Changing how we educate radically

[Music]

we are just

seven years old the first time we’re

told that we’re not good enough

but no one actually needs to tell us

that in words we have the whole

education system downgrading us more

than 100 million

students are going to begin first grade

this year worldwide

for many of them it will be the first

time

that they hear or feel that they are not

good enough

and that’s because the education system

is extinguishing their sense of

curiosity

and their sense of exploration we’re

squeezing them in small rooms with 30

students in a room

we’re teaching them in a

one-size-fits-all approach and we’re

telling them that grades aren’t the most

important thing but we’re actually

acting upon us it is

and then after doing all of that we

complain why they’re not engaged in

class

we are creating uninspired human beings

some of these students will find the way

to work with this system

others will just survive through the

next 12 years

but many will struggle i was one of them

i struggled with a very

short attention span and uh interesting

sense of curiosity and exploration

i almost burned down my school when i

was seven by experimenting what happens

when you put up

and tried to light five matchboxes

together

i was just curious i wasn’t trying to

burn or harm anyone

today many years later i understand

that this short attention span and this

interesting sense of exploration is

actually an amazing thing i have so many

thoughts and ideas running through my

head the whole time can you imagine that

hundreds of pop-up notifications running

through your brain every minute

how cool is that just imagine

that we can take that all these thoughts

and ideas

and create learning opportunities out of

them

i was just 24 years old when i

established atik plus education centers

we took underprivileged students and

taught them project-based

learning stem science and technology

education

we used project-based learning because

that basically means

they take a real-world problem and they

take a real product

create a real product to give a solution

to this problem

but more than that what we focused on

was on curiosity-based learning

it’s not that they took any project we

asked them

what do they find interesting what are

they curious about

what are they passionate about what

would they like to solve

and once we understood that we connected

them to industry players and volunteers

professionals

and they created projects together

we managed to raise 10 million dollars

for these projects

we won national and international

competitions they even presented in a

grown-up startup conference in

hong kong and won competitions

later on i established ludus

technologies an e-learning company

focused on gamifying training and

assessment processes

we understood that if we give our

students a calm environment

to get to practice and learn we can

actually assess what they really need

and that is what we focused on

understanding

what they need it’s like you can’t judge

a whale and its ability to climb a tree

nor chimpanzee on its ability to cross

the ocean just like that we need to give

our students the right environment to

flourish

based on my experience i understand

today that there are

five focal areas which i believe if we

invest into them

we will see a huge impact on education

the first area of focal the first area

we should focus on

is the school infrastructure the school

structure the second area we should

focus on

is teacher selection the third area is

teacher training the fourth is

the student experience and the fifth

is technology let’s begin with the first

one

the school infrastructure the school

structure needs to be swapped from these

crowded rooms with 30 students packed in

a room

to big exploration spaces

these spaces are spaces where student

can walk inside

and decide how do they want to learn

inside this discipline or topic or

subject

imagine a history space where a student

can walk in

and decide do they want to learn from a

digital library or maybe from social

activities

maybe they can learn in augmented

reality rooms or virtual reality rooms

maybe they have equipment over there

where they can experiment

or maybe create models of this

historical event that they’ve just

learned about

in these exploration centers we will

have exploration masters

these are teachers which give bite size

lectures maximum 15 minutes

no more than that that’s because the

students attention span today has proven

to be no more than 15 minutes

and more than that we are competing with

youtube

with instagram with tick tock and

snapchat we can’t beat them

we must join them and if we do give

lectures

they have to be different they have to

focus on real world applicability

we just talk to subject we speak about

it for 15 minutes we’ve got to make sure

it’s relevant to what they do in their

regular life environment otherwise they

won’t be able to connect it

the third sorry the second

focal area is the teacher’s selection

we say that the education

or teaching profession is one of the top

five most important professions on earth

but we don’t act as upon it we don’t do

that we don’t

we accept almost anyone for the job

we’ve got to raise the criteria

of people coming into education

applying for education we’ve got to

raise the salaries in order to keep good

people inside and attract good people

from the outside

we’ve got to raise awareness about how

prestige

this profession is

with an amazing branding strategy we can

make sure people understand education

can be the new high-tech

the third focal area is

teacher training we’ve got to allow

teachers to practice more building

autonomous plans build their own plans

and change them frequently

we live in a world of change so they

have to change these plans frequently

they’ve got to remember that the

syllabus

is a compass and not a map there are so

many paths for students to

find their best way to learn and a

teacher should focus on building the

most

passion the best path that the students

are most passionate about

teachers should also be exploration

masters as i said before

they need to find a subject which they

are most passionate about

and learn how to build amazing lessons

and exploration spaces

and keep them updated

teachers should also know how to assess

in many

dimensions of evaluation focus

more on the social and emotional aspects

we know that the biggest performance

driver today is the social and emotional

aspects of a student

we’ve got to make sure the teachers know

how to assess that

and teach that teachers need to know how

to

read data collect data and create

actionable items out of this data

and more than that teachers need to lead

to human growth to personal human growth

and that is what a seven-year-old needs

and a

year 25-year-old need anchors of success

to grow from

we’re told that we grow out of failure

but actually

we grow exponentially from success

and our teachers and educators should

focus on finding the strengths on their

students

provide them with small victories and

leverage their capabilities by doing

that

the fourth focal area is the

student experience what do we experience

while we learn

we should defocus on grades make it

almost taboo

finish with it we do need grades but we

shouldn’t focus on them

and emphasize real world applicability

and curiosity-based learning

if we do that we can teach more

project-based learning teach students

how to

find problems they want to solve and all

curious about

provide solutions with real world

applications and

products or projects connect real

industry players to this

learning and basically improve their

abilities and and the

the willingness to learn create inspired

human beings

another thing about the student

experience is we’ve got to remember

they live in the era of data and

information

information is doubling itself and

tripling itself every day it’s growing

exponentially

not only it’s growing and there’s a lot

of data out there

there’s also a lot of fake news or deep

fake so not only we’ve got to teach our

students how to

swim in association of data and

information

we’ve also got to teach them how to find

the relevant information

and make sure it’s not poisoned

after doing those two apply it to the

real world

the fifth focal area in education is

technology

we’ve got to use machines to support

human beings

and not replace our teachers

the e-learning industry has boomed in

the past year it’s never been so big

in 2020 alone more than 10 billion

dollars

were invested in e-learning solutions

globally

this is a fantastic opportunity for my

own company ludus

and the bbc innovation labs which i’m

leading

to flourish now there are two main

trends which i find extremely

interesting in technology

the first one is the development of open

source education technologies

and the second one is the use of

artificial intelligence to predict

pedagogical

and social and emotional deficits

let’s speak about the first one open

source education technologies

if we develop infrastructures

for edtech innovators and entrepreneurs

to develop applications and

education technologies we could lower

the barrier of getting in it’s extremely

high right now because it cost

hundreds of thousands of dollars for

just the most simple application

because the regulator requirements are

very very high

and also there are different protocols

one once you build

these learning management systems that

require you

a lot of time and money to build it so

if we can build

open source platforms pre-made

infrastructure

which entrepreneurs and edtech

innovators just connect on top of that

into this socket

they can just develop what they want

they don’t need to build the whole

operating system which costs hundreds of

thousands of dollars in

a lot of time to get in so that’s one

thing which today mit’s openedx is doing

and also ludas technologies is

developing this

based on artificial intelligence the

second trend

is artificial intelligence and today i’m

working on three main algorithms the

first one

is called collaborative filtering

algorithms and what they do

is optimize the best learning path for a

student

the way we do this is by following the

data of this student

finding the common patterns which bring

him to succeed and have better

performance

and then suggest to the student that

this is what they should do in order to

improve

not only that we take millions of

similar profiles to this student

and we see the common patterns which

bring them to succeed

then we can suggest your student or

teacher

recommend we can basically predict and

recommend what would be the best way

for the students right now the second

algorithm

in artificial intelligence and machine

learning is textual entailment

what we basically do is we save teachers

and educators

time on creating high quality content

the way we do it

is we take what siri and alexa do just

to remind you siri and alexa you ask

them a question

and they reply back with an answer or

with content

i said why not reverse this why not

allow a teacher to upload a wikipedia

link or an article

and the software will extract ideal

questions and assignments for that

now just imagine a world where a teacher

can have

or a student can have such a smart

system which if you give it content it

gives you assignments and if you give it

assignments it can give you amazing

content to get to the answers

we’re building the first step in what i

call

autonomous content in education

the third algorithm in artificial

intelligence that i’m developing

is what we call the ability to predict

adhd and social and emotional deficits

what we basically do is we train a

computer

to find the common patterns of adhd

students and students with social and

emotional deficits

we understand that if we manage to

predict those

we can find the biggest performance

motivator and

affect that we can intervene on time

so what we would do is we train the

computer to find how do these kind of

students act and then later on

the computer the software can spotlight

students who may need our help

who may need us to intervene and help

them

they may be about to drop out of college

or school and we can stop that we can

help them technology can make us

understand that maybe your students

don’t need another 10 math quizzes maybe

they just need a hug or to feel

appreciated

to conclude we must create adaptive

learning environments

we must we must push towards curiosity

and exploration-based learning

you must teach the teachers provide them

with amazing tools to succeed with their

students

we must use the beauties of technologies

and more than all we must ask ourselves

what kind of leaders and educators do we

want to be

ones which determine human success is

limited to their own consequences

are ones which lead them to succeed

and fulfill their full potential

let’s create an amazing future together

thank you very much