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Ronald Vallecer

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Who wants an open source curriculum based Education?



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  • Sep 29 2012: Thank you for your response. I am quite enthusiastic about online adult education. I would be glad to contribute some effort to your endeavor,with the following topics; mathematics, statistics, public health, business administration, finance and design of clinical trials. I also want to make a few suggestions in the organization of teaching materials. When my younger sister was in the 9th grade, I taught her how to study the pattern of spelling and pronunciation in English words. The reason is that the majority of English words were derived from Latin or French. If you look up a decent dictionary, it usually tells you about where certain English word were rooted from. When I looked at the dictionary, usually glanced at these relations and kept them in my memory. So after just few discussions, my sister got a championship in a spelling bee contest among her schoolmates. So the educational materials should include the method of patterns and association of certain concept, instead of rigid memorization of the formulas or the official solutions. This approach could also be incorporated into the "homework exercises". When I taught courses in Biostatistics, most of the students in my class were MDs, postgraduate nursing, public health administrators, environment scientists and nutritionists. Most of them were scared of statistics, but after the course was completed, many told me that even they had statistics before, they had never understood why and how the conclusions were reached in statistical testing of hypothesis until then. Instead of just explaining the concepts repeatedly, I used the homework questions to EXPLAIN the statistical concept which usually stays in their mind longer or forever, because the concept hit their brains when they were seriously thinking instead of from their concentration (usually wandering here and there) during the classroom lectures.

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