More people are using internet for lifelong learning

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In her highly anticipated keynote in the 2018 Code Conference, Mary Meeker, expert on Internet and new technologies, revealed the major internet trends for this year.

Regarding education, she said that lifelong learning educational digital content is growing steeply: YouTube has about a daily billion views of learning videos, and Coursera has now more than 33 million users.

“Lifelong learning is crucial in the evolving work environment; the tools are getting better and more accessible. Coursera has 33 million learners, up 30% year on year. The top courses, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning, introduction to mathematical thinking, algorithms, neural networks, etc.,” said Meeker.

Moreover, seventy percent of users go to YouTube to find solutions for work, school, or hobby problems. Certainly, the platform has an abundance of tutorials, and more companies and organizations are updating educational content every day.

“Greater than 50% of freelancers updated their skills within the past six months compared with 30% for non-freelancers (…). We’re living in a period of unprecedented change and unprecedented opportunity.”
 

Here are the highlights of the conference:

• Internet user growth rose 7 percent in 2017, down from 12 percent the year before.
   
• People are spending more time online: U.S. adults spent 5.9 hours per day on digital media in 2017  (3.3 of those hours on mobile).
   
• Freelance work is becoming more common.
   
• Tech companies are facing increasing pressure over privacy issues.
   
• Voice-controlled devices are taking off.
   
• E-commerce is exploding: it grew 16 percent in the U.S. in 2017.
   
• Smartphone unit shipments are stagnating.

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0