Mae Leyrer (Hansen), Peter Fagerström, Anna Keblowska, Märt Aro
Why?
In the industrial society the majority of people needed to know how to follow orders, sit still for more than eight hours per day and not to question authority. Only a small share of the people needed to understand the essence of what was learned, to be able to become scientists, engineers etc, to bring the society forward. Unfortunately this skill set is not suitable for the needs of information society as to achieve success the people need to have good ability to quickly analyse information to be able to differentiate relevant from irrelevant, truthful information from fiction and most of all, be able to recognise their own strength and interests to build upon them.
Hence the fact based education system that spread throughout the world during the industrial era does not serve the expectations towards people in information society. It seems that everybody knows this (including the teachers and the kids). Many have started to look for solutions and there are great initiatives* but proven solutions are yet to be found as the education system is very complex and it will likely become more complex now as we start to grasp the need for personalised learning.
What's the complication?
Educational system lags behind the actual needs of the society. For example, the amount of information that we work with is growing massively. Within next 2 years we will produce 2x more data than in all human history combined (CISCO, 2017) but the school does not consider the changes that technology has brought. Solution here might be that we would try to make the education system more agile.
From Maslow point of view the kids entering school system today have their basic needs covered (in EU very few kids know what hunger means). So now school caters for the need of belonging and as soon as this issue is covered the kids will be looking for esteem and possibilities to self actualisation. But has school recognised this?
Expectations do not align between the children, parents, teachers and employers. Based on Gallup survey companies typically need to teach a new employee to smart creative positions 4-6 month to 1 year before the employee is able to take full responsibility for the work.
The school system is built for industrial era but today we have to educate students that have grown up immersed in technology and the childrens habits have changed tremendously. Also expectations towards kids have increased (social networks allow kids to compare themselves with others that are more pretty, cool etc). To counter this there is a need to teach kids to manage their internal expectation conflicts. Generational differences in learning (Simon Sinek).
We believe that the mission of the school should be to prepare children to cope effectively with change and develop their individual strengths. People wish to be successful but education is incapable to provide majority of them with tools to achieve this. This also creates a significant conflict within people. As one outcome of mis-education we see increase in mental illness and alcohol/substance abuse (15%).
We need to review the tools, content, methodologies that are used for learning.
Sir Ken Robinson TED talk , kqed article
Democratic education, Schools on the Move, Finnish education
How?
1. Association of experts
Today we know more than ever before in history about how we learn, adding just a few keywords here: neurodidactics, neuropedagogy. There are many great experts and thinkers on this topic around the world. So as one possibility we could map the experts and researchers and bring them together into one organisation to create synergy between them. This to enable them to form groups to hypothesize how to tackle the situation, and then also grant them the necessary resource so they could conduct research.
The expectation is that mapping of the needed learning outcomes of information era needs to be followed through. After that the subjects and methodologies need to be chosen to achieve the best possible results in preparing kids for life. Schools need to be chosen to test the new way of doing things. When the material starts showing anticipated results, it can be disseminated globally.
Financing will depend on the scale of the project. We imagine that the mapping and initial proposal of subjects and methodologies should be possible to do with a few million Euros. Cost of development of learning content and study programmes is not predictable at the moment - lots of what is needed is expected to already be available in some shape or form. In addition to classic content creation methods, we plan to be using education innovation companies (EdTech companies) to create the scalable content and methodologies.
2. Creating a Matrix
for learning content and methodologies for all subjects. The matrix would consist of topics that need to be covered to achieve the expected learning outcomes. Considering the fact that learning outcomes need to be adjusted to the needs of specific students.
How it would work? In the beginning the content needs to be provided by the Matrix owner (responsible organisation). Later - whoever wishes (eg. crowdsource based) could propose content into the Matrix and then the Matrix editor would revise the proposals (could also be crowdsourced) and accept them to avoid low quality content. The ranking of the content could be done by the users (teachers, students and parents). And the teachers could filter out the content that they need.
Expected result: a teacher comes to the web portal of the Matrix. Selects what class he/she is teaching (eg. 9th class 20 lessons mathematics) and the Matrix offers the best lesson plan for this purpose, consisting of the best methodologies, eg videos, assignments, tasks, textbook printouts, reading material, individual or multiplayer games etc., ideally already taking into account the specific learning traits and level of each student in the group. The teacher needs to have the ability to shuffle the content according to their liking.
Financing. Theoretically could be provided by private investors if the governments could approve usage of the Matrix by teachers. Providers of the content (teachers, companies, individuals etc) could be financed via the Matrix. As the Matrix could be implemented globally, the cost of excellent quality content could near zero. Expected end cost should be in range of 10-20EUR/teacher/month.
3. - Development of EdTech ecosystem
There are many passionate innovators willing to develop education (produce new content or new learning methods or new education management tools) but they have difficulties bringing their products or services to the market as schools/universities/governments are not used to work with (small) “innovation cells” nor to buy the services (no market) hence there is a lack of funding. Because private investors are not willing to risk investing into companies that operate in difficult markets (no funding).
As one solution a mapping of the EdTech ecosystem could be done to identify obstacles on ecosystem development and then to fix them.
Some fixes that we are already working on. To support education innovators the Nordic EdTech Forum - “N8” has been initiated. Through it we hope to convince all Nordic countries to work together. This would help to implement each others educational innovations (creating a home market of ~33M people) and also enable private investment. The movement could also attract governmental grants and other sources of funding.
Summary
The ideal situation would be if all of the parts would be done. So we would get a general vision from the experts, based on that to create content and methodology matrix and then get the innovators to fill up the matrix with content.
With this route, preparation of classes and testing will become significantly easier for the teacher as machine learning / AI will help to compile personalised classes. Testing / examination as we know it becomes irrelevant as the learning analytics gives more and real time information on the students development than any paper based test/examination ever could. Also the kids would not need any more grades as they would get a much more thorough feedback on their learning outcomes from the learning analytics automatically in real time.
In the best case scenario this would open up ~7 hours of class preparation time and ~5 hours of marking time for each teacher per week (~12h in total). Also the reporting work for teachers would be minimised as the school, local government and the ministry could get the reports directly from the software.
This time can be used to bring more focus to the kids. To empower them (eg. personal development hour per month per student), small group work with students or development of social/interpersonal skills. And of course also general self analysis skills and teachings on “how to be happy”. So instead of preparing classes, marking tests and reporting the teacher would have time resource to become a mentor/coach for the students.
Based on discussions with experts, such an approach will also improve the learning outcomes of the students (learning material would be obtained several times faster). Hence significantly less time is required for theoretical studies, so more time could be spent on development of personal strengths and interests.
For example through voluntary education - arts, music, robotics, chemistry and other after school activities like sports (of course everybody must be enabled access to such education). In addition - all learning should be considered learning and also shown on the personal "learning report" or "final diploma".
Regarding learning - we are all different and we need to recognise this. As one solution teachers and students could use AI to help design individualised learning pathways.
Our goal is to support teachers and schools with preparing the kids for life.
Along the way we can take advantage of kids' natural ability to use modern tools and learn themselves how to use them. The kids should be enthused to pick which tools they want to use. The teacher in this context would become more of an inspiration and a coach.
Examples of new learning tools:
Reading - Grapho game - learning to read is made into a fun game. video
Language learning - Lingvist - proven 4x faster language learning than traditional methods. video
Medical - AnatomyNext - evidence based 3D anatomy, derived from medical imaging (CT/MRI) and surface scans. video
Social skills - Mightifier - helps kids to master their social and emotional skills.
More examples on: NordicEdTechForum.org
How could teaching look like in the new era?
(one possible example)
The teacher has more time to work individually with kids as the Matrix has prepared the lesson plan and filled it up with the best learning material available to date. The lesson starts with an introduction from the teacher, then the topic of the day is expanded via a short theoretical video prepared by Stanford University. Then the video is being discussed/analysed in the classroom. After that, all students will be able to try out their understanding of the topic with an interactive assignment. The teacher straight away sees the results but decides to leave the teaching work to AI based learning assistant this time.
One student is able to understand the topic better through an interactive video, another one is more hands on and will do an experiment, third one will understand it better if would have an example involving modern day cars and two groups of 4 students learn best while solving problems together. AI based learning support system offers the right materials to all students to work with to achieve the anticipated learning outcome.
One student is from a difficult background, the teacher knows this and notices that something is not well and while others are working on their assignments the teacher will have time to go to the kid, sit down at her side and comfort her so she could focus on the studies and offer to meet after the lesson to discuss the issues of the student.
After the assignments are done, the kids summarise the topic through explaining what they learned through their assignments. All kids are excited to share their findings as the material was interesting for them personally. Also all pupils are used to share their findings as they do it on a daily basis and they have mastered skills of sharing their respective stories. This time 3 pupils get to speak, they speak freely as everybody is interested to learn what they learned and they also know that even if they would make a mistake if they misunderstood anything, the attitude in the classroom would be very supportive because everybody knows that there is no possibility to fail, there is only a possibility to learn one way that did not work which is sometimes maybe even more important than learning how it works. The kids have an active discussion as they learned in different ways focusing on their point of views.
The teacher tells a personal story related to the topic to bring out a few key learning points and thanks the kids for their active participation.
As a homework, the kids want to play an interactive multiplayer game for 30 minutes to assert their skills and share their learning outcomes in the next lesson.
Just as a reminder, the World Economic Forum ranked a list of the top 10 most important workplace skills for 2020, they are as follows:
Complex problem solving
Critical thinking
Creativity
People management
Coordinating with others
Emotional intelligence
Judgement and decision making
Service orientation
Negotiation
Cognitive flexibility