Teacherless education…

Thomas Frey //April 25, 2012//

Teacherless education…

Thomas Frey //April 25, 2012//

Over the past couple months I’ve become enamored with watching my two-year-old nephew Mikaia learn the letters of the alphabet, colors, and numbers. Even though he doesn’t have them all perfect, he’s scoring in the high 90 percent when we quiz him verbally.

Next up, the periodic table of elements?

What’s most interesting is that his mother says she never set out to teach him this information. Rather, he picked it up on his own from watching “little guy” television shows.

Admittedly, the repeated quizzing by mom, dad, and others has helped, but this is a very young child who blasted through the most rudimentary pieces of learning without having any formal teaching, classrooms, or lesson plans involved.

If young kids can learn efficiently through television, what would happen if we moved up the food chain to college courses, and handed them off to television producers, game designers and app developers to see how they would go about rewriting the material in fun and interesting ways?

For this reason, I’d like to take you on a journey to re-imagine the way we learn through a competition, a competition that I believe will change everything.

Our Need for Teacherless Education

Throughout history, education has been formed around the concept of “place.” Build fancy buildings, attract world-renowned scholars, and you have a college or university. This model works well in a culture based on teaching. Over the coming years, with our hyper-connected world, we will quickly begin shifting to a leaning model. And while “place” will still matter, it will matter differently.

After my talk in Istanbul in February, I was approached by Cori Namer, an executive from Google who discussed the reason why teacherless education is so important.

“Our team at Google is looking for ways to educate the people of Africa, but very few teachers want to move to Africa,” he said.

The conversation was brief, but he framed the problem very succinctly. There simply aren’t enough teachers at the right time and place to satisfy our insatiable hunger and need for knowledge.

We are severely limiting our learning potential. Teachers become the problem in this equation, not the solution they were intended to be .

Teaching requires experts. Teacherless education uses experts to create the material, but doesn’t require the expert to be present each time the material is presented.

With a wide array of promising tools and techniques that can be used, the possibilities are truly inspiring. The new frontier of a teacherless education system is at our doorstep, and all we are lacking is that yet-to-be named visionary who will take the reigns.

Framing the Problem Around a Competition

Launched in 1996 by Pete Diamandis, the Ansari X Prize was a space competition in which the X-Prize Foundation offered a $10 million prize for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The prize was won on October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the Sputnik 1 launch, by Tier One. Their entry, called SpaceShipOne, was designed by Burt Rutan and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

A few years ago I had a conversation with Tom Vander Ark, who was, at the time, President of the X Prize Foundation. Since his background included running the education division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he had a vested interest in finding a way to advance education through competitions.

So far, nothing has been announced, and Tom has moved on to a new position, but Pete Diamandis and his team are still working to solve this problem. Their website lists the “Education Game X PRIZE” as something that will be announced sometime in the future.

For this reason, I’d like to weigh in with some thoughts of how to tackle this problem. As I talk through this approach, knowing my own limitations, I would invite everyone to add their thoughts in the comments about better ways of tackling this.