Edgar Wilson

Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation

Learning vs. Testing: Can Tech Bridge the Gap?

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest column by Edgar Wilson

Somewhere over the last few decades, teaching and testing developed an adversarial relationship in America’s classrooms.

Public policy debates swarm like bees over sticky questions on the issue of assessment:

How much is too much?

How can we evaluate teachers without standardized measures of outcomes?

Are students under too much pressure from high-stakes testing?

Are teachers “teaching to the test” at the expense of more comprehensive instruction?

The conflict and controversy is damaging to everyone involved in education—students, teachers, administrators, employers; everyone has an interest in seeing America’s schools be the best they can possibly be, but there is a lot of opinion and disagreement over what “best” actually looks like. In part, this is because we can’t even agree on how to measure quality.

Taking Advantage of the Digital Future

This may be another area where the field of education can learn something from the healthcare world.

In a presentation on the future of healthcare, Northeastern University professor Carl Nelson drew parallels between the field of management, and the evolution occurring in healthcare.

“We have the Big Data movement and data analytics not only providing appropriate diagnoses, but also guiding us all,” explained Nelson. “It can be used appropriately to guide decision-making, to make judgements.”

In essence, this means best practices growing naturally from more robust data.

Data acquisition in business, as well as in medicine, is occurring right at the point of implementation: wearable sensors, product-trackers, and communication systems all connected through the growing Internet of Things (IoT) enable data scientists to watch, live, as people and organizations operate. By aggregating social media statistics, watching how customers (and potential customers) interact with a brand, and what life events, interests, and behaviors correlate with consumer activities, businesses learn both about their customers, and themselves.

Examining all the data—passively generated and actively gathered—allows analysts to then identify shortcomings, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and missed opportunities.

“We have moved greatly in the field of management from management based on intuition certainly, over a long period of time, to a management based on evidence (evidence-based management),” Nelson said. “The same thing is happening and has been happening in the field of medicine—so-called ‘evidence-based medicine’.”

In education, the challenge has been—and in many respects, continues to be—reliable sources of “evidence” on which to base changes to best practices. As in management and medicine, intuition and expertise has an important role in education: teachers often remark at the rewards in witnessing “Ah-ha” moments in the classroom. It isn’t something measured or captured in a discrete assessment; it is an organic thing, the look on a student’s face when the elements of a lesson all click into place, that whirring of mental machinery once the fuel of understanding is suddenly injected.

Where’s the Evidence?

The trappings of business and healthcare have been upgraded to support Big Data’s newly prominent role. Analysts review measures of existing behaviors, collected and recorded on the spot, and use them to develop new, evidence-based best practices.

Tablets, laptops, mobile devices and other digital tools and toys are destined for a prominent role in America’s classrooms; that much seems safe to assume given current trends.

And just as the Internet of Things, applied in clinical settings and connected to individual patients, doctors, and institutions is providing new troves of real-time data feeds and outcomes patterns, so too can applications be deployed in classrooms and attached to individual students to give instructors a new, closer, quantifiable look into what drives learning outcomes.

Mark Oronzio, CEO of Ideaphora, is one of the innovators working to bring formative assessment—measuring the learning process as it happens—to a place of greater prominence in the classroom.

“What we’re looking to do is provide a more automatic assessment of a knowledge map,” says Oronzio.

His company’s product is based on an existing concept, knowledge maps, as a way to graphically represent and record the learning process.

When learning is captured as it happens—rather than by a summative assessment, which is aimed at determine outcomes following instruction—real-time data can be provided to both students, teachers, and even data scientists looking to correlate instructional methods with on-the-ground results.

“Aside from it being what we call an Authentic Assessment—it’s not a multiple choice quiz, where I got tricked, or because I’m not a good writer I didn’t do well on the essay—this is making connections and defining connections,” Oronzio explains. “We think it would be a more accurate assessment; it is actually a picture of what’s going on, and the connections going on in the learner’s mind. The other cool thing about it is, it is not a discrete test, it wouldn’t have to be administered necessarily.”

This is the essence of competency-based education (CBE), an ongoing method of assessment that, at best, might help displace some of the emphasis on standardized testing and high-stakes tests.

Snapshots of Learning

Abundant data makes a compelling argument.

Adding the capability to watch, measure, and analyze instruction leaves less room for politics and opinion to dictate changes to curriculum and assessment standards. By combining the principles of CBE with a method of visualizing and recording the associated data, education has an opportunity to launch into the Big Data playground.

Just as in business and healthcare, the educational revolution comes not just from the devices themselves gaining widespread adoption, but from the programs and applications whose use they make possible. It is far from a nail in the coffin of standardized testing, but it does demonstrate how technology can combine with traditional instruction to provide new windows into the academic environment.

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Edgar Wilson is an Oregon native with a passion for cooking, trivia, and politics. He studied conflict resolution and international relations and has worked in industries ranging from international marketing to broadcast journalism. He is currently working as an independent analytical consultant. He can be reached via email here or on Twitter @EdgarTwilson.

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

What higher ed can learn from healthcare

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest column by Edgar Wilson

Healthcare is undergoing reform in order to hold care providers more accountable for the quality of the care they provide. This is the emerging standard to replace volume-based service, whereby hospitals and doctors are compensated for how many tests and treatments they order, without any consideration of the patient outcomes that result from treatment.

Education needs to similarly move toward tracking academic outcomes to prove that it is actually worth the expense. Recent graduates offer a bleak review of the value they feel they are currently getting. Institutions should be held accountable for what academic and professional accomplishments their students are able to achieve. Whether it is proficiency at the next level of education, or employment in a career relevant to the student’s area of study, there needs to be a clearer link between outcomes and educational inputs. This may fall short of holding individual teachers and professors accountable for student performance, but it can certainly serve to better enable students and their families to evaluate prospective schools, programs, and balanced the associated costs against the opportunities.

 

Break Down Legacy Instruction

Doctors and nurses need more leadership training, better preparation to lead and participate in health teams. Technological disruption, breakthrough research, and a tenuous regulatory atmosphere mean clinicians are challenged to be nimble and adaptive.

Teachers, likewise, need better instruction and empowerment to not just cope, but to drive cultural change and innovation in the classroom. The world doesn’t just need more expert individuals in the classroom and ER, it needs collaborative leadership and creativity to ensure the delivery of these critical services continues to advance alongside the rest of society. Continuing Education standards for both classes of professionals emphasize the need to keep up with a dynamic, ever-changing field; leadership training would empower them to be proactive innovators, rather than reacting to the external forces at play around them.

 

Embrace Technology – Join or Die

The legacy systems and individual approaches to records technology in healthcare has made the mandatory shift to digital currently underway a long headache. While patients are enthusiastic and receptive to the new norms, many clinicians are still resistant to the change, and the gap is a significant obstacle to improving engagement. Patient health depends on their engagement with clinicians, and technology can help bridge the divide between clinical expert and patient.

Modern students are similarly more receptive toward emerging technology, from mobile to virtual platforms and tools. Teachers need more than instruction in the latest methods and tools—they need a combination of incentives and some amount of external pressure to become more proactive in integrating technology into the classroom, and leading student engagement with digital tools.

Students require the same sort of engagement to ensure comprehension, retention, and learning are all actually taking place. What is more, both doctors and teachers need to learn to get as comfortable with technology as their patients and students are, and use them to maximize engagement to reach the full population they serve.

This isn’t just a matter of rewarding the individuals who are proactive about learning, understanding, and communicating, but ensuring everyone who is access both education and healthcare is receiving the full value of that exposure. Learning and health maintenance alike continue well after such encounters, and telemedicine and distance learning platforms show a lot of promise to increase exposure, if not engagement.

 

Books are Drugs

Drug companies have too long a history of raising medicine prices without account or controls, and the doctors prescribing them to patients with no alternative are all captive to the choices of their care providers.

In academia, cadres of textbook publishers have a similarly captive market with no recourse and no obvious alternative. Not only should instructors be enabled and rewarded for taking advantage of lower cost digital, open source, or otherwise liberated resources through greater technology integration, but the schools and university systems that guarantee demand for books should exert greater pressure on publishers to stop taking advantage of the system. Students, like patients, are not positioned to be their own best advocates to control prices; the systems they patronize out of necessity must take up the role on their behalf, and challenge the status quo that has gone on unaccountable for far too long.

 

Maintenance is Key

In spite of the pace of change in the 21st century, the standard model for education starts in childhood, climaxes with impossibly-expensive universities, and then is relegated to the individual to acquire “on-the-job” training and mentorship. Resources are limited to the classroom, and after commencement, remain exclusive. That is like a diabetic seeing a doctor once and being counted on to successfully manage the condition indefinitely, and catch up with changes in science and medical technology independently.

In a perfect world, emergency medical interventions would be displaced by the tendency for people to take better care of themselves, prevent the escalation of minor ailments and conditions, and only visit their doctors for routine services, instead of reactive treatment. Instead, patients habitually neglect their health, postpone visits to the doctor as long as possible, and seek emergency care for conditions that started out as casual lifestyle choices.

Education, like health, is cumulative. Eating one healthy meal does not lead to weight loss, until it becomes a regular habit. Lifelong learning—or continuing education—is often relegated to a specific class of professional (doctors and nurses, as well as teachers, are all expected to keep abreast of best practices and emerging knowledge in their fields), rather than embraced across the spectrum of professionals. Given the intrusion of technology, communications networks, and globalization in virtually every field, few can claim that knowledge and skills in their profession has remained static, immune from these disruptive influences. Continuing education deserves the resources and public-private support to become standard for all skilled professions.

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Edgar Wilson is an Oregon native with a passion for cooking, trivia, and politics. He studied conflict resolution and international relations and has worked in industries ranging from international marketing to broadcast journalism. He is currently working as an independent analytical consultant. He can be reached via email here or on Twitter @EdgarTwilson.

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Matthew Lynch published in Physical Fitness, Policy & Reform

Cut Sports, Advance Academics

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Edgar Wilson

We need to get sports out of schools.

As an extra-curricular, sports should already be distinct from academics, but that hasn’t remotely stopped athletic programs from asserting dominance in and out of the classroom. The problem is most pronounced in tertiary education, where university budgets—and, by extension, student fees and tuition—are being coopted to support legacy athletic programs, most notably football.

Football programs—at least in the current conception—are a losing investment for most schools. Maintaining a diversity of athletic options is expensive, and is clearly not supported by the broadcast and viewership patterns of American sports fans. In the US, we want our football, and we want our basketball, and we want it for free.

These same consumer forces upsetting other pillars of the entertainment industry—music, movies, television—are beginning to cripple cable: streaming services.

Disney has been making headlines since the release of its new Star Wars sequel not only because of the record-breaking box office numbers the film is generating, but because the company is still managing to bleed money due to decreasing cable subscriptions, a pattern that undermines the value of its ESPN channels, and the associated advertising revenues.

Broadcasting college sports just can’t guarantee the same returns that made it such a popular money-maker in the past.

Beyond the backwards financial machinations of college sports, there is the fact that, overwhelmingly, K-12 sports are falling into a pay-to-play format that is fundamentally exclusionary. What merit can a sports program have as an avenue for poor or at-risk students to access college, if the cost of participation already bars them from playing in high school?

Yet at the collegiate level, sports teams have become the tent pole holding up the entire institution:

  • Rather than marketing the university based on academics, professional outcomes, research opportunities or expert faculty, their record of athletic accomplishment gets the most publicity
  • Individual payouts are larger (yet fewer) for athletic scholarships, creating a competitive, high-stakes sports culture that trickles down through secondary and even primary school programs
  • Universities must compete in terms of funding, event games, and spectacle in addition to competing on the field of play

In short, the whole mission and focus of universities pivots to accommodate athletics with increasing urgency.

Compromise abounds—even the United States Naval Academy, which graduates over a thousand students with Bachelor of Science degrees while simultaneously training them as officers for the U.S. Navy every year, has augmented its historically high standards to allow its student athletes to compete at the same level as schools lacking its demanding duel mission. Ditto for West Point.

Beyond lowering the bar for education itself, the troubling school-sports marriage is proving hazardous to the health of student athletes—at every level and age cohort.

The medical data coming out on the punishing long-term effects of athletic injuries, overexertion, and cumulative trauma from youth sports is damning. Whether or not it pays off in the form of discounted tuition or admission to a prestigious school, young jocks in full contact sports can more or less count on legacy injuries dogging them for life.

Outside the high-visibility, high-risk arena of football, research indicates that a hyper-competitive culture that prioritizes specialization leaves any youth athletes at risk of chronic injury. It isn’t that the sports themselves are bad, just that the culture surrounding them has made them so. Technophiles look to science to solve the problem of inherently violent contact sports, only to discover that the culture—not the equipment—is what needs to change to save lives.

The compromise of academics to accommodate athletes is troubling. The conflict of interest for universities, students, the public, and the myriad companies and industries that profit of collegiate sports is fundamentally undermining the purpose and potential of American higher education.

Institutions of learning should support student missions of learning—not athletics.

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Edgar Wilson is an Oregon native with a passion for cooking, trivia, and politics. He studied conflict resolution and international relations and has worked in industries ranging from international marketing to broadcast journalism. He is currently working as an independent analytical consultant. He can be reached via email here or on Twitter @EdgarTwilson.

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Matthew Lynch published in International Education

How mobile technology boosts international learning

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest column by Edgar Wilson

Mobile learning is still missing the “mobile” component.

Educational technology, while still developing, is already sufficient to enable travel study to become a core component of almost any distance-education model. While many of the proponents for online learning have focused on accommodating working professionals (whose time demands make traditional, campus-based programs impractical), the opportunities in online learning for traditional students have been slower to incorporate travel study.

If the toolbox of online learning is designed to free students, it is natural they should be able to take their education on the road. Whether spending a week participating in a regional conference, or going abroad for an intensive period of immersion, there are many valuable experiences that simply don’t translate to course work.

A key criticism of distance learning models is the absence of a campus with all the community, socialization, and collaborative activities that happen only on campus. Dispatching online students to foreign or remote locations could more than make up for this supposed deficit.

Personal development, networking, accountability, independence—travel study demands all of these, in ways traditional or online programs may not. Travel study provides much more than the “missing” classroom. Both students and administrators are beginning to recognize that joining online learning with travel study provides enrichment beyond what any single educator or piece of technology can do.

But travel study not only fits well within (and supplements) the distance education model, it may even help balance theory and application by putting unique demands on students and their nascent skillsets.

Travel study (both domestic and abroad) necessitates a profound adjustment to different social and cultural norms. In a global economy replete with virtual teams, connectivity through time zones, and international cross-cultural coordination, soft and hard skills play an equal role. STEM education especially could use a rich liberal arts supplement to better strike a practical balance between scientific and social training.

The challenges of accommodating local custom and bridging cultural divides are instructive. Taking advantage of travel programs while maintaining engagement with a targeted STEM program could lend context and emphasize the soft skills that make technical knowledge valuable.

The chorus of demand for greater academic focus on STEM subjects has missed the fact that STEM-centric skills are all but useless without additional soft skills. Employers are already decrying the gap between learned workers and those capable of communication, creative thinking, and problem-solving; STEM students need more liberal arts sensibilities in their journey to the field. Travel study is a powerful way to provide it. There is also practicality to placing study in a less isolated environment, considering the subjects exist in an international playing field. STEM students must be globally competitive, and need to learn in a more integrated environment.

The mobilization of learning technology lifts traditional barriers to travel study. Virtual classrooms, digital textbooks, and especially responsive assessments and learning applications have a natural fit in the online learning environment. The pedagogical instruments of the past are anachronistic in this new learning environment; so, too, should the tethers that bind students to classrooms and campuses be cut.

The biggest problem in empowering online students to study abroad is overcoming their sense that “a year abroad” still means “a year away.” The physical demands of the traditional classroom make travel study a complex process. Even though virtual learning models often dispense with such elements, the mindset of students (and, perhaps teachers) has yet to fully adapt.

Currently, university degrees are expensive whether delivered online or in person. Realizing the money-saving potential of digital programs could, over time, translate to lower prices, making travel study programs even more practical.

When all that is necessary to attend class and submit work is an internet connection, travel study’s key requirement is the same as online study: time management. Balancing work with school and family sets an excellent precedent for students who will need to balance the unique academic, professional, and personal experiences travel study opens up to them with their commitment to online learning.

The best online learning candidates tend to be students who are organized and self-motivated. Ensuring travel study does not devolve into an extended vacation requires some of the same traits. Bringing the two together may be the natural extension of changing educational models in the 21st century.

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Edgar Wilson is an Oregon native with a passion for cooking, trivia, and politics. He studied conflict resolution and international relations and has worked in industries ranging from international marketing to broadcast journalism. He is currently working as an independent analytical consultant. He can be reached via email here or on Twitter @EdgarTwilson.

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