In this class we want to talk about education. If there's a family business frankly, for us it's probably education. My wife is a retired teacher, my mother was a teacher. My, great-aunt and my sister all were teachers. I've never really left school. I started nursery school probably when I was three years old and I'm still here, still trying to get a straw. {LAUGH] . And we educated our two sons through college. And I think maybe we're exhausted from that and that's why we haven't done much for your education. A little history here. Boston Latin School was founded in 1635. And, it turns out that homeschooling had been the predominant and was the predominant method of education until the nineteenth century. And, in the US, actually there is a movement back towards homeschooling. A lot of Families are schooling their children at home. By about 1870 all states had free elementary schools and it wasn't until the twentieth century that laws law came in making it mandatory to attend school, usually through 14, 15, 16years of age. According to the census report in 2009, there were 77 million Children and adults enrolled f-, in schools from nursery school to college. And we see that our population is a little over 300 million, so a pretty good percentage of us are students. There are 55 million in Pre-K through high school. It turns out that 11.2 million 5 to 17 year olds were speaking something other than English at home. And this is one of our problems in the United States, is providing education for the, the wonderful diversified population that we have in this country. Ninety-eight thousand, almost 99,000 schools of which about a third is private. Fourty-four hundred degree granting institutions of higher education and in preparing for this discussion, I looked up these statistics and I was actually kind of surprised at them. I would not have guessed that we had that many. degree granting schools and higher education. Over 7 million teachers over 14 million computers which for 77 million or, or just the ones in k through 12 isn't a whole lot. Given the importance of technology today. What are the problems and opportunities in, and again let me stress the United States, we have extremely high dropout rates, they've been getting a little bit better but they're particularly bad in the inner-cities and in this economy, we're very concerned about Dividing ourselves into two groups of people, those who are highly ex, educated and are able to get very good jobs, and then people who do not have much of an education, so are less educated and are forced into low paying hourly jobs. The United States has wrestled with underacheiving schools, teachers and students. We had a staff member a few years ago that came to the university after teaching in a magnet high school in almost an inner city area, and the thing that discouraged her most about that, and she was teaching english which I think is a pretty interesting subject. Was it, the predominant attitude among the students in the class was that doing well in school just wasn't very cool. So, that's an attitude that we need to change If people are going to be successful after they leave school. On the college side, everyone talks about the rapidly increasing cost of college. This year, we had a trillion dollars in student loans in the United States. And there's been also a lot of criticism of for profit schools. And the model they have for doing business. In fact, that criticism led to some regulations which have actually resulted in lower enrollments in these for profit schools. Education is really a complex system. Obviously, a school has some performance. And the school consists, at least in the, let's talk about k, k through 12 now. The school has children and parents and teachers. And teachers are going to be responsible, or held responsible for some of that performance. There's been a great deal of emphasis on testing. And, and the other side of that is concerns that people will teach to the test, which means that a lot of non-factual, non-rote learning may pushed out. We clearly want students who graduate from any of our schools to be able to think. And there is a great diversity of opinion as to the best way to educate students both for basic facts and skills that they have to know and for the ability to think. Obviously schools depend upon funding. You can't buy, you can't throw all the money in the world at schools and immediately improve their performance, but there is some minimum level that's necessary, and I think we're more at risk of not achieving that minimum than we are of overspending on schools. We've had chronic underinvestment in education, during the financial crisis. School budgets seems to be a target and some of the first things that are cut in an economic downturn and of course we have technology that is impacting the schools. And the funding comes from taxes and people in many places are rebelling against higher taxes to fund schools. So, the system itself is one that has a number of problems that need to be resolved. And finally the community. And, and some people would say that, that schools reflect their community. I believe from the experience I've had in education, that one of the things that makes a huge difference is parents. Is parents who focus on education, who read to children, who encourage them in school, who are actively involved in the school. I think that makes a huge difference in terms of what happens to children in a school setting. Before we look at some of the factors that, that are believed to influence the way children and the way people learn. I'd like to ask you, in a short quiz, what you think the key factors are. So how do we learn. I ran across, an interesting book. by a woman named Susan Ambrose and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University called. How learning works. And I've taken the principals from that book and, and presented them here on this slide. The, they gathered this information from their own experience and from looking at many, many studies of research on education. And so the first factor that influences how people learn is prior knowledge and that certainly makes sense. The model of schooling we have has each grade going from kindergarden on through high school really building on whats been learned in prior years. Organizing knowledge influence how one learns. I think that's one of our big responsibilities as faculty members. There are millions of things you could learn. We could talk about hundreds of kinds of disruptions. My job, the value that I add. To these videos and to this course, is organizing the course, deciding what material goes into it, and then organizing that material in a way that hopefully helps you learn about disruptive technologies. Motivation directs and sustains learning. I put this one in red. Because from many years of teaching different kinds of classes, I will tell you that each class has a different personality, a different vibe to it. But the one common thing among all of the classes is if the students are motivated. If I can motivate the students or if they're self-motivated, things go much better in class. There's more learning, there's better discussion. It's just a much better experience for both the faculty member and for the students. Mastery requires acquiring skills integrating and applying them I used to have a, a guidance counselor in high school who didn't like the standard definition of IQ. my college professor said IQ is what the IQ test measures. He wasn't willing to go any further then that. My high school counselor said, IQ is knowledge And the ability to apply it. And I think what he's emphasizing there is it's not just knowing a fact. It's, how do you integrate those facts? How do you reason? How do you come to conclusions? And then how do you apply them. This is sort of what we've said about managers on executing. How do you execute with the knowledge you have? Goal-directed practice and targeted feedback enhances learning. So we need to give you, as a student, feedback on how you're doing. Current levels of development interact with climate, of course, to impact learning. So, were you are currently has an impact on how well you'll do. So, if you're not prepared for class, and your put into that class, it's going to be very frustrating for you, it's going to be hard to learn, so It, it's a very fine balance. You want people not to be bored, you don't want to repeat things they know already, you want to stretch their minds. But you don't want to stretch them so far that they can't keep up. And that's, a, a very difficult judgement call, that every teacher has to make. Students must learn to monitor and adjust approaches to learning to become self-directed. And I'm going to emphasize this becoming self directed because all of the technology that we're going to talk about in succeeding videos in this class period, they all emphasize that learning online, learning through Coursera, learning other ways online puts more responsibility for learning on the student. It's very difficult, for example, for me to give you much in the way of feedback. We can do some peer-related exercises and you'll get comments back from your peers, we can do multiple choice tests, but I still remember from high school, we used to call those multiple guess tests. So, I'm not sure h, kind of feedback a multiple choice test provides you with. So, again, you have to take the responsibility here. So, how do we teach now in the United States in K through 12? Well, a teacher leads the class. You try to keep all the students moving at the same pace. some are bored, some struggle to keep up and maybe for others, it's just right. And maybe that's the middle of the class. So there are a number of people who are asking is there a better way to do this? And that's something we want to explore. What does the role of technology in possibly helping us find a better way. So in summary in this video, we've taken a brief look at education in the U.S. There are problems. It's clear the system works for the most talented. The University of Maryland is graduating well-prepared, well-educated students and many colleges and universities in the United States are. On the other side of the equation there are the dropouts, there are the people who are possibly permanently consigned to low wage jobs. So the challenge we have is to make education work for everyone.
