For a decade, the cost of providing a quality education has risen faster than the cost of living. Elite institutions have become boutiques for the rich. The average parent of a harvard student, for example, now earns more than $450,000 a year. As for less excellent institutions, teaching quality has started to decline. For all the continent’s pride in free university places for everyone, there is not a single school in the euro zone in any of the world’s top 30, let alone many of them that are nothing more than fly-by-night universities. William Baumol, an American economist, has argued that this is inevitable: productivity in services is bound to grow more slowly than in manufacturing because the string quartet has to gather four people to perform. But baumol’s example is a slap in the face. Thanks to the rapid development of technology, you can now listen to a nearly perfect reproduction of the string quartet at home, without having to rush to the concert hall, and without the annoying cough or noise of other audiences. Even with Spotify and iTunes, music, as long as it is commercially issued, will probably be available for a relatively reasonable monthly fee. The digital revolution has transformed large parts of many industries, such as retailing in services and intellectual journalism.
Eventually, the digital revolution will transform education and medicine in similar ways. Let’s flip the classroom Technology has begun to reduce the cost of education. The Khan Academy now offers more than 5,000 free courses a month to more than four million children, and is adding more. Microsoft founder gates also encouraged his children to use khan academy. In the United States, one in 10 college students now only take online courses, and a quarter use them occasionally. Top universities such as the Massachusetts institute of technology, Stanford university and the university of California, Berkeley, are also putting some of their courses online. The world’s first online tuition-free university, the university of the people, offers free higher education (not including the hundreds of dollars required to process applications and mark exams). Of course, the drop-out rate for massive open online courses (moocs) is disappointingly high, but we are still in the early stages of developing new courses. In the future, online universities will have to be more carefully planned to provide social support and encouragement for students, just as in the 1960s Britain’s ‘sky universities’, a hybrid of television and home-schooling, were. Moreover, the progress of modern science and technology in a day, online teaching film more vivid every month, believe that over time, we can put the star professors three-dimensional holographic projection on the global each lecture hall (hologram).
Technology can also be used to solve efficiency problems. For example, more than 70 companies including Reasoning Mind and DreamBox have created adaptive or personalized learning platform, which can collect students’ personal learning data and then automatically plan teaching content according to their learning needs. These systems are especially popular with charter schools, such as California’s Rocketship Education and New Classrooms in New York. Now more and more schools are using iPads to ‘flip the classroom’ — the classroom is no longer used to spread knowledge, teachers encourage children to learn new things at home using iPads, and then discuss what they have learned in class. One of the reasons inequality is so intractable is that it starts early, in the womb, on a stroller or in kindergarten. When pregnant, middle-class mothers work harder to provide a healthy environment for their children; Middle-class children routinely hear millions more words spoken in their first two years than working-class children. Middle-class parents are more likely to send their children to preschool. Policy makers began by trying to address these issues in fairly dramatic ways, such as by expanding pre-school education. Now they are trying more nuanced approaches, like urging mothers to eat healthier or mentally stimulating their children. New technology can make these delicate interventions easier in every way. In 2014, Angel Taveras, the mayor of Providence, r.i. Mayor tavilas’s digital devices are the beginning of a new trend. Within a few years, social services will routinely provide such devices to poor mothers, giving them parenting advice and some validation to help them understand how they are performing.
There are some reasons why computer technology in today’s education is important. Technology in the classroom engages students – Students love learning how to use new technology, so what better way to capture a student’s attention in the classroom than to combine it with technology? Whether students are using the Internet to research a topic, or playing a computer game that teaches a concept students are more likely to learn when they are engaged with their learning. Student’s learn a valuable skill – Computers are everywhere, even in places we least expect them. It is important that student’s learn how to use computers and what computers can do for them early on so they can get used to using them in everyday life.
Technology can connect home and school – Many schools are offering online libraries of school resources that student’s can access from home, which makes studying and researching that much easier. Additionally, parents and teachers can stay in close contact with email, instead of relying on their student’s to relay important messages. Student’s can help parents, and feel useful – Usually it is the parents who teach their child’s new skills, but in some cases when technology is present it can be the other way around. By letting student’s teach their parents about new technologies, they are increasing their sense of self-worth and confidence in their abilities. Student’s can do things they never dreamed of – Many student’s have difficulty expressing themselves, either with spoken language or the written word. Computers can offer a method of communication that eliminates these boundaries, meaning they can express themselves in new ways. Technology can save teachers time – We all know that most teachers these days are overworked, which is why technology in the classroom can be an important step in relieving their heavy workload. By computerizing many of a teacher’s manual tasks, such as attendance and performance records, teachers can spend more time working with their students.
