As a young researcher,
I was invited to the University of South Africa to give a speech. I
noticed the signboard. And it's a quote from Nelson Mandela.
"Education is the only weapon to change the world." That changed
my research, aligns it to go more global research, or whatever I
do. I try to do it globally. My name is Mohamed Ally, and I'm a
professor of online learning at Athabasca University. My area of
research is how to use emerging technologies in online and
distance education. And a majo
r one is mobile learning. How do
you use mobile technology to reach people around the world
because a lot of individuals around the world have mobile
technology but not computers. So we have to make sure when we
design the courses, it can be delivered on mobile devices as
well as computers and to make sure we have education for all
which is related to the United Nations Sustainable Development
Goal 4 which says we need to provide lifelong learning and
quality education for all regardless of loca
tion. So
imagine a universe of the future with no buildings and no
classroom where they the professor, the instructor will
be anywhere in the world, the students will be anywhere in the
world. And they will interact with each other using the
technology at a distance. Or there could be intelligent
agent, where the student will interact with a virtual tutor
rather than a real tutor. Artificial Intelligence we'll
see customize the learning for individual student. And we will
do that by looking at s
tudent profile where students are in
the course in the lesson, what's the problem the students is
having, what's the personality style of the student and based
on that, it will prescribe the appropriate learning activity
for the student. And with machine learning, it will
actually as a student interact with the system, it will learn
about the students and and suggest the next step that the
student should go through. In my travels to over 62 countries, I
am able to see that people do not have acc
ess to education.
And according to statistics, we have over 150 million students
out of school. There's need for over 100,000 teachers in some
locations, and to build schools to meet all everyone needs will
cost trillions of dollars. So what really excites me about
this is we can reach students, it doesn't matter where they
live, what their levels are, what their background, etc. So
that we can have education for all and so that we can make sure
everyone succeeds and they have the skills and kno
wledge to have
a high quality of life.
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