The Future of Education

If we take a closer look at successful project and practices of the eminent speakers in the field of education we can see they have many things in common.

The first approach that is the repeatedly mentioned »self learning«. The winner of TED awards 2013 Sugata Mitra shows the power of children teaching themselves in his excellent project a Hole in the Wall. He argues that children with computer alone can learn the knowledge required of a western secretary in just nine months. Salmir Khan of Khan Academy also supports the idea of a tutor who sets the educational environment and allows kids, with some tutor support, to teach themselves and each other. The findings were also supported with the research of Benjamin Bloom back in 1984. His research shows that one on one instructions produce significantly better results, compared to standard lecture-based classroom.

The other frequently mentioned approach is »gamification«. Prof. Lee of Colombia University argues that Gamification attempts to harness the motivational power of games and apply it to real-world problems such as motivational problems in schools. The most important fact we can learn from games is their positive attitude to failure. Games maintain this by making feedback cycles fast and keeping the stakes low. This means that players get rapid feedback and can keep trying until they succeed, while in school the feedback cycles are usually long and students only have few opportunities to try.

But both approaches need to be supported with encouragement. Namely, almost all the authors emphasize it as one of the most important factors of success. It is obvious and well-known, but in practice often forgotten fact by educators.

In the article I am going to present my experience with these approaches in the last decade of my changes in educational practices. At the beginning I started with video lectures and quizzes, which allow self paced learning, similar to Flipped learning. But this year I have introduced these new findings and changed standard testing with short assignments that could be repeated until students succeed in solving them. The first results, which were taken at the beginning of the student year, show that up to 90% of students supported this change. Even though these results might prove to be too optimistic, more detailed research is now in its final stage and will certainly indicate the change for the better.