How do we build the new remote education system

I'm a professor at a US university. The honest answer (at least at the university level) -- probably we don't.

From what I can tell, there's very little enthusiasm for online education, on the part of either professors or students. Pretty much everyone is eager to get back to normal, and I'm fairly confident that this is exactly what is going to happen.

For a dissenting perpsective, read Joshua Kim's columns at Inside Higher Ed:

https://www.insidehighered.com/users/joshua-kim

He is a big cheerleader for online education and for major changes to university education. Personally, I don't really buy his arguments -- but his posts are extremely well written and he does work full-time at a university, so you might find him more persuasive than I do.

If remote university education becomes widespread, then I expect innovations to largely come from outside the existing system. Universities are weird workplaces, and the incentive system does not really encourage large-scale innovation.

That said, it seems that startups like edX, Coursera, etc. have not really been successes. So I'm skeptical that big changes are coming soon.

If remote or partially remote education is to become the default, you have to scrap the teacher-students-classroom model; it hardly works in real life and it's even worse when not happening in a physical space.

Moving to a fully asynchronous model is the only way you can maintain any semblance of educational standards. Put content online, have the students access it at their own leisure. Use the saved time to arrange live QA/interactive sessions for the teachers to unblock the students if they need that (it is also a nice excuse to silently check everyone's progress). Quit the cheating/surveillance arms race, fully embrace open-book tests and oral exams.

I'd also say, try really hard not to go full remote, at least for middle school and below. There are advantages to both approaches, and a completely remote education is much harder to make work.

What individuals can do, I'm not really sure, I guess it depends on what your local school is doing/allows at the moment. Fighting the bureaucracy hardly worth anybody's time.

Khan Academy (where I work) is definitely trying to help people achieve mastery[1][2], and we have people who create studies to test our efficacy and help inform future course development. We care about proving the efficacy of our approaches and constantly improving.

We've been putting in a lot of effort over the past few years specifically to help teachers help their students achieve mastery in their subjects. One piece of that has been standards alignment for our content. I don't know about the UK, but I do know that our content has been aligned with the US Common Core[3].

Since Khan is a non-profit, we're often best known for offering all of our content for free so that anyone can learn (and our mission _is_ a "free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere"), but we know that a lot of learning happens alongside teachers in classrooms and are providing tools to help with that.

[1]: https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/articles/3600307534...

[2]: https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-for-educators/k4e-us-demo/x...

[3]: https://www.khanacademy.org/commoncore

Without computers.

Our school board is using MS Teams, SharePoint, and a custom web application. It’s terrible. Even adults struggle with SharePoint. Let alone an 8 year old kid. Let alone kids with different abilities and challenges.

Remote learning is terrible and I doubt it will ever be good enough to replace a classroom for you kids.

What could alleviate it is a device like a reMarkable. I gave mine to my daughter. With cloud sync and some scripts I wrote she has her work sheet handouts from her teacher on the device. It’s e-ink and she can write with a pen. It’s a thousand times easier than navigating SharePoint and trying to use MS Word.

But it’s still not enough. The video calls are terrible. Being at home around her parents all day is not great for her.

Best thing has been spending time together to be honest. Playing board games. Running around outside, hikes, etc.

But without the support of a community of educators trained to help kids develop, especially kids with special needs, it is very hard.

> Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.

Lots of people think they learn better from eloquent teachers (on Youtube or otherwise), and while that helps, it is far from sufficient to attain mastery of a subject. Mastery is achieved when you do; do practice problems, do timed tests, discuss concepts with those better, equal or worse than you, etc.

The value add of teachers at your school/university is that they assign problems to you at the average skill level of the class, and they give space for discussions, but most importantly change the difficulty of the course, or go over stuff in a different way if you fail to understand.

If you want to create good remote education, you will have to at least create these values as well.

Some subjects work better than others. Many STEM topics that are of interest to most HNers are probably among the best things you can learn online.

I'm currently a grad student in Communication Sciences and Disorders. My field involves linguistics, speech and voice science, disabilities, and more. My education in online classes is absolutely of a lower quality than it would be in person. I don't think that will ever change until humans stop communicating with their mouths, faces, and bodies. Classes whose subject matter necessarily revolves around face-to-face discussion will always be worse online.

We need to be very careful on which subjects remain mostly-online, and which subjects we push back into classrooms.

Other than that, I have wondered whether "learning pods" will become a powerful tool (rather than a temporary bandaid to the problem). From what I have seen it seems like a promising way to lower the student-instructor ratio and still get some kids spending time face-to-face without traveling to a central location every day.

I was a homeschooling parent for some years. The world would probably do well to look to what homeschoolers know about educating children at home rather than trying to replicate classroom schooling via computer connection.

I was also Director of Community Life for The TAG Project for a little while. So I joined email lists that supported homeschoolers and discussed this stuff with experts, etc.

Public school is about eight hours a day because it's "free daycare" for working parents. One article I read years ago indicated that a parent went and observed their child at school and found that the kind only really was actively learning about one to two hours a day. The rest of the time was spent taking roll call, changing classes, having lunch, etc.

At the time, I was in California and one of the ways to legally homeschool was by hiring a tutor for three hours per day. Not eight. Just three.

My very first blog began because of interest in what I was saying on homeschooling lists via email. A friend wanted to publish something I had written and it grew from there. And then I started another site because people were asking my permission to forward my emails and I was like "Oh, I will just make it a website and then they can share the links and don't need to email me."

So I've never really gotten good traction and yadda, but when I see some of the frustrations people have with the current situation, I'm like "Yeah, I should maybe do something about that..."

Only, I mean, everyone seems to want me to help them for free, because I "care," and then almost no one "cares" when I can't pay my bills. So I don't feel very excited about the idea that, "Oh, this is a thing I know a bunch about (and could potentially help people with this)."

But, really, there is a wealth of knowledge that already exists concerning how to teach kids at home. There are lots of books, email lists, etc by, for and about homeschooling and homeschooling is best done in a way that doesn't actively try to recreate public school classrooms because a lot of the methods used in public schools are used precisely because it is a means to wrangle 20 to 40 students by a teacher who will have 20 to 40 new students every year and that's not the case if they are your kids in your home.

One would think teaching 20 5-year olds online would be an insurmountable task but it's actually been my wife's best year teaching after 6 years of in person teaching at one of the best schools in the county. The parents have been extraordinarily nice and have gone out of their way to share gratitude and one family even sent a bottle of wine.

She went from in person teaching kindergarten last year to doing the districts virtual program this year. The district has 72,000 students in K-12 and around 15% of them signed up to do all virtual this year. To give you an idea of scale, just the kindergarten teachers the virtual program has would've been more teachers than an entire traditional school would have (over 40). Most elementary schools have around 4-5 K5 teachers. The teachers still had a similar number of students as normal (around 20) and they primarily use Google Meet for live classes and Seesaw for assigning and turning in work.

Most of her students have shown improvements throughout the year so far during assessments which is promising and means teaching small children online is actually possible. She meets with the whole class at 7:45 for around 15 minutes and then does small groups from 8-10 with groups of 3-4 kids. Sometimes that goes into individual instruction as well while she gives a task to the small group and then meets 1on1 with a student individually. She meets back up with all the kids at 10 for another class lesson. From around 10:30 - 12:30 the students have PE/Art/Music with another teacher and then she does another group lesson, and then small groups, etc. until 1:30 when instruction is done for the day.

There was a learning curve at first but now most of the students are able to login to their correct classes at the right times which blows me away. The fact 5-year olds are able to more or less keep their own schedule and do assignments on their Chromebook should not be a surprise I guess but it still blows my mind.

This format has really allowed her to get way more done than she normally would during a regular school day. In person she would be at school from 7am-3pm most days plus a 20 minute commute. Having breaks during the day to do planning has been a great gift that would normally be taken up by other things in person. I can also get into the curriculum and how that worked going from 0 but this is already getting long. Happy to answer any questions if there are any.

My children are 16, 15, 14. They are all currently homeschooling in UK lockdown number 3.

All of their lessons are delivered via video (Google Classrooms). The quality of learning seems low, they seem unengaged and only respond to teacher when absolutely forced to. As a parent all I really do is IT support and discourage distraction (put your phone down etc).

In UK lockdown 1 in March there was no video learning. Tasks were emailed the day before. As a family we sat together round the kitchen table worked together. Questions they didn't understand were explained (my wife is a teacher) or googled. They put in about 4hrs each day and the learning experience seemed so much better, even though it took more effort from us as parents.

I don't really have any answers other than online learning for teenagers doesn't replace good teacher lead distraction free instruction in the classroom.

The open university in the UK was founded in 1969 and has been offering full distance learning degrees ever since in large numbers of subjects. It uses a mix of professionally produced video content (so usually not just a video of a lecturer standing in front of a blackboard), textbooks, in person or remote small group seminars (you used to phone in, now online video chat), forums, chat groups, personal support by email or post (in case you're in prison or living really remotely) and online libraries / inter library loans and occasional residential weekends / weeks.

Mastery is tested in the usual ways, essays, projects and tests, but also "in class" contributions during seminars, which is a good way of motivating people to actually attend and ask questions.

It works really well but it's taken fifty years of practice, experimentation and investment to get there and it involves a lot of contact between tutors and students and as a student you need to be more motivated than attending a bricks and mortar university (I've done both).

The fact of the matter is that most online learning created over the last year is pretty terrible because it's been created on the hoof by teachers with no experience of delivering learning in this way so they've mostly tried to reproduce the classroom but online, which doesn't work.

Most existing online material out there is intended to be supplemental to traditional bricks and mortar learning or used in a "flipped" classroom like Khan Academy where there is still pupil teacher contact, rather than replace it, or is aimed at professional / personal development rather than teaching academic subjects or the core curriculum.

Honestly if you want to improve your kids learning and can afford one get them a tutor who will work with them one to one or in small groups and can identify what the gaps in their knowledge are and ensure they are keeping pace of where they should be curriculum wise so when they do go back to school they won't be behind their peers. Don't expect a magic tech bullet.

> Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.

There's a world of difference between learning from your own initiative vs being given a curriculum.

If you're already in a field like coding, online stuff is absolutely the best way to find things out, because you already have structure. Once you have that, it's really only motivation how many topics you end up learning about.

For kids, especially little ones, they don't know where what they're doing fits in. They're literally being told they need to learn the sounds for these shapes, learn how to count, and so on. They have no perspective on it for a good long while.

Sorry, I don't have an answer but this is an interesting problem. For one, kids haven't been taught to teach themselves - and most kids aren't interested in learning anyways because they don't see any incentive.

Schooling has traditionally used social pressure and a present authority figure to ensure students actually participate. Online, both of those are basically gone.

Technically, there's actually potential benefit to guiding a student into becoming self-reliant in terms of schooling (and so, obviously, in work & life). Also, we're all aware that there are countless great resources for learning online. The crux of the problem is really how to incentivize it.

I think the solution involves:

1) Getting a curriculum (solved by the school)

2) Finding good resources for learning it (takes some digging)

3) Incentivizing the learning

4) Keeping track (some kind of online tool like Notion maybe?)

Maybe a good incentive is to simply have suitable rewards for completing tasks and getting good grades. Pair that with embellishments to the curriculum - like say, you get to learn some extra stuff by watching Bill Nye - and I think you can get a kid to want to learn.

I learned Calculus entirely online and aced my exam, but that was after failing it and becoming desperate to move on. Negative incentive clearly worked for me, but I don't recommend it.

As someone who enjoys remote work as a profession, I think this is generally a bad idea long term, at least across the board.

Remote learning should absolutely be a thing for children who learn better in that environment - I likely would have benefited from it back in elementary and junior high schools because there wouldn't be the distraction of being surrounded by bullies and demi-criminals.

However, I think it's delusional to think that Zoom and so forth can be a sufficient replacement for the social aspect of being at a physical school. Parents seem to forget that they aren't a surrogate for the teachers, friends, and boy/girl-friends their children would otherwise be interacting with at school. It's hugely valuable, nearly as much as the education itself. I'm saying this as someone who is a kind of recluse; it would have been bad for me to never be challenged socially while growing up.

My conclusion is that things like Khan Academy are already good enough, and the real question should be how such a system could be adapted to a standardized testing structure(or perhaps the other way around). What would be ideal is if schools can use something like Khan Academy so that there can be seamless transitions between home schooling and physical schooling, as well as making the concept of forgetting one's homework obsolete.

The reason that we as a society are struggling with remote learning right now is because the people in control have no idea what they're doing. They're having to play catch up to the rest of the world, at least in a digital sense. It's not that we don't already have tools ready to go. It's a failure to adapt. We had well over a decade to evolve education to the digital frontier and we were slow to the draw.

At one end of the scale, the work set on monday this week for my kids (elementary school age) was done in 50 minutes for one, and 30 minutes for the other.

On the other hand other parents are saying there is too much work to do.

My wife is a teacher in a bad school, the worst kids this year are over 2 years behind where they should be.

Perhaps the problem is that people learn and work at different rates, and homeshcooling is just exposing this.

On the tertiary education issue, I've always found that an in person lecture, delivered at a fixed rate (can't speed up or slow down), with no ability to pause or rewind, to be the absolute worst way to deliver 'education'.

For a given lecture for university, get a charismatic person (Bill Nye, Brian Cox, David Attenborough, that sort of person - and ideally budget) who really knows their stuff to deliver the material. This saves bored lecturers from repeating the same old thing and gives more time for one-to-one questions, enthuses people from the presentation style, allows rewatching it, pausing it, playing it at a faster speed or a slower speed, etc.

I see a lot of these conversations recently (big surprise!) and one aspect that really doesn't seem to come up is that content only gets you so far.

There has been quality content "out there" for decades. In-arguably there is more content recently, and it is somewhat more discoverable. But it has always been true that truly effective self directed learners exist but have been thin on the ground.

To abuse a quote from good will hunting (IIRC) - you could have got that education for $3 in library late fees. Why don't more people do this? I think roughly the same problem is at work with MOOC and remote learning. Clearly some few people can get a lot out of it; clearly a lot don't.

I've taught inside and outside of universities; I suspect we still have a pretty poor understanding of what parts are working and why.

Some of the remote learning approaches I see now seem a bit of cargo-culting the existing system and then arguing about whether or not it is working.

Like any new solution, you need to understand the full problem. Creating an educational system that works for the 80% isn't good enough. You need to handle special education, special needs. The school system provides free meals to lower income children. It is also the reason that struggling single parents can find time to work... while their kids are in school.

Any solution that only solves education, without also solving the societal gaps the public system fulfills is a non-starter.

All children are different and all children learn differently. Schools have a mandate to educate all children. Teachers instinctively make small (or large) changes to work will the children in their classes. Good teachers are good at this, not so good teachers are not so good at it. But at least it is happening.

In observing online educational things for my kids, I have noticed that this doesn’t happen at all. We supplement with multiple services, and each of my kids gets something different out of each of them. No single service would work for even one of my kids, let alone all of them.

If you want a new remote education system, you have to have one that is flexible and adjusts to each student. Not the other way around. I don’t see anyone willing to do that. It’s hard.

> Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.

Unless you go to an elite university like Stanford or MIT (whose lectures actually are among those on YouTube), an ordinary university lectures usually are garbage (in both how deep and how easy to understand they are) compared to what is available on YouTube. It is common (among people I knew) to waste time on the uni lectures (because they won't let you to attend the exams otherwise) learning nothing, then watch some YouTube, get it quickly and go pass the exam.

> Yet my recently hired collegue insists he spent more time learning from Youtube than from lectures at "proper" university.

Neither of these are likely to be ideal ways of learning.

From what I recall, research shows that people often believe they have learned a lot by watching a video, but when tested they are often unable to identify the key ideas they were being taught.

Students ideally need personal feedback and a direction to focus on. To be able to ask questions and interact with what they don't yet fully understand. To be listened to and understood.

Remote classrooms can be organised to match what happens in an effective classroom (here simplified): the teacher introduces the key learning goals and to set out some relevant tasks with examples, then walks around the classroom giving their time to students 1-1 while the other students work independently on their tasks (likely in a way that allows them to discuss their understanding with each other, with access to reference materials including the internet), and brings the class together as necessary and at the end of the session.

Being sat together in a Zoom call for an hour (or ultimately many hours a day) is not accurately reflecting what is really happening in a good classroom, except in the presentee-ism aspect.

MOOCs and, in general, sources of pure content are generally not personalised enough to engage most people beyond the first lecture. They can't predict what a student will need support with, and don't proactively act on this - whereas schoolteachers can and do. CS50x is an extremely high quality MOOC and only ~2% of registered students are destined to ever complete the semester's worth of work.

Reaching mastery best will involve using the resources we have in human teachers: teachers to guide learning.

As an early elementary school teacher, I see these cracks from the other side too. Current tools for synchronous learning also exact a "tax" on educators, as even the most technologically proficient teacher must dedicate some attention to managing the platform. This is exacerbated by the fact that many tools we are using (Zoom, Google Meet, MS Teams) are not made for education or are not well adapted to remote and hybrid teaching, particularly for young children and their teachers (Google Classroom, Seesaw). I know educators are working hard to meet the needs of their students, but I know many feel we're not doing our best teaching right now because of these limitations of that technology and, of course, the stress of the pandemic and US political situation. To be honest, I have seen so many teachers work flexibly to adapt to teaching in this world but have not seen the same level of innovation from edtech companies, particularly among larger vendors, who have the most resources and the most responsibility to make change for our students. (Google Classroom, I'm looking at you.)

If there is one thing that the pandemic should have taught us, it is that remote work and remote schooling are, in most cases, not adequate replacements for in-person. There is no doubt in my mind that we could do better, and we should, but also no doubt in my mind that there are fundamental limits on how well remote can ever get.

Also, the longer you are "remote only" (as opposed to a temporary remote session because of snowstorm or whatever), the worse the remote option becomes. Lots of things happen in person that help to strengthen teacher-student understanding, and they gradually atrophy the longer you are remote.

Plus, some of what happens at a school is education in dealing with your peers, which is even more deficient in remote mode.

That's three reasons that remote learning, while a valuable addition, is not a replacement for in person schooling, and I am way more convinced of that now than I was before the pandemic.

If you don't care about credentials, then it is largely already here. I've been learning javascript online from the worlds best teachers.

Though this doesn't work if you're learning microbiology and need access to a $1M laboratory.

I moved my family out of California to avoid remote education. I don't have confidence that 2nd grade can be effectively taught remotely.

I think that the socialization aspect is as important as the education aspect.

UK reader here. We're in an odd situation where what passes for the Government has been trying to implement a "one laptop per child" initiative but has failed spectacularly. We've even had BBC regional TV news asking viewers to donate old/obsolete/unwanted devices and in a few cases there has been a moderate response. Add to that the lack of broadband in low socio-economic households and many rural areas, and you can see that this is a non-starter.

However, I could say with a fair degree of accuracy that over 90% of UK households have at least 1 TV (see https://www.barb.co.uk/trendspotting/tracker-number-tvs/ ) and many of the poorest families seem to be able to run an Internet-capable Smartphone, so this is where it gets interesting. Oh, and there are numerous public (pay to use) British Telecom Wifi access points in many streets, embedded in termination boxes.

If the Government could somehow furnish a small, cheap computing device with no resale value that could optionally use a TV screen for display and a Smartphone as a hotspot, or do a deal with British Telecom to connect to already-available WiFi access points, they could make a significant inroad into getting kids online and learning again. All it needs is some thinking, planning and timely implementation (and this is why the Government is certain to fail).

I think trying to fit a single solution to the entire range of schooling is a bad idea.

In the earlier years of your life, a big part of schooling is “learning how to learn” whether implicitly or explicitly. By the time you get to university you have a good set of skills in terms of taking notes, referencing literature, practicing problems such that more time is spent learning the material rather than developing those meta-learning skills. I think that might explain the difference between your experience and your colleagues’.

I haven’t thought too much about the pre-k to grade school level, but at the university level it seems like universities are making an incredibly lackluster attempt at remote learning. They seem to have just taken the lecture aspect of university, thrown it into a zoom meeting, and called it a day. For the tuition that students are paying in the US (10-50k per year) there is so much room to provide value in alternative ways. I understand a large portion of those fees go towards paying faculty salaries but surely without having to run facilities they can invest that money in providing more value in remote learning. Things such as VR lectures/labs, improving the social aspect of remote university, more smaller group learning with more remote TAs, etc. There is so much opportunity here but there seems to be very low effort on the university side, probably due to massive sunk costs on the in-person learning side.

Just a historical note, from 1964, a book by Buckminster Fuller: Education Automation: Freeing the scholar to return to his studies

Even back then we had the technology and opportunity to do this. The gist: get the best (most captivating) teachers (perhaps coached by the best researchers) and record them / broadcast them to students.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Education-Automation-Freeing-scholar-...

Possible arrangement for university-level education: have the accrediting organizations administer exams for course credits and award degrees instead of individual universities.

The goal would be to open up choices. People could self-study, his tutors, or attend university. Even mix them up. It'd be like transfer credits. I could see a cottage industry of tutors and specialized labs, because the accrediting organizations' standard exams let them honestly say, "We can help you with part of your degree." Internships wouldn't have to be coordinated with universities; good employers would assign enough work relevant to the exams.

Universities would still be a useful service: pay the tuition and get access to a bunch of professors (bonus if they take on student research assistants), other students, labs, research material, the "university experience", and (let's be honest) prestige. Universities could even provide venues for exams, like with the GRE (which is a standard exam administered by a central body).

Another real-world example is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Anyone can register. I self-studied and took the N5 (easiest) exam in 2019. After that, I realized I need some help to keep progressing, so I've signed up for some paid online education services. When the pandemic passes, I'll look into getting a tutor. If local universities offered Japanese courses, I'd gladly pay to sit in.

Remote education needs to be a supplement to in-person education. The lack of interaction with other students, especially for kids in elementary or secondary school is becoming very harmful for their overall development.

For adults, online education should be thought of as a supplement to either their work-learning or their life-learning. The former to help advance their pursuit of skills, the second to help advance their pursuit of enjoyment of life.

The needs for online education for all these realms are very different and there is no one size fits all.

I think it depends on what you want _out_ of the system. For many, they want people with "ready job skills", which can be a challenge to give learners (budgets, always moving targets, etc). If you want to build good theoretical understanding and critical thinking, that requires the learners to work a lot, and is harder to quantify and test, but allows you to keep the material consistent over a long period. Also, different subjects can lend themselves better (or worse) to a distance learning situation. The OP mentions kids moving at different paces -- but that happens in person too -- they just don't notice/see it.

I think one issue is the idea that you can take a few pieces of quality "content", thread through them and have a meaningful course. Mastery is a great thing to talk about -- what is it exactly? For most, it's doing well enough to get a certain mark on a test. But I'd argue what you want is to ensure that learners use concepts they have mastered in a demonstrative way -- but again, this is harder and will cost more. It would be great if education was concerned about deeper understanding, but right now the focus seems to be "will this be on the test".

For most parts, we can't. At least not for grade school, less of a problem for college.

In France, they initially started to close schools, but for the second wave lockdown, they didn't. And now that cases are on the rise again and a third lockdown is being considered, the authorities are pretty clear: schools are the last thing that they will consider closing.

At school, kids are really taking the rules seriously, much more than adults: masks, hands washing, etc... no problem. Social distancing is a bit trickier but still, they do their best to do as they are told. One reason they are so docile: they really don't want another lockdown with school closure!

School is not just about learning stuff. It is a social hub for kids. Most of us here are probably lucky enough to have a good family, but for some, it is the only place where people actually care about them. It also teaches kids to be good citizens, respect authority, etc..., which is most important when parents don't do it.

That's not really answering the question, but my recommendation would be: try to get your kids to school for real, taking as many precautions as necessary. Kids are low risk for covid, are not that good spreaders and they won't get their lockdown time back. I think that small risk is worth it.

There's two completely different problems.

1. Someone who is motivated, and who has the talent and/or background to be able to grasp the material. How do we prove that they learned it? How do we prove it in a way that a credential-driven society will accept? (Especially, how do we do it for a fully online college degree?)

2. Someone who is not motivated, or who does not have the tools to grasp the material. How do we detect that they're floundering or giving up? How do we keep them from falling through the cracks?

Those are two completely different problems. I could see solving the first one with testing - you pass the test, you pass the class. The problem is getting society to accept the credential as meaning the same as an in-person class or degree. Western Governors University uses this approach; I don't know whether or not the outside world views their degrees as "real" degrees.

To my way of thinking, the second problem is harder. You can't solve it with technology. You need human intervention, preferably from humans that the student has a connection to, and that are talented enough in teaching to know how to help. I have no clue how to handle that remotely. If the parents aren't those people, then... what?

All of the challenges with the US K-16 system are political, cultural, or socioeconomic. The choice of technology —whether whiteboard and desks or video lectures— is more likely to amplify those challenges than anything else imho.

Speaking from my professional vantage point on K-12 (school model design and implementation, edtech, school systems leadership development), “content” has a long way to go. If not in terms of design, scope and sequence, then in discovery and management (e.g. find what works for me and transfer back to discourse of assessment, final project, job interview, etc.).

It goes hand and hand with “mastery”. Presumably there is enough content to match any student’s learning style, but the system itself biases toward standardization, not personalization. And the standard goals and outcomes drive the cultural, political and socioeconomic conversation in education reform... it’s a viciously swinging pendulum.

Then there are the classroom teachers and school staff who often best understand students’ learning needs, and bend the rules in-person, in real-time to accommodate. I’m not sure how that looks in a new remote system, but it is the most overlooked and important part of the current system imho.

We can't. Probably because learning outcomes isn't the point of school. The point of school is to teach worldly skills. To talk to other people. To interact and to stand out in a world full of other equally smart individuals. If learning was the only point of school, we would have moved to online education long ago. I think kids should still go to school and then get absorbed in jobs and then learn on the job.

By breaking down the old system. When an innovative competitor enters the field and grabs a large amount of "market share" by meeting the demands of the users (students, parents, etc..) then the education system will crumble.

Problem is - the education system is no longer about learning. It's about institutional recognition. Any innovation for learning will be dismissed unless it caters to institutional recognition.

For the technical subjects, I haven't managed find a program more comprehensive as brilliant.org. It covers a great deal of the technical subjects to perhaps most of the undergraduate level of understanding.

I then supplement a course like brilliant, with udemy courses, guided project courses and then finally in to unguided personal projects. I can pass my CS exams, work full time, and not have to ever attend a lecture.

I only really decided to go to university to meet cool people and go to parties. There was a legitimate decision whether it was really worth it. Thankfully I live in a country where education is essentially affordable for a student, so I didn't stand to lose much.

My university has practically one of the biggest, most comprehensive libraries in the world. However, being an undergraduate, they don't actually allow me to borrow most of them, but a small sliver of 'undergraduate appropriate' books. But it's still extremely nice to be able to grab any book, free of charge and do some research. -> This is one of the main reasons I want to hang around in university.

Access to workshops, and labs is nearly always restricted to the people in the appropriate subjects. So I cant actually build anything physical, unless I belong to some mechanical engineering course. Figuring out a way to get around that would also be very nice for the future education system.

The tutor system in Oxford, Cambridge if it could be scaled, would be the final nail in the coffin for the traditional university. If I could get access to a person who is more knowledgable than me in a subject to help me understand what I don't know and give me pointers on what I probably need to learn would save me countless hours of just trying to know what I don't know.

This recent study shows that transmission in primary education institutions is extremely low. https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/ea...

Different people have different modes of learning, so the key is to listen to the user and ask questions in order to surface the modes they need.

I grew up self-teaching myself because teachers refused to try new ways to teach me. If they tried to help me out, it would not help at all, because they didn't know how to use different perspectives or modes. I suggested several times that I would be more engaged if I could find an interesting way to engage with the material. I liked history, and problem solving. But much of the time, the only method the teachers would use was rote memorization or some formula which didn't make sense. There wasn't context or a story, just abstract concepts, and no visual clues, hierarchies, etc.

If somebody had listened to me and basically captured my user story and feedback, perhaps they could have found similar situations and developed a couple different structures for organizing and presenting the material. Or maybe I'm just weird.

We don't, at least not with general-purpose computers. There are too many distractions. It's a disaster.

Students need to access school web sites which include links to book publishers and YouTube. There might be math videos on YouTube, but everything else is far more interesting. Video games get to be an enormous problem. Just having web access is enough to support a game addiction. Even something like Khan Academy or Scratch becomes a gaming platform, because programming is available and people have written games there.

Right now I'm relying on time-intensive and error-prone supervision. The computer is unlocked, observed while in use, and then locked. It's miserable for everybody. If the parent looks away, the gaming begins. Forgetting to lock the computer means that it will get used all night long, leaving the kid sleepy for the next day.

I don't think the education system can be completely remote. If the society does decide to move to this system, then it will be a mix of remote and local studies. I have mentioned this somewhere else on this platform that the model of Open University is what is both achievable and sustainable. I have some experience working with Open University of the state of Maharashtra(MOU) in India. Their model of remote education has been working for decades now. The way the MOU works is by setting all the policies, courses(and content), syllabus, exams etc but delegates the delivery to its local chapters and/or franchisees. Students can visit the local chapter/franchisee for meeting with local instructors and or other students, if required or if they want.

In my university days, a few of the professors would record classes on VHS tapes that were made available at the library. I would attend class, but occasionally I would go to the library to watch the videos for review. I think we have much more opportunity now to access much more content.

I think you need good subject matter experts to team up with a tech person to create curated material. You also need some way to ask questions if you get stuck on something.

I gave it a shot at teaching a few lessons on how to program with Scratch to grades 1-5. I setup 3 simple lessons ( see my profile ) and provided a way for kids to ask questions via a simple form.

The last thing you need is time with the kids in my opinion, kids will show interest in something if you are taking part in it.

Remote has created much wider opportunities for premium enrichment of kids curriculum, and what I can reasonably predict is further polarization of outcomes. Poor kids who work will still outperform most lazy rich kids, and with incredible resources to leverage (3blue1brown, betterexplained, etc come to mind), but the ones who fall below a threshold will form a permanent, itinerant underclass.

Like most things, there is too much in every discipline for any one person to know, so the people who prevail are the ones who have the tools to adapt quickly and leverage others. Oddly, this is not a function of work either, but of attitude to work, and identity.

The question is, educate kids to become, what, administrators and tourists? Even with public education, the skills among kids are Pareto distributed, and there is a great deal of controversy of what "good," means.

The homeschooling industry existed before COVID-19. I’d start by looking at what they do and pull the parts that you like. Iterate from there.

Local teachers are somewhat overrated because you’re limited to what talent/style is available within a small radius of where you live.

Khan Academy, for instance, was far better than what my public high school offered. Now there’s a wide array of educational resources on YouTube to supplement a curriculum. Even a single video can drive home a point that will be internalized for life. I can’t really say that about my public education.

Lastly, parent-lead homeschooling is better because you don’t have to worry about teachers sharing their political opinions as “facts”. This certainly happened to me and many of my colleagues growing up.

Unfortunately I think good remote learning classes are only possible with a lot of resources invested in production. Think interactive visualizations, animations, excellent audio & video quality, etc. Almost no teachers have the skills necessary to create things in the same ballpark as 3blue1brown, for example - and that needs to be table stakes. Sticking a teacher in front of a laptop connected to a zoom meeting is a recipe for failure. This also requires money invested in student setups. Every student should have access to a good quality screen, headphones, microphone, webcam, and digitizer for freeform diagram input. Anything less than this will be strictly inferior to in-person teaching, no matter what.

I'd look into more project based "classes" instead of a rigidly taught curriculum. As more of a guided process than explicit steps, with the student getting to pick the direction they'll go in.

That's what taught me the most. It's a shame there aren't more opportunities like that in classes in general. Could be a question of teacher hours available, or because we can't effectively measure progress between wildly different projects. Still, I think it's more in-line with the way a workplace functions now.

I’m in Vancouver. We haven’t closed our schools at this point so my perspective is of how we move forward and not fixing what’s broken with those locked down today. I’m more thinking at the grade school level.

My kids have started exploring outschool.com. I’m impressed with what I see. They can follow paths that interest them at their own pace with interactions in small groups with teachers. Combine this with regular school and the quality YouTube content and I think all the pieces exist. Maybe the final piece is a syllabus as a service?

I teach CS in college. I've had kids. My daughter teaches in high school. And I'd like to say that I find it very shortsighted to think that remote learning for 6-year olds is even remotely comparable to remote learning for 15 year olds or 21 year olds.

They're very different age groups and please recognize that they require different approaches both to learning in general as learning online.

There no way you can discuss online learning in a generalized way across all age groups.

I work in this area and the answer to some of your questions are really already available. Rubrics/CASE/CLR/Learning Outcomes etc are known within the teaching community. Their implementation in the digital space is where you are seeing the gap. A traditional classroom environment doesn't always translate into a digital one for the reasons you specify, but thats not the only way to do it.

Is there somewhere where I can get remote tutoring? Like have problem get help 1:1 or 1:4 from a tutor or instructor? That was always my biggest hurdle with online or book learning. If you didn't understand a concept or problem there were no real resources to ask. Writing out a problem in an online forum still might not be enough the personal discussion and interaction helps so much.

For one thing, the requirements for effective teaching is going to be vastly different between a captive audience of 5-10 years olds that effectively need to be disciplined and educated and grown ass adults who seek out the content on their own.

I think remote learning could be done far better for older teens and adults. The remote experience is always going to be subpar for young children.

This question may be a tad premature. We are at the very beginning of a potential education revolution. What we are waiting for is the next 'Google'. This is an app/platform/system which will be so intuitive and accessible over remote tech that it will instantly change the way we look at teaching long term. It will come. The big unknown is...when?

There must be resources for homeschoolers that already solve a lot of this right? Maybe someone on HN has experience with that? I know in the past there were correspondence courses for students whose parents were not in one place for a long time (diplomats, people sailing around the world, etc.) I'm sure something like that still exists as well.

I think there are two components of school life: socializing and education. While remote socializing is hard to imagine, I don't believe you can beat high quality videos on youtube (like 3blue1brown) to understand most of the concepts. You also have to keep in mind that level of education in most of the countries in the world is quite low.

I think at least early education is better done in person. The classroom experience for little ones is about much more than traditional skills like reading, writing, math, etc. This is where they learn to work with others, learn the social skill that they need to succeed in the future. Little ones need their peers as much as education.

Two questions:

1. What are the educational invariants? I would worry that someone trying to disrupt the education space would try too many new things, and lose the basics along the way, so I’d want to know what the fixed behaviors needs to be.

2. How did gamification go? It was very popular there for a second, but nobody is reaching for it on the shelf now. Why is that?

Its an interesting question.

My kids cant wait to finish their school day (remote) and jump on to Roblox, Playstation, etc

I'm no programmer, but surely there is scope to gamify parts of the curriculum.. I'm trying to imagine some hack'n'slash dungeon crawler with lessons included by stealth.

I'm a teacher. Yes, kids learn a huge amount from YT and suchlike but the key to that is that their learning is driven by their own interests. If a kid is genuinely bored by maths, they are not going to learn more by watching videos.

Unschooling. That's an actual term/movement you can Google.

You pointed out there are great, interactive lessons online, but the problem is the syllabus. Forget the syllabus. Shouldn't the goal be learning rather than conformity?

Then the problem to solve is not schooling but childcare.

We are working on this at LearnerShape: https://www.learnershape.com/blog/recreating-traditional-lea...

Step 1: CLOUD BASED!

My wife's school is on a 2-week remote learning due to COVID flair ups. Yesterday afternoon, while teachers were at the building, 3 youth (caught on camera thankfully) went to my wife's school and physically cut the internet cabling going into the building, it was unable to be repaired by today. The servers hosting their various learning software are inside the building(s) at the middle and high school, today they had to use a waiver and completely cancel school since teachers can't actually assign work and the like.

facepalm

similarly ive been wondering how we fix online dating so it can stay online permanently. im in a serious (virtually sexual) relationship, but so far we have not been able to virtually conceive. im personally really excited to meet our virtual child (virtually of course) when that magic day does finally come!

I'm working on this!

Mentorship for mastery is where the largest gains come from, so that's where I focus my working energy.

I have an individual practice where I do one-on-one tech mentoring from students to CEOs and beyond, and my clients see huge improvements in their capacity. It's very rewarding, and I intend to keep growing after lockdown ends. Writing marketing copy is harder than mentoring for me, so my website is lacklustre, but it works well enough at hosting my calendly link: https://imagineer.school

Mentorship doesn't replace the entire school experience, though. For that, I'm using the Sudbury Valley School model, and once everyone is vaccinated we'll open a K-12 physical school in Toronto 2025.

Is anyone else here working on democratic education models?

As a parent, the moment my kid qualifies for a vaccine, they get it and will be off to school! Remote learning is slowly making this little one crazy. It hurts to watch.

How did you learn the type of programming that you use for work?

If you’re anything like me or my kids, you’ve probably learned most of it through docs, forums, in-person mentors, peers, and async coursework. In university, much of the act of learning happens in labs, not lectures.

The main model for education we have in the US is oriented around notions of authority and racial imperialism. The idea that a single learned elite sharing the light of knowledge from chosen tomes, to a lower class that is forced to attend... that dates back to Dark Age mass. The fundamental reality was that books were scarce and widespread literacy was impractical. It becomes an ideal venue for twisting or omitting information; a platform for power.

Our reality is fundamentally different. In a world of information abundance, the ability to source, collect, vet, absorb, and apply information matters. The ability to reject bad information matters greatly. The ability to create meaningful information and expression from that becomes a life’s work.

I want my kids to become compassionate, diligent, and excellent at solving a variety of problems using the resources available to them. I want them to see the breadth of human experience and foment desire to live a rich life.

I’ve come to see that modern public education embraces the authoritarian learning model, where the most compliant and capable students are prepared use by those who control the most capital. It’s a system that has been exploited to promote racial disparity in many forms over the years, and corrupted with pressure by religious groups. It’s the education system that created today’s America.

I pulled my kids out. We’re unscheduled and unschooling. My wife is doing doctoral work and one of my sons wants to go to University of Washington CS program. We’re building an academic and project portfolio and planning to do Running Start, aka free community college for k-12. He build a little social network in PHP in 6th grade and taught himself EE from YouTube. Last year he ordered his first run of 50 PCBs from China for a portable video game console he made from scratch. He can run circles around most adults on world history, geography, and critical think at age 13. Why should asshole teachers get to dictate exactly how he spends 10 hours of his life every day, when he has very different learning needs than most of his classmates?

My other son is creative and has been able to dive deep into his passions while also blazing through Khan math, learning animal husbandry, writing short film scripts, and practicing for being a streamer. There is no better venue to learn public speaking than to have to make a tight video presentation. He’s also kind of a tactical genius and I’m letting him push himself as a gamer, because he’s damn talented.

We tried replicating traditional academics at home and it just didn’t work. It depends on use of force to ensure the learning happens, and takes all of the fun out of it.

We’re meeting state standards for homeschooling in the process and trying to make sure they are not lacking in a particular area, but thankfully our state allows for flexibility in teaching models. They have plenty of social opportunities, clubs, sports, music (outside of pandemic circumstances) with far more meaningful interaction time than your average 3 minutes between class and 15 minute lunch break.

We don’t have to do school shooter drills or say the Pledge of Allegiance, but we still proudly fly an American Flag.

I see the system needing to shift away from authority and analytics, and towards creating healthy, whole humans. The short-term, fickle needs of capital, pervasive veneration of dead white men, or dogma of religious groups should not have any part of that process.