I think you've just got a glimpse of the future of education.
The runaway success of Khan Academy, which launched in 2008,
showed the potential for online learning to revolutionize K-12 education.
It meant that a great classroom lecture could be experienced by anyone anywhere.
And learning software from companies like dreambox could act as a personal tutor.
We've developed the intelligent, adaptive learning technology
that celebrates student learning.
Twelve years later, classrooms mostly look like they always have
and many teachers are skeptical that technology can fundamentally remake classroom instruction.
This whole idea of turning over education to technology takes away the human element.
Computers have been used in classrooms since the 1980s.
By 2000 there was one PC for every five students in American classrooms.
In 2008, the same year that Khan Academy launched,
the legendary business professor Clayton Christensen,
who passed away last week at the age of 67,
co-authored a book applying his theory of disruptive innovation to the classroom.
When used disruptively, software could solve the problem of students learning at different speeds.
While some are bored, others are struggling to keep up.
Christensen and his co-authors wanted to flip the structure of the classroom
and make is student centric.
They would watch online courses given by the world's best instructors.
Educational apps would gamify learning, help track progress
and personalize the content.
Teachers could then use classroom time to help students tackle bigger, more conceptual problems.
Christensen and his co-authors predicted that by 2018
about 50% of high school classes would be delivered online.
And they dismissed the objection that government bureaucracies and teachers unions
would stand in the way of rapid change.
Their prediction didn't come true.
I would say the biggest lesson that I've had is not that I'm disappointed
but just that it takes a long time to do this.
Michael Horn, who was one of Christensen's co-authors,
is a Harvard MBA who specializes in education technology.
You're trying to overthrow literally a century of policy and practice
around our current school system
and all of a sudden we come along and say
'wait a second, we're not doing it the right way.'
Schools have continued to integrate computers into classrooms
but Horn says they haven't brought fundamental change.
We think that every student, because they're in fifth grade for example,
should be doing the exact same thing at the exact same time
and we should test on those exact same things.
We literally fund schools based on the number of minutes that students sit in seats
not on how much they learn.
Disrupting Class included a plea to philanthropists to help fund this disruption.
Foundations answered that call but with limited impact.
Take Summit Learning which is backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Its goal was to be in fifty percent of public schools by 2025.
Over one hundred million dollars later, it's used in just four tenths of one percent.
Although according to the education news site Chalkbeat
Summit declined the opportunity to be studied by a team of Harvard researchers
it can point to anecdotal successes.
Such as the experience of one public middle school in Washington D.C.
So we got wind of this program and said like 'hey let's try it.'
Like let's pilot it.
Summit Learning flew teachers to California for training
and covered the entire cost of llthe program.
We saw just student engagement increase
and actually like behavioral referrals decrease
because students were engaged 100%.
Denise Edwards tied teachers' performance evaluations to the new online curriculum.
As a teacher you want that control over your classroom
like this is your space, this is your baby
and like letting go brings about fear.
But Emily Raskin, a math teacher at another D.C. high school
says that the flipped classroom model ignores the realities of student behavior.
I think that we look at the next big thing that looks great to adults
and assume that it's going to be the same thing for kids.
So if you assign them to watch a video, for example at home one night,
that is maybe ten minutes long,
by 30 seconds in, if they're not really interested, they just kind of zone out
and they come to school the next day really believing that they have watched the video.
In some schools where Summit was implemented parents fought to overturn it.
Parents and students often just don't know what they don't know about school.
They don't know what it could be, what opportunities they might be missing.
The subjects that we cover in the electronic apps are science, history, geography,
we do music, Spanish, math, art.
According to Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation
change happens first in the segments of the market so insignificant
that nobody is really paying attention to them
but eventually they grow to overtake the industry.
Disrupting Class gives home schoolers as an example.
Melissa Kigin is a mother of five in rural Maryland.
And I'm not a teacher, I'm not trained to be a teacher,
I don't think you need to have that in order to home school if you have apps like these.
We're living in this moment I think where we can reshape the models at the heart of education
and leverage these tools and technologies.
Are we on the eve of seeing the end of the traditional classroom?
No reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.
Or perhaps Christensen and Horn are guilty as the saying goes
of mistaking a clear view of the future for a short distance.
The current classroom model may survive for a long time to come
at least until software gets better at approximating student-teacher interactions.
And when change does occur, chances are it will look nothing like we had imagined.