My key takeaways from unit 1:

Leadership is a social construct.  It’s the ability to unify people towards a common goal.  

There are many theories about how to best do that (Workman & Cleveland-Innes, 2012), and the methods and metrics have changed over time (Unity Environmental University, 2015).

Although it’s a generalization, women tend to lead differently from men (Fitzgerald, 2003) with a greater focus on people as opposed to outcomes; however Fitzgerald, along with Huggins (2017) about HS principals’ (in)ability to distribute leadership, also fails to address the next point.

Leadership is action, not a job title.  Just because someone has leadership in title does not make them a leader, they are often glorified managers or simply the person in charge.  Senge (2015) also did a good job of differentiating the two.  I also found his definition of leadership as “the capacity of a human community to shape its future” a nice hybrid between the classical dichotomies illustrated by Fitzgerald.  But in the same video Senge also screwed up the origin of the word leadership claiming it was “leith”. That doesn’t abrogate his views, but it did lead me down another rabbit hole, ultimately leading me to this article on Napoleon.  Graziano (2023) highlights: vision, communication, decisiveness, adaptability, trust, empowerment, and recognition of the team as the qualities which made Napoleon a renowned historical leader.

How all of this ties into digital learning environments still isn’t clear but it’s a solid foundation on leadership to begin that exploration.  

References:

College, U. (2015, August 2). Leadership: “To Go” rather than not to go… Is The Literal Definition. Unity Environmental University. https://unity.edu/leadership-in-abundance/leadership-to-go-rather-than-not-to-go-is-the-literal-definition/

Fitzgerald, T. (2003). Changing the deafening silence of indigenous women’s voices in educational leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 41(1), 9–23. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230310457402

Huggins, K. S. (2017). Developing Leadership Capacity in Others: An Examination of High School Principals’ Personal Capacities for Fostering Leadership. International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.22230/ijepl.2017v12n1a670

Senge, P. (2015). What makes a great leader? by Peter Senge, Author of The Fifth Discipline [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aYaj2-GZqk

Workman, T., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2012). Leadership, personal transformation, and management. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(4), 313–323. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v13i4.1383

I like this activity because it focuses uniquely on qualities of a leader, as opposed to qualities of a good person, or a reflection of my personal values.  While I appreciate this is a group activity, it is also a perfect opportunity to contribute something other than required work to my blog. I’m not afraid of being wrong or having a bad take on something, and I expect this list will likely change by the end of the course.  I also think only the top 7 really matter, and the other traits are mostly in support of them.

Characteristics of an admired leader:

#1 is forward looking.  A leader needs a vision for the future.  No vision, no mission.

#2 is inspiring.  If you can’t inspire a team to pull in the same direction, or follow you, then you’re not a leader.

#3 is determined.  Generally, if you’re seeking a change, you will face some degree of resistance.  The bigger the mission, the greater the resistance will be.  It takes a great deal of determination to overcome the various forces resisting you and a willingness to battle time and time again.

#4 is competent.  I debated putting this lower on the list, but for me it belongs in the top 5.  People generally won’t follow a leader who fails them, and yet that doesn’t explain how we still have war criminals being paraded as heroes.  

#5 is ambitious.  Every hero’s journey begins with a desire to change something.  To be the face of that change is both courageous and ambitious.

#6 is intelligent.  There are lots of different ways to be intelligent.  There’s knowing and recalling information, problem solving, understanding people, and motives, planning ahead… so many ways to demonstrate intelligence that I feel like this is a catch-all.

#7 is caring.  Even if the leader doesn’t care about people (shame on you) they need to care about outcomes.

#8 is courageous.  People will follow someone who is willing to walk through the fire; or lead them through the jungle / into the dark..  It takes a ton of courage to be that person to go first.  Consequently, a good leader has to be willing to go first.

#9 is imaginative.  The biggest attribute to being fair or open minded is that ability to extrapolate and pull on the threads to imagine the outcomes.  It’s also important for coming up with new solutions to problems, especially when the tried and true hasn’t worked.

#10 is dependable.  There’s comfort in knowing that someone is there for you, or what you’re going to get from.

#11 is self-controlled.  I feel that this should be replaced with the word “poised” making mature redundant in the process.

#12 is broad minded.  Significantly more important to be broad minded than fair minded as a leader.  They need to be receptive to the multitude of elements at play at any given time, but only so that they can then decide what is best for the overall mission.

#13 is honest.  A leader doesn’t have to disclose all the reasons why they made the choices they did so long as their followers continue to believe in the mission. 

#14 is co-operative.  The squeaky wheel gets the crease, and if you’re taking on an “us vs the world” mentality then it might not serve to be co-operative with your adversaries.  

#15 is fair minded.  Everyone appreciates fairness, but we can’t all agree on the terms of what that looks like; for 30 million people, nevermind 8 billion people.. and it’s naive to think we can. 

 #16 is straight forward.  A good leader doesn’t have to shoot from the hip, but they do need to be clear in their communication.

#17 is mature, because I see immature kids acting as leaders in their peer groups.  

#18 is loyal.  This is tough because I personally value it a lot higher but loyalty is not a hallmark for a good leader.  Professional sports organizations overturn players (employees) and management every season, or contract cycle, and occasionally someone is replaced midseason.  There’s also the possibility of staying loyal to a poisonous entity that crumbles an organization from within.  This isn’t only people, but brand allegiance, suppliers or software too. 

#19 is independent, because they can surround themselves with supportive people.  I also tie this to influence.  Just because a person is a corporate shill doesn’t necessarily affect their ability to lead.

#20 is supportive, because a leader doesn’t need to exude that quality, they can outsource it.

When this course started, I had no idea what Instructional Design (ID) was.  I had never heard of ADDIE and wouldn’t have been able to name even one part of the design thinking process.  

What I learned during this course is that ID is all about making effective learning experiences.  I further realized that I already do this as a teacher and an athletics coach, I just didn’t know it.  This course has exposed me to many tips, tricks and approaches to be better at those jobs, and I will highlight my favorites throughout; but given that I perform ID in many different environments, I’ve further been able to identify some of the principles that transcend them all and I’ve borrowed from ADDIE to rewrite what that acronym means for me.

A – Know your audience and meet them at their level.  All the theoretical models contain some form of final evaluation, but they don’t all start with an analysis of the problem.  Empathetically understanding the current state of the audience helps to identify the hurdles to overcome through learning objectives en route to the desired outcome.

DD- Don’t Default to Digital, use tech as a tool rather than a guiding principle.  Often, there are endless ways to get from point A to point B.  While tech has provided countless solutions, sometimes it’s not always required to get the job done.  Include the use of live demonstrations, role playing, and simulations.  When appropriate, facilitate group discussions, or allow opportunities for questions, clarifications, and deeper understanding.  Perhaps even gamify some lessons by keeping scores and acknowledging winners.  Get their feedback to find out what made them successful.

I – Keep it iterative, because people, audiences and/or needs change over time and are not a static entity. It’s a shame when instructors are teaching the exact same unit, in the exact same way, for decades on end without questioning if there’s a better way to do it.

E – Engagement.   Engagement is key to any successful learning experience, but it’s not the only condition required for learning. Gagne’s 9 Events (1965) are the most prolific at addressing the mental state, and identifies all the processes required for knowledge transfer and retention.  Even when the problem is content, if there’s a reason why students aren’t “getting it” the solution can likely be found within one of these events.  

When it comes to digital presentations, Mayer’s Principles for Multimedia (2001) are invaluable for creating media.  These 12 principles emerge from Cognitive Load theory (1988)  to emphasize the importance of coherence, signaling, and redundancy to optimize learning.  My personal favorites are the segmenting principle, which fueled my curiosity to dive deeper into microlearning, and the personalization principle because I tend to dislike things that are overly formal. 

Finally, the pecha kucha deliverable helped me realize that consistency with fonts, graphics, and imaging within a presentation are important to me.  That can extend to themes, colors and all design choices too; but it also helped me realize that it’s silly to put arbitrary restrictions on design.  At the end of the day, in the ID context, the learning objective should rule, and every choice made should be in service to optimizing it.

References:

Gagné, R. M. (1965). The conditions of learning (1st ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Mayer, R. E. (2001). Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139164603

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

K12 education in the year 2030

Matt Poole

Royal Roads University

LRNT523 Foundations of Learning and Technologies

Dr. Elizabeth Childs

October 29, 2023

K12 education in the year 2030

Education raises peoples’ productivity, income, gives them more control over their lives, health, and benefits all of society (World Bank, 2018).  The unforeseen Coronavirus pandemic accelerated online education adoption when schools around the globe were forced to close their campuses.  While it has been a mixed-bag of results, one theme that has emerged is a call to radically reimagine education as flexible and relational, not only for the sake of the individual learner, but to avoid systemic dystopian futures (Veletsianos and Houlden, 2020; Costello et al., 2020; Selwyn et al., 2020).  Flexible education is not a structure limited to accessibility issues and pedagogical methods, but is rather a mindset of malleability and adaptation (Veletsianos and Houlden, 2020). Relational education can be viewed through the lens of Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) where an individual’s wellbeing, physical environment and emotional state, deeply affect their learning.  In order to extrapolate what that could mean for the future, this paper draws inspiration from 25 Years of EdTech (Weller, 2020)  and looks back on the recent past to identify trends and innovations that will help shape the future; and in conclusion I will make five bold predictions for K12 education in the year 2030.  

SEL can be traced back to Yale University in the year 1968, and studies on its merits began in the 1990s after the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) was founded in 1994 and formally defined the field.  The tenets of SEL are about the awareness and management of an individual’s emotions, effective problem solving, building positive relationships and managing challenging situations capably (Zins and Elias, 2007).  It is a departure from rote memorization with an emphasis on continual practice.  SEL has now been extensively studied across a range of social, economic and cultural contexts. The findings consistently identify three main benefits for students: improved well being, higher academic achievement, and better health choices (OECD, 2021).  

In the late 2010s numerous studies found that Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) improved test scores, increased students’ interest in learning, (Furman et al., 2019;  Muralidharan et al., 2019; Lai et al., 2015; San and Aykac, 2020; Kelly and Rutherford, 2017) and sometimes out-performed the human teacher altogether (Bettinger et al., 2020; Buchel et al., 2020), leading to questions of whether computers could (or should) replace human teachers.  Proponents of such a radical change note that computers can more effectively plan lessons, deliver assessment, and predict student retention (Cui et al., 2022; Ausat et al., 2023).  Economic considerations aside, it seems like there is an opportunity to leverage this on a greater scale.

Around the same time, large language models (LLMs) began training, giving rise to artificial intelligence (AI).  The initial reaction to generative AIs varied greatly depending on the context.  In the field of education, only 52% of people viewed it positively, while 32% viewed it negatively, and 16% remained neutral (Haque et al., 2022).  The positive sentiment centered around opportunities for learning.  LLMs helped children develop reading and writing skills, critical thinking and comprehension skills, and assisted in teaching curriculum with step-by-step instruction for problem solving (Kasneci et al., 2023).  Much of the negative sentiment stemmed from uncertainty and doubt as early iterations would plagiarize essays (Khalil and Er, 2023), provide false or misleading information (Tlili et al., 2023), and perpetuate existing biases of discrimination (Kooli, 2023).  The misrepresentation of information was a two-way street where humans would attribute falsified, overstated, or unsubstantiated claims to the power of AIs (Raji et al., 2022) and science fiction authors wrote about how AI wouldn’t need humans and kill us all (Russel, 2019).  Fortunately LLMs are trained on specific data sets and are not conscious entities.

In 2023, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, a chatbot service offering every student a personal tutor and every teacher an assistant.  Students can ask “why do I need to learn this?” and the AI will make a connection to something the student is interested in.  It also lets students interact with historic and fictional characters; where the AI will answer as if it were that character, allowing for a deeper understanding of literary themes and historical contexts.  Teachers employ Khanmigo to assist with lesson plan generation, report writing, and student assessment, freeing up time to develop and deepen healthy relationships with students (Khan Academy, 2023).    

Finally, much attention in education has recently been drawn to the “digital divide” meaning inequalities around access to digital devices and content.  There are several ways in which the digital divide can be conceptualized, and different approaches lead researchers to emphasize different aspects of the problem (Yu et al., 2018).  It is viewed as a socio-econmic issue perpetuating a gap between developed and developing countries on a global scale, and a demographics gap within populations.  The numbers are alarming but do not always paint an accurate picture.  According to the UN, two thirds of school age children do not have internet access at home (UN, 2020).  Inevitably some will not, but that does not mean these 1.3 Billion children do not have access to the internet, it simply means they do not have a router at home.  Similarly, when the Mayor’s Office in New York City published a report stating that one-in-four homes do not have internet access (NYC.gov, 2020), they are not taking into account that seniors, prisoners and low-income earners are often accessing the internet elsewhere.  

Rather than one universal vision of K12 education within the context of the current system for the year 2030, I offer a few general predictions.  First, in an age where AI has replaced most analysis jobs, I expect that teachers will spend most of their time as supervisors, trainers, sages, and interventionists; leaving the lesson planning, dissemination of curriculum, and assessment of students in the capable hands of AI.  I further predict there will be a myriad of AI teachers to choose from, much like we have generalist and specialist teachers, and multiple content platforms for the same medium, we can expect the same for AIs.  Second, AIs will teach for mastery of concepts, ideas, and execution before allowing students to progress to the next level of achievement and as a result student demographics will start to blend in relation to their level of achievement rather than separate students by age, although for the average student it stands to reason that most of their peers in any given class will be of a similar biological age.  Third, I predict a greater emphasis on SEL at school, both in and out of the classroom, particularly in group environments.  AIs will use facial recognition and biometrics to detect when students are struggling and call for human support to assist when automated interventions fail.  This is not to be confused with an Orwellian oversight, but rather having effective diagnostic tools to identify deviations from the individual’s baseline in a holistic manner.  Fourth, with a greater emphasis on the individual and flexibility, the daily schedule will unfold over a longer (or shorter) period of time, as opposed to the standard 8-hours a day, 40 hours a week.  Since students will be able to access their AI teachers on demand, there will no longer be a requirement to study at suboptimal times.  Finally, in an effort to narrow the global digital divide, I expect more schools to be the primary point of internet access for many students, especially within under-served communities, potentially leading to an increase of boarding schools where students can be connected 24/7.

References

Alam, A. (2021). Should Robots Replace Teachers? Mobilisation of AI and Learning Analytics in Education. 2021 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication, and Control (ICAC3), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICAC353642.2021.9697300

Ausat, A. M. A., Massang, B., Efendi, M., Nofirman, N., & Riady, Y. (2023). Can Chat GPT Replace the Role of the Teacher in the Classroom: A Fundamental Analysis. Journal on Education, 5(4), 16100–16106. https://doi.org/10.31004/joe.v5i4.2745

Bettinger, E., Fairlie, R., Kapuza, A., Kardanova, E., Loyalka, P., & Zakharov, A. (2020). Diminishing Marginal Returns to Computer-Assisted Learning (w26967; p. w26967). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w26967

Bozkurt, A., Jung, I., Xiao, J., Vladimirschi, V., Schuwer, R., Egorov, G., Lambert, S. R., Al-Freih, M., Pete, J., Olcott Jr., D., Rodes, V., Aranciaga, I., Bali, M., Alvarez Jr., A. V., Roberts, J., Pazurek, A., Raffaghelli, J. E., Panagiotou, N., de Coëtlogon, P., … Paskevicius, M. (2020). A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19 Pandemic: Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 15(1), 1–126. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3878572

Büchel, K., Jakob, M., Kühnhanss, C., Steffen, D., & Brunetti, A. (2020). The Relative Effectiveness of Teachers and Learning Software: Evidence from a Field Experiment in El Salvador. University of Bern Social Sciences Working Papers. https://ideas.repec.org//p/bss/wpaper/36.html

Costello, E., Brown, M., Donlon, E., & Girme, P. (2020). ‘The Pandemic Will Not be on Zoom’: A Retrospective from the Year 2050. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 619–627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00150-3

Cui, Y., Song, X., Hu, Q., Li, Y., Sharma, P., & Khapre, S. (2022). Human-robot interaction in higher education for predicting student engagement. Computers and Electrical Engineering, 99, 107827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2022.107827

Ferman, B., Finamor, L., & Lima, L. (2019, June 27). Are Public Schools in Developing Countries Ready to Integrate EdTech into Regular Instruction? [MPRA Paper]. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/109063/

Haque, M. U., Dharmadasa, I., Sworna, Z. T., Rajapakse, R. N., & Ahmad, H. (2022). “I think this is the most disruptive technology”: Exploring Sentiments of ChatGPT Early Adopters using Twitter Data (arXiv:2212.05856). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.05856

Kasneci, E., Sessler, K., Küchemann, S., Bannert, M., Dementieva, D., Fischer, F., Gasser, U., Groh, G., Günnemann, S., Hüllermeier, E., Krusche, S., Kutyniok, G., Michaeli, T., Nerdel, C., Pfeffer, J., Poquet, O., Sailer, M., Schmidt, A., Seidel, T., … Kasneci, G. (2023). ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education. Learning and Individual Differences, 103, 102274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2023.102274

Kelly, D. P., & Rutherford, T. (2017). Khan Academy as Supplemental Instruction: A Controlled Study of a Computer-Based Mathematics Intervention. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(4). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i4.2984

Khalil, M., & Er, E. (2023). Will ChatGPT get you caught? Rethinking of Plagiarism Detection (arXiv:2302.04335). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.04335

Khanmigo Education AI Guide. (n.d.). Khan Academy. Retrieved October 29, 2023, from https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-labs

Kooli, C. (2023). Chatbots in Education and Research: A Critical Examination of Ethical Implications and Solutions. Sustainability, 15(7), 5614. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15075614

Lai, F., Luo, R., Zhang, L., Huang, X., & Rozelle, S. (2015). Does computer-assisted learning improve learning outcomes? Evidence from a randomized experiment in migrant schools in Beijing. Economics of Education Review, 47, 34–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2015.03.005

Muralidharan, K., Singh, A., & Ganimian, A. J. (2019). Disrupting Education? Experimental Evidence on Technology-Aided Instruction in India. American Economic Review, 109(4), 1426–1460. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20171112

Nations, U. (n.d.). Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations. Retrieved October 28, 2023, from https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

NYC.gov (Jan, 2020) The New York City internet master plan.  Retrieved October 28, 2023, from http://www.nyc.gov/assets/cto/downloads/internet-master-plan/NYC_IMP_1.7.20_FINAL-2.pdf

OECD. (2021). Beyond Academic Learning: First Results from the Survey of Social and Emotional Skills 2019. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/92a11084-en

Raji, I. D., Kumar, I. E., Horowitz, A., & Selbst, A. (2022). The Fallacy of AI Functionality. 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 959–972. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533158

Rao, A., Hilton Iii, J., & Harper, S. (2017). Khan Academy Videos in Chinese: A Case Study in OER Revision. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3086

Russell, S. (2019). Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. Viking.

Şan, İ., & Aykaç, T. (2020). Effect of khan academy-aided teaching on academic achievement in English course. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 15(5), 1107–1116. https://doi.org/10.18844/cjes.v15i5.5174

Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2020). What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944

Tlili, A., Shehata, B., Adarkwah, M. A., Bozkurt, A., Hickey, D. T., Huang, R., & Agyemang, B. (2023). What if the devil is my guardian angel: ChatGPT as a case study of using chatbots in education. Smart Learning Environments, 10(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-023-00237-x

Veletsianos, G., & Houlden, S. (2020). Radical Flexibility and Relationality as Responses to Education in Times of Crisis. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 849–862. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00196-3

Weller, M. (2020, February). 25 Years of Ed Tech. AU Press—Digital Publications. https://read.aupress.ca/projects/25-years-of-ed-tech  

World Development Report 2018: Learning to Realize Education’s Promise. (n.d.). [Text/HTML]. World Bank. Retrieved October 28, 2023, from https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018

Yu, B., Ndumu, A., Mon, L. M., & Fan, Z. (2018). E-inclusion or digital divide: an integrated model of digital inequality. Journal of Documentation, 74(3), 552–574. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2017-0148

Zins, J. E., & Elias, M. J. (2007). Social and Emotional Learning: Promoting the Development of All Students. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 17(2–3), 233–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/10474410701413152

I’m currently on vacation in Ha Giang Province, northern Vietnam.  It has given me plenty of time to do the assigned readings and contrast them against a remote rural environment.  Here many children don’t attend school, they help in their parents’ shops, sit idly in traditional dress waiting for tourists to come around and charge admission to the most picturesque viewpoints, or simply rub their bellies and ask for handouts as people pass by.  Still, many do attend school as we see them walking home in their uniforms in small groups, similar to how their parents would have 25 years earlier.  It’s a society that still deals in cash, there isn’t a visa sign or credit card terminal to be found, they’ve totally bypassed that technology, but you can instantly pay for things digitally by scanning QR codes if you’ve got cellular service.

I think the most salient point in all the readings is a line from Selwyn et al., (2020) who wrote “For every recently installed holographic display, there is likely to be a 10-year-old plasma screen flickering away around the corner.”  I don’t expect the classrooms of tomorrow to look anything like they do today.  Macgilchrist et al., (2020) envisioned a future where multiple tech companies offered AI/AR environments for learning, but I wonder if the shift will be significantly greater than that across all of society and not just in the classroom.  I sincerely believe that personal AI assistants will change how we live, and in turn, what we learn.  There will surely be multiple AI offerings available as there already are, and each one will develop its own niche and target market to truly champion the individual and their needs. I’m eager to pull on that thread and to ponder what that means not only for me but the world as a whole.  

References:

Macgilchrist, F., Allert, H., & Bruch, A. (2020). Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2019.1656235

Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2020). What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944

Sal Khan is the actualization of my vision for online education. He is on a mission to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.  He is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, which offers free video tutorials for millions of students around the globe in 36 different languages.  They are currently launching Khanmigo, an AI tutor for learners -slash- AI assistant for teachers.  But what about the human interaction element of education?  Well, during Covid he helps develop the Schoolhouse platform, which offers free real-time video tutoring with vetted volunteers from all around the world.  And it is all nonprofit. 

Ironically, I chose him for this project haphazardly.  I didn’t know anything other than Khan Academy helps math students, and when my peers were bemoaning the lack of diversity in EdTech, I thought maybe whoever founded it was middle eastern (turns out he’s born and educated in the USA).  And he’s not marginalized either, he is arguably one of, if not the most, successful people in EdTech.  His Youtube channel has over 8M subscribers, he’s got donations from influential people like Elon Musk and has recently appeared as a guest on Bill Gates’ podcast.

There are a number of things that have stood out to me in reading Weller’s 25 years of Ed Tech.  The first is that he felt it necessary to point out that he may have taken some liberties with the timeline, as if somehow his analysis is rendered less valid because he got a year or sequence wrong.  That being said, it is interesting that he chose to start with message boards, and not the web or any software that came prior. 

I’ve long ago learned about HTTP and URLs but had never considered the design of the web as a networked system before.  So in reading Weller’s description of a robust, decentralized, and open system, my mind immediately went to bitcoin.  The biggest Eureka! moment for me was the realization that these two technologies share the same design principles: that they are open and available for anyone to participate; that they are decentralized, running through numerous  nodes and not owned or controlled by any one entity; and that they are robust and designed to survive attack.  I don’t think those are coincidences but rather a lesson for me that demonstrates the depth and importance of design.  

Another lesson in design was the chapter on wikis.  It’s interesting how the culture of openness led to the design of a system that’s not particularly revolutionary in its technical elements, but has become the oracle for truth online.  I’ve yet to participate in creating or editing a wiki but I’m eager to learn more.

Finally, the most contentious chapter was the one on e-learning.  Because of where it’s situated on the timeline, it wasn’t ready for primetime and e-learning gets subjugated as a brand, the e-commerce of education in the midst of a dotcom boom.  Today, e-learning theory espouses many of the same principles found in other works towards a unifying theory of online education.  Let the ivory towers debate about whether face-to-face is as good as it gets til the end of time, the reality is that it’s entirely situational and that most learning environments exist outside of lecture halls. 

Team Quality highly values your insights and feedback. Please do not hesitate to share any thoughts or perspectives you might have on self-efficacy or complexity/systems theory. Additionally, if you have any questions or comments regarding the topic discussed, we would be more than happy to provide further clarification or delve deeper into any specific areas of interest.