InnovationInspiration

10 Ways Technology is Changing Education (Part 1)

Watching TED Talks, it seems like the most common theme is the paradigm shift that education is due for. The revolution in teaching and learning is two fold. On the one side it comes from new psychological studies about educational techniques, examining what works and what doesn’t. On the other side it comes from new possibilities on the technological frontier, that change the tools we have at our disposal for educating ourselves, and one another. This is a brainstorm and survey of the different ways that technology is changing education. Many of the evolutionary threads listed below are related to one another, but I tried to separate them where I thought each was worth highlighting for its own sake. I think each of these threads provides excellent opportunities for startups looking to innovate in the education space. If you’re interested check back next week for the rest:

1. Online courses, video lessons, and lesson plans

Top universities are increasingly making their courses, videos and lesson plans available online. Things like MITOpenCourseware, iTunes U, LectureFox, and AcademicEarth, are democratizing access to the educational curricula of the top universities in the world. About five years ago, while I was studying philosophy in Denmark, I started teaching myself how to program through MIT’s OpenCourseware’s introductory course on algorithms. This was powerful for me for two reasons - I could explore programming on my own time, on my own terms, and decide if I liked it. But, more valuable than this, was the ability to learn in isolation. Because I had no one to measure myself against, I didn’t get caught up in what ‘should’ be hard, and what ‘should’ be easy. The learning felt more earnest than the regular type of group learning that happens in universities. There was no bell curve. This was a refreshing, and honest experience of what education could be like. I ended up learning lots of things that I later found out should have been hard - but no one told me, and so they weren’t.

Now, as more and more of the materials universities provide are available online, it becomes increasingly apparent that the university experience is not for the materials alone, but much more for the in-person interactions, the relationships, and the character building that emerge during one’s university years (this is something I don’t think will quite be replaced online yet).

But, while the university experience can’t be fully simulated online, the world of readily available online courses does herald a new opportunity for us: sustained, earnest, life-long learning. I think one of the promising things - is that people may continue to learn beyond the halls of academia. There is something very fundamentally wrong, and scary within the idea of university. People go there for 4 years, study as hard as they can (some not so much), and then pretty much stop learning anything else after that. On-the-job learning is fundamentally different from academic learning, and in my personal experience doesn’t push the mind the way that ‘book’ learning does. But, the cultural norms are geared towards dropping book learning as quickly as a degree is handed to us. It’s almost like we should check in our textbooks inexchange for our degree. It’s true that reading physics textbooks on your own for fun is something that is less likely to happen for most, however, having guided online courses can make continued education more engaging. Now that the technology is increasingly available, shifting towards sustained independent learning is something that depends more on a cultural shift rather than a technological one.

In this space there’s both rooms for startups that get more of these materials online (e.g. Economics materials were scantily available when I was in school - maybe this has changed), and also for helping individuals track their own education, across a broad variety of sources throughout their life. Another possibility is finding ways to certify and equivalate online learning with real world learning.

2. Curation

Related to the increased availability of online course materials is the curation of what one should read and learn. Really, if you think about it, a large part of education is just curation. The instructors serve to curate what textbooks I should read, and in what order. If I want to start learning Chemistry, it’s hard for me to know what I should learn first, what math I need to know, what a good introductory textbook is, etc. . But, with lesson plans, and courses moving online, and with the growing exchange of lesson plans between educators, there is the opportunity for the best curation to shine through.  There is the prospect of people discovering materials, and educational paths that are more effective ways to learn. Khan Academy’s educational work flows, where they highlight which lessons you should take and in which order so that you reach the knowledge you want to obtain, are an early paragon of what curation can look like.They make education into a journey, with a clearly defined path to the end goal - essentially gamifying the process of education. 

Curation startups that let people collect, and order educational materials have substantial prospect. My startup The Shared Web may eventually go in this direction - even though it’s not what we’re focused on right now. There is also excellent opportunities for collaborative curation and curriculum setting, for teachers to collectively discover the best resources to teach their students.

3. Connections

With the growing availability of materials online, and the heightened level of curation, we also get an increased linkage of knowledge. The online world is perfectly suited for linking the mesh of information. Now, as I’m watching a Khan academy lesson about Options in finance, I can quickly jump to a linked Wikipedia page about that article, explore early papers explaining the concept, or perhaps browse to a tool for simulating a stock market and how options play out in that model.  Anyone can enrich the trunk of knowledge with their own branches of insight, and explanation. Spotting patterns, and connections is really an essential part of curation, and the web is empowering us to exponentially increase the number of connections that are explicitly codified. In the near future algorithmic approaches can also help identify information that should be linked. People learn better by association, and a large part of creativity is just spotting connections and patterns - so all these new connections will create fertile opportunities for learning and creativity. The question will become how to balance the endless amount of connected content, with curation.

Interdisciplinary approaches have the prospect of thriving like they’ve never thrived before, and the true value of this hyper-connected knowledge has yet to be fully comprehended. Data mining all this connected data, across disciplines, even creates possibilities for entirely new fields to emerge. Ironically, even though the web is perfectly suited for fostering these connections, the tools and technologies that have appeared for allowing people to link knowledge are still in their infancy. This is a space that is perfect for startups to explore, and there are lots of low hanging fruits ripe for the picking. 

4. Digital Textbooks and Visualization

The texts we use to learn have continued to increasingly move online. The iPad is an obvious candidate for replacing the bulk of textbooks that university students have historically been used to lugging around - and Inkling is a company that seems to already have made great headway in this direction. Beyond relieving back problems from heavy textbooks, these digital replacements are also powerful because they are better suited at incorporating the curation and connections I mentioned above. Now, in a textbook section that covers mathematics, I can watch a visualization that illustrates the concept being explained. Perhaps, there are even many different visualizations available, and the textbook has the ability to identify which visualization will work best for me based on my learning history. In general, these types of visual aids, and digital models we can play with should make a great deal of knowledge more accessible. I know having more concrete digital and visual models of the concepts I learned for economics in university would have been fantastic. But, with the augmentation of these visual aids, we need to also ask ourselves, whether replacing out mental visualizations with tangible, digital visualizations, we are substituting something for our imagination that may actually be detrimental to learning.

Here there are two clear opportunities for startups: 

- startups focused on digitizing educational texts, and creating new interface paradigms for interacting with educational content. 

- startups focused on providing better visualizations, and models, that can serve as aids for education. (so far only http://visual.ly/ comes to mind in this domain - though I’m sure there are others)

Part 2: 5 - 10 Coming Next Week