The Future of Learning

Many of us (including me and some of my friends) have gone through high school and college, cursing the way certain subjects were taught. It's not the fault of the teachers but the fault of the system. And with the changing times and technological advancement, the education system has to evolve too. Given the fact that there is generally a lack of good teachers around the whole world, we need to come up with something which will solve the problem of education. So being an addicted internet user, I was browsing through some YouTube videos when I came across a video about some basic topics on physics by a channel MinutePhysics, and I was fascinated with it! In the following days, I found few more channels which had similar educational yet interesting videos. So while I was getting more and more educational video recommendations, I bumped into a few TED talks about changing the educational system, and this post is about them. (Even if you don't read my commentary about the videos, I strongly suggest you should watch all of them.)

What is really the problem of the public education system?

The first one that I came across was by Sir Ken Robinson on what is wrong with the current education system (Do Schools Kill Creativity?) in which he talks about how education destroys creativity. As he says in the talk “Everybody is born as an artist, but we are educated out of creativity.” Who does actually benefit from the current system? As he points out, the education system was developed in the interest of industrialization and in the image of it. Schools are organised like factory lines, producing workers. We should stop teaching in schools with the production line mentlity. In other video (Bring on the Learning Revolution – I especially love the part between 10-15 min) he talks about reforming the education system to help kids to discover what they love to do rather than standardising everything. (I should mention here that I have become a great fan of Sir Robinson. He has such a great sense of humour and a British accent! No wonder his talks are so interesting!)

What can we do about it?

The talks from Sir Robinson summarize what is wrong with the education system. But what can we do about it? There is a brilliant talk by Sugata Mitra (SugataMitra's new expetiments in self teaching) on a radically new experiment and I don't want to take away any surprises by talking about it so you should go ahead right away and see it.

(Now assuming you have seen the above mentioned video) That was one way to reform education. What else can we do? Here is a talk by Salman Khan (No, not THAT Salman Khan) about how he got the idea about creating small videos about different topics which grew so much and went on to become one of the largest online high-school and undergrad level learning website. (Let's use video to reinvent education) (My favourite line - “If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos about Calculus, I wouldn't have to!”) You can also go through this video for Khan's motivation and ideas (Year 2060: EducationPredictions)

And Salman Khan isn't the only one doing this, there are plenty of others who are following the same tracks where they want to convolve (YouTube like) videos to teach common things to students with exercises on websites which will monitor their progress, while teachers can focus on individual educational needs of children.

Another interesting video that I came across was by John Green. (PaperTown Academy) He talks about his thoughts as a student on growing up and getting a job, how he became a learner, and how the online community encourages students to get engaged into learning in a very entertaining way!

To finish off this compilation, I would recommend you to watch the following video (The Future of Learning, Networked Society ).

You can see that we are on the verge of a significant change in the educational system and it has already began and all of us should do whatever possible to improve the lives of the next generations!