9 ms·

The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning

113 points by seek3r00 7y ago

mattferderer 7y ago
I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the internet & computers in the 90s. Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster & better than a teacher. But at what cost? While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do. I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads & focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many others have started preaching this as well. You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  For point of reference, I teach high school English in a middle class suburb in a large midwestern city. I teach five classes at a time (typically a mix of two or three different courses) and class sizes are usually 30-35+.
- kuu 7y ago
  You can complement the PC with some other traditional stuff
- Kalium 7y ago
  > I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. This sounds like a nice, clearly stated, and eminently testable hypothesis. Do you have any such data?
- dalbasal 7y ago
  To some extent, computer-aided learning might help reduce student/teacher ratios in practice. 2 hrs independent learning to 1hr in groups 1/3 the size... for example. While I agree that more teachers per student is highly effective, it's also expensive... and will unavoidably end up becoming cost-limited below the ideal level. As a total side note, I wonder what other, potentially healthy changes can be made if personalized learning can be made to work well. For example, I suspect that homogeneous age classes are not ideal. Spending half your life in a room with 40 other 10 year olds isn't something that happens outside of modern school systems. It's somewhat unatural. Maybe mixed-age classes can become possible again.
- nugget 7y ago
  I had exposure to a range of different educational environments growing up, including Stanford's EPGY online/distance learning courses. My experience was that a great teacher with a small class (<15 kids) was preferable to online courses. But great teachers are rare, and so are small class sizes. I found most K-12 teachers to be mediocre, unmotivated, and burdened with large classes (>25 kids in high school). Given that reality, online learning (or just self education) was more efficient most of the time.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue... You're right. And that DOES WORK. It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" (https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn). The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics. This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.
  - mr_crankypants 7y ago
    Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement. I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one. I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests. I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify. To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.
jasode 7y ago
>Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher? It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for administering tests. This is a long article and headline of "personalized learning" and how it was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of "personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The laptop/Chromebook is the primary transmission of material. The teacher becomes a secondary role -- help answer extra questions/etc. The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the material. This is theoretically possible but reality is that you often get an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning, you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local teacher where you happen to pay your taxes. As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in-classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math. That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live instructor to transmit information. This is where we can personalize the curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live teacher. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...
- godelski 7y ago
  One of the things that learning through a laptop does it give people access to world class teachers. I don't think even the biggest proponents of online learning would disagree that having that world class teacher in person is better through the laptop. The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile? (Or x percentile)
wefarrell 7y ago
The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized “ed tech” is offered as a balm for budget austerity. “There’s been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools,” Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me. This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor. Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers. Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.
- tentboy 7y ago
  ...but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction Curious as to why you say this because recently it seems like people are realizing you DON'T need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, and more and more people are turning to the wealth of education at our fingertips instead of traditional schooling.
  - wefarrell 7y ago
    There's a multitude of evidence that teacher-student ratios are associated with positive outcomes: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=teacher+student+ratios&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=tea...
em-bee 7y ago
individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a computer to every child. so this is not new. most of all, montessori is doing it without computers.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a computer to every child. It was not championed by OLPC as merely one of the possible outcomes; individualized constructivist education was the motivating purpose for the project, around which hardware, software, and content development was organized.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    true, i was picking my words somewhat carefully, because while OLPC did expect that outcome, they didn't actually get it in many cases, because it turns out that it takes a bit more than just dumping laptops in every classroom
- ticviking 7y ago
  Note that most Montessori schools have the ability to reject disruptive students. They also literally have a term for a student who needs to learn the behavioral prerequisites for successfully learning. A "poorly normalized" student will be held back until they have developed enough to see that that need to change behavior to move on.
  - em-bee 7y ago
    i get your point, however i am not sure if disruptive students are actually a problem in a montessori class. i'd really like to see some actual reports from the field here. since in a montessori class each student does their own thing, a disruptive student can do far less damage than in a traditional class. in a traditional class the disruptive student takes away attention of the teacher from the class. and class learning is indeed disrupted while that happens. in a montessori class, the teacher can take care of the disruptive student individually without disrupting attention from other students. oh, sure, it may happen that a a teacher-student interaction is disrupted once in a while, but in that case the teacher can tell that student to work on something else while they deal with the problem child. further, if we assume that most students are disruptive because they seek attention, i expect that such students will actually be much less disruptive than in a traditional class. also, one of the key points of montessori is to teach children individually to work with their material on their own. this goes so far that in some schools the beginning of the year is split in stages. on the first day only a handful of children are coming to school. the smaller group makes it easier to get each child to calm down and get used to the classroom setting. once they are fine, the next batch of children enters (the next day or a few days later). the first group is already quiet at work, and so the teacher now can deal with the next group, and so on until all children are present. this not only allows the teacher to adjust their ways for each child individually, but doing that is the very point. therefore a montessori teacher has much more powerful tools at their disposal to deal with problem children and help them integrate into the classroom. chances are that a child that is disruptive in a traditional class simply won't behave like that in a montessori class.
tzs 7y ago
> If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber classroom and learn at her own pace. Who determines what her own pace should be, and how do they do that? One of the biggest problems I've had when learning things on my own has been pacing. Suppose learning the subject requires first learning A, then B, then C, and so on, each part building upon the previous parts. I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C. Other parts I don't spend enough time on. Let's say I find D uninteresting, but am really looking forward to E. I'll tend to rush through D, just getting a superficial understanding, and move on to E without adequate preparation.
- em-bee 7y ago
  the teacher observes each child, sees how they are progressing, and helps the child (in whatever way suitable) if the progress is not fast enough. incidentally, this is also how i work with my employees too. they report their progress to me daily, and if they are stuck somewhere or are getting off on a tangent i find a way to get them back on track.
- lunchables 7y ago
  >I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C. I would think integrated testing and feedback could be built in and even done in "real time" as students are learning. For each section you can do a brief quiz, or constantly ask questions to measure engagement and comprehension.
- ilaksh 7y ago
  When to move on or when to back track is a basic function of computer assisted learning and it is regulated by success in completion of exercises and exams.
sandGorgon 7y ago
I'll give you the other side. Think of this from a developing country perspective - we don't have enough teachers. But we have a billion people. We need to educate them. We can't train teachers fast enough. Not to mention the 20 different languages that India has. We need this to work.
- em-bee 7y ago
  We can't train teachers fast enough i don't believe this is true in the actual sense of the words. the problem is rather that we are not spending enough money on education. we could get many more teachers if that would change. and it has to change regardless. with automation replacing all manual un-educated labor, education is the only way to avoid unemployment for a large number of people. we need more teachers. many more teachers, and more effective teaching methods. but i believe financially this is all solvable if we are willing to solve it.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    Agreed. Both of my sisters became teachers. Both of them left the profession after a few years. One even went back to college, negating the “we cant train them fast enough”. She already had a masters degree but still went back to college for more education to get away from teaching. This is speaking from an American perspective but teaching is absolute hell. Teachers are more and more expected to pay for their own supplies, work 12 hour days, become counselors and therapists, plus advocates for special needs or abused children. Many students coming into kindergarten cannot read or recite the alphabet, but even worse many are not potty trained. The parents expect the schools to take care of 100% of the child’s education. And more and more in America, teachers are expected to shield students from real, actual bullets. One of my sisters left the profession when the state started talking about giving teachers guns. All for $30-$40k per year. It’s not worth it. It’s too much work for too little money. Your job is constantly under fire and political scrutiny. It’s not even education anymore.
    - metafour 7y ago
      Former teacher here with a similar experience. It's not only that it's not worth it, teaching for the most part doesn't even pay a living wage. You can't make up the difference with a summer job since the "summer vacation" has gotten shorter and shorter over time it seems. In addition, teachers usually have to do professional development over the summer as well as we always started back before the students did. One of the districts I worked at didn't have an attendance policy and allowed students to do credit recovery with online courses. It's incredibly difficult to convince middle and high school students to struggle through learning when they know from their fellow students they can make up the credit later and just google all the answers since the proctors for credit recovery didn't really pay attention. They all had their phones on their leg under the table searching for all the answers while the proctor sat and ignored them.
rdtwo 7y ago
Personalized learning would work super well if the US has a standard national criculum. Then a student could take the same module online if it wasn’t clicking at school and learn the same concept from a different instructor and perspective. Otherwise it’s super difficult to match concepts up
moosey 7y ago
I think that the main problem of a customized and changing over time curriculum is that it's hard to maintain connections to information in long term memory over time. Ever since I started using a spaced repetition/interleaving program, I find that I can start learning something, then walk away for as long as I like, and be able to come back to the subject not just fresh, but with the previous information far more entrenched than before. This allows me to jump around my interests rapidly within the limited time that I have for learning difficult subjects, and means that the time that I do spend on particularly difficult subjects that require deep understanding isn't wasted. I think that meta-learning is a key subject that any learner should start with, then messiness isn't a problem anymore. If I had learned it 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have lost all of that wonderful college expertise.
- misiti3780 7y ago
  completely agree. i use spaced repetition for most things these days, and i justify the time spent on the card making by saying i will keep this this info, with minimal effort, for the rest of my life
spurmboy 7y ago
The education industry is not doing its job? Who knew?! Me! Because I went through it and had my life ruined by it. I say this as a 30 year old man. I went to public school where the following happened: - I was not only intellectually neglected, I was intellectually poisoned. The result was worse than if I had just been left by myself as far as education and intellectual development. They don’t just not do their job, they sabotage kids - I was subjected to bullying that has had mental health ramifications that persist even now. Everyone knew and nobody did anything. The teachers don’t do anything and the admins don’t do anything. They watch knowingly as kids under their care are viscously bullied, doing nothing. Teachers are stupid. There is no other way to put it. Public education is a free daycare service. The kids who succeed in public school succeed in spite of the teachers and their circumstances, not because of them. It is not an exaggeration to say that subjecting a child to public education is abusive. Look at the average Americans understanding of maths and geography — they are basically retarded compared to other western nations. But nobody cares and nobody does anything. Saying that any alternative is too expensive is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Take grandma, who is starved for human interaction, and move her in. She watches over the child while he does assignments given to him by you and while he is tutored by starving PhD candidates and undergraduates who are actually smart and passionate. They will do it for peanuts. I know I would have when I was a starving student. Socialize the child by engaging in social activities such as soccer leagues and other things. Sleepovers, whatever. I just invented a method of education that is guaranteed to give you better results than a public school and probably costs a similar amount when you account for all the therapy you’d have to pay for from the bullying and whatever.
jklinger410 7y ago
The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning in Underfunded Public Schools
purplezooey 7y ago
It sure seems like nobody under 25 can read a damn book anymore.
hereme888 7y ago
Not a good example of personalized learning. This is more of a hyper-virtualized school system. I'd say ot's obviously bad for children to be so immersed in technology and not get the necessary personal interaction people need to thrive. Personalized learning is perhaps best observed in a homeschool-like environment.
thelock85 7y ago
I am patiently waiting (in fear?) for the day when we have "educational ad exchanges". The Gates Foundation and CZI put up a $500M slush fund for "rockstar" teachers to bid on impressions, while publishers lobby to abolish CIPA, COPPA and FERPA in the name of a "quality" education for all.
ggm 7y ago
Lower teacher pupil ratios and more personal attention to learning. Machines have a role but denying the role of the pedagogue feels wrong. And corporatism. Why is education hold hostage by big data outcomes? Ethics potholes.
harry8 7y ago
In the utterly amateur teaching I have done the key thing, which someone will never get from a computer, has always, always, always been convincing the student that they are smart and that they can learn this stuff or indeed anything. Next most important is generic how to learn stuff, which for the people I have taught usually starts with relaxation exercises and other techniques to overcome their fight or flight reactions to get to a place of relaxed enjoyment. I don't know how that replicates to other, better, more experienced teachers observations of it. If it is as important as I think, I don't know how you get that from a computer. Learning and study abilities are tortured and murdered by the constant re-enforcement of "you can't, you're not smart enough, them over there, they are better." Maybe I'm over emphasising a point that is less important than I think but also maybe not. It's a point that needs an airing here either way. Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have experience.
ilaksh 7y ago
It's hard to believe there is no hard data as far as test scores. I would expect more of that in an article like this. I assume there are studies that show significant improvement in test scores as well as some studies that show no improvement or even regression. I think how well it works depends on how well the students are supervised, the actual content of the programs, the parameters such as required learning rate, how well the particular software works or not, how closely the software tracks or does not track with the standardized tests, etc. For things like algebra I had to use pencil. How do computer instructions handle work like equations and math?

113 points by seek3r00 7y ago

I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the internet & computers in the 90s. Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster & better than a teacher. But at what cost? While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do. I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads & focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many others have started preaching this as well. You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.

germinalphrase 7y ago
For point of reference, I teach high school English in a middle class suburb in a large midwestern city. I teach five classes at a time (typically a mix of two or three different courses) and class sizes are usually 30-35+.
kuu 7y ago
You can complement the PC with some other traditional stuff
Kalium 7y ago
> I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. This sounds like a nice, clearly stated, and eminently testable hypothesis. Do you have any such data?
dalbasal 7y ago
To some extent, computer-aided learning might help reduce student/teacher ratios in practice. 2 hrs independent learning to 1hr in groups 1/3 the size... for example. While I agree that more teachers per student is highly effective, it's also expensive... and will unavoidably end up becoming cost-limited below the ideal level. As a total side note, I wonder what other, potentially healthy changes can be made if personalized learning can be made to work well. For example, I suspect that homogeneous age classes are not ideal. Spending half your life in a room with 40 other 10 year olds isn't something that happens outside of modern school systems. It's somewhat unatural. Maybe mixed-age classes can become possible again.
nugget 7y ago
I had exposure to a range of different educational environments growing up, including Stanford's EPGY online/distance learning courses. My experience was that a great teacher with a small class (<15 kids) was preferable to online courses. But great teachers are rare, and so are small class sizes. I found most K-12 teachers to be mediocre, unmotivated, and burdened with large classes (>25 kids in high school). Given that reality, online learning (or just self education) was more efficient most of the time.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue... You're right. And that DOES WORK. It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" (https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn). The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics. This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.
- mr_crankypants 7y ago
  Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement. I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one. I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests. I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify. To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.

jasode 7y ago

>Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers as a group. If tech is, indeed, merely a tool of personalized learning, then what does that make the teacher? It makes the teacher more of a facilitator/coach/mentor and also a proctor for administering tests. This is a long article and headline of "personalized learning" and how it was described in the article was unfamiliar to me. That jargon of "personalized learning" seems to translate to "laptop-based learning". The laptop/Chromebook is the primary transmission of material. The teacher becomes a secondary role -- help answer extra questions/etc. The author of the article is biased with the premise that the teachers that are physically there in the classroom are the best transmitters of the material. This is theoretically possible but reality is that you often get an ok or under-average teacher. The result is a bad teacher that confuses and frustrates the students instead of teaching them. With laptop-led learning, you could assemble the best instructors (or multiple alternative virtual teachers) instead of being restricted to the random quality of the local teacher where you happen to pay your taxes. As a personal example... None of my math teachers from 1st grade to high school were as good as Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown)[0]. (I think many HN'rs might have a similar life schooling comparison.) I would have been better off with high-quality math lessons from a laptop and then consulting with the in-classroom teacher acting as a coach to supplement the videos. The alternative of watching teachers bored with their jobs did not help me learn math. That said, I can see where some kids won't respond to laptops and need a live instructor to transmit information. This is where we can personalize the curriculum. Some kids use more laptop videos; others utlilize the live teacher. [0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw/vid...

godelski 7y ago
One of the things that learning through a laptop does it give people access to world class teachers. I don't think even the biggest proponents of online learning would disagree that having that world class teacher in person is better through the laptop. The question is, is a world class teacher through a laptop better than a teacher that's under the 50th percentile? (Or x percentile)

wefarrell 7y ago

The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized “ed tech” is offered as a balm for budget austerity. “There’s been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools,” Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me. This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That's harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor. Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It's best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It's a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It's not a substitute for interacting with teachers. Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that's supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student's education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.

tentboy 7y ago
...but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction Curious as to why you say this because recently it seems like people are realizing you DON'T need a tradition teacher student interaction to learn, and more and more people are turning to the wealth of education at our fingertips instead of traditional schooling.
- wefarrell 7y ago
  There's a multitude of evidence that teacher-student ratios are associated with positive outcomes: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=teacher+student+ratios&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=tea...

em-bee 7y ago

individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a computer to every child. so this is not new. most of all, montessori is doing it without computers.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> individualized learning is also part of montessori, and, it has been championed by the OLPC project as one of the possible outcomes of giving a computer to every child. It was not championed by OLPC as merely one of the possible outcomes; individualized constructivist education was the motivating purpose for the project, around which hardware, software, and content development was organized.
- em-bee 7y ago
  true, i was picking my words somewhat carefully, because while OLPC did expect that outcome, they didn't actually get it in many cases, because it turns out that it takes a bit more than just dumping laptops in every classroom
ticviking 7y ago
Note that most Montessori schools have the ability to reject disruptive students. They also literally have a term for a student who needs to learn the behavioral prerequisites for successfully learning. A "poorly normalized" student will be held back until they have developed enough to see that that need to change behavior to move on.
- em-bee 7y ago
  i get your point, however i am not sure if disruptive students are actually a problem in a montessori class. i'd really like to see some actual reports from the field here. since in a montessori class each student does their own thing, a disruptive student can do far less damage than in a traditional class. in a traditional class the disruptive student takes away attention of the teacher from the class. and class learning is indeed disrupted while that happens. in a montessori class, the teacher can take care of the disruptive student individually without disrupting attention from other students. oh, sure, it may happen that a a teacher-student interaction is disrupted once in a while, but in that case the teacher can tell that student to work on something else while they deal with the problem child. further, if we assume that most students are disruptive because they seek attention, i expect that such students will actually be much less disruptive than in a traditional class. also, one of the key points of montessori is to teach children individually to work with their material on their own. this goes so far that in some schools the beginning of the year is split in stages. on the first day only a handful of children are coming to school. the smaller group makes it easier to get each child to calm down and get used to the classroom setting. once they are fine, the next batch of children enters (the next day or a few days later). the first group is already quiet at work, and so the teacher now can deal with the next group, and so on until all children are present. this not only allows the teacher to adjust their ways for each child individually, but doing that is the very point. therefore a montessori teacher has much more powerful tools at their disposal to deal with problem children and help them integrate into the classroom. chances are that a child that is disruptive in a traditional class simply won't behave like that in a montessori class.

tzs 7y ago

> If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber classroom and learn at her own pace. Who determines what her own pace should be, and how do they do that? One of the biggest problems I've had when learning things on my own has been pacing. Suppose learning the subject requires first learning A, then B, then C, and so on, each part building upon the previous parts. I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C. Other parts I don't spend enough time on. Let's say I find D uninteresting, but am really looking forward to E. I'll tend to rush through D, just getting a superficial understanding, and move on to E without adequate preparation.

em-bee 7y ago
the teacher observes each child, sees how they are progressing, and helps the child (in whatever way suitable) if the progress is not fast enough. incidentally, this is also how i work with my employees too. they report their progress to me daily, and if they are stuck somewhere or are getting off on a tangent i find a way to get them back on track.
lunchables 7y ago
>I'll tend to end up spending too much time on some parts. I might, say, get stuck on B because I'm not confident I'm good enough at B to move on, even though my B is actually sufficient to support C. I would think integrated testing and feedback could be built in and even done in "real time" as students are learning. For each section you can do a brief quiz, or constantly ask questions to measure engagement and comprehension.
ilaksh 7y ago
When to move on or when to back track is a basic function of computer assisted learning and it is regulated by success in completion of exercises and exams.

sandGorgon 7y ago

I'll give you the other side. Think of this from a developing country perspective - we don't have enough teachers. But we have a billion people. We need to educate them. We can't train teachers fast enough. Not to mention the 20 different languages that India has. We need this to work.

em-bee 7y ago
We can't train teachers fast enough i don't believe this is true in the actual sense of the words. the problem is rather that we are not spending enough money on education. we could get many more teachers if that would change. and it has to change regardless. with automation replacing all manual un-educated labor, education is the only way to avoid unemployment for a large number of people. we need more teachers. many more teachers, and more effective teaching methods. but i believe financially this is all solvable if we are willing to solve it.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Agreed. Both of my sisters became teachers. Both of them left the profession after a few years. One even went back to college, negating the “we cant train them fast enough”. She already had a masters degree but still went back to college for more education to get away from teaching. This is speaking from an American perspective but teaching is absolute hell. Teachers are more and more expected to pay for their own supplies, work 12 hour days, become counselors and therapists, plus advocates for special needs or abused children. Many students coming into kindergarten cannot read or recite the alphabet, but even worse many are not potty trained. The parents expect the schools to take care of 100% of the child’s education. And more and more in America, teachers are expected to shield students from real, actual bullets. One of my sisters left the profession when the state started talking about giving teachers guns. All for $30-$40k per year. It’s not worth it. It’s too much work for too little money. Your job is constantly under fire and political scrutiny. It’s not even education anymore.
  - metafour 7y ago
    Former teacher here with a similar experience. It's not only that it's not worth it, teaching for the most part doesn't even pay a living wage. You can't make up the difference with a summer job since the "summer vacation" has gotten shorter and shorter over time it seems. In addition, teachers usually have to do professional development over the summer as well as we always started back before the students did. One of the districts I worked at didn't have an attendance policy and allowed students to do credit recovery with online courses. It's incredibly difficult to convince middle and high school students to struggle through learning when they know from their fellow students they can make up the credit later and just google all the answers since the proctors for credit recovery didn't really pay attention. They all had their phones on their leg under the table searching for all the answers while the proctor sat and ignored them.

rdtwo 7y ago

Personalized learning would work super well if the US has a standard national criculum. Then a student could take the same module online if it wasn’t clicking at school and learn the same concept from a different instructor and perspective. Otherwise it’s super difficult to match concepts up

moosey 7y ago

I think that the main problem of a customized and changing over time curriculum is that it's hard to maintain connections to information in long term memory over time. Ever since I started using a spaced repetition/interleaving program, I find that I can start learning something, then walk away for as long as I like, and be able to come back to the subject not just fresh, but with the previous information far more entrenched than before. This allows me to jump around my interests rapidly within the limited time that I have for learning difficult subjects, and means that the time that I do spend on particularly difficult subjects that require deep understanding isn't wasted. I think that meta-learning is a key subject that any learner should start with, then messiness isn't a problem anymore. If I had learned it 20 years ago, I probably wouldn't have lost all of that wonderful college expertise.

misiti3780 7y ago
completely agree. i use spaced repetition for most things these days, and i justify the time spent on the card making by saying i will keep this this info, with minimal effort, for the rest of my life

spurmboy 7y ago

The education industry is not doing its job? Who knew?! Me! Because I went through it and had my life ruined by it. I say this as a 30 year old man. I went to public school where the following happened: - I was not only intellectually neglected, I was intellectually poisoned. The result was worse than if I had just been left by myself as far as education and intellectual development. They don’t just not do their job, they sabotage kids - I was subjected to bullying that has had mental health ramifications that persist even now. Everyone knew and nobody did anything. The teachers don’t do anything and the admins don’t do anything. They watch knowingly as kids under their care are viscously bullied, doing nothing. Teachers are stupid. There is no other way to put it. Public education is a free daycare service. The kids who succeed in public school succeed in spite of the teachers and their circumstances, not because of them. It is not an exaggeration to say that subjecting a child to public education is abusive. Look at the average Americans understanding of maths and geography — they are basically retarded compared to other western nations. But nobody cares and nobody does anything. Saying that any alternative is too expensive is bullshit. Utter bullshit. Take grandma, who is starved for human interaction, and move her in. She watches over the child while he does assignments given to him by you and while he is tutored by starving PhD candidates and undergraduates who are actually smart and passionate. They will do it for peanuts. I know I would have when I was a starving student. Socialize the child by engaging in social activities such as soccer leagues and other things. Sleepovers, whatever. I just invented a method of education that is guaranteed to give you better results than a public school and probably costs a similar amount when you account for all the therapy you’d have to pay for from the bullying and whatever.

jklinger410 7y ago

The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning in Underfunded Public Schools

purplezooey 7y ago

It sure seems like nobody under 25 can read a damn book anymore.

hereme888 7y ago

Not a good example of personalized learning. This is more of a hyper-virtualized school system. I'd say ot's obviously bad for children to be so immersed in technology and not get the necessary personal interaction people need to thrive. Personalized learning is perhaps best observed in a homeschool-like environment.

thelock85 7y ago

I am patiently waiting (in fear?) for the day when we have "educational ad exchanges". The Gates Foundation and CZI put up a $500M slush fund for "rockstar" teachers to bid on impressions, while publishers lobby to abolish CIPA, COPPA and FERPA in the name of a "quality" education for all.

ggm 7y ago

Lower teacher pupil ratios and more personal attention to learning. Machines have a role but denying the role of the pedagogue feels wrong. And corporatism. Why is education hold hostage by big data outcomes? Ethics potholes.

harry8 7y ago

In the utterly amateur teaching I have done the key thing, which someone will never get from a computer, has always, always, always been convincing the student that they are smart and that they can learn this stuff or indeed anything. Next most important is generic how to learn stuff, which for the people I have taught usually starts with relaxation exercises and other techniques to overcome their fight or flight reactions to get to a place of relaxed enjoyment. I don't know how that replicates to other, better, more experienced teachers observations of it. If it is as important as I think, I don't know how you get that from a computer. Learning and study abilities are tortured and murdered by the constant re-enforcement of "you can't, you're not smart enough, them over there, they are better." Maybe I'm over emphasising a point that is less important than I think but also maybe not. It's a point that needs an airing here either way. Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have experience.

ilaksh 7y ago

It's hard to believe there is no hard data as far as test scores. I would expect more of that in an article like this. I assume there are studies that show significant improvement in test scores as well as some studies that show no improvement or even regression. I think how well it works depends on how well the students are supervised, the actual content of the programs, the parameters such as required learning rate, how well the particular software works or not, how closely the software tracks or does not track with the standardized tests, etc. For things like algebra I had to use pencil. How do computer instructions handle work like equations and math?