Category: Education Today

On January 27, 1945 the world discovered the horror of the Shoah, when Russian troops entered the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Seventy years later, while antisemitism remains a massive threat, Tel Aviv University and the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem (dedicated to Holocaust memory) have announced a MOOC on the Holocaust.

I like the quietness and intensity of the Yad Vashem. I like the idea that somewhere on the planet, there will always be a special place that keeps Holocaust memory alive, as though it were part of the landscape. I always shiver when entering the buried memorial almost entirely plunged into darkness, with tiny lights and tiny words that recall the names of all the children who disappeared during the Shoah. What will I experience with this MOOC? Will this online course provide me with the emotions that I feel when visiting Yad Vashem? In fact, it shouldn’t, it can’t.

I do not yet have any idea how this MOOC has been designed. I hope it will leave aside the emotion and concentrate on the Holocaust as a social learning experience.

This MOOC on the Holocaust can’t be a guided visit to the Yad Vashem or a video archive. A MOOC on the Holocaust should be, above all, a social learning experience: learning with others and from others, enabling learners to gain ownership of what they learn.

An experience took place in the USA called the “deeper learning Mooc”, challenging teachers and educators to question their practice. Interestingly enough, Holocaust memory was one of the subjects explored in depth by the teachers, school leaders and educators that joined the course.

We often question the utility of MOOCs. In this case, we should look at the MOOC as a unique opportunity to massively and openly reach tens of thousands of educators, engage them in a reflexive and interactive process to keep the Holocaust memory alive in our classrooms, and strengthen core values that hold as much importance today as they did in the past.

I hope this MOOC can be the first Citizen MOOC. A Citizen MOOC will convert any social issue into a learning experience based on dialogue, participation and citizen engagement.

Will this first Citizen MOOC on the Holocaust respond to these expectations? It will depend –mostly – on the learners and their capacity to engage and feel engaged. After all, this is what innovative learning should be about.

“Do you know anything about these tablet-free schools where Silicon Valley executives send their kids? Is it the sign that technology is not THE solution to learning?”

I raised this question a few days ago in London at the launch of the Global EdTech Startup Award and started thinking once again about education, technology and equity.

At about the same moment, I read a UNICEF report that concluded that progress in increasing access to schooling has stalled worldwide – with 58 million primary school-aged children not in school. While the richest people on earth were looking for an alternative education model in the heart of the Sillicon Valley, hundreds of millions of parents at the bottom of the pyramid were figuring out how to give a good education to their children. Both have in common the same preoccupation for their children’s future. Both believe that “education is the answer”.

In words of Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, authors of the fascinating book Poor Economics, “Parents, like everyone else, want schools to deliver what they understand to be an ‘elite’ education to their child.” Obviously the word “elite” has a different meaning for a Silicon Valley executive than for an Indian lower-caste family.

According to a 2011 NY Times article, high-tech giants’ top executives are sending their children to schools where not a computer is to be found and there are no screens at all. An easy conclusion can be reached: “computers and schools don’t mix.” (A little bit too easy if you consider that these kids are living constantly among screens at the very moment they leave the school…).

How can we explain that at the same time, these parents –through their companies – are providing schools in India and elsewhere with thousands of laptops as part of the project OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). What is bad for a rich American kid will be good for a poor Indian one?

Do we really have two opposite models? While the Waldorf School of the Peninsula “fosters the capacities needed for a successful, purposeful, and joyful life”, the Indian NGO Pratham aims to bring a low-cost, digital learning solution to 1000 low-income schools across 12 states of India, reaching over 50,000 children. Which one is a better school? Does it make sense to take technology out of the most technological part of the world and send it to the least technological one? Has the world gone upside-down?

For both Waldorf and Pratham, learning – not schooling – is the key. The former takes the tablets out of school because they are everywhere else in children’s lives while the latter take them into the school because they are nowhere else to be found and a fantastic tool to achieve ambitious learning goals. A question of balance…

I almost forgot to answer the introductory question: technology is not the solution if it is not accompanied by a change in pedagogy. This is the true challenge that all countries are facing. In the Silicon Valley and in India and in all countries that believe – wrongly – that a tablet will solve it all or that a tablet is useless.

12 people died yesterday in Paris, most of them illustrators and journalists. 12 people killed by two terrorists claiming they were avenging the Prophet Muhammad. 12 people that speak for our freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of thought.

Lincoln once said “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance”. Is it all about ignorance? Is it about their ignorance? Or about our own ignorance? Are these illiterate murderers the symbol of our failure to educate them?

The journalists that died were defending a simple truth: we can laugh at everything, at everyone. Do we really learn this at school? Are we brave enough when defending the core values of our democracies? Are we brave enough when we dissimulate the truth to sell more geographic atlases in a given region of the world? Are we brave enough when we let mobbing, racism and sexual harassment enter our classroom? Are we brave enough when we discuss how religion should be taught and not how democracy should be taught?

I write every week in this blog about the value of open education and innovative learning. Open education should enable knowledge and values to be shared massively. Innovative learning should be about giving anyone a chance to succeed in school and in life. We discuss endlessly about efficacy, cost effectiveness, adaptation to the job market. We don’t speak enough about simple things such as love, care and respect. How many MOOCs and OERs have been produced on democracy, free speech… and are really used? How many web skills are needed to succeed in life? And how many personal skills?

Education is only a promise that needs to be reaffirmed continuously with or without technology. Two terrorists that were brought up and went to school in France broke this promise with their bullets.

For them education is not the answer. For us it is THE answer, more than ever.

We are Charlie.

Education policymakers are dreaming about excellence. Better teachers, better learners, better resources will almost magically turn up after years of turmoil: high youth unemployment, increasing school dropouts, burnt out teachers…

How do you measure excellence? According to PISA standards, excellence can only be reached through equity and by giving every student the chance to succeed. We may all agree that citizens should be “equipped with the skills necessary to achieve their full potential”. But what is a necessary skill? This naive question gives way to many ambiguous answers.

In Spain, the new educative law – LOMCE – aims to strengthen excellence by separating earlier on the bad students from the good ones. The former will be equipped with “level 1” basic competences while the latter will access higher education or vocational training. A new concept of equity indeed!

France is thinking of abolishing grades and creating a new framework for the evaluation of competences that could enable students to escape the tyranny of academic excellence and have the system recognise their “real” strengths.  Would parents accept it? All over the world, universities are competing to attract the best in class, strengthening the elites and making college a dream for the vast majority.

2014 revealed another road towards excellence. Personalised teaching, adaptive learning, continuous evaluation: a new jargon has been developed to tell a simple truth – every student has a special talent and deserves attention.

Excellence is no longer a dream. Is it because technology puts it within the reach of everyone? This is at least the conviction of our Open Education Challenge startups and of all Edtech innovators worldwide. But technology is still very unequally distributed.

A Christmas fairy tale brings us back to the miracle and simplicity of excellence: the best student in literature in the best class of the best French high school is a girl with autism spectrum disorder.

Just imagine a system that would have denied this girl access to an ordinary school and the right to demonstrate her talent. It just happened in Spain…

How integrative can a school be? Answering this question may lead to excellence for all.

Spirit of achievement, loving parents and responsive teachers will make 2015 the year of excellence.

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.”

An enlightening intervention of Lord David Puttnam during the EU conference Education in the Digital Era, quoting Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife Sarah during the Civil War, reminded us of the basic characteristics of innovative learning: love, passion and emotion.

An entrepreneur in education also has something that comes over him or her “like a strong wind”: the desire to change education, improve learning.

During the conference, the seven Open Education Challenge startups were distinguished as “European edtech startups of the year”. Three months of incredible work, personal engagement and teamwork enabled these startups to go all the way from an idea to “a viable and investable solution”.

–          Viable: capable of being done or used, capable of succeeding, capable of living

–          Investable: that can be invested, suitable for an investment

All OEC projects are now capable of living, suitable for an investment and ready to contribute to innovative learning.

The OEC incubation process is hard to summarise in a few lines: six European cities, three months of intensive work, 110 mentors… and beyond the figures, a personal touch: making friends, working overtime, having fun, sharing passion, getting nervous. But more importantly, being aware that no innovation can succeed if it not backed by the users themselves.

At the EU conference, one contribution was heavily retweeted: “The biggest innovation doesn’t come from technology, but from teachers who embrace it properly and believe in it.”

All OEC startups share this comment: Technology is not the issue. The education challenge comes first.

Believe. Be passionate.

All an education entrepreneur needs is love!

Do you remember what you once learned at school, yesterday, a month ago, a year ago, 10 years ago? Experts from Domoscio, the French edtech startup that participates in the Open Education Challenge, have an answer: NO! They argue – based on scientific evidences – that we forget 80% of what we learn and propose a new learning tool to revise and memorize using an algorithm that adapt our learning path to our needs and abilities.

Why do we forget? One hypothesis is that what we learn is boring.

For David Miller from Kuato Studios that visited the Open Education Challenge (OEC) during its stay in London last week, learning should be about fun and game; one of their game, Recall, is a social trivia game that presents us with fun facts.… then quizzes our recall in a race against the clock!  Wayne Holmes, a former teacher and co-founder of Zondle is also concerned by how bored the learners are. Its aim is to help motivate children to remember key facts in the time needed. How?  Again, creating, playing and sharing games.

But is learning just about how fast or how well we can remember? Aren’t there other ways to learn better?

One way will be learning in teams. This is exactly what Atta, an OEC startup, proposes with its new app. Learning is a challenge that requires teamwork and students and teachers must be guided to work better in team.

Another way will be learning in an individualized way. This is what learning analytics are about, helping teachers to build individualized learning paths with precise data based on students’ learning experiences. Klassdata, another OEC startup, proposes such a tool with personalized dashboards to better follow and support learners.

Learning in teams or learning alone? Students may very well learn at home alone and remember in the classroom by engaging in a dialogue with the teacher. The classrooms will be flipped  – by the way don’t miss the app designed specifically for flipped learning by Harness – and new creative learning experiences will take place.

Learning in class or learning at home? Again the answer will be both. Even the bathroom can be another classroom if we follow the Polish startup founders of FunBrush.

What will we do with all these ideas and innovations? More than 125.000 education apps are available. Some help to learn better, faster, longer than others. This is the case of two OEC startups’ apps: Think with Things, that promotes the power of ‘everyday objects’ for thinking or GroupMooc that helps to organize on-line learning experiences in a cooperative way. We just have to choose the best and the problem often starts there! The Educational App Store can help us identifying the very best apps and certifying them so that we don’t have to remember which app is the best…

A last thought; what if we didn’t need to remember to learn? My friend Yaacov Hecht used to tell the story of this young child that once entered his democratic school in Israel and was only interested in windsurfing. With no learning analytics and no apps, Yaacov designed a personalized learning path that enabled him to learn about wind, streams and practice a lot of windsurf. He ended up with a gold medal in the Olympics… He still remembers it.

“Equipping young people with the skills to achieve their full potential, participate in an increasingly interconnected global economy, and ultimately convert better jobs into better lives is a central preoccupation of policy makers around the world.” This sentence by the OECD Secretary General introduces the PISA 2012 Report. Policy makers may certainly understand it; citizens won’t.

“Equipping young people with skills” sounds just like “car makers equipping their cars with the new technology“. But education is not about policymakers “converting better jobs into better lives” just like Nicholas Flamel converting lead into gold.

Education makes dream come true: a few days ago, scientists from the European Space Agency landed their Philae probe on Comet 67P after a 10 year flight through the galaxy!. The ESA Director General said: “this type of success is not coming from the sky, it comes from hard work and expertise.”

Just have a look at the picture below to see how rewarding hard work and expertise can be. Can you think of a better communication campaign for science education and scientific careers? We don’t need policy maker to explain why STEM education is useful for “better jobs and growth”.

We need scientists to work in teams, celebrate just as if they had won the World Cup and make us believe that we can all be “specialists” of something

The education equation is simple:

 Hard work + expertise = joy + future

In Spain, the city hall of Viladecans, a mid-size city in the Barcelona metropolitan area, plagued by youth unemployment, has just released a new education program – “son especialistas” – designed by two artists that say in a very simple way: “Young people have special talents that make then unique”.

 Education is about aknowledging and strengthening the talents of these “specialists” just like the ones who led Philae to the comet.

Two interesting surveys taken by teachers in France were published in the past few weeks. The MGEN survey showed that 1 out of 4 French teachers are under 35, that 76% have a Facebook account and 85% are connected to it at least once a day. Young teachers are among the most connected social groups in the French population.  One of the most interesting findings of a survey taken by 15,000 teachers by the French association of textbook publishers, Savoir Livre, was that more mature teachers were making more use of digital textbooks in the classroom. It also reveals that French classrooms remain largely disconnected due to lack of broadband infrastructure and digital resources.

On one hand, a growing number of teachers get digital in their daily lives at school (but not in the classroom), and on the other hand the most mature ones (with more than 10 years of experience) use digital resources in the classroom. These diverging trends are interesting as they may reveal a gap between the way teachers view digital practices for their own use and for use in the classroom. The younger teachers will consider digital tools for private use and not for classroom practice. This may be linked to another result of the Savoir Livre survey – the lack of specific teachers’ training on digital practices. A teacher that goes on Facebook is not necessarily a trained teacher!

School remains a disconnected place where teachers use smartphones and connect to Facebook, and prevent students from doing it. School is, in fact, the only place where young people can’t freely exercise their digital abilities. “Smartphones have to be turned off”.

There are good reasons for schools to ban phones in classrooms. Students may text with the phones, go on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram and disengage from what they are supposed to be doing and listening to in the classroom. Stéphane Cassereau, director of the IRT in Nantes, writes about this “smartphone plague” in his blog. He also comments on the paradox of having teachers banning smartphones in class while using them during teachers’ meetings!

For sure, smartphones can have an undesired effect in the classroom, but no more than a computer or a tablet. Jody Passanisi and Shara Peters write an interesting article about it in Education Week, and argue that the paradoxical attitude of teachers about smartphones is that “the smartphone carries with it the burden of the education community’s anxiety about technology”.

Our Open Education Challenge entrepreneurs are developing smartphone applications for use in the classroom that will contribute to this debate and hopefully reduce teachers’ anxiety about technology.

What does it take to create a genuine European ecosystem of entrepreneurship in education?

First, the shared conviction that all European countries, despite or thanks to their cultural diversity, face the same educative challenges; second, that European innovators and entrepreneurs are able to understand the common trends and bring tailor made solutions; third, that European policymakers are convinced that innovation in education must open up to new actors located at the periphery of the education systems; and fourth, that investors contribute to the creation of a socially responsible marketplace driven by customers’ expectations and conditioned by social inclusion challenges.

The Open Education Challenge brings concrete answers to the above question. The startups that were selected to join the European incubator are experiencing a unique immersion in European educative realities. Instead of proposing a traditional incubation process located in a single place, the OEC proposes an ambitious tour of European capitals to get acquainted with different realities and meet experts from all fields and all cultures. It is built on a simple hypothesis: education is the answer everywhere (and the answer differs).

After Helsinki and a discovery of “a model of excellence” that is now questioned from the inside (see my previous article), the OEC landed in Paris, occupied a floor at Numa (one of the symbols of the new French entrepreneurship spirit),  and created a vibrant dialogue between innovators, textbook publishers, higher education professors, communication specialists, human resources managers, investment bankers, education policymakers… All in one place as a symbol of an innovation process that progressively blurs the frontiers that once defined education as sanctuary preserved from real life influences.

The programme tells the whole story of what innovation in education may mean. Edouard Husson, former director of ESCP Europe, introduced the main challenge in his masterclass: innovation in education is in the hands of early adopters that still have to overcome the resistance of the system itself. The paradox of change, in the words of George Haddad, who introduced our first evening session, is that innovators must always be ready to “deconstruct” their beliefs and go back to the values that condition changes in education: love, desire, audacity. Successive workshops highlighted the need to go beyond “simple” convictions. Technology is NOT the solution but a fantastic facilitator to change the relationships and map new power forces within the classroom.

Power is perhaps the main issue. Are textbook publishers ready to give up their power – and their market shares – to let teachers develop and share open education resources and use new cooperative learning tools? Are universities ready to give up their power in certifying / validating students’ skills and competences and let new learning hubs and learning platforms take over this task – and corresponding business? Are companies ready to give up their power in centralising all the learning experiences that could take place within a company and recognise / promote other options taken freely by the employees – like MOOCs, for instance? Are families ready to give up their power in deciding what is a good learning experience for their children and let them contribute to the design of a more personalised path?

All these questions are not theoretical. They are at the core of the innovations proposed by the Open Education Challenge startups and many others.

I have just returned from Helsinki after launching the incubation process of the Open Education Challenge: a full week of incredible exchanges, continuous mentoring and shared discussion.

Thinking about innovation in education seemed so simple when arriving in Finland, the “education country”: well paid and respected teachers, committed students and responsible parents.

And suddenly … Crash! Bang! Education is more complex than we thought and even the Finns are now thinking of changes and innovations. Finland is now discovering the need for more technology in the classroom. Marjo Kyllönen, acting division head at the Education Department of the city of Helsinki, told us about the new technological needs in the schools, explaining how “digital technology will blend into learning environments invisibly and be networked.”

The startups that entered the Open Education Challenge are also a reflection of this complexity. They develop innovative technologies to change the way we teach and learn. But what is technology in education? Donald Norman defines technology as “new stuff that doesn’t work very well”. At the very early stage of their development all innovators are seen as causing confusion, but progressively things get clearer, not less complex but less complicated.

In Norman’s book, Living with Complexity, he says “the major cause of complicated, confusing and frustrating systems is not complexity: it is poor design”. Design is the first key word for our incubation startups.

During this busy week, we worked on their ideas and the educative challenges they want to address. We sat with Mikko-Pekka Hanski and his team at the design agency IDEAN to think about each startup’s grand vision. We stayed at the design factory at Aalto University, sharing Teemu Leinonen’s inspirational thoughts and meeting mentors from all over Finland.

We listened to Yishay Mor as he spoke again and again about learning design principles. We were always pursuing the same objective: get the story right and crisp!

Education and education startups are about good design!