Masterplan to Differ and making all students feel safe
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.
Heard it before? It’s said to be the famous words of Benjamin Franklin (The likely origin is Xunzi (Xun Kuang), a Chinese Confucian philosopher, btw).
Reading this master plan, I’m pretty sure you have. Most universities have these words in strategy documents, in their veins, and sometimes also printed on the wall. To succeed, students should collaborate, fail, and learn from experience. All agree. But in most cases, they don’t.
Students in higher educational institutions are passive receivers of information instead of active creators of new knowledge. This should and will change, but the change is happening very slowly. Most universities and educators around the world try to fix this by engaging their students using some kind of technology, pedagogy, or teaching methods. Most of them fail. The students do not want to be engaged.
For the academics out there. The universities and educators push for collaboration in the top right corner of the Flow Theory in Higher Education, but students are to stressed out to take part.
As a result, the dropout rates in online courses are scaring low, up to 95 %. For campus studies, the dropout rates for bachelor students in the US is 44 %. It’s insane.
Our master plan to fix the top three challenges, and at the same time change higher education, by
- Give students a safe place 🤗
- Reward students that help others 👪
- Automate the shit out of it 🤖
Step 1. Give students a safe place 🤗
Challenge: Misunderstanding of the engagement-problem
“The support for collaboration must be a lead design goal, not an afterthought”, an important Educause report states. It says current technology is “(..)designed on the transmission model of education (…) time must be given to collaboration, a true learning dimension.”
We could not agree more, engagement is key. Still, the institutions interpretation of this is part of the problem. They are pushing engagement and collaboration in the name of learning, but forget to check if their students are mentally ready. We have found the fear of looking stupid and fear of missing out are the two dominant feelings among students. Most students are afraid of asking. 87% of first year students find it difficult to cope with social or academic aspects of university life (source). Reports even states 71 % currently experience or have experienced some form of mental illness (source), 20% are suicidal or have major anxiety issues, and 29 % state they feel lonely and isolated in their students (source).
Higher ed institutions should help students find a friend, not push for student engagement. A lonely student on anxiety drugs who’s afraid of looking stupid will not ask critical questions. No matter how hard you try.
Solution: Differ — a safe place to get help
Differ is a safe place where students can get help when they are stuck.
In Differ, students
i) are matched with a mentor (a friend),
ii) can ask questions without the fear of looking stupid,
iii) find study groups
We understand student engagement will happen when students are motivated and safe. With the increased feeling of mastery, the students can continue the discussions in direct messages, groups, or communities.
Step 2. Reward collaboration 👪
Challenge: Students fight for the grades
In the most simple form, students go to school to buy a certificate to prove that they know a certain topic. Universities provide access to a knowledge bank and judge students in how good they are at reproducing a given part of that bank.
To be able to differentiate how good students reproduce, most schools use a grade system with standard deviation distribution. In reality that means students fight each other for the best grades.
As a result, we have an educational system where students are neither rewarded for helping their peers nor for exploring new ways of solving problems. Yes, yes, I know the old term of helping others will make you learn more yourself. But in reality, every single student knows perfectly well the better the others are doing, the more they have to work themselves.
Solution: Reward collaboration and document soft skills
In Differ, we connect the reason students go to school with the behavior we want to achieve.
By helping, students can document their soft skills and be matched with future employers. In other words, by helping others, we help students get a job. That makes helping and collaboration the goal itself replacing the combative and egoistic culture in higher education.
Step 3. Automate the shit out of it 🤖
Challenge: Institutions focus on scaling distribution, not collaboration
Education as we know it was built for a world where knowledge was little accessible. Today, information is a commodity. With the right motivation, everyone can find anything at anytime.
Personalisation and adaptive learning have been buzzwords in education for a while. For a good reason, I would argue. We are all individuals. We are driven by different things, thrive in different scenarios and see different solutions to challenges.
There is an obvious need for personalized content for every student. But there is an equal, and less talked about, obvious need for personalized communication. Educators all around the world are facing a growing demand of giving personalized, timely and motivating feedback to an increasing number of students.
Being a teacher can be compared to having children. As all parents know, it’s a full-time job to raise just a single kid to be a positive contribution to the society. We can not expect teachers to be able to follow-up tens, hundreds or even thousands of students all by themselves. We need to do a big time, collective effort if we are to make all students find friends, and get help when they need.
Solution: Chatbots helping students find friends at scale
The chatbots in Differ help all students in higher education to find friends, study groups, and feel safe.
Where other chatbots give answers, the chatbots in Differ helps the students find someone to discuss with.
The master plan
To sum it up, we will remove all barriers to participate in higher education. We do that by;
- Give the students a safe place to ask 🤗
- Reward students to help each other 👪
- Automate the shit out of it 🤖
