Blandin on Broadband

Community and business leaders met with legislators earlier this week to “think big” about how to prepare the best workforce available. MinnPost reported on a couple of big topics – to start we need to start earlier to prepare kids for kindergarten. The Blandin Foundation’s Kathy Annette did a nice job of making that point…

No one was more passionate about that subject than Kathy Annette, president of the Blandin Foundation.

The door “closes” on kids by the age of 5, she said, if they haven’t been exposed to pre-K programs. Those programs are in their infancy – and even in Gov. Mark Dayton’s pro-kid, pro-education budget, there’s not a huge kick start.

“What are you waiting for?” Annette asked the legislators. “What are we all waiting for?”

Another highlight was the need to hit on tech training to prepare more people for open tech positions…

“Top tech talent is hard to find in Minnesota,” said Rick King, chief operating officer of  the Technology division of Thomson Reuters, which once upon a time was West Publishing. “You could say that in the technology area, we have full employment in the Twin Cities.”

But Rick went on to point out that the hands of academia and politics move slowly…

But training more people for ever-changing tech jobs is not a simple matter.  Our institutions — be they political or educational — don’t move as rapidly as changes in technology.

Almost to make (or hopefully break) the point on the same day in the legislature, Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, a leading provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), was scheduled to testify before the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee, on the opportunities presented by Coursera, which offers high education courses (not for credit) from prominent universities such as Harvard. In 2012, Minnesota received some unwanted attention for not supporting Coursera in the state.

Also legislation has been introduced in the Senate that would remove barriers to online course work such as Coursera…

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:

Section 1. Minnesota Statutes 2012, section 136A.653, is amended by adding a 1.7subdivision to read:
Subd. 5.Free educational courses. A school providing exclusively free training or instructional programs or courses where no tuition, fees, or any other charges are required for a student to participate is exempt from sections 136A.61 to 136A.71. EFFECTIVE DATE. This section is effective the day following final enactment.