Sometimes I am so brilliant I amaze myself

Back in in 2007 I pointed out that the education industry had not kept up with technological developments;  that it wasn’t taking advantage of technology to deliver the best possible product.

Two areas that I specifically mentioned were customizing education to the needs of the end user and utilizing constant feedback techniques to insure that material is being delivered and learned to the fullest extent possible.

Second the ultimate customer for the project, will have to be heavily involved in the process. For example Boeing needs Aeronautical Engineers. To really get the type of engineer that they want they would need to lay out a set of skills that they feel are important. From there it would be necessary to backtrack to the courses which develop those skills, and a curriculum would need to be developed. From there textbooks would need to be written and labs developed. On and on continuing up the chain until a comprehensive program had been developed.

Once that process has been completed it is necessary to deliver the required knowledge to the student. Most of the pieces are already in place. Lectures can be developed and delivered via pod cast or youtube (The open courseware project and iTunes university are already doing some of this). Reading assignments can be emailed out. Textbooks and other course materials can be placed on Wikibooks. The two major sticking points as I see it are labs and a feedback mechanism.

Feedback is the easiest - IM, Email, Phones, Blog Comments, all those offer a feedback loop. Testing is another method. Here we have to be careful though. We want the test to be both fair and applicable as well relatively secure. In other words we don't want a bunch of multiple choice questions floating around on the internet that a student can memorize to get a passing grade, but we want the test to really measure knowledge. Part of this problem can be solved by the use of adaptive testing.
Adaptive testing is a method of testing that adapts to an examinees knowledge level of a subject.

CAT successively selects questions so as to maximize the precision of the exam based on what is known about the examinee from previous questions.[1] From the examinee's perspective, the difficulty of the exam seems to tailor itself to their level of ability. For example, if an examinee performs well on an item of intermediate difficulty, he will then be presented with a more difficult question. Or, if he performed poorly, he would be presented with a simpler question. Compared to static multiple choice tests that nearly everyone has experienced, with a fixed set of items administered to all examinees, computer-adaptive tests require fewer test items to arrive at equally accurate scores.[1] (Of course, there is nothing about the CAT methodology that requires the items to be multiple-choice; but just as most exams are multiple-choice, most CAT exams also use this format.)

Apparently someone was listening because the NYC Public School System is experimenting with exactly this type of system, as described in this Freakonomics article from the NY Times.

The School of One tries to take advantage of technology to essentially customize education for every kid in every classroom and help teachers do their job more effectively. That is of course a daunting task — and perhaps, some might argue, unnecessary — but the amount of thought and analysis that have so far gone into the program is impressive. Furthermore, the enthusiasm it has generated from people like Duncan and Klein make it a program to watch. And the early results are promising.

You’ll hear about School of One’s conception, its potential pitfalls, and most of all how it works day-to-day. You’ll spend some time in a classroom in I.S. 339 in the Bronx, hearing from kids like Lionel (at right), whose daily “playlist” — in this case, his math lessons — are chosen in part by an algorithm that is designed to learn how Lionel learns best.

And you’ll hear how Chris Rush and others track and analyze the schoolwork that Lionel is doing to make sure he’s not just doodling away his time (like Levitt did in the third grade).

I'll be interested to see how this all plays out.  I don’t think it will be the panacea for America’s education woes but I do think it has potential, especially the idea of addressing individual learning styles.

(There is a podcast associated with this article that is worth listening to.  On a similar subject I have mentioned the Intelligence Squared debates before.  They had one a few months ago regarding the damage the teachers unions were doing to education.  It is worth a listen also.)