The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized “ed tech” is offered as a balm for budget austerity. “There’s been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools,” Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me.
This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor.
Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.
Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.
It is a substitute for teacher-student lecture content however. My vision for education involves entirely pre-recorded content combined with a work area where teachers move from table to table answering questions or doing micro lectures as needed. Add in some real world projects and mentorship/apprenticing and you’re golden
Similar teacher workforce, but actually using their time better
This just sounds so dystopian to me. You can't replace early childhood interpersonal relationships with a computer. I can remember a number of teachers who had a positive impact on my life because of the relationship we had. I understand you'd want to have other things (mentorship etc) but in reality it would get stripped down to videos + teacher.
Replacing a career teacher with a low-skill babysitter who is half-disinterested does not seem like an improvement. Neither does having students glued to a screen all day instead of interacting with other humans. Those interpersonal skills are more important -- even in tech -- and an educational model like this would inevitably cut back on those by providing a cheaper alternative to human interaction.
Despite the fact that there are lots of talented and passionate teachers, I think it's fairly easy to describe the current American public school system as dystopian. Kids spend all day mostly just rote learning, barely allowed to use their own initiative, moving at a pace that is, in a class of 30 children, statistically probably someone else's, and not allowed to socialize except during very prescribed times. I'm exaggerating for effect, of course, but all the social interaction I remember from school was time that was smuggled, it was not a system designed for social interaction.
I agree that you can't replace relationships with computers, but I'm not sure public school is such a fertile ground for great relationships, at least not more than any number of plausible alternative systems.
> I agree that you can't replace relationships with computers, but I'm not sure public school is such a fertile ground for great relationships, at least not more than any number of plausible alternative systems.
Maybe we can't replace those relationships yet, but I'm sure eventually it will be possible. Educational tech should have the ability to do much more than human teachers ever could.
> You can't replace early childhood interpersonal relationships with a computer.
Ha. Kids can interact with computers (or rather, tablets) earlier than they meaningfully interact with people. So not only is the replacement possible, it is already ongoing. The only question is how productive the computer-based interaction is going to be. Educational content handily beats weird AI-generated video-clickbait.
I don't understand from your comment how you think using a tablet or any kind of programmatic system replaces teacher student interactions for personal development - that is, kids being kids with adults, and learning from it.
I agree with you on the importance of interpersonal relationships; however, U.S. K-12 teaching is hardly a model of consistency when it comes to quality, experience, and availability (there was a projected 110K teacher shortage last school year). What if the choice for parents and students was between Sal Khan and an dispassionate teacher, substitute teacher, or underpaid and under-supported teacher?
This is probably where tech will take us. A few "rock star" teachers will teach most of the students the main content, and the current, run-of-the-mill teachers will effectively become TAs. The downside is for the run-of-the-mill teachers to lose their autonomy, discretion, and ability to apply their professionalism and creativity. The upside will be that rock star teachers will finally start to get paid like, well, rock stars.
Rock star teachers are rock stars because of their ability to connect with students. The rock star teacher presenting to hundreds of students is not as effective as the same teacher in a small group.
True, but rock star teachers also find creative and effective ways to teach things that are hard to teach. Just like Eddie Van Halen may make playing the guitar look easy to someone who doesn’t play, rock star teachers make communicating difficult ideas look easy. Many people don’t understand the preparation required for a good lesson- often those people are other teachers.
Should help identify gaps/misunderstandings. Should...
In my 1:20 math classroom, this didn't work, despite me asking specific questions. I've had to identify them myself years later by labouriously going through Khan Academy and other on-line resources.
Maybe your education, like everything else, is ultimately and necessarily your own personal responsibility...
BTW I think a brilliant tutor could do this, but they'd be worth (and charge) about $1,000 per hour.
> It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.
Why not? Teachers can still do what they do best, which is answer questions and clarify things. You don't need a teacher to actually teach a lesson de novo each time. I don't see what's wrong with recording a (very good) lesson and just reusing that and having the actual teacher in the room answer ad-hoc questions.
I actually see this teaching model as potentially amazingly transformative for students in what would otherwise be bad schools. Rather than being held back by disruptive classmates, teachers having to teach to the lowest common denominator, etc. it could give students the ability to learn at their own pace and advance asymmetrically compared to their fellow students, even without funding for gifted programs. Basically it can be a more formalized montessori model.
Outside of self learning and higher education, I cannot see even the best recordings being anything more then supplementary material in education. A good teacher is able to shape a lesson in preparation and during it's delivery to meet the needs of her classroom/students. A recording can be used to deliver a high level overview, but it will require reinforcement afterwards by the teacher. Why not just let the teacher teach and reinforce where needed during the delivery?
>A good teacher is able to [...] Why not just let the teacher teach [...]?
By adding a qualifier such as "good" as in "good teacher", you've (inadvertently?) made your argument look more reasonable and correct. Some teachers are good, most are average, and many are bad.
The gp you responded to is talking about superior teaching recordings to help the teachers at bad schools. (But it can also help the good teachers by letting them put more energy into the 1-on-1 phase of instruction.)
The challenge I've seen is time. If a teacher has a 50 minute class, and 25 students, that's less than 2 minutes per student, if each needs individualized instruction.
I think this would be really great for kids who want to take control of their own learning and do them without the need of total access to the teacher. If I had a choice to do my learning some days on my own in a private area at a computer instead of being in a classroom of 30 students with your typical problem childs distracting the teacher and other kids, I would have in a heartbeat. Leave the teachers to babysit the problem kids while kids who actually want to learn can learn.
...but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction
Curious as to why you say this because recently it seems like people are realizing you DON'T need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, and more and more people are turning to the wealth of education at our fingertips instead of traditional schooling.
In my experience as both a student and a workplace educator (informal learning only, ex: "I can't figure out how to do a fuzzy match in excel, can you help me?"), I think you've got the emphasis wrong.
Educators know that not everyone needs a teacher, and most people don't need a teacher all of the time. The trick with high quality educators is two-fold, creating motivation for students to want to learn and stepping in to guide a student one on one when a student gets stuck.
While I haven't needed a teacher 50% of the time, I get stuck when learning. I then need a new perspective, or a new mental model, to get me thinking differently. This happens less and less as I get older, and find ways to replace a teacher with other stimuli.
A child isn't an adult. They need and want to have their hand held at certain times.
There isn't a substitute for a social interaction that goes beyond "did student 9471827 learn topic 14536?". Humans need to go over things multiple times to remember how to do it. Sometimes there's new learning. Maybe they think they know how to do it, but it doesn't feel right, and they need a partner or authority figure to say "yes, that's a good way to solve this problem or frame a perspective".
So to come all the way back around, I think most people know that we don't need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, but we do want it at times, and the interaction definitely speeds up learning.
I'd argue even more anecdotally that a human will not trust a robot teacher unless they've had a good human teacher, and that the robot teacher resembles some characteristic of that teacher.
I realize that all of this is my opinion, but I hope it was interesting to you as a potential answer for the previous comment! Have a good one today
Thanks for your thoughts! Perhaps I am a bit jaded as I went to a large university and I don't think a single professor could recognize me as a student, even the ones I went to office hours for. (always just help I never really struck up a conversation).
I will concede that for K-12 education, especially closer to the K side, having a patient teacher is certainly going to help students learn, and guide them when they are frustrated.
>I went to a large university and I don't think a single professor could recognize me as a student
I was in the same situation, and that's where the TAs (Teaching Assistants) stepped in. And most of the time, it made all the difference. Professors for a lot of classes (but not all of them) were just glorified lecture material recital machines, however, the value of TA office hours was insurmountable. The difference between classes that had great TAs vs. classes that had bad TAs was extremely noticeable in terms of the amount of material I learned.
I agree with the rest of the sentiment in the thread though. I didn't need professors or TAs 80%+ of my time, but whenever I got stuck, a good explanation or hint from TA made all the difference. You could easily tell by looking at everyone's scores and knowledge who went to TA office hours and who didn't. Ironically enough, the scores didn't seem to correlate almost at all with lecture attendance.
This inspired me to become a TA myself later on, and I am very glad I did that. It felt really rewarding to be able to figure out that one extra little nudge of information that, if given to a student in struggle, made it click in their heads.
in traditional classroom learning, sure. but that doesn't imply that a different teaching method altogether can't have benefits as well, and possibly out-do a good teacher-student ratio.
or put differently, traditional schooling is so bad that it is necessary to make classes smaller in order to give each student enough attention and opportunity to speak.
with individualized learning, as for example in montessori, that teacher attention is not needed because in montessori the teacher attention is individualized too. that is, while the teacher is paying attention to a particular child or group of children, all other children in the class carry own with their own work. so each child may get less time with the teacher, but that time is of much higher quality.
it's a completely different learning dynamic, and one that interestingly is capable of allowing a single teacher to handle larger classrooms.
I think this is a great point. When we tell people we're thinking about homeschooling, one of the most common responses is something along the lines of, "What makes you think you can do better than an educational professional?"
And my response is that I don't have to be a better teacher than a teacher, I have to be more effective at teaching my _one_ child than a teacher is at teaching my child as one of 30 children of widely differing abilities and behavior.
I've spent a lot of time in coaching and educational roles, so I feel pretty capable as a teacher, but I think the point remains that the best way to teach a roomful of children is unlikely to be the best way to teach an individual child.
Self-taught learning has always been a highly minority pursuit. Most people don't do it, they need supportive people interacting with them or they aren't going to put in the effort or to even understand how they might learn effectively. That's why the most serious proponents of computer-aided, personalized learning argue against replacing teachers.
You can replace in-person lectures and perhaps many kinds of rote exercises via computer interaction. You can even gamify the latter and provide automated feedback, which is quite helpful from the student's
POV. But no, you absolutely can't replace the teacher altogether. Computer use in education also adds a ton of sedentary screen time to these kids' lifestyle that's not necessarily good for their health, so focusing on getting the best value for that use is incredibly important.
I learned almost everything I use on a day-to-day basis by clicking through pages on a website unsupervised. I use the things taught in my degree courses relatively little.
There’s a lot of social and other benefits I gained from having real classroom learning, but I think we underestimate the value of online educations.
This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor.
Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers.
Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.