Trends in Education & Learning
Where are the opportunities?
Forbes recently identified a couple of trends in education. These include:
The rise of immersive virtual learning environments (i.e. AR/VR). An area well suited to train people without the need of using expensive equipment (e.g. plane simulators)
AI driven adaptive learning. This is an area that Sal Khan (Khan Academy founder) is bullish about. Here’s his TED talk about the subject. Personalized one-on-one learning yields the best results but is the most expensive. So can we use AI to reduce the cost of personalization with AI tutors?
Neurotechnology and accelerated Learning (i.e. the Matrix stuff) which is the next frontier in learning. Why need to spend years learning when you can just upload the knowledge to your brain through a brain implant. Neuralink (an Elon Musk company) is doing exactly that.
Lifelong learning, where what you learn in college becomes irrelevant quickly and each one of us needs to get upskilled every couple of years. So learning becomes a continuous endeavor instead of a one time thing you do in your early twenties.
In Workforce Education: A New Roadmap, a book by Willian Bonvillian and Sanjay Sarma, they explain that education is becoming the differentiating factor in obtaining high income jobs and joining the upper middle class.
In the US and other places as well, the middle class is thinning out and society is becoming more polarized between the haves and have-nots. They argue that people should work on not being left behind by getting a college degree.
“Clear trends show that upskilling and ever-higher credentials are required to succeed in the workforce.”
But the data shows that college enrollments in the US has dropped since its peek in 2010 most probably due to alternative education methods and people wanting to opt out from crippling student debt.
And the growth of wages has not matched increase in tuition creating a dilemma where studying liberal arts is becoming prohibitively expensive in comparison to STEM based education where most of the high wage jobs are now. So the message is loud and clear that it matters what you major in and that you have to upskill consistently to stay relevant.
Even in alternative education providers, for example MOOCs, the top companies including Udemy, Coursera, 2U (Edx) and Udacity are facing a lot of pressure and competition. None of them are profitable. Udacity recently sold to Accenture in a rumored $80 Million deal where it was once valued at $1 Billion and raised over $300 Million. All of them are battling each other for market dominance which will certainly create a blood bath of overspending and low product differentiation.
Corporate businesses are also taking things into their own hands with all major tech companies creating their own certifications and “professional” degrees adding more pressure on traditional 4-year degree colleges.
Alex Hormozi invested in Skool (an online community platform) seeing a trend of declining formal education verses growing alternative education routes (i.e. elearning) where skills can be learned directly from creators instead of waiting 4 years to see if you qualify to join the workforce.
Alex also mentioned the pros and cons of starting an education business and it’s interesting to hear his thoughts on the matter.
In The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World, Michael argues that college professors are stuck with two things:
Doing the bare minimum to teach because their primary job is research and not teaching.
Being stuck explaining concepts, theories and ideas developed by others in the field. So students get this information second hand instead of hearing it directly from the source.
Coursera is taking a stab at this by making content creation stackable. They go and shoot videos with instructors explaining certain topics (which they’re the best at) and then add it to a digital library. As an instructor with Coursera, you can mix and match content to create courses to teach your students. Not a bad idea at all but certainly expensive and I bet Coursera is counting on the effect of compounding to grow this digital library.
Some other ideas from Workforce Education
Deliver material in bite sized chunks, be it videos or dripping content (which most course management platforms do now). For those of you that don’t know dripping, it’s the process of slowly opening content week by week as to not overwhelm the learner. The authors also make a case that Youtube is the greatest edtech platform out there right now.
Students don’t need just money to spend on education. They need career guidance and support systems to help them succeed. Cohort and live based learning has made a splash with most Executive Education programs being delivered digitally through cohorts and live sessions.
If you read my previous post, I already teach two courses that are delivered that way. Maven is also the Udemy of cohort based live courses and Wes Kao (co-founder) is also pretty active writing online about the pros of such an approach.
New generations are quitting jobs twice as often as previous ones.
There are no good information systems that connect job seekers to jobs, identifying what skills they need to develop to qualify for the jobs and then suggest the best educational resources or credentials. A key takeaway is to develop better data on education, skill supply, and demand projections, on business expansion, and on overall workforce quality and needs.
Likewise, employers lack a solid way to evaluate worker qualifications. Whenever I post a software developer job on Linkedin, I get bombarded by thousands of applicants many are just not qualified. Recruitment agencies and freelancing platforms are sprouting out to do the assessment for companies (e.g. Toptal or Turing) and charge a premium.
Lifelong learning is a thing and it will become more and more important to stay relevant.
Some concepts to improve content include: learning by doing, flipped classroom, hands on learning, project based learning and integration across multiple silos and disciplines which give students more autonomy and purpose. Retrieval practice, spaced repetition and interleaving content (mixing multiple formats - audio, video and reading) are also important.
Desirable difficulty is when the learner is operating right on the frontier of their comfort zone. In other words, the content is not so difficult that they can’t figure it out or that it is too easy that get bored and distracted quickly.
Continuous assessments and feedback especially rich feedback is essential but hard to get. There are many different approaches to this:
Peer grading. Learning happens when students are both writers and evaluators
Automated grading through online quizzes and automatic code graders.
Mentor based manual grading. Udacity has actual people look at your work (projects) and grade it. This is in my opinion is where the platform is vastly superior than any other.
AI. LLMs show promise to provide detailed and personalized feedback.
If you noticed from my first post here, most of my time is spent on grading and providing feedback.
Intelligent Tutoring Systems. The fancy word for AI tutors are the pinnacle of personalized learning. Bloom (yeah the one from Bloom’s Taxonomy) researched the issue and found out that one-on-one tutoring is vastly superior than the conventional classroom way of teaching. In fact, 2-sigma better which is now known as the 2-sigma problem.
Cognitive Load Theory which states that teaching beginners requires a lot more hand holding and as they become experts on the subject, more open-ended problems are suitable.
Gamification: the social aspect of learning, make it competitive to excite and motivate learners. The famous concepts of micro-learning and streaks popularized by Duolingo to help learners come back to the App.
Games and simulations are two important methods to teach skills. The more realistic the game or simulation (with real-time feedback), the more learning happens.
Collaboration tools such as Miro and Zoom as well as online communities (Circle, Piazza) enable continuous collaboration between teachers and learners.
Generative learning theory: states the learners get better when they generate new information based on well understood concepts. Teaching for example?
Digital skills are on the rise and all occupations are becoming less routine over time.
Mastery based learning is when students don’t move to another topic before mastering the current one that they’re studying which as you noticed above also yielded better results than conventional classrooms.
Micro-credentials are also enabling students to get accredited without attending college. These can be stacked to form degrees. But third party certification remains an important step to assess the quality of these credentials and certificates for employers.
So what are some cool ideas that maybe are worth exploring further?
Games & Simulations as learning tools
AI based rich feedback and grading
Navigation tools connecting jobs (and trends) with skills and educational resources.
I have a lot to think about now. See you next week!