How to Make the Classroom as Exciting as a Video Game

Children in the Northern Hemisphere are headed back to school this time of year. The great majority of them will go back to the traditional classroom, in which every student studies the same subjects in the same way at the same time. The fact that this approach doesn’t work very well doesn’t seem to hinder its popularity. We know that students are interested in different things, learn in different ways, and proceed at different paces. So why the “forced march” approach to education?

This time-honored but silly approach to education, however, is beginning to crack. This summer, for example, 80 students at Middle School 131 in New York’s Chinatown attended the “School for One.” They worked on individual computers, with content tailored to their progress and learning styles. At any given moment they might be working with a virtual (or live) tutor, filling out an online worksheet, or playing an educational video game. Their individualized learning programs or “playlists” are generated by a complex “learning algorithm” with analytical precision. They studied only math with this approach, but the same approach could be employed for other subjects.

There are other instances of this “differentiated learning.” SAS offers a program called Curriculum Pathways that serves up modularized content to students in grades 8-12, and it’s also got an analytical function to individualize the educational offerings. Best of all, SAS makes it available for free.

This approach is also being adopted for higher education. I spoke recently with William Durham, the head of online education at Lone Star Community College in Houston. Lone Star has 17,000 online students, and the number is growing rapidly. He said they are moving in the same direction with e-learning. “It will increasingly be individualized in terms of content, learning style, mastery levels, and several other dimensions,” he said. “And analytics are the key to making it all work.”

This analytical approach to selecting individualized modular content has the potential to help students learn better, keep them interested, and even to increase the productivity of educational institutions. It may also change the way educators work and collaborate, as the Teaching Matters blogsuggests.

But this change won’t come quickly or cheaply. A computer for each student is only the beginning of the necessary infrastructure. A great deal of “edutainment” content will have to be developed. Providers of video-based educational content, including PBS Teachers and NBC iCue, will have to modularize it and categorize its attributes. Changes in teaching approaches, including frequent assessments, clear communication about learning objectives, and transmission of learning ownership to the learner, will have to take place, as Dr. Dylan Wiliam of the Educational Testing Service has pointed out. And all of this will have to be accompanied by substantial research to make sure it works. Fortunately, many of these changes are consistent with those espoused by the Obama administration, including Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. And they’ve got stimulus money to spend.

Someday soon, going back to school will be as exciting as the best online experience, and as targeted as the most sophisticated marketing offer. If you’re in school now and not that pumped about going back, try to be patient — help is on the way.