Transforming the way we learn and teach through technology

Think back to the days when you attended school and you may recall images of your teacher presenting lessons on a blackboard in front of you.

(Better teachers never showed you their backs.) And think back to the assessment of your learning progress, when success depended on your ability to recall facts and dates, or whether you could reliably follow rigid procedures to “get the right answer”.

Recall the many long hours you spent day-dreaming or doodling through many of your lessons because you couldn't see their relevance. 

Now think of a classroom in the future in which your teacher behaves more like a mentor or coach, working at your side, engaged in your personal, active learning experience.

Imagine learning in a school environment in which walls or desktops function as interactive displays around which you and your friends gather to collaborate on a problem relevant to you. Imagine working with your own lightweight, wirelessly-connected, digital device—one that you control with voice and gestures. 

Now imagine that the device can track your learning progress by silently monitoring your interactions and creating a profile that characterises how you learn best: what is the starting point, what are the most efficient teaching approaches, representations and motivators and so on.

Consider that based on this learning profile, your device could “consult” with your teacher, to create an individual learning path for you that would keep you in the learning flow.

Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” curriculum, you would experience personally engaging content that is neither so hard that it frustrates you, nor so easy that it bores you. And imagine that you are assessed on a very personal level, through “tests” or performances that take into account your individual progress and acknowledge what you have already achieved. 

Welcome to Gutenberg 2 

If this sounds far-fetched, consider the historical impact of printing press technology, which completely transformed the way we represent knowledge, share ideas and learn. We are living through a similar Gutenberg period again; one in which the representation of ideas and knowledge has shifted from typeset characters and ink to more fluid and dynamic digital forms and pixels.

This paradigm shift in knowledge representation and communication has already made a deep and lasting impact on the world—creating an inescapable requirement for schooling to change.

Flexible, emerging technologies can support new approaches to teaching and learning in ways that are impossible in curriculums based entirely on print and lecture.

Amplifying this potential, science has revealed new findings about how learning happens. Thanks to brain imaging technologies, we can now directly observe the impact of learning experiences on three elaborate nerve networks in the brain: the recognition, strategic and affective networks. This better understanding of how people learn, coupled with the unique capabilities of technology, have begun to change how a classroom looks, the way teachers teach, and the way students learn in a positive way.

But how can we broaden access to these capabilities to make this potential available to all learners? What aspects of education need to change? To succeed, we must focus our efforts on transforming teaching and learning. 

Transforming teaching and learning 

The transformation of any well-established, social system is never easy. And the insertion of technology on its own will not ensure a positive transformation. Left on its own, the system will usually apply technology to serve existing (not transformative) ends.

A number of key drivers must combine to increase the likelihood of a transformational outcome that benefits from the unique, augmenting capabilities of emerging, digital media. 

Professional Learning. Perhaps most important, teachers need to have opportunities to better understand the ways in which they can use these technologies to transform their teaching practices so that their students can benefit. As a main objective, teaching has always focused on enabling young people to think for themselves. Technology will not change this objective. But, properly designed and applied technology can make it possible for teachers to teach their students how to learn; not through a “mass process”, but in their own way. We have to accept that teaching in the context of these capabilities is better for both teacher and student and adapt teaching methods to leverage what technology really makes possible. 

Real-time, Adaptive, Assessment. Given the global emphasis on the development of 21st century skills—creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking—the focus of education assessment must change too. Technology can enable the assessment of each student’s personal performance, in real-time. It can capture an individual’s learning progress and conclude what students already know and what they don’t. It can then determine the most efficient way for them, working with their teacher, to achieve their learning goals. We must now recognise that our measures of what’s important to know have to align with the skills required to function effectively and live a happy, fulfilling life in this rapidly changing world. 

Interactive Content. Taken together, changes in knowledge representation, new interactive possibilities, and seamless content distribution systems require content providers to change their development approaches and business models. As the nature and focus of content changes to address 21st century requirements, so must the curriculum. To function effectively in a transmedia age, students and teachers must have access to, learn to use and learn to create materials that reflect more modern forms of representation and communication.

Dr Wayne C Grant is director of the user experience team, Intel Education. He focusses on the long term roadmap for products, in terms of definition and design and is guided by what the future of education could look like. He manages 15 people over the globe that have spent the last 8-9 years going into classrooms to better understand the drivers for technology in education.