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Education 3.0 and system transformation
By Michael Stevenson, Vice President, Global Education - London
Thursday, Jun 25, 2009 - 06:27 pm
What is Education 3.0? It’s an emphasis on 21C skills (appropriately balanced with subject knowledge), new forms of teaching and learning designed to develop 21C skills, and the use of collaborative technologies.
It doesn’t replace the reforms so many countries have pursued—standards, accountability, and high-quality teaching. Instead, it adapts them to facilitate new curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.
There's interest in Education 3.0 right around the world. You’ll find it discussed in the UK, the US, Canada and Australia (where new policy approaches are often initiated), as well as in the highest-performing countries such as Finland and Singapore. You can even talk over Education 3.0 in the Ministry of Education in Beijing.
The burning question is how to make it happen, and not in a few pilot schools but at the system level, in a way that achieves excellence and equity (goals that remain lodestars for almost every government).
One answer lies in leadership—cultivating the science of system leadership and equipping decision-makers to pull the various levers of education change simultaneously or at least in close sequence. It’s for this reason that Cisco has partnered with Harvard, McKinsey, and Hay Group to create the Global Education Leaders’ Program, launching in September 2009.
A second answer lies in reforming student assessment. Governments’ continuing reliance on traditional tests, assessing knowledge not skills, seriously inhibits the shift to Education 3.0. Working with Intel, Microsoft, OECD, IEA, academics and researchers from around the world, and five founding countries, Cisco is supporting the development of new frameworks to help governments evolve their assessment systems as rapidly as possible.
The prize is a deeper and broader grasp of 21C skills among students right around the world—creating the conditions for increased economic growth but also the prospect of bolder responses to the great issues of our time, from genetic disease to social breakdown, from economic regulation to climate change.
Comments
Regarding you second answer: I wholeheartedly agree that new assessment frameworks are desperately needed. I also believe that classroom teachers are need at the very inception of these discussions. Classroom teachers bring perspectives that are often missed by University academics.
Having said that, I am sure that you are familiar with Robert Mislevy's (U Maryland) work on Bayes Nets using the Cisco Networking Academy Assessment Database. In my opinion, this work is compelling, and points the direction forward toward personalized learning systems with intelligent tutors.
The first generation of intelligent tutors will undoubtedly be rough around the edges. This is especially true in cases where a student employs a canned strategy to a novel and complex networking problem. At this point, creativity and flexibilty of mind are best modeled by human minds. Bayes nets constructed from the assessment databases, no matter how extensive, will be naturally constrained by the finite size of the database.
That is why I believe that teachers need to be employed to bridge the gaps encountered by these future intelligent tutors. Neverthless, I applaud Cisco's efforts in this area. They provides an assessment model for science, technology, engineering, and math education (STEM) to emulate. In my opinion, STEM needs a standardized assessment database similar to Cisco's Networking Academy Assessment Database to move forward on this front.
Thank you. All the best in your efforts.