The Future of Education – What will it Look Like?

1. Solving the Main Problem

The main problem in education is an economic one. Unlike most other human activities, in education labor productivity does not grow over time. A thousand years ago, a lecturer stood in front of an audience in Oxford or Bologna and told his lecture. For a thousand years, the productivity of a lecturer has not changed at all. And this is a problem because, in all other industries, labor productivity is constantly growing. For a unit of time, we can make more cars, more clothes, and more food. As a result, people have better access to food, clothing, information, but not to a high-quality education.

However, we have found a solution that can fix this problem. We have found a way to quickly increase the quality and scale of education based on the number of people who will receive it – open online courses.

Thanks to open online courses, we can take the best teacher in the world, the conditional Aristotle, and extend his course to an infinite number of people, hundreds of thousands, millions of people around the world. Per student, the cost of such a course will be symbolic. This is a true revolution that will allow us in the next 10-15 years to provide very high-quality education to a huge number of people.

2. Transition from Passive to Active Learning

Scientists have been studying learning for ages, but have discovered very little. One thing they established for sure is that only active learning is effective. The problem is that the classical form of teaching at school and at the university is passive. A lecture, a teacher’s story about something is ineffective. Everyone knows about this, but universities and schools continue to build on the old principles.

These days the fundamental thing is happening – an old lecture type of teaching is being abandoned. Open online courses are just the first step (albeit primitive). They are no longer passive by definition – in addition to video lectures, and interactive tasks, there are also forums for students to collaborate and share knowledge and opinions.

Educational mobile applications are a new emerging trend. Next will be virtual reality, or the ability to view interactive content, for example, molecular schemes, geographical maps, space maps, DNA structure, etc. Along with virtual reality comes an augmented reality – when we can display an image in real space through a smartphone, a special application, or augmented reality glasses.

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