BLENDED LEARNING & EDUCATION

One non-profit doing interesting work is Matchbook Learning. The reason they stick out to me is simple. Throughout my life, I have seen people and programmes reward students who perform the best, like merit-based scholarships. I’ve seen programmes for students who are not in the top15% but quite close. I’ve even seen programmes for B and C students. But I don’t know of any regional or national programmes designed to take care and help and fund the education of the students who are performing the worst. (Incidentally, I see the same problem within my company as we decide in which countries we want to do outreach.)

But what I love is that Matchbook Learning works with the bottom 5% of schools (turnaround schools) in the U.S. using government funding for turnaround schools. You should watch the TEDxUNC talk: The Future of Education. Matchbook Learning Founder and CEO Sajan George tells how he uses technology-infused, mastery-based, data-driven blended learning founded in excellent teachers to turn schools around. I love how he left his job turning around failing companies and, wanting to have a bigger impact, decided to work on turning around failing schools.

His talk reminds me a bit of what some schools and school districts are doing with Khan Academy. Khan Academy now has an entire state using them for middle school math support. A 4-member, schools-implementation team from Khan Academy led a 2-day Khan Academy workshop for Idaho educators in October 2012 funded by the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, an Idaho-based foundation that focuses on the expansion of excellent and limitless education for all Idahoans. The Albertson Foundation initiated a request-for-proposals to all types of Idaho schools (private, traditional, charter, alternative, after-school) to receive funding to pilot Khan Academy in the 2013-2014 school year. The grant winners were announced the 28^th of February 2013 and the pilots will start in this autumn. You can watch a video about how Khan Academy was a saving grace for the educational work of the Albertson Foundation and check out the reaction of teachers at an education conference with Sal Khan in Boise in May 2012.

EDUCATION

The last time I wrote about education, I was emailed by a few people who were excited by the rise in open educational resources (OER) and massive open online courses (MOOCs). A few of my friends believe this is one reason why a free, open Internet is so important around the world. Of course, sometimes those very friends forget that an open Internet is one problem, but a more fundamental problem is Internet access at all or, even more basic, literacy. There are so many people who are cut off from the Internet today because most webpages are user-friendly for those who can read.

Still, many changes are continuing to happen. As I try to push for increased literacy work, access work, and education work through my company, I want to highlight a few new things I’ve seen recently.

Salman Khan, founder of Kahn Academy, was interviewed by Google recently. I sat down to watch it after someone sent me the 1-hour interview of Salman Khan. I had already seen his 2011 TED talk on videos in education. I really like Sal and am amazed that he left a lucrative career and job at a hedge fund to try to make these online educational videos but he really is transforming education. Two points from this interview resonate very strongly with my experience.

First, I hate lecturing. Even if I’m not simply lecturing, my least preferred way of teaching is simply introducing, telling, and explaining a new concept to students. I do it if I have to; I do it if there is not enough time to teach a better way (which always requires a greater time investment). My most preferred way is exploratory lessons, inquiry-based learning, expeditionary education, or self-guided instruction. There is still a role for a teacher but it is an altered role, and the teacher no longer leads the instruction; the student does. This is what I love in secondary education.

In higher (tertiary) education, where lecturing is expected, I still avoid it. If I was able to avoid administrative intervention, I would always make students learn the material outside of class and use “lecture-time” for problem solving, correcting misunderstandings, etc. It was always so much more effective. Of course, you need students who will actually initially learn the material or read the material outside of class.

Now if you listen to Sal talk in the interview, this is exactly what he says. The Khan Academy staff actually work with schools to implement and use Khan Academy courses in the classroom allowing students to work at their own pace. The teacher shifts her role to that of an aid or clarifier and classroom time is not used for lecture but instead for extra help, going deeper, correcting mistakes, etc. This is called flipping the classroom. This is pretty amazing to be able to do this at the secondary school level and make it work. I love it and hope they continue.

The biggest and most important notion he brought up is a horrible divide that develops at quite a young age, both at home, in school, and the community between smart kids and dumb kids. It’s a false divide, honestly.  I’ve never done social scientific research to try to prove my hypothesis, but a teacher knows. I’ve said it before: I have never had a single students, not one, who mastered the previous year and all lessons of my class up to today that then could not understand and master today’s lesson. Any trouble is almost always due to holes or gaps in knowledge (which my school would blame me for). Normally what happens is you keep going. If I’m teaching statics and a student has a gap in algebra, this is a statistics class for final year students (seniors, 12^th graders); I’m not supposed to teach something outside the scope of the course. Usually I was only allowed to go back and teach something else if a significant percentage of the class had the same gap. So you keep going. If a student fails an exam, the student should continue to work on that topic until comprehension and passing that objective, but not in school. Once the exam has been given, we move on to the next unit or chapter or module. I tried to work against this by using objective-based tracking, but even then I had to tell students to work on previously failed-objectives after school, at night, or weekends. We didn’t have time in the class. And the extra weight of it became too much for many students especially when they are behind across the board, in multiple classes/subjects.

With the teachers who use Khan Academy in schools, students can go at their own pace and they don’t continue to a succeeding topic until the pass and master the preceding one (for cumulative subjects like mathematics and science). This is really important and helps to avoid passing a student who hasn’t learned the material. All schools should move in this direction. Thankfully there have been innovative schools that have done this, like Montessori, though in the minority. The tough part about what I have said is that people don’t believe you because you haven’t done research to prove it. Khan Academy has started to do research, and they are seeing that when you fill the remediation gaps in a ‘weak’ student, “that same kid that you thought was weak 6 months ago is now the best student in the class, and we’re seeing it over and over again.” Yes. Watch the interview.

I’m such a big fan of what they are doing at Khan Academy and how they’ve grown and are going after an even bigger mission across the country and world. I’ve always wanted to work there, and would do it in a second if I had the chance.

Due to the rise in OER, much of it in the form of MOOCs, Stanford University has decided to make a bold move. Both Coursera and Udacity come from current and former Stanford University professors, so it’s no surprise that Stanford University is the first university to create a new vice provost position. On the 30^th of August, 2012, Stanford University announced the creation of its first Vice Provost for Online Learning. The Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning (VPOL) will be part of the larger Stanford Online Initiative and shows Stanford’s commitment to online learning not just for it’s physically enrolled students but for people studying its courses from around the world. I, myself, decided to try an online course and took one from a group called TechChange.

EDUCATION

There are lots of exciting movements happening in education right. And I sometimes feel that perhaps I’m somehow supposed to be always working or connected to education. While writing a bio for introductions to my new team, I realised how I have always been doing educational work since being in elementary. In Fifth grade I helped tutor 3rd graders, and in the 5th grade, Jose-Miguel (a best friend) and I also helped tutor a student who was a few grade levels behind. From that moment on its been an exciting ride.

One thing I realised is that anytime you have a student in your class who has fully mastered all preceding, pre-requisite courses and has fully mastered all prior lessons leading up to today, that student never has problems understanding the lesson that day. The learning difficulties (that have no mental, emotional, social, behavior bases) are embedded in holes in prior knowledge, things the teacher assumes that the student does not assume. Now, normally it wouldn’t be a problem when someone misunderstands something because you just spend time to correct the understanding. The problem is that in our contemporary educational institutions around the world, you continue on when a student doesn’t understand.

For example, imagine I give an exam, and 80% of people pass the exam while 20% fail the exam. I continue on the next unit, even though the student obviously didn’t master the material. Normally a teacher has the license to stay on the current unit if enough (a considerable portion) of the students struggled. But the determination of enough is subjective. And even if it is not, any student in the minority who failed or who barely passed still needs help and should not be moving ahead.

While teaching, a former wife helped me with objective-based tracking. It was a brilliant idea in which you provided incentives for students to become competent at all the objectives for each unit. This was to help avoid the problem I’ve outlined. The problem with objective-tracking is that it still did not alter the pace of teaching in the classroom. In other words, it was extremely difficult for my students to continue to go back to prior lessons and units and work on old objectives while the class was moving forward. It’s hard to continue to motivate the children to do that.

So in all these things, I was challenged. And though I believed in every child’s ability to earn an A, I knew our system worked against the students. Moreover, I worked on department chairs and principals who didn’t believe that all of my children could succeed though they might profess it publicly. What I needed was help, and help. . . has come. There are a host of new educational movements that allow children to actually become competent in an area before moving on to the subsequent area.

New Classrooms - New Classrooms designs new models for instruction that reimagine the role of educators, the use of time, the configuration of physical space, and the use of data and technology so that students can learn in ways that are personalized to their particular academic needs and strengths. They then support the implementation of these models within traditional public, charter, and independent schools.

Online University with Sebastian Thrun – I’m going to be taking an artificial intelligence class from him. He’s been so touched by the power of teaching people across the world and not trying to weed out students from his class that he won’t go back. He’s left his Stanford University job. He now runs Udacity (and you can learn to create your own search engine with no prior programming experience)



Khan Academy – With over 2800 videos, you can learn entire courses here through videos. School districts are now using Khan Academy for some of their courses with their students.

Florida Virtual School – a statewide virtual e-district where teachers can “teach” students through this online material or students may do entire coursework and grade-level work through FVS alone

Stanford University Free Online Classes

Google Education – Read the about page, they have the largest online science fair in the world

Short video how Chromebooks helped one student



iTextbook Video – allows students to interact with the textbook like placing your finger on a picture of DNA and rotating it, tapping a paragraph and adding notes, creating electronic flashcards associated with certain portions of the text, etc.



Open Education Resources – Open Education Resources are resources created by one party that are licensed for free use by everyone. The author in this medium-length article advocates that materials whose production is paid for by government funds should be free to tax payers since it’s their money that facilitated the work. To pay for the textbooks is like paying twice. It says that education, at its core, is sharing, and that the internet should be leveraged to bring down the costs of textbooks and thereby education. One example is the $5 textbook.

Reverse Mentoring – where students who know more about technology than their teachers can be used to mentor teachers in the use of technology and incorporation into the subject matter. This helps builds confidence in the students and improves the educational process and delivery through technology.