#355 Poster/Demo

Monday 16 April 16:15 - 16:30 Armitage Room

Global Platform for Open Education

Nitin Kumar, SyMynd, US

Conference Theme: Innovation

Summary: SyMynd's global education platform can be used by any university, school, or teacher for free and connect students globally

Abstract: Social impact that open education can provide is beyond doubt, but the true potential of open education has not been realized even with the best intention of many universities and teachers who participate in open education initiatives. The main challenge for such initiatives is that each institution needs to spend significant amount of money and efforts in open courseware (OCW) infrastructure. Also, teachers and institutions have to put efforts to transfer their contents to OCW platforms from the learning management systems that they use for on campus courses.
We at SyMynd (symynd.com) are building a universal education platform that removes boundaries between a typical learning management system used for on-campus courses and an OCW platform. SyMynd’s single platform can be used by any student, teacher at any school or university to create online courses and online classes for their on campus classes. Then if they want, with one click they can make their courses available as open access course to anyone in the world. In this manner, not only all universities and schools can use the same platform but also with no effort or expense contribute to open education.  In addition, SyMynd’s platform also enables any teacher in the world to create an open access course without any cost even if their institutions do not use SyMynd, thereby giving the power to educate the world in hands of individual teachers. Usually open course and open education initiatives can be afforded by universities in developed countries. This results in a one way flow of education. With SyMynd, institutions in developing countries can also contribute to open education without any expense, resulting in a much healthier multidirectional education flow.
SyMynd is built on the current technologies and concepts of a building education network. Students and teachers can not only access open courses with multimedia and current interfaces similar to Facebook and Youtube, but also interact with each other live in discussion format or live video chats. Imagine a student in Africa accessing an open access course from a teacher in US, and discussing with student from Japan, Egypt, and UK. Teachers can answer their questions live. In addition to courses, we are also integrating open access textbooks with courses.  Text book authors can add multimedia contents on each page. Students and readers all over the world can discuss with each other on each page of a book.
With our approach, we are reducing the cost for the online course platform to zero for open course initiatives. Also using the same platform for on-campus courses and open access courses, eliminates the barrier and effort required to transfer education contents to OCW platforms. We believe that with SyMynd’s approach we can make education accessible and affordable to anyone anywhere.