Hare Krishna Dear Guru Maharaja,
Please accept my humble obeisances.
All glories to Srila Prabhupada.
Sometimes I was thinking to cooperate with some nice online education program, so people who come to vedabase.com can take some nice online course. Unfortunately none of the current ISKCON online education programs fit standards I would like to provide.
Some time ago I mentioned the idea about online education to Mahendra Prabhu. Few days ago I asked Vidvan Gauranga Prabhu (our local scholar, he was teaching here under guidance of HG Gopiparadhana Prabhu) if he would like to be part of the project. We spoke like 3-4 hours, we looked at how MIT and Udacity are doing and got inspired more and more. The same day when I visited Mahendra and Pandava Prabhus they told me: "We have to start that online education". Then I told them I spoke with Vidvan that day about it, later to find that they independently of us also spent about 3-4 hours with the same :)
Our main ideas/concepts so far:
- Free education (it is against our conviction to charge for education, only those who will want certification will have to pay a fee)
- Certification for Bhakti-sastri, etc...
- To establish the highest quality (both in sense of education and technology)
- All different levels, similar to Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org). From the most simple basics, through Bhakti-sastri, Bhakti-vaibhava, ...
- We would like to work in collaboration with ASA / NIOS if possible.
On Friday after lunch we all plan to meet and discuss our ideas to see if all of us have a compatible vision and plan further.
If you like the idea of the project, would you like us to join you?
Your servant Prahlad Nrsimha Das
HpS - ASA/NIOS - AGTSP paoho. You can see we are a little slow in answering because of our life style. That is the kind of partner we would be. Ha! Ha! Yes, of course we would like to join. We have been doing a lot of work in this area. One principle is that Gurukula means place of the Guru. So our whole idea of education is very personal. First principle is Association: Student-Teacher, Students-Students. Then... we work on Processes in that ambience, then ... we are concerned on learning specific content. Many other things. At the end of SB 1.6, Suta tells the sages that now he will try to make them experience the instructions he heard from Sukadeva Goswami the same way he experienced. We are trying to communicate a point of view, attitude, consciousness more that facts, no???? How to do that? Blogs for new readers to associate with other new readers! ....