Re-inventing Education for the Digital Age | David Middelbeck | TEDxMünster

well our world has always been in a race between technology and education usually these two go hand in hand but there are some points in history where technology race is so far ahead that education can barely keep the pace let me give you a quick historic example in the 15th century technology raised the head as a great piece of technology was invented the printing press allowing to print books much cheaper than ever before well unfortunately only a small fraction of the entire population knew how to read ultimately leading to massive social conflicts and inequality until at some point in time the whole educational system was revolutionized in order to keep up as the first universities and schools were born well this happened a couple of times in history whenever technology raced ahead it first leads to social pain and inequality until at some point in time the whole educational system gets turned upside down in order to keep up now let's jump back into 2019 do we have a similar race between technology and education today I think yes we do we've invented in you and the powerful technology called digitalization every day we can now see how smartphones how the internet how artificial intelligence changes our jobs as well as changes our our private lives a recent study by McKinsey predicts that in the next 10 years up to one-third of all work activities could be completely replaced because of automation today the algorithms built by just a few techies in Silicon Valley decide how we communicate with each other they decide how we buy things they can even be used to manipulate entire elections as we've seen FC as we've seen in the US but the vast majority of us here today has no idea of how this technology actually works right what I'm wondering is how should we as citizens be able to make wise political citizens political decisions if we do not understand what's possible and what's not so like in the historic examples we've just seen there's now an increasing gap between those those who designed the change and those who are left behind because they lack the skills or the means to adapt once again technology races ahead and education falls behind I personally worked as a data scientist I studied information systems and artificial intelligence at the University and muenster at Harvard I then went on to lead a team of 15 engineers in an analytic startup every day I stood up and did my very best to help technology raise a head until at some point in time I realized that actually the much bigger challenge and the much bigger opportunity for our society resides at the other part of that race a helping digital education helping supporting people to catch up so this year I quit my job to work full time on digital education I think let's take a look at the second part of our race here education well there we see that our education institutions are now facing conditions that have dramatically changed in recent years right we move from an old world with a situation where great learning content is rare to a new world where much of the knowledge is a commodity and often free to use either as a YouTube material a block pause or some other type of material we also move from an old world with very stable career paths to a new world where well much of the knowledge that we learn in higher education is not relevant ten years later anymore I'm 26 now my own generation will probably retire in 2060 but I can't even predict what skills will be relevant for myself well five years from now well and how did our educational institutions change in the face of these dramatic shifts not a lot right we see live in a world where we put hundreds of people in the same huge lecture halls designed for one-size-fits-all teaching philosophy right and even more we see this this old world and lifelong learning we still have many companies where employees just spent maybe maybe two or maybe three days a year with training right this would be like if I would go to the doctor and ask and what should I do to stay fit and healthy for the rest of my life and he says well David I advise you just run a marathon very early in your life and you will fly fit and healthy for the rest of your life doesn't sound like a great advice does it so I'm afraid we are about to lose that race between technology and educationists the way we teach has not evolved with the dramatic shift that is required these days and I don't think we can tolerate that and I think we need a new generation that takes this issue into their own hands well so two years ago my friend Myers and I decided to start on the green field to build an education into experience from the from the ground up we developed this idea of what we call a learning accelerator learning accelerator is based based on it on a very simple but radical idea using state-of-the-art technology put all available efforts into the individual learner and the learning environment to bring this idea to life we found it a nonprofit organization right here in Minster actually just a few minutes away from the stage we call it Tech Labs Tech Labs teaches coding skills in the fields of web development data science artificial intelligence it's a 16-week program completely for free open for everyone and designed so that you can complete it parallel to your studies or to your regular job for example Tech Labs is built on three fundamental principles that define our idea of a learning accelerate and our idea of digital education in the 21st century the first one is the effective combination of online and offline learning every student at techlabs gets access to our own online learning platform with videos assignments articles most of this content is not produced by us but sourced and curated from the grade and often three resources of the web so if you're a morning person you can do your e-learning lessons in the morning if you're a night owl you do it a night if you struggle with a certain concept you can always go back and revisit this lecture because the computer doesn't get tired to explain it to you three or four times in a row on the other side we use the offline meetings for interaction for our students for inviting speakers for hackathons and for social events well the second principle is called personalization let me ask you here in the audience who of you uses Amazon and orders at Amazon that's impressive right and I think I think a large part a significant part of this success is based on the fact that Amazon learns our behavior of a time right that it learns what product we might like or buy next but what I'm wondering is why does our society spend billions on improving and researching these personalization algorithms at services like like Amazon or Spotify but close to nothing for providing these personalized digital learning opportunities in education isn't it strange we've completely failed to use these personalization technologies to use them in education we still live in a world where some of us think it's actually code called personalization if the instructor learns a student's name I mean that's there's a great star but when it comes to education people are radically different aren't they everybody needs a specific place a specific path a specific learning goal and destination so tech loves every student gets a unique personalized learning path based on prior knowledge and even with the basic version on our platform that we use right now the results are absolutely stunning and you can just imagine the wonderful things that would happen if universities and and schools would deploy this at a larger scale now third principle is called Community Learning tech skills isn't easy and if you struggle with a certain concept and this always happens at some point in time when an encoding it's often not the instructor but the fellow learners and the peers that help you to stay motivated to keep on track I think we readily underestimate today the value of these actual learning communities and our education institutions today so by killing this traditional one size fits all lecture and I think people have a flexible elearning lecture at home we actually free up the valuable offline time for deep interaction with our students so we use technology to make the classroom more social I think this is one of the kind of very paradox things these days right that actually using tech transforms a very unsocial experience people listening in a lecture hall just being quiet listening into a social environment that embraces curiosity diversity and just value in learning new things so how does all of this look like in practice in your first week you usually start with just meeting your fellow learners and your learning community then a few days later you might actually start with your own elearning track that has been generally personalized and and generated just for you and if you are a beginner for example this might actually be one of your first lessons teaching you how to write a small program to let a cat say hello world but soon you will be able to team up with other learners in the community to work on your own small first coding project and this will be usually a slightly more useful thing than the cat we've just seen for example one of our teams just just use the new coding skills to predict bike traffic flows and minister to optimize the entire infrastructure the whole thing a tech that is run by a team of volunteers who often spent more than 10 hours a week with improving and designing our program we teamed up with experienced mentors who guide our students with psychologists who have with personalization and we even teamed up with professors who now use the tech let's program to free up their valuable offline time for deeper interaction with the students and to work on exciting projects and this all kind of worked after just one and a half years we have created 300 more tickets we have open two more locations and Copenhagen Barcelona aiming to create 10 more in Germany next year aiming ultimately to create 1,000 techies by 2020 and 90% of all tech loves participants had no coding experience at all before joining our 16 week program this for example is gin gin started friend of Gin Gin Gin started the tech labs program last semester a few months later web with no coding Sprint's oh by the way a few months later she participated in Germany's largest hackathon finishing third and this on the left is Tamara also from Minster here after completing the tech nuts program she went on to Harvard Medical School to apply her coding skills there for research a couple of weeks ago she wrote me a message saying how think when she was the Tecates has provided her decoding experiences that she used then for medical research at Harvard well for me though the biggest reward is actually seeing these people being surprised by their own learning progress I think for many of us here this heaven glass as a child maybe when we learned how to ride a bike or so but I think we we found a way to recreate that feeling many times it's worth to fight for it I think this is just the beginning why we start with learning accelerators for for coding skills right now I think this new model of Education is equally well as soon as T to teach all sorts of other skills it suited for teaching kids to before lifelong learning and it suited to educate the workforce of entire companies with a focus on personalization while leveraging the free and powerful resources of the web so what can we do today to make this come true I think what simple to understand is that we are all part of this education systems as teachers of course but also as parents as students as colleagues at work we are all responsible to help education to catch up with technology and there's so many ways for you to make a change if you are a parent or a student hold your institutions your teachers at school your managers that work hold them accountable for providing these effective and personalized learning opportunities it's there it's possible and if you are working in education ask yourself how can personalization blended learning community how can it transform my own classroom into a learning accelerator I promise it's actually not that hard in the end this new type of education isn't just about teaching just a few more technical skills it's about teaching people to take charge of their lives and to participate in meeting one of the greatest challenges facing humanity today the wise management of the power that we have gained through digital technology thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 69,364

Rating: 4.9200001 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Children, Coding, Education reform, Learning, Social Entrepreneurship, Technology

Id: ArI6albrkuY

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019