Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Last gasps of the old education

Personalized learning, Flipped classroom, video watching: Last gasps of the Old education 

The battle is the classic one:

Should education focus on process (e.g., helping children to learn how to learn)
or
should education focus on content (e.g., there is a corpus of stuff that needs to be known).

The promoters of "education as acquiring stuff" have triumphed ... so far.
No surprise: modern technologies are used in service of "education as acquiring stuff." 
  • Online/blended learning
Students watch video lectures, take multiple choice tests, and after correctly answering seven of 10 multiple choice questions that prove mastery, move on to watch more video lectures.
Flipped classrooms have learners watch or study  presentations or  video, lectures at home instead of listening to the lectures at school then use class time to assess the learning.
  • Personalized learning -  Adaptive Instruction
Using tablets instead of desktops  presents information to a student, tests the student's acquisition of that information, and presents new information based on the student's performance.

LO repositories
a repository of videos on core content that can be accessed by students 24/7

But, the "education as acquiring stuff" model is broken.

The hordes of job hunters here in the United States are the proof that education is not preparing students — our children — for the economic realities of the global marketplace:
"The youth unemployment rate was 16.1 percent in April 2013 for those between the ages of 16 and 24, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the 16 to 19 age group, the seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 24.1 percent; for those ages 20 to 24, it was 13.1 percent." From Governing

Social learning, inquiry learning, just-in-time learning, and yes, learning-by-doing, will become the dominant pedagogies.

The focus must be on process, must be on skills such as the 4Cs (Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, Creativity).

Why? Because the kids today need to be prepared to move from job to job — to jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

Singapore’s Ministry of Education and its enlightened educators are trying to use modern, mobile technologies to support inquiry learning. We are excited and honored that our mobile-based suite of educational apps are playing a role in school transformations there.

Personalized instruction, flipped classrooms, video watching, etc., etc. are the last gasps of the old, "education as acquiring stuff" model; they are attempts at putting a patina of new on an old, outmoded, broken and ultimately ineffective educational model.

We can’t end on a downer note; we truly believe that an Inflection Point — a dramatic change — in education is just around the corner!

taken from  The Journal transforming education through technology

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