{"id":248,"date":"2023-10-29T20:01:24","date_gmt":"2023-10-29T13:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/?p=248"},"modified":"2023-10-29T20:01:25","modified_gmt":"2023-10-29T13:01:25","slug":"speculative-futures-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/speculative-futures-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"Speculative Futures Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

K12 education in the year 2030<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matt Poole<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Royal Roads University<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LRNT523 Foundations of Learning and Technologies<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Elizabeth Childs<\/p>\n\n\n\n

October 29, 2023<\/p>\n\n\n\n

K12 education in the year 2030<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Education raises peoples\u2019 productivity, income, gives them more control over their lives, health, and benefits all of society (World Bank, 2018).\u00a0 The unforeseen Coronavirus pandemic accelerated online education adoption when schools around the globe were forced to close their campuses.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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\u2019s wellbeing, physical environment and emotional state, deeply affect their learning.\u00a0 In order to extrapolate what that could mean for the future, this paper draws inspiration from 25 Years of EdTech<\/a><\/em> (Weller, 2020)\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the late 2010s numerous studies found that Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) improved test scores, increased students\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t need humans and kill us all (Russel, 2019).  Fortunately LLMs are trained on specific data sets and are not conscious entities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2023, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, a chatbot service offering every student a personal tutor and every teacher an assistant.  Students can ask \u201cwhy do I need to learn this?\u201d 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).    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, much attention in education has recently been drawn to the \u201cdigital divide\u201d 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\u2019s 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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References<\/strong><\/h1>\n\n\n\n

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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\u2019 productivity, income, gives them more control over their lives, health, and benefits all of society (World Bank, 2018).\u00a0 The unforeseen Coronavirus pandemic accelerated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":301,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt523"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/301"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0284\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}