[community] Bill Gates - personalized learning within a decade (Reddit AMA, Mar 8)

[Hung, Jonathan]

Hi Vik,

Customized learning is the opposite of “making everybody like a cybot”. Customized learning will allow learners customize their learning experience (like their environment, learning material, and tools) to suit what how they learn best. This should create individual outcomes - not a uniform / normalized outcome.

This has its challenges of course - how do learners, especially those in K-12, become self aware enough to understand to customize their learning? For example, how does one learner become aware they need more time while taking assessments, while another learner does better with visuals that accompany text?

This is where the content of the TED talk you linked to comes in. By giving teachers the right tools, teachers would be able to get intimate feedback to help better understand their students in their classrooms. This then enables the teacher to provide individual coaching to students to help them learn better based on specific needs mentioned in the feedback.

The YouTube video you also linked to shows a mother and child learning from each other - this is very much the sort of individualized, intimate learning environment I imagine Bill Gates would want. A teacher in our modern day schools with the right tools can better understand their students, and therefore be as empowered as a parent is on their own child.

- Jon.

On March 8, 2016 at 5:11:31 PM, Vik (aseedof at gmail.com<mailto:aseedof at gmail.com>) wrote:

Dear Jon.,

I really don’t like Bill Gates’s involvement on education. I don’t have the trust.
I feel it is more like a big business plan making everybody like a cybot.

After I watched his TED talk, I really afraid of the classroom.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_teachers_need_real_feedback

Education should be like this, not like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPSNguvsFk0


Vik
vik.drawwithme.org<http://vik.drawwithme.org>


On 8 Mar, 2016, at 1:53 pm, Hung, Jonathan <jhung at ocadu.ca<mailto:jhung at ocadu.ca>> wrote:

Bill Gates is doing an AMA (“Ask me anything”) session on Reddit and had this to say when asked:

"You have previously said that, through organizations like Khan Academy and Wikipedia and the Internet in general, getting access to knowledge is now easier than ever. While that is certainly true, K-12 education seems to have stayed frozen in time.

How do you think the school system will or should change in the decades to come?"

His response:

"I agree that our schools have not improved as much as we want them to. There are a lot of great teachers but we don't do enough to figure out what they do so well and make sure others benefit from that. Most teachers get very little feedback about what they do well and what they need to improve including tools that let them see what the exemplars are doing.

Technology is starting to improve education. Unfortunately so far it is mostly the motivated students who have benefited from it. I think we will get tools like personalized learning to all students in the next decade. [Emphasis mine]

A lot of the issue is helping kids stay engaged. If they don't feel the material is relevant or they don't have a sense of their own ability they can check out too easily. The technology has not done enough to help with this yet."

See the actual quote here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/49jkhn/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/d0s9ids

- Jon.

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JONATHAN HUNG

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