The Most Persistent Myth

This will revolutionize education. No prediction has been made as often or as incorrectly as that one in 1922. It was Thomas Edison who declared that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. Yeah, and you know how that worked out.

By the 1930s, it was radio. The idea was you could beam experts directly into classrooms, improving the quality of education for more students at lower cost. And that would mean you require fewer skilled teachers. A theme common to all of the proposed education revolutions. Like that of educational television in the 1950s and 60s, studies were conducted to determine whether students preferred watching a lecture live or sitting in an adjacent room where the same lecture was broadcast via closed-circuit TV. What would you prefer?

In the 80s, there was no debating: computers were the revolutionary solution to our educational woes. They were audio-visual, interactive, and could be programmed to do almost anything you like. Well, at the time, they could run Oregon Trail, but their potential was obvious. Researchers suspected that if they could teach kids to program, say how to move a turtle around a screen, then their procedural reasoning skills would also improve. So how did it go? Well, the students got better at programming the turtle, but their reasoning skills were unaffected.

Even by the 1990s, we had not learned from the failure of our past predictions. And I quote: "The use of video discs in classroom instruction is increasing every year and promises to revolutionize what will happen in the classroom of tomorrow." Video discs? Yeah, those giant oversized CD things! Remember when they revolutionized education? Nowadays, plenty of things are poised to revolutionize education, like smart boards, smartphones, tablets, and MOOCs. Those are massive open online courses.

And some believe we’re getting close to a universal teaching machine, a computer so quick and well-programmed that it is basically like having your own personal tutor. In theory, a student could work through well-structured lessons at their own pace, receiving immediate and personally tailored feedback—all without the interference of a meddlesome and expensive teacher. Do these claims sound familiar?

Over the past 100 years, a lot of areas of life have been revolutionized, but education is not one of them. By and large, students are still taught in groups by a single teacher, and that is not what a revolution looks like. Some might blame this state of affairs on the inertia of our educational institutions. It’s just too hard to get a huge bureaucracy to change. But I think the reason technology hasn’t revolutionized education is something else. Something that goes to the very heart of what education is.

Let’s consider the process of learning. Say you want to teach someone how a human heart pumps blood. Which learning do you think would be more effective: this animation with narration or this set of static pictures with text? Obviously, the animation is better. I mean, for one thing, it shows exactly what the heart does.

For decades, educational research focused on questions like this: Does a video promote learning better than a book? Are live lectures more effective than televised lectures? Is animation better than static graphics? In all well-controlled studies, the result is no significant difference, that is, so long as the content is equivalent between the two treatments. The learning outcomes are the same with all different media. How is this possible? How can something which seems so powerful, like animation, be no more effective than static graphics?

Well, for one thing, animations are fleeting, and so you might miss something as they go by. Plus, since the parts are animated for you, you don’t have to mentally envision how the parts are moving, and so you don’t have to invest as much mental effort, which would make it more memorable. In fact, sometimes static graphics perform better than animations.

And I think this points to a really fundamental aspect of education, which is: it doesn’t matter what happens around the learner. We are not limited by the experiences we can give to students. What limits learning is what can happen inside this head. That is where the important part of learning takes place. No technology is inherently superior to any other.

Researchers spent so much time investigating whether one medium or technology was more effective than another that they failed to investigate exactly how to use the technology to promote meaningful thought processes. So the question really is: what experiences promote the kind of thinking that is required for learning? Recently, that research is being conducted, and we’re finding out some pretty important stuff.

I mean, it may sound obvious, but it turns out learning with words and pictures together—whether they’re animation and narration or static pictures and text—works better than words alone. Also, we see that anything which is extraneous needs to be eliminated from a lesson. For example, on-screen text competes with visuals, so learners perform better when it is omitted than when it is present.

Now that we know how best to make educational videos and any experience can be simulated in the video setting, YouTube must be the platform that will revolutionize education. I mean, the number of educational videos on YouTube is increasing every day. So why do we need teachers? Well, if you think that the fundamental job of a teacher is to transmit information from their head to their students, then you’re right—they are obsolete.

I mean, you probably imagine a classroom where this teacher is spewing out facts at a pace which is appropriate for one student, too fast for half, and too slow for the rest. Luckily, the fundamental role of a teacher is not to deliver information; it is to guide the social process of learning. The job of a teacher is to inspire, to challenge, to excite their students to want to learn. Yes, they also do explain, demonstrate, and show things, but fundamentally, that is beside the point.

The most important thing a teacher does is make every student feel like they are important, to make them feel accountable for doing the work of learning. All of this is not to say technology has had no impact on education. Students and teachers work and communicate via computers, and videos are used both inside and outside of classrooms. But all of this is best characterized as an evolution, not a revolution.

The foundation of education is still based on the social interaction between teachers and students. For as transformative as each new technology seems to be, like motion pictures, or computers, or smart boards, what really matters is what happens inside the learner's head. And making a learner think seems best achieved in a social environment with other learners and a caring teacher. [Music] [Music]