A few nights ago I sat with the superintendent of a suburban school district in Massachusetts and discussed questions we would ask prospective candidates in a principal search with which I am helping. Technology in the classroom and homework came up, which, along with student stress in high performing schools, are an educators’s topics du jour. In a nod to both subjects, the superintendent brought up recent research surrounding the practice of “flipping the classroom” -- having students use out of school time to learn a topic or watch a lecture, and use in school time to teach and challenge students’ knowledge of that topic through Socratic means. The research shows that such an approach dramatically increases the learning and retention for students in underperforming schools, and also increases performance and reduces student stress in higher performing schools.
We digressed from the topic of the principal search and role played what it would take for this particular suburban district to ‘flip the classroom’. The response was somewhat obvious; aside from having to completely reteach teaching methodology to teachers, and get a highly critical parent population adverse to change on board, the main stumbling block was technology. Specifically, the need for a technology platform that would allow and empower teachers to deliver their lectures on-line for consumption by students out of school.
That very next day, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a truly groundbreaking $60 million joint partnership called edX, an open-source technology platform to deliver online courses. What is unique about edX is not only that it is sponsored jointly by the world’s two greatest research institutions, but that the technology is being offered to anyone. Free and open-source. Moreover, the platform is not a run-of-the-mill “click & watch” online learning service, but includes modules for self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories. All of this will be supported by a research team to assess how students learn and the effectiveness of the online learning model, which, to date, is the greatest weakness in the entire conversation about technology in the classroom.
Perhaps more so than Apple’s ‘walled garden’ approach to eBooks and its desire to reshape the delivery of classroom content, the potential ramifications of edX on education infrastructure are enormous. At the university level, the impacts are clear - as a learner, you will gain access to MIT/Harvard level content from anywhere in the world with an internet connection. This continues to flatten the world, lowering barriers to access to educational content such that the only thing standing between you and increasing your knowledge is your will and access to the internet.
In the US, many people take for granted the public library system as a social institution providing for a community’s open and free access to books, periodicals, and general literacy services. Today’s public library system is relatively new, taking stage little more that 100 years ago, under the leadership and philanthropic support of magnate Andrew Carnegie, who’s foundation built nearly 1,700 libraries in 20 years. These, and subsequent, community libraries transformed the lives of generations through common access to content. The weakness in the public library system has always been, however, facilities (location, cost to build & maintain, etc.) and equal access to content, both symptomatic of a socioeconomic divide. The edX initiative, as designed, negates these infrastructure weaknesses, and in that regard can be even more impactful than the proliferation of the public libraries in further leveling the playing field for educational services of college level content.
And what of K-12 education? School systems and leaders are now faced with one of the most exciting opportunities they have had in years. If edX performs as billed, K-12 systems have at their disposal a platform around which they may radically reform the classroom experience and the in-school/out-of-school dynamic. For an investment little more than what some systems budget for so-called SmartBoards, computers in the classroom, and “clickers”, the open source edX may be adapted for the flexible delivery of lessons to students away from school, the sharing of lectures and methodologies between districts, the normalization of home schooling efforts, and the leveraging of other technologies (like Skype) to cost effectively flatten variations in the educational experience across distances.
No matter what technology tools we have at our disposal, “good teaching is good teaching,” as one master teacher recently told me, and we should not lose sight of that. However, with edX, the content revolution just got a whole lot more complicated and existing education infrastructure must prepare itself to respond.
