Last week’s post by Ray Maguire (on using computer game development to rekindle a sense of purpose among schoolchildren) led to a number of offline and email conversations around the topic of education.
One of the first was from Jim Farver, a man with 30 years of industrial training experience, who introduced us to the Khan Academy which is a fantastic and growing free resource of short (and that’s important) videos on masses of subjects. I learnt about gravity and diabetes but I could just as easily have worked through a sequence of videos on calculus or chemistry.
What makes these videos special is the fact that anyone can watch the videos at any time. Been off sick and missed a bit of trigonometry? The normal approach is to get an already hard-pressed teacher to coach you or to pick up what you can from fellow pupils, who might have better things to do. And, how embarrassing is it if you still don’t ‘get’ it? You can watch the Khan videos until you really understand.
In the classroom, how about letting the kids pace themselves and step in when needed? Back end metrics can show who’s doing what and who’s stuck. Everyone in the class moves through the curriculum at the pace that suits them rather than having the teacher delivering the same material to all, boring those who are fast and leaving behind those who are slow.
It transforms the lives of teachers and pupils alike. And, if you’re at all curious about subjects like gravity or diabetes, the answers are right there, delivered by a friendly human in less time than it takes to read a Wikipedia page, for example.
Here’s Salman Khan explaining his approach at TED:
Hi David. Thanks for the acknowledgement. I think readers of this post would also be interested in Udacity, an organisation inspired by Salman Khan which delivers interactive courses online.
Before I explain further, I’d like to mention that my industrial training experience led me to a belief that putting the focus on “education” or “teaching” was incorrect. Education is nothing more than providing the environment in which learning occurs and learning implies a potential change in thought, behavior and performance. The challenge of appropriately incorporating technology into the learning environment is significant, but the returns are potentially huge.
So, back to Udacity. One of its founders, Sebastian Thrun signed up an astonishing 160,000 students for a free on-line class in Artificial Intelligence and, based on the results, resigned from Stanford University, saying that he could not teach in the classroom again.
Here’s an article based on a presentation he made at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference http://allthingsd.com/20120125/watch-sebastian-thrun-leaves-stanford-to-teach-online/, it includes a link to a video of the session which brings his experiences to life. It would probably alarm the tenured lecturers who walk in, deliver from their notes and walk out again. More aware lecturers will see opportunities to transform the university learning experience.
I would love to participate with faculty in a round table discussion on this but I find that, surprisingly, academic institutions neither appreciate change nor outside “help”. Attitudes have changed little since 12th century Venice when the faculty prevented the introduction of Arabic numerals. Indeed, Thrun points out that the lecture model of “teaching” predates Gutenberg and hasn’t changed much in 1000 years!
Hi David,
I attended a calculus class when I was back for my 50th college reunion (at a good school). First, I was amazed that the same lecture, in the same place in the curriculum for freshman was still given, 50 years later! Contrast this with the evolution of technology in this same time frame. Nowhere in industry could you find the same thing being done, the same way, 50 years later! Second, the corresponding Khan lecture is at least as good, can be viewed at a more amenable time than 8am and probably would have a larger class size than the 6 who attended the 8am class. There was very little class participation so not much difference there either.
If I were teaching an introductory college course, I would find a way to use the Khan lectures. Interestingly, the calculus lecture I attended was structured almost identically to its Khan counterpart, so it is indeed possible that the lecturer even used the Khan lecture for his own preparation. Faculty could be better utilized teaching advanced classes to students majoring in their area or providing individual attention for student research.
This does raise some interesting questions. What is the evolving role of higher education given the emerging availability of on-line training? On-line training has been around for a long time. Control Data had an online educational system called Plato used for management training in 1973. It was text based in those days, and was highly interactive including online tests and questions. They invested millions in this and it continued to evolve into the late 80s.
For at least 20 years, there have been courses given by “superstars” available on CD/DVD for reasonable fees. These are absolutely outstanding for presenting lecture material. I have reviewed many of these and have found them excellent. They have never replaced colleges. Thus far, none of these approaches have replaced the institutional approach to training. I believe there are many reasons why this is the case and many challenges to “online courses”. I do believe these courses pose a real threat to poor instructors, however, – those that come into class, deliver their lecture notes and leave.
To a large extent, humans learn by experience, almost a collective trial and error approach. “ Fire hot. Hand in fire burns. Don’t put hand in fire!” I love the quote, “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from poor judgement.” Putting students into learning environments, and letting them make errors with much less penalty than would exist in the “real world” allows them to gain experience and ultimately better judgement. This is why flight simulators are used to train pilots, etc. Can online training provide a good learning environment?
I believe we have not even begun to tap the potential of computing to assist with student learning, but I see online training, as it exists today, to be potentially complementary to what institutions with an outstanding faculty can achieve. How can we implement a credible credential program for on-line training? This will be essential for the ultimate success for approaches like the Khan Academy. My corporate clients demanded a payback from the training provided to their employees, correctly viewing it as an investment. Student behavior had to potentially change and performance improve in order to make these investments good ones. They measured results. They insisted on results! How can online training measure and deliver appropriate results? Not simply test results.