I still can't get over how we shut down schools in a huge amount of the world for a long period of time, and didn't come out of that with high-quality, open source, government-sponsored software for remote education. Instead, we just waited it out on every level, while the rich got a lot richer.
That we don't have that anyway is mind-blowing. An open-source corpus of educational material seems like an obvious social good in excess of many things that do get huge quantities of money sprayed at them.
Why does every school need to figure out sourcing their own worksheets for teaching kids about oxbow lakes or copper sulphate or whatever? Half the time they look like a teacher made them in 1993 using Windows NT clipart program, a typewriter and a photocopier, the other half of the time they are sloppily and half-heartedly cobbled together by some educational company.
The BBC does do quite a bit of this with BiteSize, bit it still seems limited compared to what I would really hope for.
Introductory Calculus, my friend, a teacher, during a period, where a new edition proved to be more buggy then the rest, abandoned text books. A recent HS grad, walked into their class, and was dismissed... then dropped my name, and was told to sit down. There are things from recent work that is now being incorporated into the curriculum, cleaner approaches... but the text books have not kept pace, except for one important exception: The amount of free textbooks has ballooned, and a great new proof of integral (1/x)
Being away from a bad family environment and around non-threatening people for a few hours every day is a huge benefit to many people. But there are also good families, where children thrive and can learn well remotely or through homeschooling. Not all families or students are the same. Indeed the effects of the lockdowns on students prove that. Some kids did well. Those who were already struggling got permanently destroyed (for all intents and purposes) by the lockdowns. Overall the lockdowns were bad because, imo, teachers cannot teach well remotely. Remote learning is not a hard problem. Remote teaching— that’s the problem.
It's only close to true for those kids that would have done reasonably anyway.
For those kids that don't have the kind of family environment that will allow them to catch up, it's gonna be a long haul. And they may never get there. That weighs on them for the rest of their time — on the education system, while they're still in it. And it weighs on us, in terms of the resources they take away from other children in education, and then on wider society later in life.
Since the lockdowns, there seems to have been a change in the mindset of some groups — skipping school has been made acceptable. There's a whole bunch of kids that might never return to education as a normal routine. It's likely the hangover will be long and painful for some groups.
Reading the teachers subreddit I have seen post after post complaining about letting kids graduate who willfully missed 100-200 days of school. I was not aware it was as large of a problem if the reddit posts are to be believed.
I think you're really missing the forest for the trees.
Schools aren't the solution to the problem you're describing (children with bad homes) and was a problem before COVID.
Bigger picture is that it is better to keep a larger portion of the population from dying or developing long term complications than slightly (very) protect a few children that are already being abused.
If you're really going to stand by your position then I suggest a reasonable compromise and that is expanding access to licensed professional social workers and community health programs that are there to help parents and children succeed in life.
Perhaps but I’d argue society has moved to where this is better (children must have an education) vs the alternative say getting a job or whatever children did 100 years ago. Also it is being paid for, at least in my area, through quite high property taxes where over 60% go to school. So if the alternative is find day care or educate them myself I expect my taxes to go down where I can use that money for education and day care.
When you observe school policy debates at the local level, you come to realize that, for many parents, school's main function is free daycare for the kids so that they can go to work. Remote school doesn't help much on that front.
Because remote education doesn't really work. Humans are just not wired for it.
One of my friend's daughter was 6 years old in the middle of the mess. He simply could NOT get her to "mode switch"--if she was home and daddy was home it's "vacation time" and anything else was a miserable fight.
He and couple of other families finally got together to pay a teacher and have a "pod" of 4 other children in their local housing development. That way the daughter went to "school" for some number of hours a day and her father didn't have to fight the "mode switch" any more.
All four of those students are now WAY ahead of all their classmates.
I agree but would also note that your proof isn’t very fullproof. You can pull 4 students and send them to a tutor under any condition, and those students will come out ahead. You prove only that a teacher with a 4 person classroom of students of concerned parent-types tends to outperform the baseline, a pandemic remote learning environment with a mix of students and public school salaried teacher.
The point was that my friend couldn't get his daughter to learn, period, without a fight until he solved the mode switch problem. And that parents in the same housing development didn't seem to be able to solve it either as their children are now far behind those of my friend's daughter and her compatriots from that pod.
Neither individual home tutors nor parental tutoring nor online schooling seemed to be able to solve the problem. The solution required an in-person mode switch of the teacher and environment.
Now, this could obviously be different for, say, college age or adult learners. Young children don't have the same general understanding of conditions that adults do. On the other hand, "mode switch" is a thing even for adults as we talk about "flow" all the time.
I think you’re right. I’d just love better data. I used to do the typical Silicon Valley commute and arrive at work unable to focus for an hour or two because mode switching so quickly know it’s a thing. What I wonder about is why is it more of a thing in some situations compared to others, and is it not a thing we want to make students practice doing.
Outschool is pretty amazing. I think through a Darwinian process a lot of remote education tools will emerge. I think people ignore that remote education tech is helpful for homeschooling, for extracurriculars, for people trying to get a degree while working, people in very rural areas, developing countries, and a whole host of other use cases. There was definitely a “we will hack this stuff together and throw it aside asap” mentality which baffled me as an engineer, but I’m certain a lot of very capable and smart people have learned amazing things and built great tech. It’ll take a while for the bitter after taste to wear off, and as I discussed above, the back biting and second guessing and the indignation that they had to sacrifice or suffer in some way in a disaster. But as emotions cool, I think we will see a resurgence of the techniques and technologies.
Re: governmental open source - the government is typically bad at such things. It’ll be private sector, educator, and contributor sourced as with all great things in the space of tech, for better or worse.
The UK Government Digital Service has produced some pretty excellent, useable and consistent online services, with a particular focus on accessibility. Also great care taken to keep the services functional on very old and low-spec devices, far in excess of any private company I have used a website from, which are usually so bogged down with JS glitz that they barely actually work.
I have seen a few teachers who discovered their new talents during COVID, and made YouTube lessons for their students. Most of them simply filmed themselves in front of the blackboard, talking and writing, just like they would in a classroom full of students.
The ones I know about were mostly elementary school math teachers, so it was like you had online lessons covering grade 5-9 math, almost overnight. Of course it made me think: "How much work would it take to systematically cover everything?" At least, everything on the elementary and high school level -- perhaps universities are a special case, but for every elementary or high school lessons, you have hundreds of teachers that teach it every year, so a few of them should be capable and willing to do a solid work in front of the camera.
And it would be so incredibly easy! Not in the sense that I would underestimate the work of a good teacher required to make a good lesson... but in the sense that the teachers are already preparing those lessons anyway -- it is their everyday work. The only thing that is needed is for them to repeat the lesson once again, in an empty room in front of the camera.
The greatest actual obstacle is probably that many don't think about it, or don't want the extra work of learning to use the camera, buying the right camera, cutting the video, making and maintaining an online account, etc. Which is why this would benefit from some division of labor. How about letting the teacher prepare and do the lessons, and have someone else operate the camera and cut the videos? The advantage is that the camera person can be the same for many different subjects. More teachers would probably be willing to join the project this way.
Now imagine the easiest possible implementation: very simply edit the videos (just remove the mistakes, or maybe the parts where the teacher took a break, speed up 3x the erasing of the blackboard, etc.), upload those videos to YouTube (to the teachers' accounts if they have some, or to a project's common account if they don't), and then create a simple web catalogue of all the videos. So that the person would visit the homepage, choose the subject, choose the grade, choose the topic, and then see a list of videos from different teachers teaching that topic.
I think the "minimum viable product" should cover at least one subject in one grade completely, so that it is a reliable resource that the user can keep visiting during the entire year, knowing that they will always find what they are looking for. Otherwise, there is really not much advantage over using Google. Expand from there to cover more grades and more subjects. Basically, always provide an equivalent of a textbook for the entire grade, not just a video here and a video there and a disappointment everywhere else. -- But of course, once you have the entire grade of a subject covered, you can keep adding more videos from other teachers even if they do not cover the entire grade. If you have 1 video for one topic, and 3 different videos for another topic, that is perfectly okay. The important thing is that all topics (in given subject and grade) are covered at least by 1 video. Alternative videos are good, because if you don't get it after watching a video, it might help to hear another person explain it differently.
I think you could do all this relatively quickly and cheaply. I mean, if you find teachers willing to do this for free (and I believe you could, considering the fact that a few of them already did it alone), and if the schools provide the empty classrooms in the evening, you basically just need to pay someone with the camera to record the videos, someone to cut the videos, and someone to make the web front end. That would be like, three people's salary, and in return you get hundreds of videos each year.
Providing all those videos for free could dramatically change the experience of education. Anytime a child didn't understand the lesson at school, or was sick, they could watch the lessons at home. This would be an awesome resource for homeschoolers, or for talented kids who want to learn the knowledge of higher grades. Adults could refresh their knowledge, whether out of sheer curiosity, or because they want to help their kids.
And because the contents of school education do not change so fast (except maybe for computer science lessons), the content once produced could be used for decades. And once it is there, it can still be further improved -- like, if you think that some teacher did not explain a certain topic properly, make a better video yourself. If certain knowledge becomes obsolete, or something is added to the curriculum, just record that one lesson.
You could also dub those lessons to the languages of minorities (by different people, again the division of labor), etc.
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In before "but isn't Khan Academy doing exactly this?" -- yes and no. Yes, Khan Academy provides awesome online education, a strong alternative to schools. And it does much more than I propose here; such as automatically evaluated exercises, tracking of student progress, etc. But the cost is that preparing all this takes a lot of time. Also, the barriers to contributing are high; a random teacher cannot just record their lessons and add them.
I would like to see a system where contributing is simple for teachers, and therefore we could reasonably expect to have the elementary and high school education covered systematically; to have alternative explanations for the same topic, to keep getting new and improved videos for the existing topics, etc. (And there is nothing wrong with having Khan Academy as an alternative to this; the more options, the better.)
