TechChange is a social enterprise all about providing online professional development in technology and social change. In this episode of the ‘Learning 4 Good’ mini-season over at ‘Learning is The New Working,’ I sit down with its President and CEO Nick Martin, educator, technologist, and social entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in international development and social innovation, to hear about both his and that of TechChange, and why what he thinks is doing is very much ‘Anti-MOOC’ thinking but which is also more than ‘watch a video, take a quiz.’ Along the way, we also dip into::
- how his job consists in the company of doing ‘what no-one else wants to do’
- why a modern poetry major didn’t end up in the CIA, but in Costa Rica
- the kind of work you need to put in to develop 800 courses for customers from the government of Sudan to Microsoft
- the challenge of engaging Learners with training they don’t get paid to attend
- why data literacy and monitoring and evaluation are buddying up, as well as the (perhaps surprising?) appetite in the NGO sector to engage with things like Blockchain and AI
- why even his students think they have to work in management consulting, not non-profits, to support their financing issues
Resources
Nick is always looking for partners to build good learning, online or blended; he’s also working on ideas for low-cost, high quality online Master’s programs as a practical way of dealing with the Student Debt Crisis. Connect with him on these or other ideas over at the TechChange website, here.
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