Modernising Education in the Digital Age [Part 1]
Aside from better organisation of social roles, another major pathway towards human advancement is through technological achievements. From the development of telegrams in 1844 to the mass adoption of the internet by the end of the 20th century, humans have devised novel and improved methods of passing information from individual to individual and mass to mass. As such, these developments in telecommunications have fundamentally affected how we interact with a larger society — how we meet people, develop relationships and maintain them.
By extension, this has changed and improved large aspects of the human experience: We shop for things online produced elsewhere. We consume content created by individuals all over the world. However, thinkHER ambition believes that the field of education has yet to successfully adopt technology to make a major breakthrough.
Consider classroom-based education. Content aside, this method of teaching has remained largely the same from the mid-19th century until today. The recent global pandemic has signalled the need for the adoption of technology to ensure resilience. Education must adapt and evolve to the digital age. Here are our ideas on how emerging technologies can change the face of education
What does our vision of the future look like?
AI for Improved Learning
Reviewing homework and exam responses has always been a tedious process in every teacher’s career. The nature of language makes it difficult for semantics and meaning to be drawn out in a rigid fashion. Automation attempts have been limited to autochecking of multiple choice questions, which greatly limits any examination process. However, the introduction of more powerful computational techniques for text analysis and natural language processing has broken new ground for applications in the field of education.
For example, a simple application would be highlighting repeated errors performed by individual students or in a class across assignments. This would signal teachers to focus on specific key topics in which students commonly perform mistakes. More complex applications include studying information retention by performing analysis on student responses between classes based on different teaching formats. This allows schools to refocus their teaching pedagogy with a new lens — moving away from the traditional test scores approach when assessing a student’s capabilities.
This technological application is not new. Historically, one significant hurdle has been data transfer. Homework and exams are often performed on paper, and the process of converting paper responses to digital text is arduous. However, the global pandemic has accelerated the movement of student responses from paper to digital, which streamlines the data collection process.
With all that has been written, steady caution should be taken when implementing such technologies in the education field. As stated above, the methodology of teaching has been largely constant and attempts to disrupt the field over a short period would be an immense undertaking. Any technology implemented should aim to empower teaching instead of undermine or replace it in its initial phases of rollout, with subsequent phases aiming to chip away and transform the incumbent culture.
Part 2 coming soon.
Tom Chu is a Data Science Consultant at Deloitte Hong Kong in GMT+8, and co-founder of thinkHER ambition in GMT+1 (BST)