A Mobile Centric Localized Virtual School

A Virtual School education model, if executed holistically with an accurate systems view, in a well understood socio-economic context, can be a cost-effective, yet of minimum acceptable quality at scale (100+ million students), K-16 education delivery solution for the various developing world ecosystems. In my view, although each developing country which needs to solve this problem cost-effectively at scale has many similarities like high population, low income, broken institutions, tech savvy youth, but at the same time, each ecosystem has many nuances like problems with ubiquitous broadband access, too many regional languages, private vs. government debates, broken regulatory structures, which eventually require unique home grown, integrated solutions. Therefore, execution across legal, political, technical, financial, along with cognitive and epistemic challenges, is absolutely vital to success of this model, which many believe is the only way forward.

Let us take the pseudo-unique case of Pakistan, a country with a total population of 220 million people growing at 2% annually, out of which a 150 million youth under the age of 30 who need to be skilled to survive the 21st century (UNDP, 2018). With sovereign reserves of USD 10 billion and this skilling of the youth costs running into 2-4 trillions dollars, it is self-evident that the traditional brick and mortar schooling system will not cut it (Ahmed, 2018). Therefore, a more cost-effective, innovate solution needs to be developed to solve this grand, existential educational challenge. I, for one, believe that virtual schools are the way to go in solving this emergency. A few key aspects and/or pre-requisites for such an implementation to think about are as follows:

1. High quality, open source, production quality structured content developed with State (Federal) funding (important) for the entire K-12 segment, plus a few popular degrees (People, 2018) in the tertiary space. K-6, middle school, high school, tertiary education, and solutions for out of school children, currently at 25 million, and vocational training needs should be looked at separately due to varying needs of each segment. For example, for K-6, a hybrid (brick and mortar + virtual) solution might be best; for vocational needs, ubiquitous learning, i.e. going totally virtual might be more desirable, especially, considering the daily survival needs of daily wage workers, and hence, their inability to dedicate time and share a physical location synchronously, i.e. within the same Spatio-Temporal context. (Kalantzis & Cope, Spatio Temporal, 2018)

2. A Learning Management System with the user Interface / user experience informed by latest HCI / design and cognitive science research. This is something which needs to be iteratively improved. Besides interactive and engaging content in local languages, good user experience is absolutely vital to learning and completing the modules online.

3. AI powered chat bots to answer repetitive and routine questions and to facilitate peer to peer learning anytime, anywhere (Sanjeevi, 2018). With better AI, Speech Recognition, and Natural Language Processing, a voice command system would also significantly increase interactivity and hence stickiness with content.

4. An appropriate and effective assessment system for the New Learning environment which ensures academic integrity and verifies long-term learning by the user at a level which is comparable or better to the current brick and mortar only system. Besides face recognition, biometric verification technologies can be used to verify the user with each keystroke, if needed.

5. The right accreditation and legal framework which encapsulates this New Learning paradigm for the 21st century. This is a huge hurdle. One cannot fit the New Learning models in ancient legal systems. Initiatives like Sabaq.pk, which are otherwise doing a fantastic job with producing good content in Urdish (Urdu + English) is trying to cater to / fit themselves into, too many different, archaic assessment systems. This will simply NOT work, as has happened too many times in the past.

6. As it is commonly feared by teachers resisting such a system, it will not de-professionalize the teachers (Gee, 2013); in fact, it will up the ante and make them more productive and value-added in their classrooms. Also, such a system can serve as an excellent teacher development platform, which is also a huge problem in the developing world.

7. It will also improve the quality of home schooling and/or other learning taking place outside the traditional system. It can also become an excellent platform for training stay-at-home mothers. Integration of Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality technology will provide the immersive experiences which humans crave and learn through. (ADOBE, 2018)

8. It will provide deeply motivated students access to the best content and the appropriate accreditation in an effective manner at the time and location of their convenience. For example, such a system can be pivoted for the gifted and talented students as a separate product. Check out Stanford Online High School as an excellent example of this.

9. A Virtual School does not preclude any hybrid models; rather it provides that new minimum above which all traditional, more costly schools and students/teachers have to perform. This logic is keeping in view the low quality and/or non-existent brick and mortar schools in the developing countries. Of course, as mentioned above, Stanford’s viewpoint is totally opposite. Their virtual school product is for the high-end, high performance segment.

10. Finally, such a grand project, if undertaken with massive government funding, will drive the development of new educational technology (Kalantzis & Cope, Can Education Lead Technology?, 2018) to solve the interdisciplinary problems of teaching literacy, numeracy, digital literacy, and the appropriate 21st century skills to the masses in a cost-effective manner, pretty much anytime, anywhere and at any age. This is the new age and hence requires a new paradigm for learning, especially, for the young people (Harari, 2018).

In summary, most of the ideas regarding Virtual Schools above are not novel; they have been in existence for a while; in fact, the whole idea of a Virtual School itself to cater to the educational needs of the masses (the bottom 98% of the world) has been talked about, over and over again, since the birth of the internet. However, in this case, the novelty is not in the idea, rather in the brilliant execution and delivery by integrating the right technologies, at the right price point, for the right segment/ecosystem, with the right legal maneuvers, and at the right time - which is NOW, and with most likely using a “Mobile-first, Participatory, Personalized, Group-based learning” strategy (Kang, 2018).

References -

1. (UNDP, 2018): http://www.pk.undp.org/content/pakistan/en/home/library/human-development-reports/PKNHDR.html

2. (Ahmed, 2018): https://tribune.com.pk/story/1799361/6-pakistans-education-grand-challenge/

3. (People, 2018): https://www.uopeople.edu/

4. (Kalantzis & Cope, Spatio Temporal, 2018): https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning/lecture/aUuGe/ubiquitous-learning-part-1a-learning-in-space-and-time

5. (Sanjeevi, 2018): https://medium.com/deep-math-machine-learning-ai/chapter-11-chatbots-to-question-answer-systems-e06c648ac22a

6. (Gee, 2013): https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning/lecture/RvgQL/new-technologies-new-social-relationships-and-learning

7. (Adobe, 2018): https://theblog.adobe.com/virtual-reality-will-change-learn-teach/

8. (Kalantzis & Cope, Can Education Lead Technology?, 2018): https://www.coursera.org/learn/elearning/lecture/qyH5a/can-education-lead-technology-the-plato-story

9. (Harari, 2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bin71Ctn1AE&index=4&list=PL2gXgHBN9OxjJ0kEQyiU4Ge2EWuznWhxu

10. (Kang, 2018): https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/how-smartphones-can-close-the-global-skills-gap-for-billions/