Technology and the Future of Education – OZY

It was like stepping into a time capsule, the principal said, when contractors at an Oklahoma City high school came across century-old paintings during a renovation project this year. Almost perfectly preserved, the blackboards contained well-scored math problems, arithmetic tables, and multicolored drawings. The Oklahoma City Superintendent of Schools called them “artifacts” and pledged to preserve them at all costs.

Chalkboards are in good company. It turns out that relics are pretty common in schools across the country, and schools have a lot of practice preserving artifacts. Chief among them is a one-size-fits-all model of education, in which students receive the same lessons at the same pace, regardless of their individual knowledge, skills and abilities.

We’ve known for a long time that individualized instruction is a game-changer. In a revolutionary 1984 study (PDF) led by psychologist Benjamin Bloom, students who received personalized tuition scored two standard deviations better than their peers in a regular classroom. That’s enough to propel a middle-of-the-pack student into the 98th percentile. But despite Bloom’s findings, American classrooms have remained virtually unchanged for nearly 200 years. Individual tutors, after all, are incredibly expensive.

But that is changing. Technological advances that would have seemed science fiction ten years ago changed the fundamentals. We are entering an era where every student can have a personal robot tutor to guide them through individualized education. It’s time to get out of the time capsule.

Today we generate a staggering amount of data. Eighty percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years. In fact, the International Data Company predicts that by 2020, some 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. And they were mostly okay, because by today’s standards we’ve created about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. To put that into perspective, in 1969 astronauts traveled to and from the moon using computers with just 2 kilobytes (0.002 megabytes) of memory.

All of this data has somehow been a giant leap forward for humanity, but “infobesity” can be crippling. Separating signals from noise can be transformative. Indeed, advances in data science and database technology have unlocked insights from these vast troves of data, creating opportunities for a wide range of industries. E-commerce platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay use powerful algorithms to predict shopping preferences and make timely product recommendations with pinpoint accuracy. Spotify can suggest artists, albums and songs by constantly analyzing the music you – and people like you – listen to. More than half of the programs watched by Over 214 million Netflix users start with a system-generated recommendation. The list continues. If you’re not using big data, you’re in big trouble.

Historically, it has been difficult, if not impossible, to access analytics that measure the effectiveness of a course or educational product, let alone do so in real time or in a predictive or prescriptive way. But the digitization of educational content – ​​from printed textbooks to interactive software – has created the potential for personalized and adaptive learning materials. The same software that powers Amazon and Netflix can now track your understanding of a topic in real time while providing timely prescriptions to fill in gaps and optimize learning.

As covered by OZY a few weeks ago, the pandemic has hit many people hard, especially in the school system. The education system is in desperate need of teachers, substitutes and other faculty members. With more teachers leaving than joining and the recent Omicron variant, students spend days without proper instruction. Students who were already behind, especially those of color, were doomed to fall even further behind. Something had to be done to solve the growing problem and technology was the answer.

Some school districts are partnering with digital education platforms to create digital classrooms. A elementary school group of Kentucky have adopted the Discovery Education platform as a new form of education. Students and teachers can access the platform to obtain a wide variety of materials suitable for their continuous learning. Activity tools, quizzes, lesson plansand just about everything they need is close at hand.

Both startups and established players catalyze innovation. Newsela, which recently acquired HapYak, and supported by Kleiner Perkins and Mark Zuckerberg, builds literacy skills through a publishing platform that automatically scales news stories to the user’s reading level. Acrobatiq, a recent Carnegie Mellon spin-off, has developed adaptive courseware based on a decade of research from the university’s pioneering open learning initiative. McGraw-Hill’s ALEKS and Pearson’s MyLab are high-impact personalized learning platforms that we believe will gain widespread adoption. IBM is betting that the supercomputer and Peril! champion Watson will disrupt education as it has in healthcare – with data-driven solutions – in recent years.