An average American spends a minimum of 13 years in school education and a maximum of 23 years of learning as the highest degree qualified. Despite the abundance of knowledge through the digital medium nowadays, why are we still conventionally pursuing education? Mostly because educational institutions are more than a place to learn facts and google could never substitute the social function that schools provide.
So let’s take a look at how educational institutions have evolved through the years and what the future holds for technology in the education sector.
The Late 1800s: Prussian Model
Many don’t know that the education system we know today is based on Prussian Model. The model bifurcates the students as per age-based units. We can imagine it like an assembly line where different boxes are differentiated according to their manufacturing date. Likewise, the students when they enter the educational system are divided by their age. Prussians were among the first people who developed this idea of the industrial educational revolution.
Fast forward to the 1870s, now public education was mainstream in the United States. Although, there was not one standard pedagogy. To clarify, every student living in different cities did not have similar education.
Finally around 1892, US policymakers implemented standardize education system. Interestingly, the same standards are still visible in today’s education system. Surprisingly, there was no major change in the standards for more than ten decades.
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The Late 1900s: Revolution of World Wide Web
Worldwide people enabled the distribution of information through the internet at a very menial cost. This led to an information insurgence, a person with a computer was able to reach millions of people in a very short amount of time. This changed the entire way learners looked at the classroom programs, now they were able to access information not only in the classroom but also through the digital medium.
The internet provided a way for self-paced learning and personalized feedback. Earlier learners were just able to gather information either from classrooms or books. Now, the dynamics have changed. Information is omnipresent but the real challenge is how well can a learner access the right information and understand it in its entirety.
The Future of Education: Artificial Intelligence
Ken Robinson, a British author, speaker, and international advisor on education, said that the education system doesn’t need to be reformed it needs to be transformed. In other words, the education system does not need more standardization but more personalization. As every learner is unique, their pace is different too.
Now the question is how to transform the education system by including personalization. Artificial Intelligence can act as a tutor who sits on your shoulder and focus solely on your learning path. In the information age, the paramount challenge is to not forget the information after learning it once. To overcome this, a technique called spaced repetition can help. By using this technique a learner refreshes the concept just before he/she is in a state to forget the concept.
Hence to optimize the learning process, a teacher must know how every student has retained after studying the same concept. However, this is impossible in a classroom setting. Fortunately, AI systems target the issue of the learner’s forgetting curve and work on the spaced repetition as long as the student learns the concept.
Conclusion
In either scenario, there are some threats to the existing jobs in the education system. AI systems demand work, hence retraining the educators can be time-consuming and expensive. The training not only includes working with the systems but also troubleshooting the menial issues associated with them. In turn, the new advancements may create pressure on a few. Mostly because every educator is not well versed with the technological whereabouts.
As time goes by, technologies will transform the way we work. We can only hope these changes will not follow the law of unintended consequences. To put it in another way, implementations of new innovations make learner’s life easier. However, it can unintentionally create new problems or collateral damage that may be worse for the education system.
