The Obsolete Classroom: Rethinking Education in the Information Age
Humanity will never reach its full potential as long as our approach to education remains the same. The current system worked for its time, but its fundamental flaws increasingly irritate people who know they could learn exponentially more.
What Limits Us?
Limited supply of gifted teachers - Of the teachers we have, only a select handful are truly gifted at engaging students to reach their full potential.
Classrooms are Obsolete - Consider the extreme inefficiency of a classroom as compared to a 1-on-1 teaching environment. In a 1-on-1, the teacher zeros in on the student’s level of understanding and moves them forward at an optimized speed. In a classroom, teachers must moderate their speed to accommodate the weakest link.
Cognitively, the most critical determiner of success or failure in most classes is attention. Pay perfect attention and your success will be high. The trouble is paying perfect attention. It’s natural in a 1-on-1 when everything said is relevant to your current level of understanding, but in a classroom setting students lose attention when they already understand a concept and the teacher’s words become redundant.
The student’s challenge in a classroom, therefore, is phasing in an out of attention at an interval that they hope will catch enough crucial ideas to follow along. The teacher naturally becomes even more redundant and verbose with each concept to accommodate these attention intervals, and learning efficiency goes out the window.
Exponential Improvement is Simple
I had trouble with Geometry in high school. It was hard to pay attention in class, and the problems didn’t make much sense to me from the start. The moons must have aligned, however, because one night I came across a friend’s dad who could articulate Geometry very well. He looked at where I was struggling and started to help. An hour later, I was plowing through proofs we hadn’t even learned yet in class.
To my pleasant surprise, in that one hour I learned everything I needed to know about Geometry for the rest of the semester. I still couldn’t pay attention in class, but it didn’t matter because I aced every test the rest of the year.
Why don’t we all take classes like this all the time? Why do we waste months struggling with something we could learn better in hours? Soon we won’t have to ask these questions anymore.
Envision the Future
Imagine a global repository of videos of the world’s greatest teachers - your choice of the top 3 most inspiring, entertaining, and articulate Geometry teachers of all time. One is funny and uses a lot of stories to explain ideas, one is serious and concise, and one is a mix of the two. All are passionate about Geometry, and you can choose who you’d like to learn from.
I hear the arguments already “But it’s just not the same learning from a video than having a real teacher. You lose the human touch!” There is legitimacy to this response, but let me ask you this: You have to take a Geometry class, would you rather watch videos of the greatest Geometry teacher of all time whose teaching style suites your desired learning style, or would you rather go with the luck of the draw? If you’re still on the fence, read the next point.
Make Content for Self-Paced Learning
Presume you’re about to learn from a video of the greatest Geometry teacher of all time. How exciting - but as soon as you understand a concept you’re still going to have to wait through redundant explanations before she goes to the next concept. There’s no 1-on-1 efficiency.
Here’s where the new educational content model comes in. The greatest Geometry teacher of all time broke down the key concepts ahead of time, and mapped them to sequential times throughout the video. The key ideas in your current lesson are listed on the right side of your screen with a brief description of your current learning objective. You can skip to the next concept as early as you feel ready. If you move forward prematurely and get lost, simply go back and hear out the previous explanation.
Questions are Key
Teachers who have taught Geometry for 30 years know it’s the same questions that keep popping up over and over again. The solution? Post a list of questions that link to elaborated answers.
This will cover the vast majority of questions that come up. When a new question does come up the student can submit it to be answered. The teacher who curates the lesson will receive this question and be able to append another answer, if worthwhile. Her incentive for maintaining the content leaves the scope of this post, but in short it upholds her reputation as a quality content-provider and retains the royalties that accrue (if she doesn’t provide it free).
Optimize Your Feedback
A quiz assesses your understanding at the end of each lesson. So what? Here’s the value add: The new system tracks the type of errors you make, and provides a report with actionable information on precisely what you need to improve on.
Forget useless feedback like “B+” or “71% - Try harder!” Optimized learning should provide you with a report on your strengths and weaknesses of the key concepts. Got multiplication down, but always mess up on long division? Your report should show that.
The Possibilities are Endless
Imagine the shift in human potential with ubiquitous optimized education. Children and adults alike could continue education indefinitely. The world’s most talented teachers would be accessible by all, in a system that allows the individual to move forward at their full potential. Courses could be accredited through an educational review board, and passing a particular class would validate a standardized metric of understanding to be included on a resume.
Job postings could require X level-of-understanding in courses X, Y, and Z, and the ability for humans to assimilate understanding of emerging technologies would go through the roof.
Make it Your Volition
These improvements are required for us to move forward as a race. As a student currently attending one of the top educational institutions in the world, I find it increasingly unbearable to sit through lectures and learn so slowly. Whether you are a youngster just entering the system, or a professional acquiring new skills for your career, agree that our current system of education is rapidly growing obsolete. Tell me I am not alone. Spread the word, keep innovating, and help make this opportunity a reality.
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Brilliant!
Michael - loved the post. 2 points.
1) Exponential Improvement is Simple - I agree fully with this. Remember when I didn’t pay much attention in stats and barely did the homework and had that final when I had the 18 credits? I thought I was going to fail the class, I knew nothing. In a few hours, you had taught me everything and I aced the test and brought my B to an A-. Thank you for being a great stats. teacher and the ironic thing is that I did like our teacher alot as a person, but for some reason I learned alot more from you. I think this anecdote further supports your point.
2) As a whole - I agree fully with your article but I find that there is one key flaw which is very indirect. In our society today, I believe that we are moving towards a service orientation rather than knowledge. Knowledge and supply chains can be outsourced to other countries but service and interactions with clients can’t. When I met some home-schooled kids in middle & high school and at Michigan, I noticed their social skills were much weaker. I I think your model is superior for learning knowledge but at the same time limits a person’s social development tremendously. The people who rise to the top of corporate ladders aren’t necessarily the smartest ones per se, but rather the most socially cunning and good at bridging the gaps of the knowledgable people. Maybe you could address this point in a edit?
I can’t edit my post but I’d like to add that this was Stats350 at the University of Michigan, not a shabby school. Not easy. I managed to learn a semester’s worth in a few hours from Michael.
Ray - great point. The educational framework I propose isn’t intended to replace the current system. It’s meant to be flexible and supplement learning in whatever capacity is optimal.
There are some bodies of knowledge that would be perfect to assimilate in such a system, and there are others where teamwork, discussion, and collaboration enable optimal learning. Teachers will play a crucial role in facilitating learning in these interactive courses.
Give students the option to excel at their own speed with the raw-conceptual\pure declarative-knowledge classes, and we are free to emphasize more social-oriented learning in the class.
I imagine this system would never completely replace the traditional model even in the classes that are perfect for it - I am, however, strongly convinced that such an option should be available & would prove invaluable to the global community.
I agree whole-heartedly that this would be a great way to supplement learning - especially technical learning. For example, people know that they don’t teach much at Harvard but the social networking that happens there really helps their grads. There are certain areas that require more teamwork and collaborative learning but things like Math would be great for this method. Remember “The World is Flat” talked about the tutoring of American students by Indians? One-on-one is still the best.
I like the idea of exploring how to get some of the benefit of one-on-one instruction delivered to more students. My initial sense is it’s a lot harder to get that benefit than it might seem. When I think about what I do as a Geometry teacher when I’m working with an individual student, I notice a few things: First, I’m adapting my vocabulary and style based on who the student is and how they interact with me to keep them engaged and not frustrated. Second, I’m constantly asking questions and checking for understanding with each component concept and skill. Third, I’m using those answers to hone in on areas of confusion so that I can clarify them by providing examples and details, but only where necessary. This is why it’s so fast. Finally, I’m guiding the overall direction of the conversation toward the eventual learning goal.
Why break all of this down? Well, I think that these are generally difficult things to do in an automated or self-directed way. I love watching good lectures, and they give me ideas for things I might use or try with my students. I’m just not convinced that it’s better (or more efficient, even) to try to encode all of the information about the interrelated concepts of mathematics and the even more vast number of ways people might misunderstand those concepts, along with questions that will accurately test how things are going along the way. I think it’s a lot to ask someone to be simultaneously learning abstract concepts and monitoring their own progress through a field whose terrain they don’t yet know. Of course we eventually want students to get better at this sort of thing. But there’s a reason we don’t just give people a copy of the Physician’s Desk Reference book and have them diagnose their own illnesses. Neither medicine nor teaching can be reduced to a flow chart. Live, in-person doctors serve a purpose. Live, in-person teachers also serve a purpose, and it’s much more than just providing a “human touch” — the background knowledge and ability to adjust and communicate the context appropriate to various learners is an extremely complicated and difficult task that computers just aren’t good at yet.
That leaves me in the odd position of advocating that we somehow try to generate more talented teachers. Maybe that’s where this videos come in — we should be seeing examples of the best as we learn how to teach our subjects.
mrc - thanks for sharing your insight. I agree with you on every point but one - that the videos should be teacher-centric rather than student-centric. It would be great to have lessons dedicated to helping teachers improve their teaching ability in general, along with clips of specific lessons in their specialized body of knowledge for more specific lessons, but the better the content is able to teach someone from the ground up the better it’ll naturally be at assisting teachers as well.
You’re absolutely right on the benefits of 1-on-1 teaching. It’s certainly got its advantages over pre-arranged teaching content. For those of us who no longer have access to Geometry teachers, however, it would be nice to have a 5-hour extremely well-laid out course available to get a refresher on the subject (or with any other body of knowldge we may have lost over the years).
Teachers specialized in X are only available to a tiny subset of the population at any given time; & effective, dynamic content for those with the desire to self-learn would be a invaluable for the rest of us.
Thanks again for your insightful response.
[…] Classroom instruction is clunky and chunky by comparison to individual one-on-one teaching. (As discussed over on the lovely blog of Michael Anuzis.) If we were to approach this individually, I can imagine sitting down with a student at a web browser and guiding different kinds of exploration, asking questions or posing assignments along the way. Or if I had a computer on every desk in my classroom, I would certainly need to address the challenge of how to use them effectively. Yet neither is the reality. […]
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