Luui is the operating system for optimism
Being the Other One Percent
In any community, one percent can make all the difference.
The incredible thing about what we learn, is that we can pass it on to others, while having no less of it ourselves. When we let others have access to, and benefit from what we know, we all become richer – even when only a small percentage formally create a course, or actively teach.
Never will you ever meet anyone else who knows just what you know. What we can share – the knowledge, skills, and experience we keep in our storehouse of what we have learned – complements what others can share with us.
Optimistic? We think it’s worth trying. Big tech has gotten far by broadcasting what is often the worst in us. Let’s try sharing what’s best in us.
To communicate not just our goals, but how we aim to achieve them, we call the people who join Luui a collective.
Luui does in Video Based Learning, what Wikipedia and the open source movement demonstrated could be done without buying into an elaborate philosophical or commercial ideology.
What’s the Luui Collective?
TL:DNR: People who think that it’s actually good when people share the things that make life richer, more engaged, more enabled.
The Luui Collective are subject experts, editors, testers, content developers – but mostly just everyday people who like what happens when skills, interests and enthusiasm for subjects get spread around to those who can do better things with them.
What Makes it a Collective?
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How? In lots of ways. Of course some will do big things: create and guide the creation of courses from scratch.
But the structure of Luui also makes contributions like volunteering to simply keep a course up-to-date and useful over time highly valued.
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While it’s a lot like any other registration to any site or service, what being part of Luui does is makes you a rights holder in the collective. It means that you aren’t an asset, but a participant.
There’s a lot of empty talk from all quarters that sounds like this: we think we can convince you this matters.
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The elements that go into a course can be re-used in new contexts. For instance, if you’ve built a course on restoring wooden boats, you might want to borrow the chapter from another course on sharpening chisels.
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Luui lets members register the topics, tools, materials or anything else that they want to learn. When course creators develop courses to meet those needs, the topics the course is matched to become ‘official’ categories in the Luui catalogue
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When a new course becomes an officially listed part of the catalogue, the creators grant the exclusive rights to distribute it to Luui.
Because creation is intended to be a shared process, and also because the upkeep of courses over time becomes a bigger task than the original creation, this granting of rights to Luui removes the complicated formulas around who contributes and who owns.
What does the word “collective” conjure up? A commune in upper New York State 25 years after Woodstock? Soviet propaganda from the First Five Year Plan? A faculty room with earnest young man with scraggly beard dressed post-goth black and a Che t-shirt, speaking from a lectern where the mike stops working every 30 seconds?
The Problems the Collective Addresses
Learning is a movement of knowledge and skill from where it’s plentiful to where it’s wanted and needed. In many places, the problem is the lack of expertise in the places where people want to learn. How do we make expertise approachable, engaging and present where it needs to be?
In many topic areas, the rate of change in skills and knowledge – especially, but not only – in tech is blistering. Content that isn’t maintained, updated, falls prey to staleness and irrelevance,. And errors always are possible. Content that doesn’t adapt and update can mislead, create frustration, and discourage the best impulse we have – the impulse to learn.
Content that adapts, changes, finds better ways to express to learners its lessons is of no real use if nobody knows the changes have occurred. Learning is, fundamentally, staying on top of what you know as much as it is learning in the first place.
Learning can be top-down, and sometimes that’s great: think of standardized currucula that gives all students the same tools to face the world. But local knowledge and solutions are also very high value, but may not fall into the purview, budget, interests or economic realities of curriculum developers. Tools are needed that allow the capture and distribution of local knowledge to be organized, effective, and discoverable,.
The App
The Luui app is a video-learning based environment where multiple resources are brought together, with flexible presentation for learners. It focuses primarily on video-based learning, but presents courses and chapters as separate segments that can be individually focused on, examined. This follows on the proven effectiveness of our earlier AVM project, stress-tested and proven in classrooms in Cambodia, where the challenges above were all connected. You can learn more about Luui on the website, starting from the home page. But here’s what lets us really change how these problems can be solved.
Our approach
The Luui Collective, and the Luui app and network that supports it, is our solution. It’s a video-based learning solution where groups of subject experts at different levels initiate course creation processes, but where multiple members of the collective participate in the process, Anyone can volunteer to participate in any course, and at any stage: planning, research,, course creation, publishing and the process of continuous updating that keeps content valuable to learners.
We do much of this through the Luui App, which is the front end to our course content distribution service, available to all members, and with primary focus placed on learners in emerging economies, or wherever resources for learning are hard to find or use. Luui also acts as the authoring environment, which includes a continuous improvement model, allowing courses to always be adapting to new realities and better approaches. This happens because Collective members act as active testers and validators of content, and return to courses as long as the courses remain published, to validate them. Of course, so do the students using Luui.; but part of the function of the collective is to themselves follow courses and identify and improve them, before our education partners’ students encounter them.
Direct input like that happens inside the app, allowing areas where issues arise to be pinpointed to any specific paragraph of text, section of video, slide of a Keynote, image, or link. Members of a course team see these reports aggregated in realtime, and can assign update responsibility as best suits the team’s internal expertise, or appeal to the larger collective to solve issues.
And, once corrections are made, noifications go out through the Luui app targeted not only to all currently students currently subscribed to the course, but also to any past students, who then can revisit Luui, to quickly view the updates to their previously established knowledge.
The collective starts with subject experts who are anywhere, and want a way to share what they know. It could be physics 101 or advanced robotics: or it could be techniques to make ground water safe for agricultural workers or how to file accident reports to the local ministry of transport in a specific region, country or municipality. With systems of discovery that adapt to the content submitted, Luui allows sub communities to share within themselves, but also across a wider world.