What if? What if each student could meet the most proper teacher? We live in a world in which education became the biggest differentiator among humans. And just few of us had the luck to meet the mentor that ignited the spark of the kind of knowledge each of us could evolve with. We are different. Some of us can sing better, some of us can understand nature, some of us can do surgery, and some of us can do farming. Is the today educational system able to address this difference properly? Born together with the first industrial revolution, the today educational system had a clear goal very well suited for those times: to create several sorts of students, each addressing properly the segmentation existing in the society, all of them having the same knowledge achieved in a uniform way and used during the whole life. Who was not in line with the others was treated as a scrap and the aim of the system was, among others, to minimize the scrap. After more than 150 years, in the dawn of the third industrial revolution, in the age of creativity, the system seems to be less and less efficient. I strongly believe that this is the reason why more and more students are learning less, are bored and think the school as the place where they have to be, and not as the place that they would love to be. They keep learning in a uniform way, things that they will likely forget immediately after the exam. The most of them learn without any passion, using the same textbooks (electronic, or on paper) following the same curricula and teachers that they never chose. What if each student could have access to his/her most proper teacher? I use to teach since 1984. First, as any young professor I tried to teach in the style of my favorite professors in the University. Then I found my own style and I polished it year after year. I strongly believe that a course or a seminar is about collaboration. It is about questioning each other and rediscovering or even discovering together. It is about exploring as a team. I fully disagree that the students are storage devices in which we should poor the information as we do with our hard disks. I don’t want to create perfect databases able to pop information on demand. I would love to know that my students have a critique eye on everything, that they doubt a lot, that they try to find out alternative ways of approaching the same problem. I write less than I talk and I try to talk less than I listen. After 30 years of teaching I learned that some of the students love this way of teaching and some fully disagree with it. This means that I am a bad teacher for some of my students and they would need somebody else, with a different teaching style, to learn with. What if a human has access to the kind of education that boosts his/her inborn talent for something? I met people that had no learning opportunities, having lots of barriers in their way to their dream profession. They could become great citizens and happy humans. Instead, the society treated them from the beginning as scrap. And this is not just unfair, it is also very inefficient. In my life, I saw so many cases of people that lost their joy to live and their self-esteem, just because they never had the opportunity to evolve how they dreamed to. Or even people that never knew what they could do with joy and passion, bored and feeling that work is life-time drudgery. I believe that we live in a world in which there are more printed and electronic materials than teachers. And I believe that we cannot evolve just using books. Regardless how good and well written they are. And this is because education is not just about knowledge transfer. It is definitely not about how good our memory is. It is not just about how well we can understand something from a book. I believe that is about exploring. I believe that is about having human models. Somehow each course is a reconstruction of the history of the human kind in the area we are learning. And this means not just the history of the past but seeing the future as well. I believe that learning is not a one way process. And I believe that a good teacher is not a scientist, is not a showman, is not a communicator and is not a mentor. It is all of them. This is beyond any sort of standardization. Each instruction session is unique and unrepeatable even if the instructor is the same. And this is because the students are different. This means that for a mature human society it is very important to raise the geographic barriers that can block the access to the teachers a student really needs. It is very important to raise the barriers that block the access of a student to the knowledge he/she was born for. It is very important to transform the school in the place where there is the kind of knowledge and the way it develops the personality of each of us. I tried to use the technology to reach there. One good idea was the use of the massive open online courses (MOOC) where you can access courses taught by great professors. Another good idea is to augment all these materials with virtual teaching objects. They can be very useful when it’s about mathematics or natural or technical sciences, but I saw great teaching objects for arts of history as well. These are proper means to democratize the access to learning. Still the true face-to-face interaction lacks. Up to a point, this may be done (and it is used in webinars) through videoconferencing systems. But a last barrier still stays there: the full feeling that you are in the same classroom, sharing the same blackboard and able to share your notebook as well. Four years ago, a friend of mine asked me if there is something useful for online tutoring. I told her that any videoconferencing system can be used without any problem. Then I said: Wait a minute! How will they share the blackboard or the notebook? I thought about this several days, trying to find out a good screen sharing program that solves this, but always all was limited and unnatural. This drove me quickly to a technology that I developed that virtualize the blackboard and the notebook and allows through a natural interface to create the feeling that both the instructor and the student are in the same room. After I developed the technology and talked a lot with my friend around what the technology should provide, we decided to create a software platform to make it alive and useful. None of us had the money to develop it, so we decided to find an investor. It took more than I wished but less than it usually happen. Fortunately, he is an old friend that has the inborn abilities and the knowledge to organize a business and to monetize it. So, after one year we started to develop the platform that was designed by us to fulfill the face-to-face collaboration that the educational process needs. No less and definitely no more. That means that we avoided all the temptations to make it like a very sophisticated piece of software with lots of features that almost nobody is using. We decided that both the blackboard and the notebook should be used and look like as close as it’s possible with an ordinary blackboard and an ordinary notebook. So we decided to use electronic whiteboards as blackboards and tablets as notebooks and the interface we designed for them was one to make everything to look close to the classic blackboard and notebook. This aspect is very important, because the users should not feel that they are in the front of the computer but interacting with another human. Thus the focus is not on how to use the software but on the educational process. Generally I believe that the technology should not be an intruder but an integrated part of the environment. The server which was responsible with the virtualization and the communication was designed to grant live synchronous access to and from each device in the session. When I first saw lines coming simultaneously from different devices and displayed properly on the surface I was using as a blackboard, I was sure that the idea works and it is useful indeed. We had luck with a very good team of software developers that succeeded to implement the most of the functionalities we designed. Right now we are about to release it and I am confident that it will ease the educational process and fulfill the aspects that are not yet covered. This release works on touch sensitive surfaces in Windows 7 or 8 or on iPads. One year ago I filed the patent application to USPTO and this year to the European Patent Office so both the method and the technology have now the intellectual protection they need to evolve. One year ago we made a movie with the version we had it in that moment. It is here: youtube/watch?v=hcUQHXi0xlE. It works in two basic scenarios: the virtual classroom and the tutoring session. In both of them the participants may be in remote locations, in organized classrooms or using their tablets, respectively. For these two scenarios the platform has two different names: LiveStudies (livestudies) and LiveTutoring (under construction). The software assures the read/write/draw interaction and it works together with any videoconferencing system to provide the hearing and seeing each other functionalities to the users. We tested the method and the software platform with a group of enthusiast professors. It worked well. Now we are working close with two private high schools to deploy it in real world and give them access to larger number of students. We are also working together with a tutoring company to provide online tutoring by using our software. And, I hope that soon one university that wants to enhance its MOOC service will use this learning method as well. I strongly believe that integrating MOOC with videoconferencing and the method I developed will work together soon in the real world providing a new form of education, without geographical and political borders and without social restrictions providing the most appropriate education to more and more humans. Of course, I am on the way to improve the method and the technology. The whole team is on the way to extend the software capabilities and to provide better functionalities. Android client application is almost ready and we concentrate to provide integration with distributed learning objects which may be accessed remotely in a live synchronous way. Education is the new human right that needs a proper approach for each human being regardless where he/she lives. It should be not affected by the social status or wealth. Each human being has is unique and deserves to develop his/her potential as far as possible. If we discover it in time and cultivate his/her talents, the whole human society will develop better and each of us will have the chance to transform the right to pursuit of happiness into a daily reality.
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:55:50 +0000
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