The greatest opportunity
Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay
Unused human potential is something that bothers me to the very core. My dream is equal opportunity to proper education for anyone on the planet. Imagine how many potential geniuses there are in poor countries of the world, that currently lack access to education. Maybe there are one million PhDs out there, just waiting to unleash their ideas upon academia? Imagine how this untapped potential could change the world. How it would increase the growth of human knowledge. How many more research papers would be published every month? The value this would bring is incalculable. Big changes bring big opportunities. The virus induced rapid change to distance learning has suddenly made the dream a reality.
In academia, there has been a long discussion of how a shift towards distance learning should be done in an optimal way. Like waking up to an air raid siren, teachers around the globe suddenly faced a new reality. They had to conduct all their education as distance learning. Academia is like a great ocean-going ship. It can handle rough waters and storms, and complete long voyages with ease. But a great ship cannot change direction quickly. Is it possible that Covid-19 is for academia what the fatal iceberg was for the Titanic? I do not believe that Academia will sink. The iceberg might make a massive dent in the hull, and what emerges on the other side after repairs will be very different to what we are used to. I am certain that the changes will be an improvement.
Education is a two-way system that consists of various learning activities like lectures, assigned reading, group assignments, laboratory work, role-playing, case-study… The list goes on and on. Each activity creates knowledge from both within and as external input. The various learning activities could perhaps be arranged in a knowledge creation scale with internal (student focused) on one end and external (content focused) on the other. Let us discuss one of the most common forms of learning activity – Lectures. A lecture is like a 1-2-hour monologue, with little or no interactivity. Lectures are thus quite far to the “external” side of the spectrum. At least in the STEM field (my domain), lectures are very common, and they have very low interactivity. Therefore, they are perfect for distance learning conversion. They are low hanging fruit and a good place to start.
I know there are many university teachers who do their lectures, year after year, as offline monologues in the classroom, and when they retire, the whole course material that has been polished for decades retire with them, never to be seen again. Here’s another waste of potential that bothers me a lot. All we have to do is to record every lecture and put it online in the public domain. I have done it with my own traditional classroom lectures for a couple of years, and the quality improvement this has resulted in is staggering. People from all around Sweden have contacted me and provided me with feedback. People who are working in the field that I teach! They know precisely what they wish that their teacher should have told them. And now they are passing this information on to me, so I can include it in my next round of online lectures. It feels like the quality of my content has increased by a factor of ten. It’s not that surprising either. If 300 people watch the lecture instead of 30 students in a classroom, you get ten times more potential feedback. The next step will come this spring when I shift to the English language. Then I can reach the whole world, instead of just the Swedish speakers. Also, by using the large world languages, YouTube can automatically transcribe the lecture with subtitles in just about any language of choice. Give it five more years and the audio stream will dub the voice. Give it another five years, and the video feed will lip-sync using my own voice. It’s coming.
The next Einstein is sitting with a smartphone in a hut somewhere in Africa or India, just waiting for quality content to be uploaded. Covid-19 is about to give him the keys to the Ferrari.