DYNAMIND - WORLD AWAKENS

Extracts from book: (Emphasis on extracts are ours)

'Disrupting Class- How disruptive innovation will change the way the World Learns'
Published in 2008 by Clayton M. Christensen
Bestselling author of The Innovator's Dilemma',
Michael B. Horn & Curtis W. Johnson.


Introduction
(Page 10)
Every student learns in a different way. This idea- that students have different learning needs-is one of the cornerstones of this book. A key step towards making school intrinsically motivating is to customize an education to match the way each child best learns.

Our Comment: i2K's Dynamind engine has been designed for One-on-One customized learning for each learner.

(Page 11)
In its most common manifestation, student-centric technology comprises a computer with software, which can tailor itself to a student's specific type of intelligence or learning style. An individual tutor would be another type of student-centric technology. Monolithic technology, in contrast, employs single instructional style for all students. A teacher lecturing in classroom of students, all of whom use same textbook, is the most common monolithic technology in education. But computers where software tries to teach all students in the same way would also be monolithic technology.


Chapter 2: Making the Shift- Schools meet society's needs
(Page 65)
And most products that the fragmented and marginally profitable educational software industry has produced attempts to teach students in the same ways that subject have been taught in the classroom.

Our Comment: Technology available in the market today, like LMS, VSAT etc, are monolithic unlike i2K's Dynamind which is designed for personalized learning.


Chapter 3: Crammed Computer Classrooms
(Page 82)
Cuban concluded, "In the end, both supporters and critics of school technology (including researchers) have claimed that powerful software and hardware often get used in limited ways to simply maintain rather than transform prevailing instructional practices"

(Page 84)
Understanding how schools have spent so much money on computers only to achieve such little gain isn't so hard. Schools have crammed the computers into existing teaching and classroom models. Teachers have implemented computers in the most common-sense way-to sustain their existing practices and pedagogies rather than to displace them.

(Page 86)
By migrating instruction delivery to custom-configured vehicles able to meet individual students' needs, schools can realize the dream of transforming the classroom from a monolithic one into student-centric one where all students can learn in the ways their individual minds are wired to learn.


Chapter 4: Disruptively Deploying Computers
(Page 92)
Tutors today are largely limited to the wealthy; and for those privileged few, good tutors come as close as possible to helping students learn each subject in ways that match the way their brains are wired to learn. Like all disruptions, student-centric technology will make it affordable, convenient, and simple for many more students to learn in ways that are customized for them.

(Page 98)
From 45,000 enrollments in fully online or blended-online courses in the fall of 2000, that number had grown nearly 22 times to 1 million by the fall of 2007. Roughly 70 percent of these were for high school students. A significant 43 percent of rural schools already provide students with access to online courses that would not otherwise be available. Even with this rapid growth, however, online courses accounted for just 1 percent of all courses in 2007. Not much change is on the horizon if one projects linearly into the future. But when viewed from the logarithmic perspective, the data suggests that by 2019, about 50 percent of high school courses will be delivered online. In other words, within a few years, after a long period of incubation, the world is likely to begin flipping rapidly to student-centric online technology.

(Page 100)
Figure 4.2 suggests that the "flip" in the substitution curve will begin in about 2012 - just four years from now. In the subsequent six years, the technology's market share will grow from 5 percent to 50 percent. It will become a massive market.

(Page 101)
In addition teachers will always remain in school, as we note in Chapter 1 - increasingly functioning as One-on-One tutors rather than teaching monolithically-and computer-based and student-centric learning will enable a teacher to oversee the work of more students.

(Page 107)
Instead of spending most of their time delivering one-size-fits-all lessons year after year, teachers can spend much more of their time traveling from student to student to help individuals with individual problems. Teachers will act more as learning coaches and tutors to help students find the learning approach that makes the most sense for them. They will mentor and motivate them through the learning with the aid of real-time computer data on how the student is learning. This means, however, that they will need very different skills to add value in this future than the skills with which education schools are equipping them today. Since customization will be a major driver and benefit of this shift to student-centric online technology, increasingly teachers will have to be able to understand differences in students and be able to provide individual assistance that is complementary to the learning model each student is using.

Our Comment: i2K Dynamind's Mentor WorkDesk exactly does what books says: Provides platform for teachers to act as learning coaches.

(Page 111)
When student learn through student-centric online technology, testing doesn't have to be postponed until the end of an instructional module and then administered in a batch mode. Rather, we can verify mastery continually to create right, closed feedback loops.

Our Comment: Dynamind blends testing and assessment into each and every stage of learning and creates closed feedback loops that are available to each and every learner at ALL stages of learning.


Chapter 5: The System for Student-Centric Learning
(Page 134)
The tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them to teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classrooms. These instructional tools will look more like tutorial products than courseware. But rather than being “pushed" into classrooms through a centralized selection process, they will be pulled into use through self-diagnosis- by teachers, parents and students.

(Page 137)
Notice that these sound more like tools for tutors-and that's the point. We'd love for every student to be able to afford personal tutors who have the skill to tailor the way they teach each subject to their students in a manner that matches the way the student learn. But it's too expensive, hence we've settled for monolithic instruction. These stage 2 tools disrupt the tutoring business; they can make it so affordable and simple that each student can have a virtual tutor through these tools. Over time, the modules that students, parents and teachers employ to help students solve individual learning problems in individual courses will be combined into complete custom configured courses-the consummate purpose of modularity.

Our Comment: Dynamind provides tools for teachers, students and parents to interact, co-create customized learning experience. It uses community intelligence to improve itself and therefore learning becomes better with passage of every moment.


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