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10 Ways Tech is Changing Education (Part 3)

This is a continuation of a cursory overview on how tech is changing education, and what opportunities exist for startups in this space. Here’s the full bullet point list of what you may have missed:

Part 1

1. Online courses, video lessons, and lesson plans

2. Curation

3. Connections

4. Digital Textbooks and Visualization

Part 2

5. Online Problem Solving

6. Progress Tracking

Part 3

7. Gamefication

8. Personalization

9. Social Learning

10. New Sources of Knowledge (e.g. TED Talks, Blogs, Quora)

7. Gamefication

There are two ways to think about gamefication in education: 

i. Take elements of games and apply them more broadly to education

If you think about it, the whole framework of moving from one grade to the next, submitting homework and receiving marks as evaluation, has countless parallels to games. Let’s go even further: it is a game - with fairly clear rules and levels defined. But, technology can help create new rules, leveling systems and rewards that creatively engage and challenge students to push to the next level. 

The purpose of gamefication is to provide motivation, and purpose. I believe that a sense of progress is crucial to having that sense of purpose. Simply being able to see how you’re progressing through your lessons, being rewarded for progressing faster, or for completing particularly challenging extra tasks can boost students’ drive to learn - even if the points, or congratulations students receive don’t have concrete consequences. Taking it a step further schools could make these points actually matter. What if we replaced the entire system of grades with a points system that measures small accomplishments frequently, and carries on with students from year to year? Students are given points for each lesson, assignment, and test they complete, and they can gain additional points by volunteering to do more difficult problems. Granted this could be overdoing things - but its worthwhile to experiment with different ways of incorporating game elements into the standard educational systems. The role startups can play here is creating these types of tracking, and reward systems. Essentially these startups would be building gamefication platforms, similar to what BigDoor in Seattle, and Badgeville are doing - but more focused on the education sector and its particular needs.

ii. Make educational games

I believe educational games are a market that is likely to explode with the growing prevalence of light-weight, social gaming on mobile and tablet devices (wow that sentence was a buzzword festival). The beautiful thing about educational games is that they can be technologically very simple, but still phenomenally engaging and effective! I’m sure lots of people born in the mid-80s had the joyous experience of mastering prime numbers through the addictive game Number Munchers (here’s a link for those who missed it http://www.numbermunchers.org/). I think that in the younger age category (ages 3-12)  is where educational games have the largest market opportunity, but the applicability of educational games spans all the way up to the university level! In one of my Political Science classes at McGill University, we had the option to write a book review, or to play a game called Tropico and review how the politics of developing countries is depicted in the game. Just the novelty of playing a game to learn hit a chord with many of the students (way more people opted to play the game than read the book).

At all levels these educational games will have an impact on future generations. Watching my 3 year old niece play Cut the Rope on my phone recently was a real wake up call about the power that educational games could have in her life, which is likely to be far more engulfed by pervasive computing than mine has been so far. I’d rather her become a fluent Spanish speaker by playing Dora the Explorer games, rather than just playing Cut the Rope. People will pay for games, and  in particular parents will pay a premium for good educational games that their children enjoy! While some games educate indirectly already (e.g. Civilization 3 taught me lots about history :), the real innovation here will come from game designers who incorporate education more deeply into the fiber of their game worlds!

8. Personalization

Each student learns at their own pace, and has their own learning style. Accordingly, the technology students are using to educate themselves should adapt to each student’s needs, techniques, and wants. Already, as you progress through the educational system it becomes increasingly personalized. As you move from kindergarden to elementery school, to highschool, and then on to university, you have increasing amounts of choice available to you: you get to start choosing which classes you take, what you want to study, and eventually, even who you want to be taught by.

What technology can do here is to increase the degree of personalization that is possible, and to help students make the ever more difficult choices that emerge from increased possibilities. 

If for each topic that I need to learn about, I can choose between 13 videos by different instructors all teaching the same thing - then just by narrowing down to one instructor I have effectively personalized that lesson for myself.

But, while creating platforms that provide these types of options is interesting,  I think that with the additional choices that become available, there is also an interesting opportunity to create systems that automatically customize lesson plans for students, or aid them in making their choices. This will help avoid the paralysis that can emerge from all this additional choice: I can study whatever I want now, at any time I want, however I want to learn  - but I may spend more time thinking about my choice, than actually learning.

9. Social Learning

When I hear the term social learning, so many different possible interpretations of the term come to mind that I’m not exactly sure what it means.

One aspect of social learning is about people sharing skills that they have with one another. This is one of the hottest areas for educational startups. Companies like TutorSpree (helps students find tutors), SkillShare (lets people hold classes on something they’re skilled at, and make money from it), and YongoPal (connects people in Korea with conversation partners who are fluent in english) are just some examples of the type of social learning that’s emerging. For startups - one great aspect of these companies is that they monetize very well! Self improvement is one of the areas that people are willing to pay for online! The role of the startups here is often just to foster a marketplace for people to share their knowledge, and then take a share of the payments facilitated by the site.

There is another aspect of social learning, which is setting shared lesson plans/goals, and moving towards them together. I’m not as familiar with the companies in this space - or what has been done - but I think that group learning is a powerful thing. There are companies like 43things which works to group people with similar ambitions into support groups. But, I think that a company with greater focus on group education, and collaborative learning has potential. This company would provide online tools to help study groups form and collaborate, and see how all the other members of the group are progressing.

10. New sources of knowledge

Information no longer lies solely in books, and in the heads of teachers, professors, and professionals. The web has bred new forms of information and new mediums for education. 

Here the opportunities are two fold for startups:

i. To create new sources of knowledge, and new mediums for capturing and presenting previously inaccessible knowledge.

ii. Taking all the disparate silos of information and either layer educational components on top of them, or incorporate them into the existing educational systems. 

In terms of sources of new knowledge, Wikipedia, Quora, and TED are the ones that most readily spring to mind.

I think Quora is particularly interesting because they are becoming a repository of knowledge that would be difficult to come across in books, or classrooms (e.g. vs Wikipedia). They have effectively taken large amounts of knowledge that was only in people’s heads and had them transcribe that knowledge into an accessible written format. It’s incredible how many interesting questions are available on the site, with remarkably well crafted answers. Granted, their content is still largely focused around tech and startups, but if they can spread to other domains Quora will indirectly be a powerhouse in the education field. 

TED

When I think about technology that has most deeply impacted my own continued education - it has got to be TED talks. TED is the best exposure you can get to exciting ideas, presented in an entertaining fashion by interesting and talented individuals. Though the educational content is surface level at best (i.e. you don’t learn about anything in depth), it still is a good place to spark interest in learning more about specific topics.

With all this content appearing everywhere, different companies are thinking about how to incorporate all these sources of knowledge into our educational system. Schools are experimenting with Twitter in their classroom (link to NYT twitter in classrooms). And two of the startups here in the TechStars New York office are also working on incorporating these disparate sources of knowledge into our day to day education:

Red Rover does this by providing a dashboard to pull in and make searchable information across all these different sites, so that you can quickly identify if the information is available somewhere on the web, or who might be the most likely person in your organization to possess that information.

And, Veri, who I don’t know too much about, is working on adding a ‘fun and engaging way to learn any topic online.’. They do this by adding an educational layer on all these new sources of information such as blogs, twitter and more (essentially creating educational games around these new sources of knowledge).

Conclusion

The opportunities for tech startups in education are countless! I’m not in this space and with only a cursory glance at what’s out there, it’s easy to get excited. For anyone thinking about starting a company in this space, you should read Peter Thiel’s thoughts on why there will be a radical transformation of education on the horizon.