Education 2.0: The Destructive Reconstruction of Higher Learning
AN UNPRECEDENTED — and massively overdue — wave of innovation in the higher education industry is about to be unleashed, and it will bring unprecedented disruption to the field.
The waves of digitalization of content, connectivity and interactions that have disrupted the media, retail, travel, entertainment, publishing, manufacturing and financial industries are about to strike the higher education industry, presenting a massive opportunity for the redesign of a field whose practices have remained unchanged since the early 1000s.
This is not a typo: Early Renaissance paintings depicting classrooms and historical accounts of learning practices both indicate that the basic choreography of content, context, learner-teacher interactions, and structured drilling and quizzing as a prerequisite to certification have not changed for more than 1,000 years. The lecture-problemsrecitation- exam format — canonized by repeated and unquestioned practice in early modern Europe and North America — has formed the basis on which learners are sorted, measured, incentivized, evaluated and ‘taught’.
Remarkably, these practices have persisted in spite of a century’s worth of empirical evidence — in cognitive and applied psychology, in educational practice, and more recently in artificial intelligence — that there are faster, better, cheaper ways of helping learners acquire new skills than those that populate current college and university classrooms and labs. Spaced learning, variable-delay reinforcement- based learning, socialized learning, hyper-resolution feedback, problem-based learning — amongst others and — i.e. the application of a skill outside of the context in which it is acquired.
