Victor Garcia Mata

The schools of the future

Victor Garcia -

In the old days If you wanted to become a good artist you had to train under the direct supervision of a master on that field at that time.

Then we created schools, and the lessons were given to a whole group instead of one individual at a time. This increased the amount of highly educated people on a society and as a result the quality of life eventually.

During the industrial revolution we got the print, which made the distribution of books and knowledge more accessible to everyone. I would say this was the holy grail of education at the time. The ability to reproduce the intellectual works and ideas at a scale never seen before.

Technology has evolved non stop since then, to the point where now we can distribute any content like text, pictures, video or audio to every corner of the world in the time it takes us to press one button. The ideas fly over internet and they are even hard to stop, mutating and evolving at a very fast rate.

And our schools... they haven't changed much since then. Sure, we have computers now, email and zoom, we can even attend a class from the comfort of our home no matter where we live.

But the way we teach classes hasn't changed much, we just transferred the offline experience of a school to the digital world.

Why does it need to change?

Public or even private schools teach in a way that was conceived at another time. Go to a physical location, every day, for a specific duration of time and absorb whatever the teacher has to teach you.

And what about the content we teach at schools?

The programs are usually designed to ensure that all the students who complete their education program have at least the minimum of what it takes to do their job, or whatever the education program is.

And how do they do that? By creating a program that is moderately challenging to perhaps 70-80% of the population. It means that for the rest is either too easy or highly challenging.

We all are equal as humans, but as individuals we are so different from each other, with different skills and potential for different things. By providing education in the current way we are deliberately wasting the potential of those who fall outside of the norm.

People who struggle at school could do better if we teach them in a way they can understand or discover their unique skills at which they can be remarkable. Gifted students won't just exceed the expectations of the programs, they can even go beyond the program and learn something many levels above it's peers.

How can we leverage technology to scale education?

Instead of just replicating what we have been doing for thousands of years let's re think how we can do it.

Did you ever had a favorite teacher at school?

It probably means there was something about that teacher that just clicked with the way you are as a person. We should focus on hiring and training great teachers but also try to match them with the students that can benefit the most from them.

How can we match teachers and students?

Perhaps if we collect data of similar students and the classes they took we can start to make suggestions of teachers they might like. Similar to the way music apps recommend you new artists to listen or Facebook people you might know, but on this case, teachers to learn from.

Or maybe we can take the "Dating site" approach, and try to match students with teachers based on their own terms.Maybe both, why not?

Scaling the teachers

This concept isn't new, the concept of MOOC,s (Massive Open Online Courses) has been around for a while, but currently is not leverage by traditional institutions on their day to day classes.

Perhaps there is a stigma about remote learning, but thankfully that stigma seems to be fading away now that during COVID many people switched to 100% Remote learning.

On a traditional school you have your classes with one teacher and you attend to them certain days at a certain hour. But on a digital world there shouldn't be such constrain anymore!

We can keep that same model, but also record each class, and make it available to every student, even if they are not part of the same class you are in.

Why? because maybe your assigned teacher is great, but you had trouble understanding today's topic, you can just go to the online platform, find the same class you just took and re-watch the video, or watch the video about the same topic explained by another teacher.

You don't have to be limited to just one teacher at a time anymore.

Students can't focus on online platforms

That only means the content is not interesting enough. We should invest on making the content of the program more engaging instead of just dumping information as it is on the books to the students and ask them to pay attention.

If we are going to do that, we might as well just give them a PDF Version of the entire course material and ask them to complete the final exams whenever they are ready.

People claim they don't read, yet they spend hours and hours reading articles on Facebook or Twitter, so reading or using an online platform is not the problem, is the content.

There is so much we can learn from the Social networks, they have optimized user engagement over the past years to the point where you can just keep reading post after post, and you won't even realize how long have been there.

If we can leverage that for education purposes, that would be the holy grail of education of this century.

Is in person learning dead?

No, there is nothing like being face to face with people, I have that clear now. I am not proposing to get rid of it, I propose to enhance it.

Technology should empower people, and I think this is a great opportunity because the gap is huge and the technology is already here.

Sites with MOOC where you can learn anything for free:

Tools that can be used for online classes

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels