Future of education

This is going to be a pretty jam packed post so brace yourself.

You probably know that I'm a big fan of online education. In my mind, online educational giants like the Khan Academy and Coursera are so valuable, not because they just produce a lot of free educational content, but because they are the first real innovators in personalized education. What do I mean by that? Well let's consider the traditional classroom. Students are grouped by age (not by ability) into different classes where they are forced to learn the basics; Math, English, History etc. It's only by the end of high school that students have limited control over the classes they can enroll in. Don't get me wrong, I think young students should be exposed to all the core subjects to teach them the fundamentals of physics, math and literacy, but what I don't like is how students are grouped by age and are forced to move at the pace the teacher sets. Faster kids get bored, slower kids get disinterested, and the whole class dynamic is only glued together by social pressure and authority. If implemented correctly, online education can fix all these problems and more. Imagine a school where:
1) The syllabus is an organized on an online Learning Management System (LMS) that is flexible enough to allow students to customize the subjects they're more interested in (eg focus more on African empires in history class), but rigid enough such that students still need to learn the basics.
2) The classroom is flipped. Most of the lecturing content is done entirely online, and physical classrooms are organized by subject, not by age. The purpose of the classroom is to apply the theory through example problems / group projects. The teacher is no longer an authority figure, but a mentor and a motivator. Peer to peer tutoring is encouraged.

Now I know what you're thinking:

1) How can we trust that kids will be self motivated /disciplined enough to watch lectures online and tailor their own learning experience.
This is a big one. At younger ages, kids definitely need more guidance and face to face teaching. Clearly this whole system is for kids that have reached a certain maturity level. For starters, I think each student should have their own mentor and be scheduled to meet regularly. Ideally the mentor will be able to identify and fix red flags through online analytics. Small things like gamifying content can help motivate (especially male) students. But most importantly, the LMS needs to be well implemented, comprehensive and engaging. My high school, Knox, got this step horribly wrong. They were experimenting with the 'laptop program' but had no LMS, homemade educational content, censoring, or even staff that knew enough about computers. Instead laptops were viewed as a supplement to the traditional classroom which inevitably resulted in students playing computer games and watching porn in class.

2) Won't tailored content be a bureaucratic nightmare? What about grading?
It would be a bureaucratic nightmare if we stuck to the old school way of grading. Recording attendance, homework, assignments and projects can be done automatically. Rather than grade the student based almost exclusively on a final exam, a progress report of the student can be generated automatically using multiple inputs including; video watch time, attendance, example problem scores, RATE of learning, peer to peer tutoring etc. Imagine all the useful data that has historically been ignored by only recording a final letter grade! Khan Academy already has a working version of this, but in my mind there is a long way to go.

3) Won't kids get embarrassed studying with younger students?
I don't know a way out of this one. It constantly amazes me how much our ape like instincts leak out in weird ways. It influences how we dress, sleep, work, socially interact, everything. No matter, how much a school is modernized, it will never be able to undo the deeply engraved biological impulses students have been evolutionary programmed with. It's true that if a really talented younger kid wants to 'specialize' in the same subject an older weaker student, then they will be in the same class. And maybe this will be a huge cause of embarrassment that will cause the older kid to disengage. I don't know. However, I suspect that once the expectation is clearly changed from an age based system to a results based system, where there are multiple ways to get a high 'score', perhaps this form of embarrassment won't be so prominent. And even if it is, is it any better than the existing system of having a severely multi talented class which secretly mocks and judges other students?

In summary, online learning is already a huge part of education. Students use YouTube and Wikipedia all the time. At the moment, this content is not utilized fully when treated as an additional supplement of teaching material to the traditional educational system. However, if implemented correctly, I think it can revolutionize the educational system. The old school way of teaching perfectly paralleled the industrial revolution style of working - a 9-5 with fixed outcomes. Now that jobs are becoming more flexible and creative, I think it pays to have an educational system which is based in part on self motivation, flexibility and personalized learning.