Education is an odd bird: we all know it could be better, while at the same time it is the best it has ever been in human history. For the last two centuries the world went through a great expansion in learning: our literacy rate skyrocketed from 12% to 88% worldwide, and Primary, Secondary and Tertiary education have all seen drastic growth (in schools and students), breaking records on almost a yearly basis. [caption id="attachment_67931" align="alignright" width="152"] Lucas Rizzotto[/caption] Guest Article by Lucas Rizzotto Lucas Rizzotto is an award-winning XR creator, industry speaker, and entrepreneur working on the the realities to come. You can follow his creations and thoughts on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Instagram. Our educative curriculum has also evolved, embracing our continuous growing understanding of the world — and the recent boom of the internet has brought self-education to the masses in new and exciting ways, turning websites like Khan Academy, TED, Wikipedia, and YouTube into some of the biggest free knowledge hubs in the planet. Imperfections aside, we owe a lot of who we are to this faulty system, and its growth in reach has been phenomenal. How we teach, however, has yet to change: Contemporary learning is still very much archaic. We group students arbitrarily around age, have them go to a physical building 5 times a week to listen to adults speak for about 6 hours, and just kind of hope that all involved parties are qualified enough to keep students engaged and predictably moving through a static educational curriculum. It works to an extent, but it is not pleasant for anyone — teachers have a lot on their plate, from lesson and assignment planning, to teaching, grading and the expectation of giving hundreds of students individualized attention. On the student side, they are forced to adhere to strict timelines and live under the rule of fear instead of curiosity, with the constant fear of failure looming as they’re assigned labels ranging from A to F at the end of each term. [caption id="attachment_67921" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image courtesy KU School of Medicine–Wichita[/caption] Today’s educational system is static, generalized and puts less focus on individual self-development than it perhaps should. To make matters worse, students often don’t understand why they are learning the things that they’re learning, which makes certain classes feel arbitrary and purposeless in the face of their personal ambitions (and has a number of neurological implications we’ll soon discuss). With that being said, what could be done to fix these issues and take education to a new level? What could make education more exciting, fun and practical? I believe it comes down to three simple ideas (that aren’t new by any means) which can finally be fully explored with smart use of technology. These keys are personalized learning, experiential learning and mastery-based learning. In this article, we’re going to explore these ideas as well as a possible path for education in the future, mixing Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Technologies and several new design paradigms that could change education forever. Personalized Learning [caption id="attachment_67929" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Fully personalized experiences are almost a standard in the tech world today — but not in education. | Image courtesy Will Keightley (CC BY-SA 2.0)[/caption] ‘Personalized Learning’ refers to a diverse variety of programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and strategies that address the distinct learning preferences, interests, aspirations, weaknesses, or cultural backgrounds of individual students. The result of this is an educational experience that’s more fitting to you as an individual and maximizes what you can get out of each class. This approach makes intuitive sense, and there has been a rising pool of scientific evidence backing these ideas up every year. A recent report commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found that students in schools using personalized learning strategies made greater academic progress. Additionally, countless neuroscience studies have shown the how personalized experiences positively affect how the brain receives information, providing some relevant ideas about how learning works to the synapse-level. "A student must care about new information or consider it important for it to be stored as a long-term memory. Memories with personal meaning are most likely to become relational and long-term memories available for later retrieval.” — Dr. Judy Will, Neurologist & Educator. This is a powerful concept, and it shows that for students to learn anything they need to be convinced that the information being shown is important. To properly teach, you must first inspire, and personalized learning is as much about knowing how to teach an individual as it is about how to convince them that the information is worth knowing — and this is hard. Different students respond differently to distinct motivations, but this is why the most popular teachers tend to be inspirational: they don’t just throw information at students for them to process, but they also inspire and awake their class’s interest and curiosity — once a student finds a subject cool, everything changes for their brain. [caption id="attachment_67923" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Teach with a focus on how the brain functions, and the result is an education that works instinctively.[/caption] So if personalized education is so important, why do we barely see it in schools? In today’s system, giving students true individualized attention would require dozens if not hundreds of specialized hires per institution— and even if we did have all those people available, we still lack the proper methods to gather and process personal student data in large scales to create actionable results. Despite these challenges, some schools are still finding ways to explore these concepts to a degree, but the true potential of personalized education remains largely unfulfilled. Full personalized learning also requires a fluid, flexible and non-linear educational curriculum to be fully idealized — this is the only way you can embrace student’s differences and create distinct learn paths for each one — unfortunately, this just happens to be the antithesis of today’s rigid solutions. [irp posts="55341" name="The White House Highlights 6 Funding Opportunities for VR Education Projects"] Thankfully, new developments in design & technology have been generating promising new paths for personalized learning — but before we get to that, let’s talk about another key: mastery-based learning. Continued on Page 2: Mastery-based Learning » Mastery-based Learning Mastery-based learning is based around a very simple idea: when dealing with cumulative subjects (like Math, where past knowledge is essential to understanding what’s next) a student should only move forward with the subject once they’ve mastered all concepts that precede it. [caption id="attachment_67924" align="aligncenter" width="640"] One-on-one Mastery-Based learning was actually the standard for a long time — in a Master-Disciple relationship, students would spend years learning until they were ready to create a Master Work, only then to be elevated to the rank of journeymen.[/caption] You would think this is how today’s education works, but it’s not. Students don’t require an A to pass a class, but rather a C — so if you know about 70% of a subject, you’re allowed to move forward — general knowledge, not mastery. This might not seem bad at first, but it is. Grading is not a reliable metric for knowledge the way it’s handled today. There’s a distinct difference between actually understanding a subject and simply learning how to get through a series of tests (be it through memorizing formulas or copying another student’s work), which is what an alarming amount of students tend to do. Because of this unreliability, grades end up failing at their sole goal of giving students and schools the performance feedback they need, effectively making student’s needs invisible and unattended by the system they’re working around. [caption id="attachment_67925" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Knowledge is a tree, and all subjects are interconnected[/caption] The situation becomes more dire once you realize how essential mastery is for a proper education: if you fail to fully dominate fundamental concepts as a kid, things will seem inevitably harder to understand as you progress throughout the years and accumulate knowledge gaps. Cumulative subjects build on top of themselves, so if you don’t fully understand fractions, there’s no way you can learn geometry properly, and if you don’t understand Algebra, you can’t ever gain deep knowledge of Calculus. These correlations also branch off into different subjects as well — Physics assumes mastery in branches of Mathematics to be fully understood, and high-school Biology assumes basic understanding of Chemistry. People are not ‘bad at math’ because they lack Math genes — it’s because they rush through the curriculum and never master the fundamentals. At one point, the subject feels impossibly arbitrary. You can go as far to say that all knowledge is interconnected and cumulative in the grand scheme of things, which makes the consequences of said gaps even more unpredictable — they stealthily cascade difficulties into a number of subjects without making themselves known, leaving students disoriented, lacking confidence and with the false belief that they’re incapable of learning certain topics because of an innate ability to do so. This is why so many people claim to be 'bad at math”'— it is not because they lack math genes, but because they rushed through the earlier stages of math without fully understanding them. It is no wonder certain subjects can become so incomprehensible through the years — lack of understanding leads to lack of intuition, and lack of intuition leads to subjects seeming non-nonsensically arbitrary. The only way to survive the semester becomes memorization or doing what your teacher wants you to do, not learning what it all means. This is why there’s a high likelihood you know that pi is 3.14 — but you don’t know what pi actually represents. [caption id="attachment_67926" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Although it’s not taught as such, Mathematics can be a highly visual topic. | Image courtesy David Nerwen[/caption] Mastery-based learning can fix all of those issues — through a deeply personal and individualized approach (intersecting with what we talked about regarding personalized learning), students can move quickly through the subjects they’re better at, and dedicate the required time wherever they face complications. Ultimately, you’re only allowed to move forward when you truly master a subject, without feeling humiliated for taking your time. The end result is actual knowledge that can spread interconnect with other subjects in a number of unexpected ways, both creatively and intellectually — much more than a grade for a transcript. [irp posts="55929" name="Everything Wrong with Traditional Data Visualization and How VR is Poised to Fix It"] The reasons we don’t do it today are similar to what we touched on before — implementing this widespread would require a lot of monetary and financial resources to pull off realistically — and it’s hard to imagine ways to measure knowledge without grades, tests and all the systems we’ve grown so used to, as faulty as they may be. However, there are new ways to achieve this — but before we get to it, let’s talk about experiential learning. Continued on Page 3: Experiential Learning » Experiential Learning You’ve probably heard about the wonders of 'Learning by doing' from someone in your life—and they wouldn’t be wrong. Learning through hands-on experience is vastly different than just passively listening to a lecture, and your brain loves it. This is formally known as experiential learning — the process of learning through experience or 'learning through reflection on doing'. In scientific research and in the classroom, it has demonstrably been shown to be one the most effective forms of meaningfully retaining information — experiential learning engages most of the senses, builds social-emotional skills, creates a context for memorization, expands critical thinking and is unquestionably more relevant to real life applications of what’s being studied. [caption id="attachment_67927" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Teamwork makes the dream work! It also continuously puts theory into practice, creating a symbiotic relationship between the two.[/caption] Experience-based learning also encourages experimentation, embraces curiosity and (perhaps most importantly) turns mistakes into a natural part of the learning process, rather than grounds for punishment of students. It’s no wonder it’s such a powerful form of learning —it’s how we’ve been learning things since primordial times. Our current system understands this to an extent, as experiential learning isn’t completely absent from schools — you’ve probably had an art or science class that was very much hands on, and there’s one type of experiential task that teachers love but students hate: homework. [irp posts="62741" name="'SuperChem VR' Shows Impressive, Engaging Gamification of Chemistry Lab Education"] Teachers assign homework because it works when students actually do it. To complete these assignments, one has to think about what they’re doing, perform the task at hand and reflect through the entire process. But from a user-experience standpoint, homework tends to be uninspiring — it doesn’t play with most of the senses, its format is predictable, it usually isolates students and it isn’t exactly exciting to complete. So why aren’t we trying to do things differently? Putting it simply: it’s hard. Conceptualizing new ways to teach subjects like math, biology and history experientially is a huge design challenge, even more so when you’re trying to do it without breaking the bank. After all, we’ve taught Biology using books and a blackboard for as long as anyone can remember, so how would we go about engaging all senses, making learning active and social, keeping the cost low and achieving all learning goals? - - — - - Now that we’ve defined the problem, the questions, and our utopian destination for education, let’s talk about the future —in Part 2, Tomorrow's Solutions we explore how exciting new technologies can disrupt traditional education. More from the ‘How VR, AR, & AI Can Change Education Forever’ Series: Part 2, Tomorrow's Solutions