What is the compelling question or challenge?
Find effective ways to integrate technology into education to provide teachers with environments that support emerging pedagogies and students with the 21st-century skills they need to succeed.
What do we know now about this Big Idea and what are the key research questions we need to address?
Driven by explosive advances in computer and the Internet, digital technology has become an integral part of people’s lives in the United States. In fact, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) education director stated that “students unable to navigate through a complex digital landscape will no longer be able to participate fully in the economic, social and cultural life around them.” Despite the need and much excitement over the use of technology in education, a recent global study from OECD showed that “education systems which have invested heavily in information and communication technology have seen NO noticeable improvement in PISA standardized test results for reading, mathematics or science.” Contrary to the hopes and the intentions, OECD also associated the frequent use of computers in schools to lower test scores of their students. These statistical findings have brought the director to issue a call for the school systems to “find more effective ways to integrate technology into teaching and learning to provide educators with learning environments that support 21st century pedagogies and provide children with the 21st century skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world” (Schleicher, 2015; Coughlan, 2015). Despite this interesting result and a plea for a change a few years ago, the main approach taken by the educators and the technologists in the United States remains to be the same; provide even more advanced technology into the classrooms. Given OECD study and our decades of experience in underrepresented K-12 student education and technology research development, we predict that the current approach will continue to be ineffective; especially with low-income youth and students of color.
Today, there are many new and technologically advanced approaches that attempt to enhance education. While there are so many new technology-driven educational products, an overwhelming majority of them seem to promote a common theme; replace human educators with advanced computer hardware and intelligent programs. This trend may be due to our confidence in the great progress that we made in the field of computer technology, including an efficient large-scale knowledgebase, artificial intelligence through machine learning, and networked mobile computing platforms. However, this trend goes against what we have understood and practiced throughout history; that learning is a human interaction (Dix 2017). There is plenty of recent research that supports this concept of human interaction playing a key role in learning that begins in infancy (Schwarz 2003) all the way through adulthood (Hurst, Wallace, & Nixon, 2013). When our team observed this discrepancy between what we know is important in human learning and the current trend in technology use in education, we developed our big idea in finding a better way to use existing technology then develop new technology to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of educational opportunities while strengthening the human interaction aspects of teaching and learning.
Under this Big Idea, research questions that we would like to address are as follows:
- How can we repurposed existing and/or developed new technology to make the best type of education practice (namely contextual, personalized, environmental, and one-on-one) practical for all tutors and students?
- How can we use the technology to automatically detect, extract, and provide helpful information to guardians, educators, and students to encourage best teaching and learning practice and experience?
- How can we use technology to efficiently and effectively motivate and train educators to improve their teaching skills and practices?
Considering that US student placed below average against 71 countries that have participated in PISA standardized test in 2015, we believe it is critical that we begin to make investments to lead in the efforts to research and discover more effective approach.
Why does it matter? What scientific discoveries, innovations, and desired societal outcomes might result from investment in this area?
The initial steps toward making progress in realizing the Big Idea are pragmatic ones. Discoveries and innovations around our approach would be repurposing of existing research techniques and emerging commercial technology to increase and encourage efficient human-to-human interaction in teaching and learning. An obvious next step would be to use video conferencing, Internet, and virtual/mixed/augmented reality interface to allow the realistic virtual presence of teacher and students. While there are several innovative and mundane tasks associated with building a large scale augmented reality tutoring infrastructure, what comes after the infrastructure seems to present much bigger potential for scientific discoveries, including that of human-computer interface, Big Data analytics in tutor-to-student interactions, new cyber-physical knowledgebase assisted pedagogical decisions, new methods of remote teacher training and certifications, and automated social interaction monitoring.
We expect that innovative Big Data analysis algorithms applied to session videos, audios, and other corpora of data associated with each participant would allow us to custom match student with the best available tutors to encourage faster and stronger relationship building and induces easier personalized education.
We also expect that collected instructional sessions can be automatically analyzed to discover best teaching practices for various students to provide a customized training curriculum for each educator as well as provide an improved learning environment for each student.
Predictive algorithms that account for various physical sensor data including audio, video, and temperature are expected to be developed to effectively infer non-spoken information and semantics about the users to further enhance the teaching and learning experience as well as prevent inappropriate interactions.
At one hand, the best experience for a student would be to feel like there is a real human tutor that is always there to help him or her. On the other hand, a desired goal for the tutor would be to help as many students as possible in a given time. Research work to optimally balance these two factors is expected to produce new improvements in human-computer interface.
The desired goal of new discoveries and innovations is that they will establish and refine useful educational tools and environment for both educators and students. We hope that the system will initially supplement and help current educators to quickly build their relationship with their students by providing additional contextual information that will be automatically generated by innovative sensor designs and algorithms in data analytics. But as the research matures, it is our hope that additional qualified educators/volunteers who had physical and financial constraints would be able to play a role in educating the nation.
If we invest in this area, what would success look like?
Our team has taken an initial step toward accomplishing our vision in our Big Idea by the way of developing a Remote APPEAR Tutoring Infrastructure between Boys and Girls Club, Mar Vista Gardens and the University of Southern California via the Internet. This low-cost (~$400/unit) infrastructure provides one of the simplest ways that tutors interact with students by the way of persistent face-to-face video conferencing. But unlike most typical video conferencing system, our platform allows local projection of captured video of a remote desk. Given that there are plenty of willing volunteers who couldn’t afford to travel to remote locations, this infrastructure will be immediately leveraged by them to provide free and sustainable tutoring service to underrepresented K-12 student members of Boys and Girls Club. Part of this effort is to develop a software-only platform for the tutors that will allow them to effectively tutor the students without any special equipment. Continued refinement infrastructure and a better understanding of its use will allow us to not only scale up the network across multiple centers but also provide a platform.
Our vision of success is establishing of a large network of APPEAR EDU platforms across the USA that provides free, sustainable, and personalized tutoring to all students. This can be accomplished through the innovative integration of new human-computer-interface technology for virtual human-to-human interactions and BigData-driven data mining and pattern recognition for monitoring, training, and enabling personalized pedagogical decisions. Furthermore, mature components of the technology can be extended to provide practical educational opportunities in poor villages around the world.
Why is this the right time to invest in this area?
The need for supplementary education is highlighted as recent curriculum changes are further pushing underrepresented minority students down in educational performance. However, government resources for such social programs have been under threats of reduction data mining elimination especially during the times of economic downturn. Even if there was some level of resource, sustainability of such programs is becoming more difficult due to unfavorable locations of inner-city communities. Therefore, new technology research program focused on increasing efficiency and the effectiveness of APPEAR based personalized education and teacher training may effectively eliminate several overheads while opening up a new opportunity to wider participants. We believe such a paradigm shift for tutoring is necessary for the current economy and resulting technology and methodology will drive the tutoring program to have a positive social impact.
References
Gray, D. (2017). The Scientific Methodology in the Engineering Design Process. Presented at the Annual ASEE K-12 Workshop on Engineering Education. Columbus, OH
Gray, D. (2016). Retention, Transfer and Application of Basic math Concepts for an Algebra Class. Presented at the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education Conference. Albuquerque, NM.
Gray, D. (2016). Improving higher education responsiveness to STEM Pathways. Presented at Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce State of STEM. Los Angeles, CA
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