Looking at the big picture

It's amazing to read about the significant impact free online schools like Khan Academy, Udacity, and Coursera can have on people who may lack the resources to get an education elsewhere, and even those who just need a little extra help. The fact that anyone with internet access and a computer, anywhere in the world, can get a college-level education for free is quite impressive. Not only that, but these courses have the ability to let students learn at their own pace, and review the lessons until they have fully grasped the material. As Sebastian Thrun points out in the article “One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education,” his students at Princeton actually preferred his video lessons to his lectures, and even did better on exams after having watched them. Free one-on-one university classes in which students learn better than sitting in lectures? This truly seems like it could be the future of education. There are so many positive world-wide implications, that it's easy to see the why this form of education might be preferable to our current system.

However, it seems important to tie this in with concerns being posed in other areas of education. In a recent post titled “What Higher Education Should Be For,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, shares concerns that higher education is becoming more technical and more specialized. He believes the current model of liberal arts education is in danger of being left behind by students who prefer to gain skills that will make them “more employable.” This seems to be a concern echoed throughout liberal arts campuses. My own undergraduate university is going through financial difficulties, and the administration believes it may be because this generation of students is shifting toward wanting to learn more marketable skills. In his article, Shwartz articulates a worry that is shared by many educators:

“If you get specialized training, in anything, you will likely be good at solving the small problems that other people hand you.. What you will not be able to do very well is decide for yourself what is a problem worth solving. You will not be very good at even recognizing the big problems, let alone solving them.”

If we agree with this point of view, then it seems we must agree on the importance of classroom discussion for some contexts. It seems we must agree that, although tailored teaching can be most beneficial under some circumstances, there are still some lessons, such as the ones that a liberal arts education can provide, that can't be learned from a video. (Even if you don't agree, let's follow this train of thought.) In this new form of education through online videos, technical training would have a great advantage over humanities, and those lessons that lead to looking past the smaller problems might have to be sacrificed. So if we truly do make a shift to this new form of education, one implication might be that there will be fewer students who will have the ability to look at the society's bigger problems.

This would be a huge problem in the long run, because those people who look at society's bigger problems are most likely the same ones that are trying to solve those problems through social innovations. It would be a tragedy to think that by positively impacting the world as a whole through more availability of quality education, we could possibly hinder future generations of social innovators. One of the main goals of social innovation is sustainability, and there's nothing more important than the sustainability of the type of people who will be social innovators. It seems this is an important point for future educators to keep in mind. Perhaps it's a moot point, and video-teaching will merely supplement education with great results, but it's an important point to ponder nonetheless.