The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a well known non-profit sponsor of education grants and initiatives. Recently, the Gates Foundation has teamed up with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and four other education non-profits to fund and promote a new education initiative that takes aim at poor national graduation rates with the “development and use of online learning tools.”
In today’s economy, the vast majority of new jobs require more than a high school diploma. However, statistics show that fewer than half of American’s under the age of thirty have a postsecondary certificate, diploma or degree.
To combat these harrowing statistics, the Gates Foundation has gifted an initial $20 million for the development and implementation of postsecondary online courses and online learning tools. These online tools and courses will cater to community colleges and low-income students.
With online education continually expanding, many critics still wonder about its effectiveness. However, experts say that “if technology is well designed, it can help tailor the learning experience to individual students, facilitate student-teacher collaboration, and assist teachers in monitoring student performance each day and in quickly fine-tuning lessons.”
In many online higher education institutions as well as projects studying the implementation of online education technology at ground-school universities like Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the use of online courses has been extremely promising.
For this reason, the Gates and Hewlett Foundations are focusing their initial efforts on higher education. “The program’s members say the timing seems right for such an effort, partly because the technology of online learning is advancing rapidly. And, they add, budget-constrained colleges have a greater economic incentive to try online tools, if they are going to make headway in preparing a greater number of students for an economy that increasingly requires workers with higher levels of skills.”
Gates has spoken publically in the past about the importance of utilizing technology to learn, and is a major supporter of online education and online learning.  Recently the Microsoft founder noted that, “innovation is your only hope, and the only new game in town is technology.”
By creating and funding this initiative, the Gates and Hewlett Foundations and fellow non-profits hope to increase access and accelerate learning through the use of online technology. In fact say Gates and Hewlett Foundation representatives, “The online tools can help open up educational pathways to skills, especially for low-income young adults.”
Access to new technology is often very limited for low-income students. The Gates and Hewlett Foundations hope to not only change accessibility issues for low-income or underrepresented students, but to help improve national graduation rates.
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