If I Had A Billion Dollars To Make The World Better, I Would Totally Disrupt The Educational System
–David Grace (DavidGraceAuthor.com)
The Lecture Model of Education Is Vastly Flawed
If you have the job of teaching thirty kids geometry, you have the following problems:
1) The ones who really get it will be bored because they are ahead of you.
2) The ones who don’t get it will turn off because you will have lost them
3) Some material percentage of them will ignore you because they don’t see why they should care about it, but they will hide the fact that they aren’t listening.
4) A minority of the class will actually be on track with you and pay attention but some of them will have one or two things they don’t get which issues will, to some degree or other, negatively affect their ability to fully understand the material.
5) Inevitably some students will miss some lessons and thus miss some important material. It will not be possible for you to step back and catch them up.
6) The principal tool you will have to gauge which concepts a student understands and which ones he does not understand will be a quiz or test.
These are crude tools at best. They are subject to corruption (cheating or copying). Getting really useful feedback information out of them for each of thirty students is difficult and time-consuming.
There will be few opportunities for you to really get useful information about each student’s strengths and weaknesses.
7) The amount of time you would need to put in with each and every student in order to gauge their progress and difficulties on even a weekly basis will make that process somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Out of the thirty students, you will be lucky to have ten who really master the material.
Summary Of the Defects In Lecture-Model Teaching
In summary, the defects in the age-old Lecture Model are:
- A massive mismatch between material delivered and material understood;
- Knowledge gaps caused by missed classes;
- Inconsistent mastering of the material by different students;
- Very poor feedback and correction tools;
- Labor and cost intensive
A Better Educational System — Use An App
An app running on a tablet or phone would present the material in very small increments, one page of text at a time, and it would test on every page of material.
Suppose the app presents only three or four paragraphs of text on the topic of American History. At the bottom of the last paragraph would be two questions whose answers are contained in the presented text.
The student cannot proceed unless and until he correctly answers both questions.
He gets one of four screens based on his two answers:
1) Both answers correct — he gets the next page of text
2) Answer 1 is wrong and answer 2 is right — he gets alternate text regarding the question 1 material and is re-tested.
3) Answer 1 is right and answer 2 is wrong — he gets alternate text regarding the question 2 material and is re-tested.
4) Both answers are wrong — he gets shunted into a reading-test app. Is the problem that he cannot read well? The reading app tests for that.
If reading ability is low, what is the problem? Vocabulary? The English language? Dyslexia? He doesn’t know how to sound out the words? Does he have vision problem?
If he passes the reading app his reading proficiency is noted in the file and he gets the alternate material on both question 1 and question 2. Then he is retested on both questions.
If he fails again the teacher is called so that he can try to figure out what the problem is and to offer one-on-one help.
Advantages Of Apps Over Lectures
- Every student proceeds at their own pace.
- Nobody gets to goof-off and fake paying attention.
- Basic skill problems such as reading, vision, dyslexia, etc. are uncovered and dealt with.
- One-on-one help is enabled and practical.
- Particular concept problems are immediately detected and the software branches to effective, specialized tools to deal with those issues.
If you have 30 kids running the app there are probably only one or two who need help at any one point in time so the teacher will be able to give that one-on-one help.
The teacher can move around the room or respond to software alerts to his screen to provide specialized help as needed and where needed.
- Because the students are tested on every page of the material as they go, batch testing is eliminated. No more tests or quizzes either to cram for, administer or grade.
- The school year is not divided into arbitrary time frames, e.g. two months for geometry, one month for American History or whatever. A student will stay with an app until he or she completes it. Johnny may finish the American History Part I app in two weeks and Billy may finish it in a month. When Johnny finishes it he may go on to European History or American History II or whatever.
- The school won’t be graduating people who have learned nothing because the students won’t be credited with any course they haven’t managed to complete the app for.
- Problems with basic skills such as reading or math will not be allowed to slip by untreated.
Can Schools Be Fixed — No, The Establishment Will Kill Any New Model
Can these apps be created? From the money side, of course. At least a billion dollars. Maybe five to ten billion dollars. When you think about it, that’s totally financially doable.
But, everyone in the public education industry will hate and fear it.
The school boards and teacher’s unions will NEVER let this be done. They are not primarily interested in education. They are totally committed to keeping their jobs and their power.
But there is a way to do this in spite of the educational establishment?
Skip The Schools Entirely
The way to get this adopted is to do an end-run around the educational establishment which will oppose this at every turn, namely, disrupt the current school system by cutting out all the middlemen — the school boards, the unions, the administrators, even the concept of a physical school, classrooms and teachers.
Eliminate Classrooms & Human Teachers
That’s right. No physical schools. No classrooms. No teachers.
We would directly connect the students to the material with nothing in between.
How? We would do this with a fundamentally different kind of software distributed on the Internet for free.
The Three Levels Of Free Teaching Apps
Level 1
Individualized teaching apps presented on a 2-D screen, e.g. tablets and phones.
Level 2
3-D teaching apps running on a VR device.
Level 3
3-D Virtual AI Avatar Teachers running on a VR device.
Bedrock Principle — Different People Learn Differently
DARPA has identified several different learning styles, meaning that different people best learn the same material in different ways. Some people learn better with examples. Some with memorization. Some with narrative associations. Etc.
Before you can hope to effectively teach anyone, you first need to find out what learning method will work best, then second best, then third best, etc. for that particular person.
The Foundation App
Learning Styles
The Foundation App is the first app that any student would complete. It would identify what style of learning works best with that particular person at that point in time and it would save that information in a profile file.
The Foundation App would present the same test information in different learning styles and based on the student’s performance, it would build a picture of how that student learns, which teaching style will be most effective for that person at this point in their life.
Different People Have Different Talents And Weaknesses
Some people are great abstract thinkers. Some are not. Some have spatial awareness. Some do not. Some people have a sense of the balance between form, color, texture and light. Some do not.
The Foundation App’s second job will be to find out what are the student’s basic areas of strength and weakness, today.
I say “today” because these talents will change over time, but for today you need to know if you’re dealing with someone who is, for example, “good at math” or completely mystified by math, good at pattern recognition or not, has a good memory, or not.
The Second Basic App — The Societal App
Once the Foundation App has determined what teaching techniques will be most successful for this particular student and what that individual’s areas of talent and weakness are today, the student needs to learn the basics about how his society functions. This Societal App will be different for different economic and cultural systems.
For the U.S. people need to understand the concept of insurance, how to manage money, loans and interest, how elections work, how the courts work, etc.
The Third Basic App — The Problem Solving App
The third basic app would teach the basics of problem solving — the concept of two steps forward, one step back; breaking big problems into smaller problems, then sorting those smaller problems in workable a order; risk-reward concepts, etc.
Academic Apps
After the program learns the basics about this student and the student has learned the basics about how his society functions and has acquired some tools he can use to deal with problems and challenges, then that student will be ready to start learning specific areas of knowledge.
Which Apps To Present In What Order?
Based on the profile complied by the Foundation App, a Lesson Plan App would pick those areas of knowledge to present to this particular student and in what order.
It may turn out that the student who has a low aptitude for math has a great talent in psychology, so the Lesson Plan App would suggest that he/she take the psychology app. If they take that suggestion the student will progress through the psychology app until their progress slows to a crawl.
The student will progress through each academic area at his own speed and will stop when they reach their practical limit at that age.
Of course, the student will be free to take any app they want.
Topic Area Apps, Not Specific Subject Apps
Instead of dividing “math” up into an app for arithmetic and an app for algebra and one for geometry you would have a “math app” that has learned from the Foundation App what is the student’s basic capacity to handle mathematical concepts. The app would start with arithmetic and given the student’s talents and his progress through the exercises it might advance the student to algebra in only a few hours.
Another student who is “math challenged” might take dozens of hours to make it through arithmetic and fractions and may never get through algebra. That’s fine.
The math app would take the student as far as he can go in a reasonable period of time at that stage in their life and then say, “OK, you’ve learned all the math you’re reasonably capable of learning at this stage in your life. We’ll come back to quadratic equations in a year or two and see if you’re any better at it.”
Now the Lesson Plan App will suggest the next topic area
How The Apps Will Be Presented
Initially the apps would run as 2D programs on smart phones, tablets, etc. For those students who had VR systems, a more advanced version of each app would run in 3-D with user input through manipulation of virtual objects instead of tapping a screen.
The next level of software would be 3-D with AI avatars. The student could pick a form of AI Teacher avatar — the wise, old professor, the grand-motherly teacher, the young man or woman just beginning their teaching career — to provide one-on-one teaching.
The student could change avatars as they matured. These avatars would accept voice input and engage a teaching dialog with the student. It may be three or four years before these Avatars are ready. Think of Cortana on steroids embodied in a 3-D virtual format.
Not Just Academic Material
These three levels of apps (2-D, 3-D and AI Avatar) wouldn’t just be used to teach academic subjects. They would be used to teach everything.
Suppose Siemens introduced a new MRI machine. Someone will need to install that machine. Someone will need to operate it. Someone will need to maintain it. Someone will need to fix it.
If you properly design the teaching-app tool kits and Foundation Apps, Siemens could use them to build its own apps that could determine which applicants had the highest aptitude for the skills required for each of these MRI-related jobs.
Those candidates with the highest aptitude levels could then be trained by an AI 3-D avatar to perform the required jobs related the new machine.
A Role For Human Tutors
Of course there would still be a role for highly paid and highly trained human tutors, but that role would be limited to those jobs and those students where the apps were unsuccessful or for whom very specialized training was needed or could be afforded.
Who Will Make The Apps?
I would vote for Facebook or Google doing it, but any company or private foundation could build these apps, heck, a dozen different groups could provide competing apps, and would release them into the world for free or for a fee for a specialized app.
You would build them to run on Android, IOS, Windows, Linux, whatever. You would make then freely downloadable.
You would build them so that different language modules could be plugged in for different users and you would let anyone and everyone learn whatever they want. All anyone would need is a smart phone and a desire to learn.
The Foundation App and the Lesson Plan App would be the same for everyone, with different language modules. The Societal App would vary from culture to culture.
Degrees, Diplomas & Licensing
Each country would be free to establish their own licensing standards to determine the level of training a student had achieved. Essentially, today’s high school diploma would be replaced by a GED system where people would study on their own, then pass a test.
Different institutions could agree to admit a particular student to their testing and certification programs. Stanford and Harvard might have more rigorous testing and certification standards than Podunk U.
If you pass the Stanford test suite in economics then you’ll get a Stanford-branded B.A. in economics. If you want to get a Masters or a Ph. D. you’ll have to write papers, do some research, have your thesis accepted or whatever that institution required.
The Value of Disruption
The point I’m making is that you can’t fix the problems inherent in an elected, school-board-run system with teacher’s unions, bureaucratic intransigence, political pressures on textbook publishers, etc.
You have to go around them. You have to make them all obsolete.
The basic idea is to get rid of organized, regimented classes and classrooms and instead substitute individualized, standardized, AI-Tutored self-study apps with third party accreditation.
That way you can eliminate the costs of a physical plant and a political and administrative layer.
If you want to still have physical schools where the students appear for a few hours a day to play sports, meet with human councilors or learn to dance or play an instrument, essentially engage in communal social functions, fine, but don’t depend on that facility to turn out educated citizens.
The new system starts with the Foundation App that stops treating every child as an interchangeable part in a big educational machine and instead customizes his education as an individual.
From there the student progresses to the Societal App that teaches him how their society works.
Next, they learn the basics of how to deal with life’s challenges via the Problem Solving App.
After the student has finished these initial programs then they will be ready to obtain specialized knowledge via an app store where training would be available like food from a buffet table.
*NOTE: I first wrote this article with “he/she” and “his/her” references to avoid gender stereotyping but that made it difficult to read so I’ve slipped back into “he/his” for ease of reading.
— David Grace
www.DavidGraceAuthor.com
