Designing Efficient Educational Materials
The propagation of Massive Online Open Courses, apart from giving people unprecedented access to education, has shed light on some flaws of our education system. The ability to freely move through lectures makes it evident that most of them are terribly inefficient. Generally, over 90% of what the lecturers say is filler content. Since the undergraduate professors’ goal is to make every person in the classroom understand the material, there is a lot of repetition. The actual crystallized knowledge that is important for students to learn makes infrequent appearances, and is rather hard to find in two-hour videos.
An efficient way to educate people using the Internet has to do the following things:
1) Present information in a way that is easy to navigate. Wiki, not VCR.
2) Present information to each person based on how they learn best. Some people are global learners, some are analytic, etc. Adjust information accordingly to each person. This includes realtime peer interactions, which should be always available, but strictly optional.
3) Provide feedback immediately. That way everyone can learn at their own pace.
4) Remove barriers between “subjects” in learning. It made sense in the 20th century to have “Organic Chemistry I” and “Organic Chemistry II”, but in the age of immediate access to any information, the student should be able to choose the direction of learning on the spot (with the course designer’s suggestions). As such, the credit system should become much more granular. Get how cognitive dissonance works? 1 credit. Know all of the major parts of the brain? 1 credit. There should be no “majors” as such, but rather each student should have an individual heat map of verified proficiency.
5) Be continuously updated. Currently there is quite a bit of lag between scientific article publishings and textbooks. It can (and, arguably, should) be reduced.
Brick-and-mortar educational institutions are in no way exempt from these changes. Here is how the educational community of the future will look like in the future, given the change in educational materials:
There will be no actual professors for most undergrad classes (and because of that research and education will get decoupled more, but that’s a whole another subject). Undergrads will use the Internet to access the educational materials designed at premier universities. Some people will prefer studying alone, some - in groups. If they have any questions, they can ask grad students who will also grade papers. It is possible to use AI to grade papers about as well as professors currently do, but it would be a difficult step for universities culturally. In any case, there will be significant cost reductions for universities and students.
Classrooms will be used slightly differently. They will have learning terminals (computers with limited functionality). Students will come to them when they want to be tested, so that the university can be sure that students don’t cheat by having other people pass online tests for them. There will be agreements between universities, so that students can travel between them and take tests at different points in the world.
Since a lot of students require structure to stay motivated enough to learn, there will be weekly requirements - every week each student will have to earn a number of these new, smaller credits to stay enrolled (which will only mean being eligible to use the testing classrooms and live on campus). Prestigious universities will have higher requirements. It will matter less where people get their degrees from in terms of the actual education, but social circles will keep the educational brands relevant.
The nature of the future (depending on whom you ask) has an uncertain quality about it, so timelines are difficult to predict, but there are no barriers to creating well-designed courses now. They will appear in the next few years. Massive firings of undergraduate professors will take a few decades because of the tenure institute, so “educational institution startups” may be a possibility, but the legal and social changes required make the reality described above unlikely to happen before the end of this decade.