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