Most college courses are one-size-fits-all—a lecturer delivers the same information to everyone in the room, regardless of whether some students already know the material or others are utterly lost.
It doesn’t have to be that way, says Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University. He outlines a vision of how technology can help personalize learning in a new book that he co-edited, called Digital Teaching Platforms: Customizing Classroom Learning for Each Student.
His research focuses on elementary- and high-school classrooms, but he says the approach has implications for colleges as well. The Chronicle talked with Mr. Dede about his strategy, and why he sees big changes on the horizon. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Q. Do you think we’ve reached a tipping point for education technology? Have we hit a moment where things will change in a big way?
A. I do. It’s a little like the tipping point a century ago, when America shifted from the rural one-room schoolhouse to the industrial-era school. We now have the kinds of technology that would let us develop a 21st-century education system if we have the political will to go ahead and do that.
Q. So it’s not a sure thing, then. You’re saying it’s up to individual policy makers and educators, right?
A. Exactly. These are transitions that don’t take place automatically. Just because you have a technology doesn’t mean you’re going to use it or use it well. But just as people made the shift a century ago—because the rural one-room schoolhouse was not capable of meeting the demands of an industrial-era economy—so many people, including myself, feel now that an industrial-era school system is also not capable of meeting the demands of a global, knowledge-based, innovation-centered economy. To the extent that people come to believe that, and come to see that we could redesign education based around new technologies and more sophisticated ideas about learning and teaching that have evolved over the last century, then the chance is there to do that.
Q. You say in the conclusion of your book that schools will not be able to teach the growing class sizes forced by recent budget cuts without a technology platform to make teaching more efficient.
A. Yes, as year after year of cuts hit districts, the vast majority of the budget is people. All the fat is gone, all the muscle is gone. We’re now cutting into bone. And if you don’t have some set of power tools that the teachers can use, at some point class size becomes unmanageable.
Q. And you think that with these digital “power tools,” teachers can handle class sizes of 40 or more students?
A. I do. Obviously, it would be better not to have a class of that size. I’m not saying that this is a desirable alternative. But if you have a differentiated curriculum in digital form, and if you have formative evaluation interwoven with that so the teacher is getting a steady stream of information about where each student is, then the teacher at the center of this digital teaching platform can assign the parts of the curriculum to each student that make the most sense as the next step.
Of course, there are parallels in other social services. The days of a doctor making house calls are long gone. In modern medical care you have a differentiated system of both people and technology that allows a single physician to see a very large number of patients.
Q. What would you say is the most promising technology for teachers?
A. What technology does is it enables collecting a very rich set of information about student behaviors. So you have a digital curriculum that is designed to be highly interactive. As students interact, there’s a time-stamped record of everything they’re doing that lives on a server. And if you have a system that’s set up to analyze that kind of information, it can provide very valuable diagnostic data for the teacher to personalize instruction. If I’m a teacher, and 70 percent of the class is benefiting from what I’m saying in class now—which is a pretty good number—then I’m losing the 15 percent at the top end who are bored, already know this stuff, and are just being warehoused. And I’m losing the 15 percent at the bottom end who have no clue what I’m talking about. That’s a lot of people to lose.
Now I’m able to have different instructional streams, so instead of a one-size-fits-all strategy, I’ve got enrichment opportunities that the top group can participate in, and I’ve got remedial activities that the bottom group can participate in. And I still have activities for that big middle group, and they’re all happening at the same time because of this digital teaching-platform idea.
Q. What do you think the takeaways are for higher education?
A. They’re largely for the huge freshman and sophomore introductory courses that are a lot of the economic engines of higher education, the 600- or 700-person lectures, where we can imagine this being part of a “flipped classroom” model of higher education. So yes, you’re able to go view the lecture before the class on streaming video, but beyond that there may be exercises of different kinds that you can take that really help you, depending on how much or how little you got out of the lecture.
Say at the end of the lecture you take some sort of a quick assessment, and then the teaching platform says, “OK, you should look at these additional materials.” But it tells another student to look at other additional materials. And then when you come into class, everyone is closer to the same point, and the teacher can have some kind of a dialogue or exercise, or small-group work, or interacting through clickers, or so on. It opens up a much broader range of teaching possibilities.
Q. What is the biggest challenge for the vision to emerge?
A. It’s a different kind of pedagogy for the teacher to master. Now you’re not up there giving a lecture and just trying to keep everybody hanging in there whether it’s at the right level for them or not. You’re managing, if you will an orchestra, where some students are hearing one melody and some students are hearing another melody. You’re maybe working with some individuals who need more help than the teaching platform can provide, and you’re coming over to this other group doing small-group work, listening to them for a minute, and keeping them on task. It’s a more complicated model of teacher performance that, when they know how to do it, teachers are going to appreciate. Because frankly, it’s much more interesting than to stand up and give the same lecture five times a day. But I think professional development will be the biggest single challenge.
