16th August 2018 - State of Education

Today's Topic -  16th August 2018

Submitted by @Silen

What are your thoughts on the current state of education and what do you think will change as technology advances and the use of it becomes more widespread (for example incorporating internet lessons or self-teaching courses)?
Big Hairy Man (or hairy)Last Thursday at 5:06 PM
Well self teaching courses are defenetly gonna be the new norn in the future with all the advances in technology making a way more efficient and more quicker method for people of all ages and educational levels to learn what they need the most.
mood_kill.exeLast Thursday at 5:13 PM
The current state of education heavily depends on the country you are talking about. Since I come from the U.S. I will talk about it there. As of now, online education is used as a tool IN THE CLASSROOM. For example people using google docs just to fill things out. There are also the online courses you can use. These are still mostly supplementary though. There are some that are good, but most are actually scams. Not to mention most of them just teach web dev anyway.
traderLast Thursday at 5:26 PM
I'll throw this one out there, I think machine learning and premade videos are the future of education. In the future I believe that we'll do away with grades and teachers in lieu of macines doing the job. Think about it, machine learning has the abillity to make connections about topics in ways we cant possibly imagine.

But how, you ask? Well the first step would be a massive archive of videos about subjects. The system would start out testing a student before they began a course to establish a baseline, this would cover the fundamentals of that topic and some more complex stuff, just to figure out where that kid is at. Then you would have them watch a number of videos on the subject being taught, lets take addition and subtraction as an example. You'd watch a few different videos on addition, then you'd take a test, covers basic to advanced addition stuff that you'd never expect the kid to know. You'd see how close to the average score the kid got and if that child did well, then it would look at the meta-data of videos, determined both by a person and the machine (based on other students). The algorithm would look at that stuff and then apply it (along with models of similar students) to predict which sequence of videos will help with subtraction, rinse, repeat. If a student had this for their entire education, the system would have an amazing profile of what works for them.

The system would always need teachers but instead of 1 teacher to 30 students per subject it might be 1:150 or more, saving on cost and incentivizing the hiring of highly qualified teachers. Although this system does have problems with qualitative subjects like English, but my work around would be the videos combined with the test being evaluated on the average score given by 50 (or any number honestly, 50 just seems good) test examiners instead of just the machine.

I'm sure there are other issues but I think it's a great system based on my school experiences. Feedback welcome!
Just as a clarification to my post, the part that mentions a large number of evaluators is so that we can have an unbiased score. The score would be based on a rubric or marking scheme provided to each evaluator, the theory being that the larger the number of evaluators, the closer to finding the "true" quality of the work you get to. It'd be perfect too as the student wouldnt have a relationship with the teacher to bias the score.