Boundary-less Education:  Connect, and Collaborate to Transform Education

It is no longer business as usual in the education field!   The blurring and dissolution of boundaries is a necessary condition for achieving the goals of education today, be it to meet the rapid development agenda of nations that require expanded access and quality, or be it the need for increased agility and relevance to address rapidly changing skills requirements of the marketplace. Can we provide quality education at scale and relevant to the demands of an effective workforce, while fostering new opportunities for entrepreneurship and venture?

IIT AGNE conducted a symposium on March 5th, 2016 which brought a panel of experts, thought leaders and practitioners from academia and industry to illuminate some of the transformative opportunities presented by the blurring of boundaries in education, as well as the systemic “readiness” conditions for success.

The discussion was chaired by Dr. M.S. Vijay Kumar, Associate Dean & Senior Strategic Advisor for Digital Learning at MIT and included Professor Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University; Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning, MIT; Jean Hammond, Co-founder and partner at LearnLaunch and Dr. Tinsley Galyean, Executive Director, Curious Learning.

Vijay Kumar opened the discussion by framing the themes to be addressed by the panel. As the world’s population increases by the billions, countries need to consciously start acting to scaling up education to train very large numbers of people and give them the tools to succeed in a global agile economy to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. This true of primary education, where millions of people are still left behind; and it is true of higher level or tertiary education, where the costs of a traditional college education are becoming prohibitive. At the same time, there cannot be compromise on quality and the skills and knowledge imparted have to equip the students to be flexible, innovative and entrepreneurial in their approach. It is very clear that Technology is going to play an increasingly critical role in reinventing education for the 21st century.

Sanjay Sarma, who leads MIT’s open education initiatives, made the point that the classroom system of education is an industrialized system of training large number of people in the shortest possible time to be productive citizens, developed in the 19th century as the world began transitioning from a rural agrarian to urban industrial economy. But it does not fit how human beings learn, where learning on a topic grows slowly but steadily with time, then accelerates to reach a peak, before declining. In addition, we are motivated by having constant positive feedback and knowing the bigger picture in terms of learning goals and complex concepts.

Constant and ongoing testing promotes learning by weeding out superficial knowledge as we have to think about what we learnt and strengthen conceptual understanding. The modern education system fails in this respect by only focusing on the peak learning and using tests as a final measure of success. A new educational system has to succeed by customizing to the actual process by which human beings learn and use testing to reinforce and support the learning process.

Professor Dede talked about the role of technology in enabling curiosity-driven learning in children. He showed videos of children learning about the human impact on the environment by exploring a 3-D world that included a housing development with fertilizers sprayed on lawns that impact the ecosystem of a pond/lake, which can be measured over time. This is reinforced by taking groups of children to a real pond, where they can explore the impact by taking actual measurements. The children use their natural curiosity to explore and learn by doing tasks in a problem solving context in both an artificially constructed game and the real world.

Jean Hammond, a successful technology executive and serial entrepreneur, runs LearnLaunch, a technology incubator for Ed-Tech startups in the Boston area. She described the significant opportunities for entrepreneurs in creating new technology that can be used to promote, measure and reinforce learning on a very large scale. Entrepreneurs are needed to exploit new trends such as gamification, self-paced learning and authenticated learning/testing. There is now significant private and public investment in creating and encouraging the use of education technologies, though venture capital investment is relatively low compared to other fields.

Finally Dr. Tinsley Galyean showed videos of young children with no access to education, living in remote communities and slums in Africa, who were provided tablets loaded with educational apps for young learners and left with no instruction. The children took only a few minutes to collectively experiment and find out how to turn them on, then in a few months proceeded to use the apps to master the alphabets and numbers. Within a year, four year olds were using the tablets together with the loaded music app to create music in novel ways. These children were roughly at the same level as their counterparts who were in a formal education system. This shows that the natural inventiveness and curiosity of children can be harnessed to enable young learners who have little access to formal education to catch up with their more fortunate peers.

This discussion was followed by a lively discussion with an informed audience that focused on topics such as the cost of learning, downsides of an educational approach scaled to large numbers and the possible limitations and flaws of the emerging educational systems.  Overall the presentations and the discussions highlighted the significance of transcending traditional boundaries  between disciplines, research and learning  as well as the physical and the virtual for seeking innovative solutions to advance quality educational opportunity.