This article was published in advance of the 2013 Skoll World Forum. Watch the live stream April 10-12 by clicking here.
From 2001-2003 as a Senior Executive at Hewlett Packard I chaired a working group of the UN Information and Communications Technology Task Force. Our goal was getting technology into the hands of underserved populations around the world to improve education, health care and economic development. NIIT’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Sugata Mitra had received international acclaim for his famous “hole-in-the-wall” experiment in the New Delhi slum of Kalkaji, fueling the belief that if kids had access to the internet they would essentially educate themselves. Technology companies, foundations and development agencies invested heavily in computers and Internet access but the results were disappointing. The technology was not sufficiently integrated into the educational experience. On visits to rural schools in Africa and India I was often taken to computer labs in locked and shuttered rooms with rows of idle computers protected under plastic covers. Curious students following me on my tour peered in from the door to see the carefully guarded spaces they were not welcome to enter.
Since 2006 I have been on the d.school faculty at Stanford teaching innovation through user centered design and experiencing the current disruption of education from the inside. This unusual background gives me complete confidence that the technology-enabled transformation currently under way WILL radically improve access to high quality education across the globe. Here’s why.
From my vantage point, Sal Khan lit the match igniting the current blaze of innovation. In 2004 while working as a hedge fund analyst in Boston and helping his cousins in New Orleans with their math, Sal started posting lessons on YouTube. Surprisingly, his cousins preferred “YouTube Sal” to the live version and the videos attracted a broader audience. Incorporating insights gleaned from his cousins and other viewers, Sal made more lessons. In 2009 he left finance to transform education. In early 2011 Sebastian Thrum, a Google employee and Computer Science professor at Stanford heard Sal Khan give a TED talk about the Khan Academy’s advances since those first videos. Sal described lessons structured to allow students to progress through a knowledge map, incorporating quizzes and exercises to require mastery before advancing to the next level. He talked about the flipped classroom pilot where the Khan team and second to seventh grade teachers collaborated to design dashboards allowing the teachers to observe each student’s progress and intervene if a student was stuck or pair them with another student who could offer peer mentoring. He showed the extensive catalog of lessons and tools for students, teachers and coaches available for free on the Khan Academy site. He marveled at the impact of incorporating gaming technology like badges and leader boards to provide motivation and feedback. Thrum was captivated and decided to launch an experiment with his fall Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford, offering a parallel online version free to anyone. 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled. Most notable was the fact that only 30 of Thrum’s 200 Stanford students showed up in class that quarter. They loved his lectures but found the online learning experience superior.
The experiment’s overwhelming success led Thrum to launch Udacity in January 2012. In April two other Stanford CS professors launched Coursera with financial backing from top tier Silicon Valley VC firms. In May Harvard and MIT launched the third major MOOC (massively open online course) player, EdX. Disruptive innovation was unleashed with the ecosystem of the Silicon Valley behind it to deliver educational content in a high scale, low cost model while providing a deeply interactive experience to learners akin to one-on-one tutoring. In a pattern that we’ve seen many times before when technology disrupts the existing model, the core innovations exposed new gaps that needed to be filled and entrepreneurs began emerging to fill them: start-ups like Proctoru, delivering online proctoring services to enable trustworthy online test taking and Piazza, an online discussion board to manage class Q&A. Suppliers of web and computer based curriculum are also proliferating, using technology to improve the effectiveness or efficiency of delivering fairly standard content as well as to transform the pedagogical approach.
Now the real excitement can begin, as the door is open for the radical reinvention of the classroom and campus experience. As Clayton Christianson, the Harvard Business School professor and acclaimed disruptive innovation expert has observed, the most transformative disruptors often begin serving consumers who are not targeted by established players. This seems to be happening in education. Some of the most cutting edge work in K-12 is being led by social entrepreneurs starting new private schools to eliminate the achievement gaps among underserved students, like Rocketship Education in the US, Spark Schools in South Africa and Innova Schools in Peru. These organizations are taking advantage of the full range of innovations available, incorporating technology in curriculum planning and delivery, classroom management, teacher training and parent communication to create new models for providing excellent, affordable K-12 education.
In higher education, one of my favorite examples is the African Leadership Academy, founded by two Stanford MBAs with the goal of developing the next generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leadership for Africa. They recruit extraordinary 15-18 year olds from all 54 African nations and around the world into a two-year residential program in Johannesburg and a lifelong comradeship. Their selection criteria, blend of intellectual growth and hands-on leadership development and their approach to connecting and empowering the community of ALA students and graduates are atypical and extremely inventive. ALA readily incorporates the best new technologies (like MOOCs) and continually iterates in collaboration with their students. They are already delivering many of the things that Stanford undergraduates talk about when we ask them how they would like the campus experience to change: more meaningful and structured ways to connect with peers and faculty who share their intellectual passions, more experiential learning opportunities, deeper mentorship from faculty and peers.
While established institutions in higher education and K-12 are participating in the revolution that is underway, it challenges many of their core assumptions and operating paradigms and significant resistance must be overcome. Meanwhile social entrepreneurs focusing on the underserved can move quickly to create the future of education.
Those around the globe with the least access to education today may be the first to fully benefit from the breakthroughs enabled by the innovation that is afoot. Keep an eye on this space…or jump in!
