The future of education
Change #3: Less one-to-many; more many-to-many
As we enter this period of transition, two oppositional forces are at work, each with its own pluses and minuses. On one side, massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide tremendous benefit by making lectures from the best educational institutions available free to anyone with an internet connection. But similar to most traditional classroom lectures, knowledge flows mainly in one direction. Learning is mostly passive. Two-way interaction is needed.
On the other side, learning at a deep level requires active engagement on the part of the student, with the instructor acting as a guide. But how can we make this happen when there aren’t enough qualified instructors to go around? That’s where peer-based learning over a dedicated social network comes into play. Such next-generation adaptive deep learning platforms are in various stages of development. As they begin to come online, they are expected to significantly reduce the cost and improve the effectiveness of individualized learning.
Over the course of the 12 or more years a student spends in a traditional classroom, many reinforcing beliefs and behaviors come into play. For example, a common belief that “I’m no good at math,” if unchecked, leads to disengagement and isolation. Along the way, students, feeling disenfranchised, might choose to disrupt class either to gain attention or attempt to slow down the pace. The ability to learn math then becomes unnecessarily limited through self-imposed constraints. These are just a few of the many problems that inevitably arise within a one-size-fits-all, one-to-many education paradigm.
Using social media as a learning platform helps alleviate these tendencies in several ways. One is anonymity. Students are free to self-organize into groups of their own choosing, thereby promoting learning at a less-imposing peer level, yet still guided by an instructor qualified in both the subject matter and learning styles and behaviors. Within this new type of learning environment, students are free to express themselves openly and honestly without fear of retribution, including sharing topics with which they are comfortable or uncomfortable. Long-standing barriers to learning are slowly removed.
A whole new mindset
In summary, conventional approaches to education treat students as part of a formal system, an assembly line, to support a mechanized industrial economy. This has carried over into the Information Age, in which the assembly line has morphed into “workflow.”
Today, we find ourselves in a highly networked knowledge-based economy. This new world demands radically different learning approaches in alignment with complex behaviors of natural systems. As such, we envision hiring less based on traditional diplomas and certifications, and more on a person’s ability to actively demonstrate an evolving set of hard and soft skills.
Mainstream academic institutions will still play an important role. University-level research creates a pipeline for the insertion of new discoveries into society and economies. The good news is this pipeline will generate even more and faster breakthroughs as more schools begin to embrace individualized pedagogy.
In the meantime, consider working these three changes into your own personal and organizational learning behaviors. You might just end up making some new discoveries yourself.