mit and dubai direction (media lab mit, quadir brothers legatum network linking mit and abed) also links into the number 1 financial literacy cutrriculum for all ages given brac as the most massive partner of my friends at aflatoun whose founder Jeroo Billimoria started financial literacy training for oprphans and are now in 90 countries- similarly the kenyan jamii bora network and the mandela network I love best for youth entrepreneurs emerged from how can we ensure orphans are their countries most brilliant collaboration entrepreneurs turning the solidarity of gangs fom bad to goodwill uses - when kenya had riots after the last elections it was literaly orphan networks of youth that mediated both through jamii bora and the smarter version of twitter which kenya launched as usahidi (last election , next election) and whose founder then became headhunted by google africa to relocate with mandela networks
thanks to celebration party 3 of dads work- howsted by japan ambassador in dhaka, we have also been rebriefin japan on its number 1 role in worldwide youth's futures, who my dad believed needed to do most to rehearse ahead youth collabortaion economics - economist survey 1975 asia pacific centiry - across the asia pacific region
DO NOW AGENDAS why japan needs to save bangladesh from top-down forces so that bangladesh www.considerbangladesh.com can then inspire china to call for the most brilliant youth future goals now china is the number 1 creditor nation; dad was always preparing the number 1 creditor nation ahead of time to take on youth entrpreneurs next great collaboration revolution for the whole human lot
PORTALS OF MOOC
while the world's most expensive universities assume they will continue moocs to that endgame of destroying youths freedoms to explore their own generation's productivuty with millium times more colaboration technology the opposite clusters of mkoocs designed for 10 times less costly job creating education need several convergent portals
1 can simply be free access to moocs led by practtioners who want job creatin or milennium goals actions to be the reason
for their practice network
2 can be in richer nations 25 dollars a month youth membership and in poorer nations $1 dolar a mont youth membership of a peer to peer association of how to both chose which moocs to0 use; find universities that will examine you on your customised colection of moocs; help stdents impriove the moocs abd linkin youth entrepreneur competitions- if i understand correctly you want to build that portal for about a fift of youth who have previously be wholly left out of education because they prefer learning by action than learning by sitting - this was nicely expressed in this collaboration video we hoste out of new york by the bbc's main clean energy filamekr and ocean diver paul rose who also works at the outward bounds consultancy impact internationsl that mostofa, zasheem and I invited to yunus first global summit 2009 - it is an extreme irony that yunus 8 million members number 1 wish was the whole economic power of grameen be invested in their next generation's educatiuonal development but brac firstly did all the work providing the schools that yunus children were sent to and secondly none of the 100 most powerful people who befriended yunus ever helped him MOOC
portals of MOOC needs lot more brainstorming being the number 1 gamechanger currently actuove of the 7 markets that mostneed to be freed if dads 1984 vision of net generation 3 billion new collaboration economy jobs are to be freed in time to save us from the oppsoute orwellian endgame of a human race more connecetd than geo-politically-separated- which alos makes a cultures secindary education mooc urgent - fortunatly this was one of the top 6 student suggestions in the alabama state faceoff of youth competitions - regionally i imagine navneet will be nurturing this
chris
…
Added by chris macrae at 7:42am on January 20, 2013
teachers say eg
The Princeton sociology Professor Mitch Duneier commented on his MOOC that ‘…Within three weeks I had received more feedback on my sociological ideas than I had in a career of teaching
KERRY GLASGOWIS HUMANITY'S LAST BEST CHANCE - Join search for Sustainaabilty's Curricula
101ways-generation.docx 101 ways education can save the world WHAT IF WE DESIGNED LIFELONG LIVELIHOOD LOEARNING SO THAT so that teachers & students, parent & communities were empowered to be ahead of 100 times more tech rather than the remnants of a system that puts macihnes and their exhausts ahead of human life and nature's renewal 2016 is arguably the first time thet educatirs became front and centre to the question that Von neummn asked journalist to mediate back in 1951- what goods will peoples do with 100 times more tech per decade? It appears that while multilaterals like the Un got used in soundbite and twittering ages to claim they valued rifghts & inclusion, pubblic goods & safety, they fotgot theirUN tech twin in Genva has been practising global connectivity since 1865, that dellow Goats of V neumnn has chiared Intellectual Cooperation in the 1920s which pervesrely became the quasi trade union Unesco- it took Abedian inspired educations in 2016 ro reunite ed and tecah as well as health and trade ; 7 decades of the UN not valuing Numenn's question at its core is quite late, but if we dare graviate UN2 aeound this digital coperation question now we give the younger half if the world a chnace especially as a billion poorest women have been synchronised to deep community human development since 1970
Dear Robert - you kindly asked for a short email so that you could see if there is a CGTN anchor in east coast who might confidentially share views with my expectation of how only Asian young women cultural movements (parenting and community depth but amplified by transparent tech in life shaping markets eg health, food, nature..) can return sustainability to all of us
three of my father's main surveys in The Economist 1962-1977 explain imo where future history will take us (and so why younger half of world need friendship/sustainable adaptation with Chinese youth -both on mainland and diaspora)
1962 consider japan approved by JF Kennedy: argued good news - 2 new economic models were emerging through japan korea south and taiwan relevant to all Asia Rising (nrxt to link the whole trading/supply chains of the far east coast down through hong kong and cross-seas at singapore)
1 rural keynsianism ie 100% productivity in village first of all food security- borlaug alumni ending starvation
2 supercity costal trade models which designed hi-tech borderless sme value chains- to build a 20 million person capital or an 8 million person superport you needed the same advances in engineering - partly why this second economic model was win-win for first time since engines begun Glasgow 1760 ; potentially able to leverage tech giant leaps 100 times ahead; the big opportunity von neumann had gifted us - knowhow action networking multiply value application unlike consuming up things
1976 entrepreneurial revolution -translated into italian by prodi - argued that future globalisation big politics big corporate would need to be triangularised by community scaled sme networks- this was both how innovation advancing human lot begins and also the only way to end poverty in the sense of 21st C being such that next girl born can thrive because every community taps in diversity/safety/ valuing child and health as conditions out of which intergenerational economic growth can spring
in 1977 fathers survey of china - argued that there was now great hope that china had found the system designs that would empower a billion people to escape from extreme poverty but ultimately education of the one child generation (its tech for human capabilities) would be pivotal ( parallel 1977 survey looked at the futures of half the world's people ie east of iran)
best chris macrae + 1 240 316 8157 washington DC
IN MORE DETAIL TECH HUMAN EXPONENTIALS LAST CHANCE DECADE?
- we are in midst of unprecedented exponential change (dad from 1960s called death of distance) the tech legacy of von neumann (dad was his biographer due to luckily meeting him in his final years including neumann's scoping of brain science (ie ai and human i) research which he asked yale to continue in his last lecture series). Exponential risks of extinction track to mainly western top-down errors at crossroads of tech over last 60 years (as well as non transparent geonomic mapping of how to reconcile what mainly 10 white empires had monopoly done with machines 1760-1945 and embedded in finance - see eg keynes last chapter of general theory of money); so our 2020s destiny is conditioned by quite simple local time-stamped details but ones that have compounded so that root cause and consequence need exact opposite of academic silos- so I hope there are some simple mapping points we can agree sustainability and chinese anchors in particular are now urgently in the middle of
Both my fatherwww.normanmacrae.netat the economist and I (eg co-authoring 1984 book2025 report,retranslated to 1993 sweden's new vikings) have argued sustainability in early 21st c will depend mostly on how asians as 65% of humans advance and how von neumann (or moores law) 100 times more tech every decade from 1960s is valued by society and business.
My father (awarded Japan's Order of Rising Sun and one time scriptwriter for Prince Charles trips to Japan) had served as teen allied bomber command burma campaign - he therefore had google maps in his head 50 years ahead of most media people, and also believed the world needed peace (dad was only journalist at messina birth of EU ) ; from 1960 his Asian inclusion arguments were almost coincidental to Ezra Vogel who knew much more about Japan=China last 2000 years ( additionally cultural consciousness of silk road's eastern dynamics not golden rule of Western Whites) and peter drucker's view of organisational systems
(none of the 10 people at the economist my father had mentored continued his work past 1993- 2 key friends died early; then the web turned against education-journalism when west coast ventures got taken over by advertising/commerce instead of permitting 2 webs - one hi-trust educational; the other blah blah. sell sell .sex sell. viral trivial and hate politicking)
although i had worked mainly in the far east eg with unilever because of family responsibilities I never got to china until i started bumping into chinese female graduates at un launch of sdgs in 2015- I got in 8 visits to beijing -guided by them around tsinghua, china centre of globalisation, a chinese elder Ying Lowrey who had worked on smes in usa for 25 years but was not jack ma's biographer in 2015 just as his fintech models (taobao not alibaba) were empowering villagers integration into supply chains; there was a fantastic global edutech conference dec 2016 in Tsinghua region (also 3 briefings by Romano Prodi to students) that I attended connected with great womens education hero bangladesh'sfazle abed; Abed spent much of hs last decade hosting events with chinese and other asian ambassadors; unite university graduates around sdg projects the world needed in every community but which had first been massively demonstrated in asia - if you like a version of schwarzman scholars but inclusive of places linking all deepest sustainability goals challenges
and i personally feel learnt a lot from 3 people broadcasting from cgtn you and the 2 ladies liu xin and tian wei (they always seemed to do balanced interviews even in the middle of trump's hatred campaigns), through them I also became a fan of father and daughter Jin at AIIB ; i attended korea's annual general meet 2017 of aiib; it was fascinating watching bankers for 60 countries each coming up with excuses as to why they would not lead on infrastructure investments (even though the supercity economic model depends on that)
Being a diaspora scot and a mathematician borders (managers who maximise externalisation of risks) scare me; especially rise of nationalist ones ; it is pretty clear historically that london trapped most of asia in colomisdation ; then bankrupted by world war 2 rushed to independence without the un or anyone helping redesign top-down systems ; this all crashed into bangladesh the first bottom up collaboration women lab ; ironically on health, food security, education bangladesh and chinese village women empowerment depended on sharing almost every village microfranchise between 1972 and 2000 especially on last mile health networking
in dads editing of 2025 from 1984 he had called for massive human awareness by 2001 of mans biggest risk being discrepancies in incomes and expectations of rich and poor nations; he suggested that eg public broadcast media could host a reality tv end poverty entrepreneur competition just as digital media was scaling to be as impactful as mass media
that didnt happen and pretty much every mess - reactions to 9/11, failure to do ai of epidemics as priority from 2005 instead of autonomous cars, failure to end long-term carbon investments, subprime has been rooted in the west not having either government nor big corporate systems necessary to collaboratively value Asian SDG innovations especially with 5g
nye:csis jan2020 dc the greatest debate help search 2025NOW.COM
I am not smart enough to understand how to thread all the politics now going on but in the event that any cgtn journalist wants to chat especially in dc where we could meet I do not see humans preventing extinction without maximising chinese youth (particularly womens dreams); due to covid we lost plans japan had to relaunch value of female athletes - so this and other ways japan and china and korea might have regained joint consciousness look as if they are being lost- in other words both cultural and education networks (not correctly valued by gdp news headlines) may still be our best chance at asian women empowerment saving us all from extinction but that needs off the record brainstorming as I have no idea what a cgtn journalist is free to cover now that trump has turned 75% of americans into seeing china as the enemy instead of looking at what asian policies of usa hurt humans (eg afghanistan is surely a human wrong caused mostly by usa); a; being a diaspora scot i have this naive idea that we need to celebrate happiness of all peoples an stop using media to spiral hatred across nations but I expect that isnt something an anchor can host generally but for example if an anchor really loves ending covid everywhere then at least in that market she needs to want to help united peoples, transparency of deep data etc
please map how and why - more than 3 in 4 scots earn their livelihoods worldwide not in our homeland- that requires hi-trust as well as hi-tech to try to love all cultures and nature's diversity- until mcdonalds you could use MAC OR MC TO identify our community engaging networks THAT SCALED ROUND STARTING UP THE AGE OF HUMANS AND MACHINES OF GKASGOW UNI 1760 12 3 - and the microfranchises they aimed to sustain locally around each next child born - these days scots hall of fame started in 1760s around adam smith and james watt and 195 years later glasgow engineering BA fazle abed - we hope biden unites his irish community building though cop26 -ditto we hope kamalA values gandhi- public service - but understand if he or she is too busy iN DC 2021 with covid or finding which democrats or republicans or american people speak bottom-up sustainable goals teachers and enrrepreneurs -zoom with chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk if you are curious - fanily foundation of the economist's norman macrae- explorer of whether 100 times more tehc every decade since 1945 would end poverty or prove orwell's-big brother trumps -fears correct 2025report.com est1984 or the economist's entreprenerialrevolutionstarted up 1976 with italy/franciscan romano prodi