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Personalized Education
Imagine the best desktop computer you can imagine,
slung over your shoulder like a slim handbag, connected to the billions
of resources available on the internet, supporting instant multimedia communications
anywhere on the planet, and you have a picture of the tool available for
education within the next decade. The development of such a tool makes it
not just possible, but inevitable, that education of the future will become
deeply personalized.
Education today, from the kindergarten level to PhD seminars, is based on
the model of the class. At the early levels
especially, classes are organized not by the learning needed by the student
so much as that student's age. In post-secondary education, age becomes
less of a factor but education is still fundamentally time-based and depends
on standard curricula for groups of students. The model is that of a group
of people starting at the same time, studying the same materials at the
same pace, and ending at the same time.
This model of education was adopted because it was the most efficient.
It is heavily dependent on the teacher, and the teacher in turn is responsible
for assembling, and often presenting, the materials to be learned. For the
most part, customization and personalization are not practical, because
personalized teacher-led instruction is not practical. It is much more efficient
to deliver the same content once to a group of students than it is to deliver
the same content thirty times to individual students. Given the technology
that we had, the class was the only practical solution.
Education in the future will be much less class-based, and much more topic-based.
This already is the model being explored by such
alternative educational models as programmed learning and constructive
learning. The idea is that learning is not paced so much by the teacher
as it is by the student's own capacity to acquire the material. Additionally,
the topic selection for an individual's education will be based on that
student's need, not the preselected curriculum for a particular class.
Any given student may at any time be taking any given topic, and progressing
at a pace through that material appropriate to his or her learning ability.
What will make this possible is the development of Educational Delivery (ED) technology.
The primary purpose of ED will not be so much to teach as it will be to manage learning.
Individual students will be served by ED along a variety of dimensions:
Topics will be selected student interest, student aptitude
and educational level, and societal need. The menu of available topics
presented to any given student will be determined by the student's
demonstrated prior learning, by parent
input and control, and by legislation
governing education in that student's political jurisdiction.
Selecting an educational topic,
for a student, will be like selecting a channel on television. A student's
daily menu will be varied and constantly changing, building on each day's
achievement.
This model for the selection of educational activities - I call it the
Quest Model - has worked well in gaming
environments. As various people log on to an online game, they may be
at different levels, have different inclinations, and have different abilities.
The game presents a variety of quests for them to fulfill, based on their
level, and they select from these quests based on their inclinations.
As they select a quest, they are joined by fellow-travelers attempting
the same quest (for often, a group is required for the successful completion
of a quest). Some quests may be short - just a few minutes - while others
may require a sustained commitment over several days.
Although unusual in institutional settings, except at the very coarse course-selection
level, the menuization of educational topics is common in business settings. My
first experience with this occurred in 1981 with Texas Instruments. In addition to
two required courses, I had a wide range of options to choose from as
supplementary learning (I selected MVS-JES3, a processing language, and
On The Way Up, a communications course). Learning was self-paced, supported
by manuals and videotapes (state of the art).
Today's internet is offering adults especially more opportunities for topic
selection than ever before. There is a proliferation of online
courses - some short and to the point, such as those offered by
Ziff-Davis, others long and involved, such as those offered by Athabasca
University. Potential students now typically access course indices, such
as offered by Tele-Education new Brunswick, and select the learning which
suits their needs.
But these are merely course selections. The prominence of the course is based on
the class-based learning model. As classes, in and of themselves, fade from the scene,
the selection of learning will drop to a lower scale, with topics selected in hourly
or daily increments. This trend I describe as the modularization of learning, and
is discussed below.
The Presentation of Material will occur automatically, powered
by the ED system, based on the students' progression through the topic.
While the presentation of material will in some cases be linear (as it
is always in a classroom), such as via video presentations or text-based
reading, in other cases choices will have to be made, while in other cases
the presentation of material will be multi-threaded
(that is, material on two distinct subjects will be presented simultaneously,
as for example is common in music videos or on internet chatlines).
As students progress through a topic, material will be presented to
them dynamically, according to one of the following mechanisms: (a) student-selected,
from a library of background information
on the topic in question (for example, the student reads a description
of the quest from a scroll); (b) event-driven,
by the system, when the student reaches a particular point in the course
(for example, upon reaching Athia, the student encounters a shopkeeper
with a tale to tell); (c) time-driven,
by the system, after a certain time has elapsed (for example, after an
hour, it rains, and the writing on the sheepskin is revealed); or (d)
instructor-driven, by the instructor, as additional information is requested
or volunteered.
The personalization of education just described will be adopted - gradually, as
traditionalists fade out of the scene - not because it provides better educational
results (this has yet to be proven, although it is likely) or because students prefer
it (this again needs to be proven, but is again likely), but because it is more efficient.
Classroom education is in many ways wasteful. Material is reviewed for thirty
students when in fact only five need review. New material presented is absorbed
by half the students, but is beyond the capacity of the other half. That time in class
which is spent by a student unproductively - either waiting for an instructor to
address another student's question, discipline problem, or other need - is eliminated
through personalized instruction.
Or to put the point another way: so long as the class remains the dominant paradigm
of education, the potential for improved efficiencies inherent in the new technology will
remain unrealized. Only when the capacity for new technology to customize and
personalize education are employed will the efficiencies begin to show.
Learning Styles employed by online learning systems will be tailored to individual
students as well. Different students
learn in different ways. Online learning systems will identify
individual students' preferred learning styles, and present educational
materials accordingly.
Thus, for example, students who learn best by exploring (for example, learning software
by trying every command to see what happens) will be presented a variety of options
they may pursue, while students who prefer ordered, linear presentations may be
presented with a video stream covering the same material. Students who learn orally
may watch and listen to a taped lecture, while students who learn visually may be
presented with graphical representations of the concepts being covered.
Learning styles exist across a number of dimensions, and designers of educational
systems will need to, first, prepare materials appropriate to each of
these dimensions, and second, incorporate a method of selecting materials
from different dimensions. Learning
style selection may be enabled via (a) a testing mechanism, which
sets a system's default values, (b) student selected, via a set of sliding
scales for each dimension, or (c) instructor selected, to satisfy desired
learning or learning style criteria.
Recording and tracking student progress, currently a time-consuming
and dull job for instructors (often still accomplished in course gradebooks they way it was
done in the fifties) will to a large degree be handled automatically by the system. While
the instructor will still have an essential role in monitoring and evaluating student progress,
the computer will compile the data required for reasonable and efficient monitoring and tracking.
Most people when they think of automatic monitoring and tracking, think
of two things: first, auto-marked tests
and exams, and second, progress logs.
Each of these will have a role in the future, but a much smaller role
than might otherwise be assumed, because of the wealth of data available
to the online instructor.
For example, an online test might measure a student's (current) recall
of physics, but often of more interest to the instructor is how that knowledge
is used. Since all the student's interactions online can be logged and
recorded, and since intelligent
searches can locate instances of particular terms or concepts
in a body of data, an instructor can identify when, if at all, a given
concept was used during the course of studies.
Or, for example, the results from a student's work with a simulator (in crop planning, say),
may be fed directly into the student's course database. For example, suppose a student,
based on the available data, decides to grow wheat and oats, applying pesticide and
fertilizer to the crop at appropriate times. At harvest, the simulator would calculate the
resultant yield, and feed this result to the student's database, where, if appropriate,
completion of the simulation would be graded and the mark applied to the student's
overall result.
Such dull tasks as recording grades, monitoring attendance (or participation) and progress,
and the like, will all be performed automatically, the results presented in intuitive and
informative graphics or charts.
What will not happen is this: students will not be summatively evaluated by the online
learning system. In the end, insofar as they are graded, they will want to be graded by a
human. The reason for this is much more psychological than it is practical. People will
not react well to being graded by a machine. They will not like the automatic
no-appeal-possible quality of such a system. Even where all inputs to the system automatic,
students would want the final result consulted by, evaluated by, and awarded by, a human being.
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