The goal of this framework is to provide a path and an environment for individuals to advance from complete beginners to someone using skills as a tool to solve real-world problems or build solutions for real-world problems.
Problem Statement we're working on as a Community-
Nowadays, getting a job or getting good grades is the primary motivation for learning a skill. This leads to mediocrity because the vast majority of individuals have no idea how to use their skills to solve real-world problems or design solutions in the real world.
There isn’t a strong collaboration culture, where like-minded people work together to use their skills as a tool.
Students don't know how to ask for help, they hesitate to ask for help. That's why we want to open a door for the professionals, who don't have much time to create content, but somewhere they have a drive to helps others.
To design a solution to a problem, there is a requirement of expertise from multiple areas. We have observed a lack of collaborative ecosystem, culture, where after learning a certain amount of skills, students can start applying them with others to a product or some kind of solution.
That’s why we at Nerd For Tech have started an initiative to build a strong culture of Professionals & Learners around Practical Learning & Collaboration.
In a nutshell, those who have experience (professionals, professors, entrepreneurs, researchers), can guide a learner through their learning journey. Don’t misunderstand that someone would be teaching.
No, that’s not the case. We want to foster a culture in which learners teach themselves, with our Professionals and Experts on hand to assist them if they run into problems.
For those who don’t understand how important it is to apply skills to build better solutions. Here’s a short tale.
Nikola Tesla is credited with creating one of the most important designs in the field of electrical engineering.
We might be sitting in the dark at night today if he hadn’t used his skills to solve the problem of transmitting electricity over long distances. He used his intuition and passion to design AC motor circuits that are so powerful that we still use them in our AC machinery after 120 years.
This whole ELA framework has been divided into 2 phases.
Phase I — Exploring & Learning Stage I
Phase II — Applying & Learning Stage II
Let’s see what Phase I is all about —
We’ll try to organize the best free learning resources for various domains and professions in one place. As a result, a learner can find all of their learning resources in one place, at least for the time being.
We don’t want to create new learning resources, since the web is full of them & many communities & individuals are generating quality resources.
Don’t get us wrong: we’re not copying the resources to make money; this is a non-profit project. Instead, we’ll simply paste the links to our website, directing learners to the owners’ website.
A learner can use these high-quality resources clustered by domain to explore, and once he or she discovers their passion, they can start to learn from them.
Once a learner has reached a certain learning level, here comes the Phase II.
We call Phase II an “Entrepreneurship Phase”. It’s all about finding a problem, working out on them with a team while learning advanced stuff parallelly.
Consider a group of young people who are motivated to learn something new in order to make a difference in the real world. This motivation is far more important than simply learning something for the sake of earning a certificate.
While working on a solution, our experts & professionals can volunteer to mentor a group. We’ll try to provide a mentor to every team that’s in the applying phase.
To manage the whole community culture, we have started a community over Slack & have created different channels for different purposes.
So that was it guys our ELA (Explore -> Learn -> Apply) framework. Here’s a website link, where you can find it in action — Click Me.
If you want to join us as an Expert - Check out this blog post - here
If you want to join our community team - Check out this blog post - here
If you're a Learner, you can slack community space & don't hesitate to reach out to Team Nerd For Tech or in case you have any questions/Suggestions.
Cheers!
Team Nerd For Tech