Fixing Education with Technology

[CaiGengYang]

This is my idea for fixing education --- It has been bugging me and been at the back of my mind for many many years. Thus I just wanted to post it here to get some thoughts on whether this is a feasible and workable proposal.

Let’s Fix Education with software and technology now ! Using technology to make education interesting through entertaining(but challenging) quizzes, games and videos, combined with ways to help users (students and tutors) communicate and collaborate more efficiently and elegantly in real-time. The truth is , alot if not most or all of the material taught in traditional colleges today can be learnt free of charge on the internet. At the moment, software companies mostly require individuals to have a college degree to get a job in them.(correct me if I am wrong) But for the often exorbitant amount of money spent on college education compared with the free alternatives offered online, is it possible to create an online system where users can learn exactly the same material offered in the best colleges in the world. And once they pass the course, they get offered an equivalent degree that is legally recognized by global governments and software companies worldwide. Isn't that a more efficient way to get things done?

This would be a really interesting experiment to create if we could get the rich people (people with money) and governments to fund this idea. Politicians and government officials often discuss how to create a world where everyone is given "equal opportunities in education and business" --- A system like this could go a long way towards creating true equality for everyone in the world because the internet is freely available to everyone in the world ...

Just my 2 cents --- let me know your thoughts ...

[dozzie]

Quizzes and games are not what's fun in education. It's applicability of what one has learned. You can't solve that with technology, it's a thing on the side of curriculum.

The fun also comes from exploring an interesting domain, but student needs to like the domain already to have fun learning, and it's hard to control that.

I know that if all you have is hamme^H^H^H^H^Htechnology, everything looks like a nai^H^H^Htechnology problem, but it's not the case.

> The truth is , alot if not most or all of the material taught in traditional colleges today can be learnt free of charge on the internet.

Yes, one can find material to learn from on the internet. But for any more advanced field, beginners won't know what to look for and where to start to get to the point where they can learn on their own. They'll still need a guide of a teacher.

External motivation to learn (to get a grade) also plays a big role in education. Only the most determined can learn their way through without such thing.

> This would be a really interesting experiment to create if we could get the rich people (people with money) and governments to fund this idea.

You mean, to create competition for Coursera and other MOOC platforms/services? If all you seek is to have an experiment, try looking at their results, you don't need to wait.

[LarryMade2]

Adult life isn't quizzes game and videos. A lot of it is interacting with strangers, communication and dealing with boring and repetitive actions.

Electronic assistance to education is fine abut a big part of the school system is to introduce people into society, its diversity and also how to interact with your global community of fellow strangers. I like computers they have helped me immensely in learning but I prefer human teachers, that not only possess the knowledge but have applied it in real life and can also impart a bit of one-on one insight.

I think we are loosing society by gluing kids eyeballs to an LCD most of the time.I think we fix education by not making it just a vehicle to pass tests/ enter college/employment but also encourage the human factors.

[kleer001]

I'm pretty sure this is already being done en mass.

Are you familar with Khan Academy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy

There's been tons of work on this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology#Practic...

etc...

[CaiGengYang → kleer001]

There's always going to be competition in whatever field you are playing in. Especially technology, which is the most competitive field in the world. Google was launched despite there being lots of other search engines before that.

[kleer001 → CaiGengYang]

Sure, but Google had some special sauce that no one else had.

[edimaudo]

Technology can enhance education but it cannot fix it. Education is a personal journey and it is different for most people. If you ask most people who do well and are well educated, they have common traits like high level of curiosity, very driven and have lofty dreams.

[CaiGengYang]

This idea is related to point 7(about fixing education through technology) on YCombinator's new RFS list ---http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

[dreamdu5t]

Software is part of the problem with education. Honestly. It's part of a trend in social isolationism amongst schoolchildren that robs our kids of social and emotional education.

Having kids work together to do something in real life, like grow a garden, is what education needs more of. It does not need more prison-time where you sit still all day and take multiple choice questionnaires by yourself. Or worse, play some videogame that cultivates no actual accomplishments other than knowing academic trivia.

Computers are also not helping kids learn math or reading any better. That's only been getting worse since the calculator was allowed.

[insoluble]

> if we could get the rich people ... to fund this idea

One problem is that there is very little incentive for the average rich person to care about making education affordable. After all, if poor kids can get a good education, then how is the rich person supposed to make his or her children competitive in the job market? (although, I admit, rich kids generally don't ever need to get normal jobs)

Another problem is that the current rip-off book market would lobby very strongly against anything that makes knowledge affordable. After all, they already do put their foot down anytime a school tries to use used books or otherwise cheaper alternatives.

A third problem is that there are currently a plethora of "brands", if you will, of books for any given academic topic. Having a centralised source of knowledge would put the majority of the authors out of business. You can expect a lot of these people to work against any proposition to re-use existing (especially unrestricted) knowledge.

Personally I have felt for a long time that the educational system is ridiculous, in not only the financial and efficiency realms, but also in other areas. Mainstream education is far too focused on preparing people for -- you guessed it -- becoming teachers themselves. It's as if, just maybe, those devising the curriculum are biased in their idea of what an education is for. This phenomenon is similar to when parents bring up their kids in such a way as to prepare the kids for walking in the parents' footsteps, rather than recognising that one size doesn't fit all. For the majority of people, a vocational path would be far more efficient.

On the topic of your proposal, what I would like to see perhaps the most is that quality learning material on a given topic be re-used and built upon directly rather than having hundreds of people constantly and continually re-inventing the wheels of education. Also, academic knowledge and learning materials themselves need to be freely available. The money that people and the government currently put toward buying overpriced textbooks needs to go to making for-the-people electronic learning materials. With proper oversight, I bet we as a society could make even better learning materials than those currently in mainstream use for less than a quarter of the money that's currently drained into the system.

I also agree that we have the technology to vastly improve the learning experience. Unlike advanced AI and other technologies which still have a long way to go, we have more than enough CPU power, bandwidth, storage capacity, and know-how to make a very effective learning system that's completely automated.