Education

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Books and classroom teaching/online videos are a user interfaces to knowledge. After the introduction of chatGPT and the fast evolution of large language models, it’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence is emerging as a new way to access and use knowledge. How this turns out, is still early to say.

The current crop of chat-based services is extremely useful in summarising large body of human knowledge into useful shorter clear text explanations with an interface that feels natural. And they help in writing software, mostly producing usable results. But at the same time, it sometimes produces gleefully wrong results. Gets mathematical formulas wrong, invents names and authors for scientific papers that do not exists etc. The user needs to have enough own knowledge to judge what parts are useful and what not.

This has for a long time been the case already with search engines. In order to ask the right question, you need to have fair bit of know-how of the domain; you need to know the right direction.

Generative aspect of AI is going to change many things in ways that are hard to predict as we are in the beginning. But it is clear that in order to successfully use them, one has to have fair bit of knowledge in own head. This means people still need to work to learn.

So what else is happening in the more traditional field of education?

First and foremost, personalisation is going to hit to education as well. Machine learning models can follow the progress of each student and pick the right approach for everyone. There are so many ways to learn: some like reading, others to hear (while doing workouts etc.), some prefer human interaction others digital environments. Some people learn best in a group, some alone, some need to try to solve the problem on their own first before delving into the answers. Everyone has their own rhythm and time of day when they prefer to learn.

The future educational environment learns how the learners learn and adapts.

All of this powered by open sourced (or sponsored by public side) learning materials, videos, machine learning models, learning games etc. When materials are shared in open format, they become globally accessible and can be localised for different countries and for different groups (people with disabilities in hearing, seeing, dyslexics, very young or old etc.)

Ideally during later phases of studies, the participants design solutions to real world problems so that at the end they have a portfolio to show publicly at what they accomplished. This helps in getting employed as other see their output.

Many people prefer human interaction in learning. Global connectivity allows best trainers to teach other people the art of teaching (train the trainer) anywhere as long as they share a common language. Real-time language translation will ultimately remove this barrier as well. This at least makes it possible to have the quality of teachers fairly high and even across the globe.

But schools are not only for education. They are places where people meet other people and form lifelong friendships. But first people need to want to come to the school/campus so they see each other. For educational institutes to really have a big positive impact in students’ life, they need to think outside of the classroom. With good quality teaching available 24/7 from home/dormitory, campuses need to attract. Campuses with best sport facilities, restaurants, best craft beer and bars and other happenings will be the winners. Not all administrators will want to accept this.

Online learning allows people whose youthful years went more into the entertainment sector than rigorous study, to fix their know-how gaps later in life when their prefrontal cortex starts maturing and common sense begins to kick in.

A slightly different scenario is where online schools charge users either per course or a monthly fee for all-you-can-study model. Online is a winner-take-all world where the best courses attend the majority of students. This means that income will centralise to a few of the most popular. And the online services or content creation teams can afford to spend blockbuster-movie like budgets on preparing their material and accompanying gamified learning software.

There will be both in-person schools and very good and big online services. Teaching becomes big and small.

On the risk side this trend can easily lead to edutainment where the incentive is to attract the maximum number of students. And the best way to do this is to offer entertainment that gives students the impression that they are learning. True learning requires some amount of pain as your mind is trying to grasps concepts that you do not yet understand and that process requires necessarily trial and error. The error bit being painful.

A third alternative regarding payment is that teaching becomes free and students pay a set percentage of their future salary for the skills they use at work. People no longer pay for education and courses but pay for skills and competences that result in steady income and the trainer gets a share of future revenue share.

Next: Upside Down Learning