We need to stop the mass manufacturing of students

The good and bad of mass manufacturing

We are living in an era of mass manufacturing. Be our car or furniture, our clothes or medicines, even our food, and electronic gadgets; all are mass manufactured. Mass manufacturing is a cost and time-wise, an optimized process that produces a product in bulk quantity at a cheap price and ensures homogeneity in product across a large batch. This is how we can afford iPhones. In such cases, mass manufacturing is a must! In certain key aspects of our life such as health care and education, this mass manufacturing hurts badly.

A mass-manufacturing plant of a moto-X smartphone. Each phone is going to be identical, curtesy the art of mass manufacturing. picture taken from: moto-X website.

Personalization of Education will be expensive but fruitful

When I started my Ph.D. at Cornell, it was my fascination for product development that motivated me to pursue research in 3D printing. One of the powers of 3D printing is personalization. Over a period of time, I learned that the same design principle of personalization can be employed in health care which motivated me to develop a cancer-on-chip device. This chip can be employed for personalized cancer treatment, which would significantly improve the survival and treatment experience of cancer patients. I believe that pedagogy needs personalization too, in terms of teaching technique, as well as teacher-student relationships. One of the drawbacks of our conventional teaching is its “Big-Box”, uniformity of teaching approach-“one size fits all. Unfortunately, a classroom is always heterogeneous, with students coming from diverse backgrounds and with different learning styles. The issue with the “Big-Box” approach is that, although our students have access to the same material, it is not tailored according to the need of individual students. The students, who have a certain specific way of learning apt for provided study material, benefit the most from lectures and lecture materials, but a vast majority is weaned off from the joy of learning.

A typical classroom is exactly like this picture. There could be anywhere between 200 to 700 students in a classroom, where a professor would try the same art of mass-manufacturing. All students irrespective of their interests and learning style would be taught as per the lecturer’s standard and evaluated using a standardized test. No wonder we are producing workforce to do the mundane tasks, rather than developing critical thinkers and leaders. picture take from tutitam.com

21st-century students are different from the 20th Century students

One more issue- we are living in a world full of distractions; social media, blogs, smartphones, etc. In the classroom, students are easily distracted away if lecture material is the slightest intimidating or boring. This necessitates that as teachers we focus on making the classroom more interactive, less intimidating, and interesting to succeed in our mission of effective teaching. Personalization of teaching to address classroom heterogeneity [1]: To be able to personalize teaching we need to recognize the learning style suitable for each of our students and develop lecture material tailored to the need of each. This would need more resources on the part of the university, and more energy on the part of faculties, but would lead to exceptional results. Massively online open courses (MOOCs) are aggressively working in this direction, and these methods can be translated into a conventional classroom environment too. Peer review based learning to create an engaging classroom environment [2]: I anticipate that incorporation of peer review in the classroom is another way of promoting student interaction and healthy competition. The peer-based review would also expose students to a wider range of subject-related doubts and concepts, ensuring more homogeneous learning.

Gamification works!

Gamification of the learning process to encourage students [3]: Some of the language learning apps, such as DuoLingo, have implemented a reward-based technique called “gamification” to encourage their users to keep using their app. A similar approach would greatly benefit our classrooms too.

References:

1. Personalized e-learning system using item response theory. CM Chen, HM Lee, YH Chen — Computers & Education, (2005)
2. Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning: A Guide for Educators of Adults. Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series. P Cranton (1994 )
3. The gamification of learning and instruction: game-based methods and strategies for training and education. Karl M. Kapp (2012)