First Research Academy Network 2020

Currently there is no tool for measuring learning outcomes of students, which would be broadly accepted by teachers, schools and district officials, by parents, policymakers. An open to public, consistent with the learned content, and uniform by the procedure and results tool for measuring learning outcomes does not exist. MOCC is a promising instrument which can lead to a development such a tool.

(the edited version has been published) The scientific method developed to study physical phenomena presents a proven instrument for conducting research in any other field of science. Yet, vast amount of literature on physics education research does not represent examples of application of that scientific method, even if the researchers are physicists. In this paper the author offers a critical reading of one of recent papers published by Phys. Rev. special topics – PER. The goal of this work is to stir up a conversation on how the scientific method developed to study physical phenomena can be applied to study phenomena in realm of education. Please, note, the updated version is at http://www.scipublish.com/journals/EPI/ or http://teachology.xyz/msm.html

General public usually makes an equivalence between “coding” and “assigning a symbolic code to each element of the algorithm”. As the result, “learning how to code” (and cyberlearning in general) is shrank to “learning a code”, i.e. memorizing symbolic representation of various commands. In reality, memorizing coding commands without being able to produce a workable algorithm is like memorizing the meaning the individual words of a foreign language, but not knowing the grammar, hence not being able to produce a meaningful sentence.

Education is an important human practice, and many books offer various views on the matter. The majority of those books, however, are written by scientists and for other scientists - so, thick, complex, too theoretical. Most of the parents, politicians, even teachers and school administrators do not need to have deep philosophical or scientific view on what education is for. A short, clear, operational definition is sufficient.

Finding cure to all diseases (Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan: https://chanzuckerberg.com/); Space tourism (Richard Branson: http://www.virgingalactic.com/ ); Space cargo (Jeff Bezos: https://www.blueorigin.com/); Colonizing Mars (Elon Musk: http://www.spacex.com/) - what do all these goals have in common? The tasks of achieving these goals are all doable!