How Do We Educate The Next Generation?
A Peek Into the Next Generation of Schools
During my tenure at Afanti, an Edtech startup in China specializing in utilizing technology in education, I led a small team of 4that is tasked to reimagine how can technology transform how students learn, teachers teach and school runs by utilizing our competencies in AI, machine learning, computer vision, and internet technologies.
If a person from the 1910s come to this world, they would not recognize anything, except for the schools and classrooms we have. Since industrial revolution, our society has changed beyond our imagination, and yet the schools have remained more or less the same.
The Challenge
Given a blank canvas, how might we utilize technology to redesign education for grade school (K-12) students
Background
Education has not changed drastically in the last 100+ years. Since industrial revolution, the main principle of education has remained: pass children through a conveyor-belt of standardized class sessions so to mass produce people ready to take jobs.
As the society diverges from the industrial, standardized model, and demands diverse and more complex thinking, schools are not keeping up with the change and fail to prepare students for life. Ask people in the workforce, and nine out of ten would say education DID NOT prepare for what they are doing today.
But what are the student preparing for?
Unpredictability + Cross-disciplinary = Future
These are the top challenges that shape our future — global warning, emergence of AI, overpopulation, gender inequality, vast wealth gap… What do they have in common? They are all outcomes of unpredictability with unpredictable consequences. No one thought that computer would be capable of ruling the world 30 years ago. No one can anticipate exactly what 1 degree increase in climate would change the world.
Another commonality with future’s challenges is that they require cross-disciplinary collaboration. Challenges in the future involve and affect many disciplines that business leaders, scientists, politicians and other experts need to work together to solve.
It is impossible to predict what people need in the future (because the future is increasingly more unpredictable due to its complexity). We also can’t train students in every area needed in the future even if we know what discipline is needed. How would we prepare children for a seemingly unknown future?
Instead of telling them what to know as current schooling system to, the only way is to help students learn by themselves, so that they can keep learning to adapt to new environment.
Self-learning is the top skill for the future
Self-learning (also autodidactism) is education without the guidance of masters or institutions. Of course, not everyone is an autodidact when he or she is born. But everyone has the potential to become self-sufficient in learning. The journey to autodidactism can be simplify to two steps:
1. Learn how to learn
How to learn encompasses searching for quality resources, transforming those resources into knowledge through interpretation, assimilation and other methods, scheduling for learning, assessing outcome of learning, evaluating and iterating on the previous steps to better learn.
Everyone starts with a blank slate. As one go through the process of learning and learn more about oneself, a unique learning process will start to emerge. One must be given room and freedom to use and morph one’s learning method.
2. Learn how to apply
What is good about knowledge if it is not used. Learning how to apply the knowledge is just as important as knowing how to acquire knowledge. Not only should one know how to apply knowledge off one disciplinary to application of the same discipline, but one should also know how to abstract and apply knowledge to a range of disciplines. Innovation often comes when we abstract ideas from some disciplines and apply in challenges of other disciplines. Being able to apply knowledge in its originating domain is just as important as far transferring ideas.
Scenario and evaluation is needed for one to learn how to apply knowledge. You need to have appropriate scenarios that requires application of knowledge from different disciplines, and measurement of success in your application. The cycle of solving challenges, evaluating success and iterating on how to apply knowledge is crucial as it helps create a map of knowledge that transcends fields and scenarios, allowing you to easily abstract known knowledge to explore and understand unknown fields.
Taking from Technology…
Consumer technology evolved from pocket calculators to voice assistants that can answer to almost any request in a little more than 30 years. Even with the progress, schools are still using ancient softwares and antique hardware because they think education is all about the teachers, not the technologies. While technology should not replace teachers, taking some ideas from technology will assist students and teachers in the learning process.
Customization and Recommendation
What makes Youtube and Netflix so successful is that it knows what you like and recommend you with more similar content. These platform not only recommend similar content to your previous history, but predict what would you like and push content that may fit your taste.
Data collection and analyzes
Technology enables effortless data collection, complex analysis and modeling. We all have something with us at all times that collects different data, whether it is your fitness tracker, your smartphone or even your car. Data we can collect can tell us a lot about our habits, and predict what we will do.
Artificial Intelligence
While there a lot of concerns about artificial intelligence taking away jobs, it does assist us by doing repeated and mundane tasks for us. Don’t want to go to the grocery? An AI can restock your fridge for you anytime something run out. Don’t want to read a bunch of newspaper to get your daily dose of news? An AI can compile daily headlines and read them to you.
Portability and Pervasiveness
We all have a very powerful computer with us at all times. It allow us to access all the information available, compute complex problems, collect data about our surroundings, and a lot more. From waking up and your morning commute, to working in the office and getting dinner, technology never leaves any part of your life because it is so pervasive.
… And putting it into Education
A major challenge in integrating technologies into classrooms is that neither teachers, school administrators, nor technologists know what are the scenarios where we can use these technologies. Majority of our ideation focused on coming up with scenarios where these technologies can effectively assist learning.
Personalized Learning Trajectory
Each student have different learning habits and interest. The customization engine behind Youtube can also be used to customize a person’s learning trajectory. We are optimizing on what materials to provide, when to provide, when to revisit materials, how different material can relate together, to create an interesting and positively enforcing learning journey.
With data collection, analysis and AI, the system can also morph according to changes to the students, and even predict what, when and with what type of material the student want to study.
Student-driven Learning
It used to be that students have to learn in schools because it is the only place where teachers teach. But with the internet, teachers are everywhere. Students can access quality material and tutorial anytime. The school no longer has the monopoly on education. Coupling with the widespread of computers among students, students can decide when, where and how they want to learn.
Student also used to go to school because teachers can answer their questions, but with the connectivity of internet and, in the future, AI, students’ questions can be answered by teachers, experts, practitioners or AI. Students can truly decide their learning schedule because they are not bounded by location and time of their teachers.
Continuous Assessments
A major part of learning is feedback through assessment. Ideally, teachers should give feedback whenever students applied their knowledge and skills, such that they can immediately improve on their application. However, teachers do not have enough time and energy to constantly give students feedback.
AI can assist in monitoring how students apply their knowledge and immediately give feedback to them. The portability of computers also means that teachers no longer need to just sit in their office grading papers. They can give feedback to students in different settings, for example, field trips. Computer can store all the feedbacks given by AI and teachers, such that students, parents and teachers can spot trends and points of improvements, and suggest remedy more frequently, shortening the feedback-improvement loop and speeding up students’ learning.
Learning everywhere
The portability of technologies (e.g. iPad and smartphones) enable students to take their learning everywhere. No longer are they trapped in a classroom. They can go to different environments while taking their learning materials with them. Teachers can also provide feedback in those newly realized settings. Students no longer have to read about theoreticals, they can now learn about phenomenon in real life.
Students realize how to learn and apply knowledge in the real world when they extend their classrooms in different real world settings. They would realize that learning is not linear (i.e. trial and error in learning) in the real world, and application of knowledge is not absolute (i.e. the things we learn in books may not be accurate in the real world).
Technology Immersive School for Self-learners
Let’s see what a student experience would look like in this technology immersive school. John is a 7th grader and his daily schedule looks like this:
Morning: Flipped Classroom
John’s first class is Mathematics. The topic is multiplication. Today’s class is a introduction class, therefore John will go through the materials by himself on the platform.
Everyone has a personalized learning path for the class, depending on their learning speed and mastery of previous learning objective. For John, since he has mastered his previous materials, he would be tackling two learning objectives today with video tutorials and exercises in his personal learning path. John’s teacher spends more time with students who are struggling, while John is speeding through his material by himself.
At the end of the lesson, John completed all the materials in his learning path and checked off the two learning objectives set for this class. His teacher reviewed John’s progress and gives him a high five when John leaves the classroom.
Afternoon Class: Interdisciplinary Project
John is in his English class, where he partners up with three of his classmates to produce an awareness campaign for tackling Global Warming. In his previous science class, John remembered that fossil fuel power plants are one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas. He brings in the knowledge from science class and proposes to do a campaign to urge the neighborhood to use less electricity
One of the milestone for the project is to interview others about their perception of global warming. So John’s team goes out and interviews some of the staff and students in their free periods what they think about electricity consumption and global warming.
They use Google Form to record the interview results. They take pictures and upload it to the platform so that their project supervisor can give feedback on their interviewing techniques.
After-class: Feedback — Learning Loop
After class, John has plenty of free time. He can choose to play a game of football with friends, go to a student production, or stay in his room to prepare for tomorrow’s class. He decided to play some ball, then do some preparation. Students have freedom choosing when and how they learn.
When he goes back to his room and check the platform, he sees feedbacks from his teachers about today’s classes:
He sees his performance in today’s Math class. He found out he has not quite mastered long form multiplication. He reviews his mistakes in his exercises, and his questions from the class to see where he got wrong.
He then looked at his science class. His teacher highlighted a few moments in class. He checks one of them. Turns out it is a positive comment about his understanding in experiment design. But there is still room for improvement, as the comment outlined. But John is happy about his performance in science class today.
At Home: Learning Progress Review
Back at home, John’s mother wants to know how her son is doing at school. Luckily the school sends out monthly updates to parents and students about their performance.
Since John was continuously assessed and given feedback, and all the feedbacks are stored in the system, it is really easy for John’s mother to see his son’s progress monthly, and pinpoint where he needs assistance. John also can see his improvement over time. With detailed comments from teachers, John also knows how to improve so that he can master the learning objectives.
Epilogue: What Should Education Be
After my time working on this project, I realize one thing about the role of technology in education:
Education Should Be Based on Human Nature
Education has existed since humans emerge. We inherently are born as blank canvas. Our surroundings then teaches us how to survive and procreate. We, unique as individuals, personalizes our learning by taking part in different experience. We iterate by trial and error, and expand our horizons by adapting to changing environments
Education should return to the basics, by understanding human nature to learn and adapt. Technology’s role in education, then, should facilitate these natural learning experiences, by creating more personalized opportunities, pick up the errors people make, and facilitate learning in any setting.
Inspired by this project, I want to dig deeper into what is education and how should we educate people. I decided to embark on an education research project to answer these questions. Read my manifesto here. I am also curious to listen to your thoughts about education — Let’s chat
