From the 3R's to 6 (or 7) D's, with Julia Begbie

Subtitled "Digital Disruption within Education", this was a presentation I attended yesterday, hosted by the London Futurists at Birbeck. Julia and her colleagues at the KLC School of Design have created the U.K.' s first completely on-line Design degree.

Essentially, aside from giving an overview of her experiences creating online education, Julia presentation centred on the affects of MOOC's (Massive Open Online Course) on education. Having been on a few courses via Coursera, this was quite topical, and Julia showed that the initial popularity, failure and resurgence of the MOOC's mirrored the Gartner cycle quite accurately:

The 6D's in the title of the presentation are from the entrepreneur Peter Diamandes, "the 6 D's of Exponential Growth":

Julia added a 7th D, Data. Education (citing Khan Academy in particular) benefits from feedback through the huge data sets created by the courses. She also showed a few sections of Sir Ken Robinson's talk animated by the RSA a while ago:

Overall, it was a good presentation by an enthusiastic speaker. However, there was something that's been bothering me about technological, and with it human, progress, which this presentation illustrates unconsciously. What was preventing all this happening years ago? All the bits where there: Drupal, for example, now at version 7, has been around for fifteen years; Wordpress for about twelve. Why the wait?