Live Like A Cat

Passive vs Interactive

Elon Musk believes education should be more like an interactive game, and much less like what is it today which is a rather boring experience with one person droning on in front of others.
“I think of the days of old without movie or video games, if you wanted to see a play, at any given town you would have a troop of actors generally usually wouldn't be very good.
Now with movies you take the best actors in the world, best script writers, best directors, best sound, best editing and special effects, multiple takes, all to make it really compelling, thats why you want to sit down and watch a movie, thats how teaching should be.
There is still a role for teachers but it should be a helping role as for when pupils get stuck as opposed to just lecturing in front of a classroom”

I think his analogy is right, think of the sci film Interstellar, a local stage theatre would have an impossibly hard time competing with the orchestral score, space visuals of black holes and wormholes and Matthew Mcconaughey. With a movie you also have the ability to pause and rewind to rewatch scenes or take breaks.

Now instead of Interstellar think of a high school physics lesson, and instead of a teacher lecturing, imagine you have a new experience, you can watch an educational film with incredible visual special effects to teach you about space, animations to explain difficult concepts easily and a great speaker like Neil DeGrasse Tyson Best Educators - Can use the worlds best teachers for each subject, teachers that are charismatic, passionate and entertaining but also amazing educators. If you don’t like a certain teacher you can change them at a touch of a button to one you prefer. explaining the technical information in a easy to understand way. Something similar already exists, the recently remade show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey received an unprecedented rollout in 180 countries. A whopping 135 million people — including 45 million in the U.S. — watched at least some of the 13-part science series, making this the largest global launch ever for a television series.

This shows that the engagement levels can be high for educational material that is well produced. By creating a curriculum into a well funded tv show like experience it may be able to capture this binge watching phenomena where people crave for more and more.

Imagine history lessons using virtual + augmented reality technology, you could actually go back in time to simulations of ancient Rome and walk around the coliseum or learn about Caesar's most famous battles by being on the actual battle ground. The old model of looking at text, pictures and even video will not be able to compete with that much of an interactive experience. Think of science lessons in virtual labs where you can dissect frogs without any animals having to be harmed or expensive lab equipment having to be bought, and again back to the Interstellar example, what better way to learn about wormholes than to go through one or Mars by standing on it. Virtual reality will allow engaging learning in a way never before seen, especially when the graphics become so good it's hard to distinguish if its real or not.

A study from the National Training Laboratories Engagement - In an active learning classroom, teachers focus less on what they do and more on what the student does.
Teachers are aware of how motivated the student is and how much time and energy the student devotes to the learning process.
“Student involvement,” says Astin, “not teaching resources or techniques, becomes the concern of the instructor.” Motivating and involving students becomes the concern of the teacher. in 2000 found that only about 5 percent of the information delivered through lecture was retained. Compare that with retention rates at 50 percent for discussion group and 70 percent for practice by doing. Even higher, at 80 percent, was retention by students teaching others. Long lectures have proven to be ineffective because students can only focus Attention Span - A study from 1985 tested students on their recall of facts contained in a 20-minute presentation. While you might expect that recall of the final section of the presentation would be greatest— the part heard most recently — in fact the result was strikingly opposite.
Students remembered far more of what they’d heard at the very beginning of the lecture. By the 15-minute mark, they’d mostly zoned out.
Yet these findings — which were quite dramatic, consistent and conclusive, and have never yet been refuted — went largely unapplied in the real world. for 15-minute intervals. We should devote precious class time to something more engaging Engaging - With engineering or science, class time can be used for students to collaboratively tackle more challenging questions or projects. The main point is that when humans get together to learn, we should replace passivity with interactivity.

We know the traditional lecture format in teaching students has many inefficiencies and limitations, teachers have to spread out there time and resources to the whole class, minimising the personal interaction.
A class can not all learn at the same pace and in the same way, pupils who miss a lesson due to illness can find it difficult to catch up. Teachers are not of the same skill level and can have bad days plus with modern day distractions like smart phones, smart watches and smart wristbands teachers may find it hard to keep the class’s attention. More engaging lessons and materials is the first step in improving education.

Robot Teachers

• 1.6 Million more teachers are needed in the classroom by 2015
• 250 Million children around the world can not read or write
• Learning basic reading skills could lift 171 million people out of poverty.

These statistics are what is causing a huge drive to provide education to places where there isnt enough teachers. The Global Learning XPRIZE Global Learning XPRIZE - Once the 18-month field-testing phase concludes, the prize purse will be objectively awarded to the team that generates the best international standardized test scores within the group of participating children.
Our goal is an empowered generation that will positively impact their communities, countries and the world. challenges teams from around the world to develop open source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 18 months. There is also a future prize to solve adult illiteracy. Adult Illiteracy. - More than 32 million adults in the U.S. cannot read. That’s 14 percent of the adult population. An additional 21 percent of American adults read below a fifth-grade reading level.

Educational researcher Sugata Mitra is the winner of the 2013 TED Prize for his Hole in the Wall Hole in the Wall - “My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. ” project.
I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English --they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. I connected high speed internet to it -- it's about three feet off the ground -- turned it on and left it there." Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, "what else can children teach themselves?"

There has already been encouraging results using tablets to teach children. An App Educational App - Realtime remote monitoring of children's progress ensures learning is taking place and can feed back to their teachers.
It is our purpose to deliver transformational learning to one billion children. We are first and foremost an educational software developer, with a complete focus on the individual child's learning. designed to help provide a better education for children in Malawi has proved an equally effective learning tool for pupils in the UK. In six weeks, children made the same progress in maths as expected after 12 to 18 months of teaching.

More people getting access to the smart phones and the internet, Richard Branson, Elon Musk and Google are working on providing Internet access to people without it. Internet access allows software to update, continual improve and allow developer to test different techniques to see what works best. Relatively cheap smart phones can also be used in many educational ways. Lab4U uses Android sensors to create science labs in classrooms across Chile.

Some other tech is available such as a robot which helps kids learn to write, there are prototypes of intelligent textbooks that answers students questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Advancing Artificial Intelligence and game design may help to increase the engagement of students. IBM are working on educational software which learns about you to tailor make lesson plans for your ability.
The classroom will learn you.
“Since the days of the one room schoolhouse, both K-12 and higher education classrooms have been focused on a one-to-many interaction between a teacher and a group of students. All students receive the same material from a teacher in a lecture setting because individual attention for 30 or more is nearly impossible. But IBM and its education partners think the classroom of the future will shift from a one-size-fits-all model to a truly personalized environment.

IBM envisions educational institutions adopting cloud-based cognitive systems to collect and analyze all of this data over a long period of time — creating longitudinal student records that would give teachers the information they need to provide personalized learning experiences for their students. These systems would also help teachers identify students who are most at risk, why they are struggling, as well as insight into the interventions needed to overcome those challenges.

The system could also couple a student's goals and interests with data on their learning styles so that teachers can determine what type of content to give the student, and the best way to present it.“

I think teachers will still be around in the developed world and be enhanced, cognitive software will improve education, it will mark homework automatically so teachers can spend more time preparing lessons, this also benefits pupils as they can receive instant gratification and if they do poorly in the homework a new lesson plan to improve the pupil will be dynamically created. A gamification element with scores and rewards can be incorporated by the software.

How many times have you being too scared to stop the teacher and ask a question because of anxiety fears, even though you needed the answer, software with natural language processing in advanced version of Siri combined with better search engines will be able to answer any question you have. Eventually the software will be able to read your face when you are stuck, and react by slowing down or advising a break. Smart software will be an important tool in providing a better, personal education in the future.

Education on Demand

Massive Open Online Courses(Moocs) have only just started to arrive, with more popularity and refinement they will start to make some university’s obsolete. Moocs - THE GOLDEN AGE of universities may be dead. And while much of the commentary around the online disruption of education ranges from cost-benefit analyses to assessing ideology of what drives MOOCs , the real question becomes — what is the point of the university in this landscape? If you look at current huge list of free available Moocs such as Coursera , Udacity , edX, The Open University, Khan Academy , Udemy , Apple U and many others you can see the amount of free education that is now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

You can see the potential disruption these could cause, on demand is what the new generation wants. Just like how people are watching TV on demand, the same will happen to higher education, because if a student has a choice between a 9am lecture or a lie in and watching the lecture from the comfort of their own bed, then the structured set time model has no chance in competing.

The on demand helps people who still need to work jobs, it releases them from a lecture schedule and allows them to self pace their own time for studying. University is very expensive in the UK and US, there may be a limit where students decide against plunging themselves into debt and see Moocs as a better, cheaper alternative.

Conclusion

Soon everyone on the planet will be able to receive free Oxford or MIT calibre education, on demand, gamified to be more engaging as well as combined with intelligent AI to become their own personalised teacher. The benefits to teachers will be huge, they will be enhanced by this new technology and will help better prepare students and adults for the job market of the future where adaptivity will be an important skill.