Personalized Education

Research on How People Learn

A. Components of Successful Education
Source: https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/publications/pubs/1383

Components of Education :
o ambitious and meaningful projects that students feel ownership in
o active learning around applying knowledge rather than passive
memorization
o connecting new knowledge to prior knowledge
o understanding where students are at rather than blindly teaching
can be done better with online learning and instant assessment
o teaching at level slightly above their heads (separate point)
o problem-oriented learning (separate point)
o constant feedback, clear standards
o metacognitive thinking so students know how to learn on their own
o ability to work with others
hard to do online but important!
summary: 1. critical thinking / application to problems, 2. social abilities, 3.
personalized learning, 4. teaching slightly above expected level, 5. meaningful
projects

B. Importance of equity in education

Source: https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/GlobalEdReform

study of educational privatization is important because it shows the results

of pay-to-play education, which is similar to a common model for online
education services
Sweden, US, Chile are case studies for education privatization
Finland, Quebec, Cuba are case studies for public investment
In general, public investment historically leads to significantly better
learning outcomes (mainly measured by test scores)
in Chile, privatization led to education segregation where wealthier kids got
much better education than poor kids, all of the good teachers went to the
wealthy schools
in America, privatized charters are an issue in places like New Orleans
because they are incentivized to drop low performing students to raise their
average test scores so they can receive continued funding.
Ontario saw large increase in educational outcome when moving from
privatized to public investment

Finland has best schools in the world because it pays for teachers to get
masters, has up to three teachers per classroom, and invests heavily in give
teachers resources and making them feel like teaching is a profession
Main takeaway: for the sake of larger democratic principles and upward
trajectories that act as a release valve for societal tension, open and even
education is important so I'd be cautious to make paid online education
services

C. New Orleans Learning Outcome Notes

Source: https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/scope-
brief-student-experiencesneworleans.pdf

It's important to make sure that kids with learning disabilities have the
proper resources to learn
o These students almost always get individual tutors so I'm not
convinced that online personalization can actually help much
In general it's a bad idea to allot money based on education outcomes (ie. test
scores) directly because it creates incentives to shun students rather than
improve the education quality of the lowest students. The differences in
schools seem to be based on underlying student readiness rather than
education quality. The question becomes how do you improve that
underlying readiness.
o Much better system is to
A. judge the increase in scores while a student is at the school
B. punish schools that have abnormally high expulsion rates
The larger solution is incentivizing districts to test a larger variety of systems
and obtaining good data that can be used for designing future systems.
Rewarding and respecting students creates a better environment than
starting with a baseline of do this or be punished

D. AltSchool

Philosophy has four components: Personalized, Student Ownership over

Learning, Relates to Real World, Driven by Clear Goals
activities are very open-ended, self-driven, goal-oriented (ie. keep a journal
of reading the time from your watch)
learning process is wonder investigate share
believes that technology will supplement but not replace learning

D. getting educators to effectively use new tech/standards

Source: http://cepr.harvard.edu/files/cepr/files/teaching-higher-
report_abstract.pdf

ways to improve teaching effectiveness towards certain criteria (such as

incorporation of online lesson plans)
o professional development days
o explicit feedback upon classroom visits
o evaluating teachers directly around learning criteria
can consistently improve math and structure subject scores this way, but
writing scores are not as easily affected because of variations in teaching
effectiveness

E. Keys to Success of Finland's Education System

Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/innovation/why-are-
finlands-schools-successful-49859555/

Take teachers from top 10% of graduates

Teachers give considerable individual help to students when they struggle
Try to maintain equality across all of the schools in different economic
classes
Finland education is also 30% cheaper than US education on taxpayers
Almost 0% test or rank based
I think the key is creating competition for teaching jobs
o in Finland the pay and respect of being a teacher is similar to that of
being a lawyer
o online education can't fully replace good teachers, but can just move
the baseline way up

F. critique of online education

Source: http://ucaft.org/content/being-present-critique-online-education-
bob-samuels

Need to teach students to focus attention so that they can learn online on
their own
Also necessary to teach confidence and creativity, which are possible online
but not by solving lists of problems
Important to make sure that online instruction doesn't cause students to be
less focused and consistently multi-tasking

D. General conclusions

After talking to people in education policy and reading policy papers, I'm
convinced that there's very little creativity in the field. This implies that
they're likely missing the simple and solvable stuff in personalization.
Online education can improve the instruction portion of the classroom, but
won't fully replace the class because there's so much social and meta

learning to be had. When the instruction time sync is decreased, there's more
time to focus on EQ tasks.

Goal:
~10 pages of thorough analysis on the personalized education space (focused on
1.current state, 2.gaps, and 3. where I think it needs to move in the next decade).

Research on How People Learn

Objective: identify key qualities that are necessary for solid education

Resources:

Testing variables for successful education:
http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf

why the Finish education system is so successful:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/innovation/why-are-finlands-
schools-successful-49859555/

Best directories of research:
www.cde.ca.gov/
https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/
http://cepr.harvard.edu/

Online Classes
Coursera
https://www.coursera.org/

Udemy
https://www.udemy.com/

MIT Online Coursework
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/

Online Lessons
Expii
https://www.expii.com/

Oppia
https://www.oppia.org

Khan Academy
https://www.khanacademy.org/

Physical Schools/ Charters:

AltSchool
https://www.altschool.com/

Rocketship
http://www.rsed.org/

Trade Programs/ Re-education:

MakeSchool
https://www.makeschool.com/

McKinsey
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E5DA1230F932A35757C0A
9619C8B63&pagewanted=all