Q&A: The Educational World Is Flat

“The Educational World Is Flat” by Jonathan Wai was originally published on Psychology Today.
Tom Vander Ark is an educational innovator who thinks like an engineer.  He is currently the CEO of Open Educational Solutions, a partner in Learn Capital, and director of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning.  Previously he served as President of the X PRIZE Foundation and was the Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  He is a prolific writer and speaker, and in 2006 Newsweek readers voted Tom the most influential baby boomer in education.
Anyone familiar with his work will know that he is not shy in making predictions about our educational future.  His vision is clearly portrayed in Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing The World, where he persuasively argues that the rise of educational technology already has and will continue to transform the way that each of us learn.

But I also think it’s much more than that.  It’s an important synthesis of an enormous amount of writing and thinking that Tom has now put together in one place.  Yet despite my belief that digital learning will change our future, I must admit that I still love holding in my hands a non-virtual book.  And at least for me, the mark of a good book is how many notes and scribbles I make in the pages.  My copy of Getting Smart is covered with ink.After taking a tour of our educational future with Tom as my guide, I had the pleasure of chatting with him on the phone.  I had many questions, and he shared his thoughts on the importance of recognizing individual differences, the role of video games in motivating students, cultural literacy, his idea of educational playlists like those on our iPods, how we miss spatially talented students, the role of culture in education, and whether he thinks technology will help us find the next Einstein.

WAI: A theme that I feel appears throughout Getting Smart is the importance of recognizing individual differences in multiple dimensions.  How do you feel we can use technology and perhaps video games to tailor educational environments to students?  And how do you think this will impact learning?

VANDER ARK: When you visit U.S. secondary schools, the overwhelming affect is boredom.  We need to do a better job of engaging students and compelling media, social learning, and game-based experiences can all help.
Calibration is an important lesson from casual gaming-targeting the degree of challenge precisely in a band between boredom and frustration.  In addition to engaging content, the ability to constantly vary the level of challenge appears to be important to persistence.
For 15 years, learning technologies have given students some level of control over level, rate, time, and location.  With more variety and more sophisticated content, students are increasingly able to customize their learning pathway-they will increasingly be able to mix experiences in their most productive modality, themed to their interests, accessed at any time of day, often in collaboration with other students in remote locations.
Customizing learning experiences should increase learning productivity-students will learn more per hour.  More broadly, giving students the opportunity to exercise some level of choice over rate, time, location, and path will boost engagement and achievement.

2. Why do you think motivation is the holy grail of education?  And how important a role do you think technology (such as video games) will play in motivating students?

As your research indicates, talent matters.  However, effort is the single biggest determinant of college and career readiness.  With sufficient effort, the vast majority of young people can be adequately prepared for college and idea economy careers.
Effort is driven by a complex mixture of motivations-different for each student and dynamic over time-driven by parent and extended community academic press, teacher expectations, future orientation and goals, peer pressure, engagement and interests.  American culture is diverse and the degree of academic pressure and support varies widely.  Technology won’t do much to fix that, but it can lift the floor and spread opportunity.
The shift to predominantly digital learning experiences will result in a flood of keystroke data that will power comprehensive learner profiles that will move beyond opinion surveys to data driven profiles that can recommend modalities likely to produce persistence and performance.

3. You were trained in the areas of engineering and finance.  You note in Getting Smart that a lot of people who you think are making a difference in education are individuals who were not traditionally trained as educators.  In what ways do you think that coming from a different area (such as engineering that focuses on systems and problem solving) might allow important insights into the problems of our educational system and how to solve them?

As Jane Jacobs noted in Systems of Survival, public delivery systems develop a ‘Guardian’ mentality that values protection, obedience,discipline, tradition, and hierarchy.   Reformers and outsiders bring a ‘Commerce Syndrome’ with a competition mindset, open to inventiveness and novelty, they invest for productivity, and value initiative and enterprise.
New eyes with no loyalties other than to kids and community gives an observer a chance to ask tough questions about the strange collection of historical practices that make up the typical school day.   While not valued in education, a breadth of leadership experiences and exposure to solution sets from other sectors is helpful.
However, reformers and philanthropists must remember that education incumbents share a psychology that is different than the private sector and that stimulus response may be different than expected.
From a research perspective, we continue to force Ph.D. candidates into obscure corners.  I’d like to see teams of multidisciplinary doctoral students working as a team to attack the complicated sociological, pedagogical, financial, and organizational challenges of urban education.  They could author a team report as well as an individual dissertation-it would provide tremendous exposure to systemic thinking.

4. I think that technology is a great equalizer of opportunity, but may in fact be an amplifier of achievement.  What are your thoughts on the role of technology in learning not only for all students, but also the “smart fraction” [for interested readers, see my article on this here] or the most talented students?

Digital learning is extending access to the best content, courses and teachers.  School models that incorporate online learning can afford to extend the day and the year.  Better diagnostics are identifying specific needs that can be treated effectively with new tools.   Khan Academy gives every parent access to a great math teacher.  Edmodo gives every teacher free access to content and tools.
Digital learning will help prepare a larger percentage of students for college and careers but it may not narrow the achievement gap.  Learning technology will probably amplify differences in parenting with well supported students spending more time in productive learning activities and unsupported students wasting time online.
When students have access to more and better resources and can move at their own pace, a larger percentage of students will graduate early with college credit.

5. We select students for college based on tests like the Scholastic Assessment (SAT) and the American College Test (ACT) which have math and verbal sections but do not have a spatial section.  So we essentially miss identifying a lot of spatially talented students (who are good at working with their hands and rotating figures in three dimensions) who are not as math and verbal oriented.  In some of my research, my colleagues and I have demonstrated the importance of spatial ability for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas such as engineering [for interested readers, see my article on thishere].  What are your thoughts on how video games that are spatial in nature might have an influence on students who have a spatial bent?

American schools sort for compliant auditory learners.  At least two thirds of our young people don’t get what they need and deserve from our schools in part because of a narrow pedagogical approach.
I hate the fact that we’ve turned science into a quizbowl.  I’d like to see a month each year when students get an opportunity to go deep in an area of science and experience expertise in public presentations of learning.