Schools face radical decade of change

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 07 September 2011 15:50

Business IT - Technology

Imagine if every time a child walked into class their computer automatically opened up a personalised learning programme with content tailored for their needs and also accounting for the way that an individual child learns. Now track forward five to ten years and it will be reality.

At least it will be reality if Ramona Pierson has her way. Dr Pierson is chief science officer for education at education technology specialist Promethean, and developer of an algorithm which is now being trialled in a number of pilots around the world to deliver personalised learning programmes for schoolchildren.

During a visit to Australia this week, Dr Pierson said that school education had been largely static since the 1960s in that it remained largely book based. But she said that the pace of change was now such that 'you won't recognise education' ten years from now.

While Australia's Government has focussed in recent years on getting hardware and communications networks into schools through its Digital Education Revolution programme, the real benefits will accrue in terms of how the technology platforms are harnessed.

Dr Pierson has worked on an algorithm that can be used to search online learning and data repositories to match content with students, the modalities they prefer to use to learn, and also acknowledging the needs of the teacher and then deliver that 'just in time.' In conventional classroom settings it would be possible for teachers to use a 'dashboard' showing them which modalities were working best for which children, allowing personalised learning programmes to be delivered at scale.

In a TED talk earlier this year Dr Pierson noted that the current education model was linear and based on an 'archaic curriculum that pretends the rest of the world doesn't exist. We are using textbooks five to ten years out of date.'

Dr Pierson was a founder of SynapticMash which was bought by Promethean in June 2010. During an interview with iTWire this week she said that the fact that the publishers of the world's text books were now 'crumbling' would spur educators to seek alternative input.