Re-inventing Education for the Digital Age | David Middelbeck | TEDxMünster

Well, our world has always been in a race between technology and

education

, usually the two go hand in hand, but there are some points in history where the technology race is so far ahead that

education

can barely keep up. rhythm. Let me give you a brief historical example. The technology of the 15th century attracted attention when a great piece of technology was invented: the printing press, which allowed books to be printed much cheaper than ever before. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the entire population knew how to read, which ultimately led to massive social conflicts and inequality until at some point, the entire education system was revolutionized to keep up with the times when the first universities and schools were born well.

This happened a couple of times in history, every time technology advanced, it first generated social pain and inequality until at some point. moment when the entire education system is turned upside down to keep up now, let's go back to 2019, do we have a similar race between technology and education today? I think yes, we have it, we have invented it in you and the powerful technology called

digital

ization every day. Now we can see how smartphones, how the Internet, how artificial intelligence changes our jobs and our private lives. A recent McKinsey study predicts that in the next 10 years up to a third of all work activities could be completely replaced due to automation.

Today's algorithms created by a few techies in Silicon Valley decide how we communicate with each other, decide how we buy things. They can even be used to manipulate entire elections, as we have seen in FC, as we have seen in the US, but the vast majority of us here today have no idea how this technology actually works. What I wonder is how should we, as citizens, be able to make wise political decisions if we do not understand what is possible and what is not so possible in In the historical examples we just looked at, there is now a growing gap between those who who designed the change and those who are left behind because they lack the skills or means to adapt.

Once again, technology advances and education falls behind. I personally worked as a data scientist. I studied information systems and artificial intelligence at University and mue

nster

at Harvard. I then went on to lead a team of 15 engineers at an analytics startup. Every day I got up and did my best to help technology raise its head until at some point I realized that, in reality, the much bigger challenge and the much bigger opportunity for our society lies in the other part of that race: helping

digital

education, helping people catch up, so this year I left my job to work full time on the digital sector. education I think let's take a look at the second part of our career here education well there we see that our educational institutions are now facing conditions that have changed dramatically in recent years, as we move from an old world with a situation where a great learning content. rare in a new world where much of knowledge is a commodity and often free to use, whether as YouTube material, a block break or some other type of material, we also move from an old world with very stable to a new world where much of the knowledge we learn in higher education is no longer relevant ten years later.

Am 26 years old. My own generation will probably retire in 2060, but I can't even predict what skills will be relevant to me, well, five years from now. and how did our educational institutions change in the face of these dramatic changes that are not very correct that we see live in a world where we put hundreds of people in the same huge lecture halls designed for a single teaching of philosophy, correct and even More we see This old world and lifelong learning, we still have a lot of companies where employees just spend maybe two or maybe three days a year with training.

This would be like me going to the doctor and asking him what I should do to stay fit and healthy for the rest of my life and he says: Well David, I advise you to run a marathon very early in your life and you will fly fit and healthy. for the rest of your life. Doesn't seem like great advice, right? So I fear we are about to lose that race between technology and educators. The way we teach has not evolved with the dramatic change that is required these days and I don't think we can tolerate it and I think we need a new generation.

That takes this issue into its own hands, so two years ago my friend Myers and I decided to start in the green field to turn education into experience from the ground up, we developed this idea of ​​what we call a learning accelerator. It is based on this, on a very simple but radical idea, using cutting-edge technology, we put all available efforts on the individual student and the learning environment to bring this idea to life. We actually found it as a non-profit organization here at Mi

nster

. just a few minutes from the stage we call it Tech Labs Tech Labs teaches coding skills in the fields of web development, data science, artificial intelligence, it is a completely free 16-week program, open to everyone and designed so that you can complete it in parallel to your studies or your regular work, for example, Tech Labs is based on three fundamental principles that define our idea of ​​​​learning acceleration and our idea of ​​​​digital education in the 21st century.

The first is the effective combination of online and offline learning for every student at techlabs gets access to our own online learning platform with videos, assignments, articles, most of this content is not produced by us but is We source and select from the grade and often three resources from the web, so if you are a morning person you can do your e-learning lessons in the morning, if you are a night owl you do it at night, if If you have difficulty with a certain concept, you can always go back and review this lecture because the computer never tires of explaining it to you three or four times.

In a row, on the other side, we use offline meetings for our students' interaction, to invite speakers to hackathons and social events. Well, the second principle is called personalization. Let me ask you here in the audience who among you uses Amazon and orders from Amazon. That's impressive, right, and I think a big part of this success is based on the fact that Amazon learns our behavior at the right time and learns what product we might like or buy next, but what I wonder is why? . Our society spends billions on improving and researching these personalization algorithms on services like Amazon or Spotify, but almost nothing to provide these personalized digital learning opportunities in education?

Isn't it strange that we have completely failed to use these personalization technologies to use them? In education we still live in a world where some of us think that it is actually a code called personalization, if the instructor learns a student's name. I mean, there is a big star, but when it comes to education, people are radically different. place a specific path, specific learning objective and destination for the technology to love, each student gets a unique personalized learning path based on prior knowledge and even with the basic version on our platform that we use now, the results are absolutely stunning And you can imagine the wonderful things would happen if universities and schools implemented this on a larger scale.

Now the third principle is called Community. Learning technology skills is not easy and if you are struggling with a certain concept, this always happens at some point when coding. It is often not the instructor, but the learning partners and peers who help you stay motivated to maintain the course. I think today we easily underestimate the value of these real learning communities and our educational institutions, so we eliminate this traditional one-size-fits-all conference. and I think people have a flexible e-learning conference at home. In fact, we free up valuable offline time for deep interaction with our students, so we use technology to make the classroom more social.

I think this is one of the most paradoxical things these days. that actually using technology transforms a very antisocial experience, people listening in a lecture hall are simply silently listening in a social environment that embraces the diversity of curiosity and simply values ​​learning new things, so what does it look like? all this in practice during the first week? Start by simply getting to know your fellow learners and your learning community and then a few days later you could start with your own eLearning itinerary which has usually been personalized and generated just for you and if you are a beginner e.g.

This might be one of your first lessons teaching you how to write a small program to let a cat greet the world, but soon you'll be able to team up with other students in the community to work on your own little first coding project and usually , this will be a little bit more useful than the cat we just saw, for example, one of our teams simply uses the new coding skills to predict bicycle traffic flows and ministers to optimize the entire infrastructure, a whole technology Run by a team of volunteers who often spend more than 10 hours a week improving and designing our program.

We partner with experienced mentors who guide our students with psychologists who have personalization and we even partner with teachers who now use the Tech Let's program to free up their valuable time offline. for deeper interaction with students and working on interesting projects and all this worked after just a year and a half, we have created 300 more entries, we have opened two more locations and Copenhagen, Barcelona, ​​aiming to create 10 more in Germany next year. ultimately creating 1000 tech experts by 2020 and 90% of all tech-loving participants did not have any coding experience before joining our 16-week program. This, for example, is gin gin, a friend of Gin Gin Gin started the technology labs program last semester, a few months later. web without coding Sprint, by the way, a few months later participated in the largest hackathon in Germany and finished in third place and this on the left is Tamara also from Minster.

After completing the Tech Nuts program, she went to Harvard Medical School to apply her coding skills. there to investigate a couple of weeks ago she wrote me a message saying that when she was Tecates she had given her decoding experiences that she later used for medical research at Harvard. Well, for me, though the biggest reward is seeing these people surprised by their own learning progress. I think for a lot of us here this glass of heaven when we were kids maybe when we learned to ride a bike or something, but I think We find a way to recreate that feeling, many times it's worth fighting for, I think.

This is just the beginning why we are starting with learning accelerators for coding skills right now. I think this new model of education is equally good at teaching all kinds of other skills, it was suitable for teaching children before lifelong learning and it was adequate. educating the workforce of entire companies with a focus on personalization while taking advantage of the powerful, free resources of the web. So what can we do today to make this a reality? I think what is easy to understand is that we are all part of these educational systems as Teachers, of course, but also as parents, students and colleagues at work, we are all responsible for helping education catch up with the technology and there are many ways to make a change, if you are a parent or student, keep your institutions, your teachers in school, your managers who work hold them accountable for providing these effective and personalized learning opportunities, it is there, it is possible and if it is working in education, ask yourself how can personalization, blended learning community, how can transform my own classroom into a learning accelerator.

I promise it really is. In the end, it's not that difficult, this new type of education is not just about teaching a few more technical skills, but about teaching people to take charge of their lives and participate in achieving one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. humanity today: the wise management of the power we have gained through digital technology thank you very much