The problem is that parents are not prepared to homeschool, and may not have the time since they are trying to work from home.
Teachers are not used to teaching online with the current tools available to them.
What is the most important challenge in education today?
It is being able to teach students when they have some free time, when they are not distracted, and only what they need to know at the moment.
Studies show that people forget 70% of what they learned 24 hours after training. So, it is essential that people only learn what they are most interested in learning at the moment. Usually, that is to solve an immediate problem.
One summer, when I was in elementary school, I was terrified! You see, by the end of the school year I had not yet memorized the Times Table and I knew that I'd be entering the upcoming school year clearly disadvantaged. I imagined a disappointed teacher and my embarrassment and humiliation amongst my schoolmates. That is pretty much what happened!
Jack and Jill are working on a physics problem. Their teacher asked them to calculate the force needed to hurl a 500 pound projectile from a spot on Earth to 20,000 miles in low earth orbit. They don’t have any idea of what they need to know to solve this problem and they don’t want to dig through numerous articles or videos on the subject. They want to learn what they need for this problem as thoroughly and rapidly as possible.
Current e-learning has been focused primarily on mimicking the classroom, except that the teacher takes on a less important role. Students are interacting with content that a subject matter expert assembled, but there is no direct relationship between the student and the content matter expert, a.k.a., the teacher. Webinars and the occasional live interaction are inadequate substitutes for the classroom experience.
Most of our lives we learn specifically what we need to achieve our goals. As children, we learn how to crawl, walk, and talk when we are physically ready to do so and when our brains are sufficiently developed to take on the task. Even so, we will only attempt something new, like the precarious act of walking, when we are motivated to do it. Babies start to crawl to get to something that they want, their mother and her milk, for example, a shiny toy, or perhaps something to explore. Similarly, we learn to talk to get what we want.
Since the early days of computers, many of us dreamed of how computers were going to revolutionize education. We didn’t know exactly how it was going to work, but we knew that the “personal” computer made it possible to individualize education. In learning, one size does not fit all, so individualized education is the “holy grail” of education! Industrialization brought us mass education, essential to building an educated workforce, but today’s workforce requires specialization and skills that are way beyond group-think.
Knowledge Avatars™ is a platform where anyone can create and publish a digital tutor called a Knowledge Avatar™. Click below to choose what you would like to do.
This article is about the value of programming as a teaching tool not to teach programming, but rather as a medium that students use to illustrate their understanding of a concept. For example, if a student can program a computer to draw circles using basic trigonometric functions, then the student understands the concept of a circle at a very fundamental level. If a student develops a simulation that models the economic functions of a city, then that student has learned some important lessons about such an economy.