Education is now the number one economic priority

By Thomas Frey, Executive Director and Senior Futurist at the DaVinci Institute

“Education is now the number one economic priority
in today's global economy.” - John Naisbitt, Author of Megatrends

Transition from Teaching to Learning

Education has traditionally consisted of the two fundamental elements of teaching and learning, with a heavy emphasis on teaching.

Throughout history, the transfer of information from the teacher to the learner has been done on a person-to-person basis. A teacher stands in front of a room and imparts the information for a student to learn. Because this approach requires the teacher to be an expert on every topic that they teach, this is referred to as the “sage on stage” form of education.

While lecture-style teaching has been used for centuries to build today’s literate and competent society, it ends up being a highly inefficient system, in many respects, the “equivalent of using Roman numerals.” For any new topic to be taught, a new expert needs to be created, and this universal need for more and more experts has become a serious chokepoint for learning.

To illustrate this point, let’s look at the example of a new topic that cannot be taught because the expert on this topic lives on the other side of the world. A teacher-dependent education system is also time-dependent, location-dependent, and situation-dependent. The teachers act as a control valve, turning on or off the flow of information.

The education system of the future will undergo a transition from a heavy emphasis on teaching to a heavy emphasis on learning. Experts will create the courseware and the students will learn anytime or anywhere at a pace that is comfortable for them, learning about topics that they are interested in.

In the future, teachers will transition from topic experts to a role in which they act more as guides and coaches.


2.) Exponential Growth of Information

During the time of Gutenberg, people tended to live and die within 20 miles of where they were born, not because they were afraid to travel, but because they had no reliable maps. People during this era had a very limited understanding of the world around them. The flow of information was controlled by just a few elite members of society, and they understood well the concept of knowledge equaling power.

We have gone from that time, just 500 years ago, where information was precious and few, to today, a time where information is so plentiful that we feel like we are drowning in it - information overload.

However, we still see many of the same “information control” issues permeating society today. Elite members of society still control the flow of information, perpetuating the notion that only doctors can understand medicine, only physicists can understand how the universe works, and only teachers know how to prepare us for the world to come.

There are many ways to talk about the rapid growth of information that we have experienced over the past few years. But it is important to pay attention to the changing dimensions of information as well as the sheer volume of it. Information is no longer just text-based, but graphical, musical, audio and visual.

Consider the following statistics

* The number of songs available on iTunes – over 3.5 million.
* The number of books on Amazon – over 4 million.
* The number of blogs available online – over 60 million.
* The number of entries on Wikipedia – over 4 million.
* The number of user accounts on MySpace – over 100 million
* The number of videos on YouTube – over 6.1 million


3.) Courseware Vacuum

After viewing the data above and thinking about the size and shape of information around the world, now consider the number of courses available, either online or in a classroom.

Information is exploding around us in every possible form. Yet, we do not have an easy way to translate these blocks of information into courseware. While some attempts are currently being made to unleash the public on this problem, we remain a long ways from solving the problem.

Open Education Movement - The open-education movement was inspired by the open-source software movement (i.e. Linux). It mixes in the powerful communication abilities of the Internet and applies the result to teaching and learning materials, such as course notes and textbooks. Open educational materials include text, images, audio, video, interactive simulations, and games that are free to be used and also re-used in new ways by anyone around the world.

It is estimated that more than 150 well-intentioned initiatives have been launched in this area. Over time, the increasing levels of attention and activity will cause one initiative to stand out and become the “industry leader.” This leader will, by default, set the standards for everyone that follows.

Some open-education projects are already attracting a large number of users per month. Some, like the MIT OpenCourseWare project and its OCW Consortium, are top-down organized institutional repositories that showcase their institutions’ courses. Others, like Rice University’s Connexions, Wikiversity, and Moodle are grassroot efforts that encourage contributions from all comers.

* MIT OpenCourseWare makes the course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all MIT’s 1,400 undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. MIT now claims 1.4 million visits per month from learners "in every single country on the planet.”
* The OpenCourseWare Consortium is an extension of what MIT began. Students don't have to register for classes but need only to log on to more than 1,800 potential courses at 12 universities that provide the course materials such as syllabi, video or audio lectures, notes, homework assignments, and illustrations.
* Connexions claims more than one million people from 194 countries are tapping into its 3,768 modules and 199 courses developed by a worldwide community of authors.
* Wikiversity is a division of Wikipedia serving as a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service. Its primary goals are to create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages.
* Moodle is a course management system using a free, Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. Moodle claims over 20,000 participating sites listing over 820,000 courses.
* Curriki.org is an education development resource with over 3,000 members and 450 courses in development.

While we applaud these efforts, there are some critical elements missing. The learning system of the future will have a single access point for all of its courses. Moodle is claiming over 820,000 courses but they are spread over 20,000 sites and many courses are duplicates. We estimate the number of unique and different courses to be less than 50,000, not in the millions like the number of available books and songs.

Using books as a close analogy, it can be argued that every available book has the potential of being translated into courseware and, most often, multiple courses. There are currently far more topics discussed in books than there are courses to teach the material. This leaves an obvious courseware vacuum waiting to be filled, and the key to unlocking this vacuum is the participative courseware-builder described below.


4.) Expanding Gulf Between Literates and Super-Literates

According to the New York Times, there are an additional 20,000 new words added to the English language every year. The primary driver behind this ever-expanding dimension of vocabulary is the ongoing development of science and technology.

Along with the creation of new science and technology comes the need to explain its attributes, its function in technical terms, and its overall purpose. New words and their associated colloquialisms help create meaning and structure around the emerging new concepts as they attract more research and come into focus.

Young students can learn new words quickly: on average, 3,000 new words each year, which works out to 8 words a day. This, of course varies significantly from one student to the next.

In the English language, the 2,000 most frequently used words account for 80-85 percent of the words used in non-specialized written texts and about 90-95 percent in conversational speech.

However, the total number of words in the English language tops out around one million words, and the vocabulary of some of our most gifted scientist and engineers tops out around 200,000 words.

The distance between the functionally literate and the super literate is growing. Some people who have become expert on a specific topic have pushed the envelope of understanding far beyond the comprehension of the rest of the world. And in doing so, have created whole new vocabularies to describe the concepts and phenomenon they encountered. These super experts often live in a research community where they are often the only living person who truly understands the topic of their research.

Until now the primary tool for these super literates to pass along their understanding of research to future generations has been through papers that are published in technical journals. Because of the rigid requirements for publication, these papers often take months to compose, and are written in a vocabulary few can comprehend.

An alternative to publishing papers will soon be the creation of courseware. While developing courseware in the past has been laborious and poorly utilized, the new courseware builder described below has the potential to change all that. Courseware will become an alternative to publishing papers or writing books, and will serve as an additional channel for the super literates to disseminate their understanding of the world.