10 Relearning EducationRead more at location 2111
Note: il fine dell educazione: umanità cittadinanza esemplarietà produttività on line education competition/education blog dialog principio del time shifting elearning: prezzo qualità flessibilità prifittabilità testabilità imparare giocando... l industria dei giochi Edit
We as a nation have been thinking about education without knowing what we really want from it. Do we want well-rounded young adults to emerge? Or good citizens? Role models?Read more at location 2112
For the purposes of this chapter, and indeed this book, I’ll keep the goal simple. One goal of better education is to procure better earnings.Read more at location 2114
find work either as personal servants or as more distant service providers to the high earners,Read more at location 2117
Online education is one place where the new information technologies are emerging. For instance, millions of people are taking MOOCs (massive open online courses)Read more at location 2124
In my own field of economics, what is the most common and regular form of contact the general public has with economic reasoning? It’s no longer the Econ 101 class but rather it is economics blogs, which are read by hundreds of thousands of people every day. I submit that “cross-blog dialogue,” as I call it, is for many people a better way of learning than boring lectures, PowerPoints, and dry, overly homogenized, designed-not-to-offend-anybody textbooks. Schools are supposed to be proper and politically correct, but sometimes the point really sticks when Paul Krugman calls someone an idiotRead more at location 2128
Blogs have to get people to care because it is a very competitive environment. The competition is to capture anyone’s attention.Read more at location 2132
These new methods of learning are all based on the principles of time-shifting (watch and listen when you want), user control, direct feedback, the construction of online communities, and the packaging of information into much smaller bits than the traditional lecture or textbook chapter.Read more at location 2135
Online education is even growing as a supplement to K–12 or in some cases as a replacement altogether. As of late 2011, about 250,000 K–12 students are enrolled in full-time virtual schools.Read more at location 2139
At these online schools, the degree of contact with flesh-and-blood teachers varies. Instructors might answer questions by email, phone, or videoconference, supplemented by periodic meetings, class trips, and “live,” in-the-classroom exams.Read more at location 2140
The world still awaits systematic, rigorous (randomized control trial) studies of all of these methods of learning, and it is too early to say what is working and what is not.Read more at location 2143
two things for sure. First, very often the online methods are much cheaper and also more flexible than the previous alternatives.Read more at location 2144
online education will be extremely cheap. Once an online course is created, additional students can be handled at relatively low cost, often close to zero cost.Read more at location 2151
It will be a brutal age of good schools and also mediocre schools undercutting each other in terms of price and thus tuition revenue. If it costs $200 to serve a class to another student, how long will it be before an educational institution undercuts a competitor charging $2,000 for those credits? I don’t think the price will fall all the way to $200, because good schools won’t want to look too cheap, and maybe they don’t need the money, but still I expect the price for a class to be much lower than its current level, especially at institutions below the top tier.Read more at location 2158
Many think that students won’t pay attention to a computer or a machine teaching a lesson, but there are many ways of using the online product to lower costs while keeping the attention of the students.Read more at location 2163
Imagine keeping students on campus and having them show up in classrooms at regular points in time, as they do now. Or let them show up when they want. Put a large number of those students in a large “barn” and have them watch the online lessons, with a few (non-tenured) instructors wandering the rows to help out those with problems. Does that sound Orwellian? Virginia Tech is doing that right now for some of its math classes and it seems to be working out just fine. It is called the Emporium modelRead more at location 2165
Imagine adding to this mix enhanced capabilities for machine intelligence to monitor and report which students aren’t working through the material at all or at the right pace. The costs for the instructors are of course much lower.Read more at location 2170
The point is that most of the off-the-cuff critiques of online education (“no one would do that!”) underestimate how versatile the idea can beRead more at location 2173
Third, another big change is that the profits from developing teaching innovations will be much higher than they are today.Read more at location 2174
when the best courses serve tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of students, or maybe even millions, the financial returns to pedagogical innovation will be looked at in a new light.Read more at location 2179
Fourth, online education also allows for a much more precise measurement of learning. Consider the Khan Academy and its online videos. They are already measuring which videos lead to the best performance on quiz scores, which videos have to be watched more than once,Read more at location 2183
We’re about to apply “Big Data” to the students themselves, and man and machine will work together to improve significantly the quality of education. In a slightly more distant future, we can imagine the computers hooked up to bodily sensors of pulse and scans of facial movements, perhaps to determine if the student is bored, distracted, or simply not understanding the material.Read more at location 2187
Computers have taught many people, young and old, to play better chess. It can even be said computers have revolutionized the way the game is taught.Read more at location 2190
The most important teaching function, however, is that a player has a willing partner and analyst 24/7. The programs can analyze chess games on request, including one’s own games. Just enter the game into the program and request feedback in the form of suggested improvements and analysis.Read more at location 2196
It’s remarkable what a good job the games industry, especially in its online manifestations, has done educating us in playing the games.Read more at location 2202
The many millions of people these games have educated include millions who would not otherwise be thought of as educational winners or job market winners. It is actually the most astonishing education success story of our time and it is driven by commercial incentives and the desire to make learning fun. Game-based interaction tends to be hands-on and step-by-step, moving up a ladder of complexity with rewards along the way to keep the game player interested.Read more at location 2207
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the WorldRead more at location 2212
Her dream, entirely reasonable in my view, is to see a games designer nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.Read more at location 2213
Education into the world of games works remarkably well, but it works mainly for people who wish to learn the games.Read more at location 2215
For people who aren’t already motivated, or on the verge of picking up a new fascination, nothing about the game is all that enticing or seductive.Read more at location 2216
Chess teacher Peter Snow reports that some of his young students love playing against the computer, but they deliberately put the quality settings on the program so low that they can beat it many times in a row.Read more at location 2218
Similarly, studies of spelling bees show that the winning spellers are those who not only work hard, but who engage in disciplined forms of study that do not always yield immediate positive feedback.Read more at location 2221
the average age of chess prodigies, like most game prodigies, has been falling over time, and a large part of this is driven by better mechanical education. In the 1950s, it was considered miraculous when Bobby Fischer became a master at age thirteen. David Pruess, who writes for Chess.com, acutely observed, “Today, you have 7- and 8-year-olds who are training better than Bobby Fischer did a generation before.”Read more at location 2226
Magnus Carlsen is, as I write, the highest rated player in the world and arguably the most impressive chess prodigy of all time, having attained grandmaster status at thirteen and world number one status at age nineteen, the latter a record. He is from Tønsberg, in southern Norway, and prior to the computer age Norway has no record of producing top chess players at all. Even Oslo (Carlsen now lives on its outskirts) is a relatively small metropolitan area of fewer than 1.5 million people. Carlsen, of course, had the chance to play chess over the internet.Read more at location 2234
In the old days the Chess Olympiad was dominated by the Soviet Union. It wasn’t just the state subsidies for chess and the restrictions on using one’s mind for business or artistic creativity (a lot of talented people found chess to be their best or perhaps only option). Most other parts of the world had genuinely backward chess scenes. But now you can put yourself on the path to top skills from almost anywhere. In 2008 and 2012 the small nation of Armenia took first place at the Chess Olympiad, and unlike in the old days the top Armenian players do not need to move to Moscow.Read more at location 2239
When Sebastian Thrun, then of Stanford, taught his artificial intelligence course online, the best performers were not the students from Stanford. Generally the best performers were the students abroad, often from poor countries and very often from India.Read more at location 2244
Online education can thus be extremely egalitarian, but it is egalitarian in a funny way.Read more at location 2248
when humans and computers work together and cooperate, the rewards flow more readily to top talent, not to the socially well connected.Read more at location 2252
One major problem is simply that universities are for the most part bureaucracies. Faculty often fear online education because they sense it will either put them out of a job, lower their status and importance, or force them to learn fundamentally new methods of teaching,Read more at location 2260
One central question is how quickly accrediting bodies will move to grant full and transferable credits for good online courses. I do expect to see some progress in this direction, but accreditors serve in part to prop up a higher education cartel.Read more at location 2263
Note that Sebastian Thrun, after a successful experience with teaching online material, decided to quit his tenured teaching position at Stanford and start his own educational company.Read more at location 2267
When it comes to chess, no special interests interfered with the transition to machine-based instruction. No accrediting bodies asked these search engines to prove themselves. There were no lesser, “tenured” computers that had to be pushed out of the way, edged into retirement,Read more at location 2269
We see also a growing role of machine-aided self-education when it comes to the iPad and many other computer-related devices and programs. The kids who learn iPads start by trying to manipulate them and they learn by trial and error, allowing the iPad to teach them. There is no iPad instruction booklet in the box you bring home from the store. You can download one online, or read it online, but hardly anybody does.Read more at location 2277
This kind of machine-based learning is driven by a hunger for knowledge, not by a desire to show off your talent or to “signal” as we economists say. If you’re not a good player, the fact that you studied with a top teacher doesn’t mean a thing.Read more at location 2280
Announcing “I studied with Rybka” would bring gales of laughter, since anyone can do that.Read more at location 2282
The current business model of Harvard and Princeton is to market the quality of exclusivity and to raise money by encouraging alumni to donate to such a wonderful and exclusive institution.Read more at location 2288
In part, the human chess instructor teaches the pupil how to use the computer. The human instructor has also become more important for motivation, psychology, teaching pacing, and teaching the psychological foibles of potential human opponents.Read more at location 2304
keeping one’s composure, maintaining concentration, and not getting psyched out or intimidated by older or better opponents. These skills are important, and if anything they are more important outside the world of chess.Read more at location 2306
The next step is that human instructors will consult the machines to better understand the mistakes their students are making.Read more at location 2308
The instructor who teaches human qualities like conscientiousness and who motivates his student needs to be there.Read more at location 2316
At a good teaching school, a professor is expected to run the class and, sometimes, have a small group of students over to his house for dinner. As the former function becomes less important, due to competition from online content, the latter function will predominate.Read more at location 2332
We could think of the forthcoming educational model as professor as impresario. In some important ways, we would be returning to the original model of face-to-face education as practiced in ancient Greek symposia and meetings in the agora.Read more at location 2335
It’s a common claim that you can’t replace professors with Nobel-quality YouTube lectures because the professor, and perhaps also the classroom setting, is required to motivate most of the students. Fair enough, but let’s take this seriously. The professor is then a motivator first and foremost. Let’s hire good motivators. Let’s teach our professors how to motivate. Let’s judge them on that basis. Let’s treat professors more like athletics coaches, personal therapists, and preachers, because that is what they will evolve to be.Read more at location 2338
The Mormon Church has been fairly successful at getting a large number of people to convert to the Mormon religion. Let’s set the theology aside and see if their methods of motivating converts can teach us anything useful about how we could improve education.Read more at location 2342
Of course, educational institutions aren’t ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don’t want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated class.Read more at location 2346
We like to pretend our instructors teach as well as chess computers, but too often they don’t come close to that ideal. They are something far less noble, something that we are afraid to call by its real name, something quite ordinary: They are a mix of exemplars and nags and missionaries, packaged with a marketing model that stresses their nobility and a financial model that pays them pretty well and surrounds them with administrators.Read more at location 2350
The better-performing students will be treated much as chess prodigies are today. They will be given computer programs to play with, with periodic human contact for guidance, feedback, and upgrades to new and better programs. They will cooperate with each other toward the end of greater mastery of their subject areas. Their conscientiousness, and the understanding that high wages await them in the world, will enforce hard work and discipline. The lesser-performing students will specialize in receiving motivation. Education, for them, will become more like the Marines, full of discipline and team spirit.Read more at location 2358
Neo-Victorian social ideals may not triumph, but they will become a much stronger force among lower earners.Read more at location 2365
We already have the KIPP schools, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program. KIPP is a nationwide network of open-enrollment schools, mostly for underprivileged youths. Studying in KIPP is not easy. The school insists on longer hours from its students, often running 7:30 to 5:00 Monday through Friday and 8:30 to 1:30 on select Saturdays. There is often mandatory summer school, and in general the classes are much harderRead more at location 2366
An overwhelming majority of the students are either Latino or African American.Read more at location 2369
Especially charismatic teachers will surely have their place—and probably a very well-paid place—in the new world of work. Hong Kong already has glamorous celebrity tutors, called “tutor kings,” who help prepare students for the all-important scholastic exams. These instructors are good-looking, photogenic, and their personal lives turn up in the celebrity gossip papers.Read more at location 2380
It is rumored that Richard Eng, one of the leading tutor kings, pulls in $1.5 million a year;Read more at location 2383
There has been no comprehensive study of the effectiveness of these tutors but it is believed they do a better job getting the students to pay attention to the lessons.Read more at location 2384
It’s an open debate how much education can boost innate aptitude or IQ, but the trait of “conscientiousness” does consistently predict educational and job success and also subjective happiness. Yet as access to information increases, conscientiousness will become all the more important. It will be less about whose parents could afford Harvard or who could charm the admissions officer, and more and more about who sits down and actually starts trying to master the material.Read more at location 2391
Expert coaching or motivating will be a competitive growth sector for jobs.Read more at location 2398
A lot of new jobs will be coming in the area of motivation. These jobs will require some very serious skills, but again they won’t primarily be skills of a high tech nature or skills that are taught very well by our current colleges and universities.Read more at location 2401
Top doctors will have a coach, just as today’s top tennis players (and some of the mediocre ones) all have coaches. Today the coach of a CEO is very often the spouse, the personal assistant, or even a subordinate, or sometimes a member of the board of directors. Coaching is already remarkably important in our economy, and the high productivity of top earners will cause it to become essential.Read more at location 2405
Before his current work on building up an openings book for his Freestyle chess team, Nelson Hernandez (now in his midfifties) worked as an army paratrooper, a stockbroker, for a hedge fund, and as a financial analyst, the job he now holds. He describes being good at “dull, repetitive tasks” and “really wanting to win” as making him well suited for his Freestyle avocation.Read more at location 2413
