Welcome to the Ed Tech Blog, a blog all about innovations in education and technology.
The field of education is ripe for innovation, and technology is (finally) beginning to have an impact at the scale of what could be an educational revolution. While the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions brought technology that has improved so many aspects of human life - from smartphones to smart homes, electric lights to electric cars, modernist cuisine to modern medicine - an Educational Revolution has proven elusive. Up until a few years ago, our primary method for formal education - live, instructor-led, classroom lectures - had remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years. The chalkboard might have been the last major educational innovation.
The advent of telecommunications, however, and more particularly of the Internet, enabled learners to participate at a distance. First, the ability to broadcast, and second, the ability to record broadcasts meant instruction could reach audiences removed in space and time from the instructor. But it was not until the advent of digital media and networked data storage that the best of both these worlds - knowledge on demand and at temporal and spatial distances - was fully realized. This is the Internet, and it clearly has changed everything. Online meeting technology meant students no longer need to be physically present to participate in a class. But the class itself - live and instructor led - remained unchanged until recently.
The Internet has greatly changed how anyone with a connection can access information. Historically, knowledge of the world was restricted to those who could gain access to institutions of higher learning. Constraining factors of class size (at most, those who could sit within earshot of the lecturer) and a minimum level of affluence (the luxury of not needing to devote all one's energy to sustaining life) further restricted those who could apply (not to mention arbitrary societal factors such as gender and race). Education was limited to society's elites. While barriers to accessing information remain, the Internet has greatly increased the proportion of people with access to information of all kinds. As a vast repository, the Internet is democratizing knowledge.
But education is more than access to information or knowledge. The methods for transmitting information, instilling knowledge - these remained largely unchanged throughout the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Students still attended (and indeed still primarily attend) live, instructor-led, classroom presentations. These are not without their benefits, as the student-to-instructor ratio often remains low enough for students to interact directly with their instructors for immediate feedback and answers to questions. But they are also not without their limitations. Up until very recently they have always required students to be in the same location as their instructors, which has in turn required a critical mass of interested students in a geographical area, reducing the potential for specialization. In addition, students have access only to the most informed or skilled instructor available to their institution of learning at the given time, rather than having access to the world's most qualified (who wouldn't want to learn Relativity from Einstein?). Moreover, traditional classrooms are limited to their time and place, restricting the presentation of materials to that which is available temporally and spatially in their classroom or immediate vicinity. (If the object for discussion is in a city halfway around the world, it might not be possible to bring it to the classroom. But what if you could transport the classroom to it?)
And so the field of education is ripe for technological innovation. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are just one example of how the innovation is already underway. They allow for larger class sizes than would be possible even in the world's largest arenas. They are accessible, many of them for free or at a very low cost, to people all over the world. They allow access to the world's specialists in a wide array of fields. They allow the instructor to travel to remote parts of the world and "transport" the classroom along with her. They are available on demand to accommodate different study schedules. And they allow students from all over the world with diverse and specific interests to come together in a single setting, allowing increasing opportunities for specialization.
And then there are blended learning and flipped classrooms and corporate LMS systems and so much more. So what's next? Stay tuned as we explore the ever-changing field of education technology.