At the TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, Chris Anderson was greeted as a rockstar by the 650+ attendees.  And as the co-curator for  TEDxYorkU I was excited to be one of them.  As he welcomed organisers from over 90 countries he noted the energy and growth that the TEDx program has seen.  This explosion of ‘ideas worth spreading’ is due, in part to the adoption by TED of the concept of radical openness which Chris touched on at TED Global 2010.

Next, Chris highlighted  TED ED, which are a neat series of short – most talks are around 6 minutes – animated talks geared to primary and secondary school students.  In themselves, the videos are nice and I enjoy watching them but really they are just a curated group of videos, that are displayed in a different way which has been done before.

It was the next what he showed next that really got the crowd going.  Chris live demo’d TED ED 2.0 which allows people to ‘flip’ videos and create lessons from them. And not just TED ED videos, but every You Tube video.  The intro video explains it quite well:

So, why does this stand out?  There are quite a few options for online learning and flip teaching including the Open Courseware Consortium, Coursera, Khan Academy and edX, the recently announced partnership between Harvard and MIT.

I think it is a big deal for three reasons.

1) TED Design & Curation. If you haven’t yet, take a look at TED ED (but come back!).  You’ll see that the design of the site is excellent and intuitive.  Aside from how it looks, TED is known for a gifted knack at curating top talent which it is utilizing to give talks and animate them.  So yes, it is edutainment but if that means more people watching, learning and engaging material instead of checking out LOLcats then that is a win in my books.

2) You Can Learn About LOLcats.  Okay, so say you want to actually construct a lesson about LOLcats – with this platform you can.  In fact, I have.  It is more open than other platforms given the linkage to YouTube.  So, it is really limited to your creativity but I can imagine this being an excellent tool for workplace training, professional development, focus groups, DIY movement and self-directed learning in areas that are outside the mainstream.

The other platforms I cited above are for a clearly defined user who is typically a student in a course of some sort. TED ED allows the user to define and create the learning.  Which is, a surprisingly novel approach.

 3) It’s Beta.  After he wowed us on stage, Chris hosted a workshop on TED ED at the summit which I went to and took some  notes.  I found two things he said to be of particular interest. One was how he saw this as a means to amplify excellent teachers as to learning more efficient. And two, how he focused on our feedback and wanted to identify barriers and challenges for this being used and scaled up.  Since then, TED Conversations has had a number of posts from TED ED staff about the platform and how to improve it.

So yes, parts of it are buggy and yes there are a couple of features that are really needed, like the ability for non TED ED videos to have the quick quiz function.   Still, for a beta, it is very impressive and the level of engagement by TED to the users and greater TED community demonstrates to me a serious desire for TED ED to be a transformational approach to learning.

I’m going to keep exploring TED ED, with a particular focus on how I can use it in higher education for co-curricular programming. If you’d like to collaborate, or chat about this, drop me a line!

***Note, others have written poignantly about the TEDxSummit experience. I’d encourage you to check these posts out for a glimpse of what went down.