Think Forward #7: Sifting through detritus

Cautionary tales from past K-12 innovations that failed to live up to the hype

CRPE co-hosts the Canopy Project, a national database of learning environments that helps illustrate both the forest and the trees in K-12 innovation. 

Some days, I wonder if we also need a detritus project—a catalog of discarded innovations now decaying on the forest floor.

The excitement surrounding artificial intelligence has made one piece of detritus timely again: Massive open online course, aka MOOCs.

Remember those?

A 2012 New York Times article described a "shimmery hope" that technology could dramatically reduce the need for human teachers to deliver instruction or give feedback on student work. As a result, "free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks."

Now, a new hype cycle is building around the possibility that automated tutors powered by new, more powerful forms of AI have the potential to accelerate learning at scale. 

The failure of MOOCs to live up to their boosters’ shimmery hopes a decade ago should give us pause.

This spring marks ten years since the Florida Legislature passed a bill to dramatically expand online learning options. Among other things, it created the Florida Approved Courses and Tests Initiative to allow middle or high school students to enroll in publicly funded MOOCs in a handful of subjects. 

A decade in, the state's list of approved courses reveals mostly conventional offerings from familiar names in the world of online learning. There's an online classical school that lets students encounter the ideas of Western civilization in virtual reality, but the courses aren't massive or open—just online.

K-12 educators typically treat MOOCs as supplemental resources, validating ed tech researcher Justin Reich's 2013 prediction that they would largely "end up being talking textbooks with auto-graded worksheets, useful in some particular circumstances with particular populations, but, like every previous generation of education technology, ultimately a disappointment that fails to fundamentally improve learning for students."

MOOCs flourished in a few niches outside K-12 education, particularly advanced professional training or continuing education for adults in technical fields who had already earned a degree.

In his book on why technology often fails to disrupt the status quo in education, Reich details one barrier to MOOCs that AI could potentially solve. They often rely on automatic grading software that works far better in math or computer science than English or history.

More advanced AI might make it possible for automatic grading, and therefore, large-scale online courses or automated tutors, to penetrate deeper into the humanities. 

But technological advances won’t change the reality that most students, especially at the K-12 level, simply need the guidance, attention and accountability that only a human educator can provide. 

The combination of AI, decentralized communication networks, and ubiquitous mobile computing have the potential to transform every facet of society. But how that transformation will affect education institutions remains far from clear. 

History suggests new AI-powered learning experiences could flourish in certain niches, but as Reich is fond of arguing, they’re more likely to offer supplemental tools that get domesticated by the existing education system than they are to fundamentally transform it.

Think Fast

• A new paper outlines five ways AI could make teachers significantly more productive. The New York Times spotlights a teacher using AI to generate lessons that students critically evaluate. A worthwhile discussion of AI’s potential in education.

• If human connections are critical to most students’ learning, one path to disruptive innovation may involve connecting humans in new ways. The Christensen Institute maps tools that can help students expand their personal and intellectual networks.

• A new Vela Education Fund report is full of interesting details on the state of education entrepreneurship—including typical monthly costs of different learning options.

• A push for school districts to think about unit economics: How much does an individual course or program cost to deliver? This could help districts offer more individualized learning opportunities to students.

• School choice legislation faces opposition from some homeschooling advocates.
  
  Here’s what seems to be going on: New forms of support that blur the lines between schooling and homeschooling have aided an uptick in parent-directed education. New homeschoolers have different tastes and motivations than earlier, more traditional homeschoolers, and may be more open to blurring the lines. Some traditional homeschoolers don’t want to blur the lines, fearing it could invite government scrutiny.
  
  For this reason, some state legislation creates a firewall between traditional homeschooling and line-blurring policies. Florida’s education savings account bill would create a new classification—a “personalized education program”—for students in homeschool-like arrangements who use ESAs.

• Robert Pondiscio outlines the challenge of supporting 4 million people to work as teachers. What if we reframed the problem? Rather than recruit 4 million people into jobs that look the same for first-year teachers as for 20-year veterans, we could design a more diverse array of teaching jobs that looked different depending on teachers’ interests, skill sets, or experience levels.

Final Thought

“Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.” 

- Thomas Edison, in 1913, on how the technological breakthroughs of his day would transform education (as cited by Reich in Failure to Disrupt).

Header photo credit: Nenad Stojkovic