School Education in the New Interconnected World

Over the last weekend, I was talking to a close friend of mine who was looking around for a job. He was approached by a Tier 1 company for a position that needed him to relocate. Since he was comfortably settled in Plano, TX, where his wife worked in the schools there, he refused to consider the offer, although he confided in me that it was the ideal job for him. I asked him the reason for this. He said he would straight away lose the money that his wife is bringing home from her job because she got acquired the necessary teaching credentials for the state of Texas and if he relocates to another state, she has to take the required courses for that state, sit for the qualifying exams, get the certificates before she can even apply for a similar job. A no-brainer for him insofar as his job decision was concerned, but that set me thinking.

Imagine this – the subjects of Physics, Chemistry, Math, Biology etc do not change with the state. The syllabi might change. However, if a person knows the subject and has been a teacher all her life, and has been a credentialed teacher in one state of the USA, she is not qualified to teach in another state! Without getting into the political angle here, my thought was why not change the way students are taught using some technology. I had – at one point in my career – started my own company to do exactly that so why not use that experience? Also, over the last few decades, everything has changed in our lives with all-pervasive technology. However classrooms have remained untouched. The classrooms that our grandparents went to are almost exactly the kind of classrooms our children study in today. Chalk and blackboard might have given way to slide projectors in some schools and laptop projector in others, but a packed classroom, text books, regimented curriculum, a teacher painstakingly explaining abstract concepts with the limited tools at her disposal still remain the same.

Roar of the clouds

What is cloud computing in human language? And how can cloud change our education system? Cloud computing converts software, infrastructure and platforms into services. So we speak about SaaS, PaaS and IaaS these days for software, platforms and infrastructure respectively as services! It delivers common bu­siness applications online that can be accessed from a web browser. The data and software reside on remote servers. Cloud is a metaphor for the internet and it can have many avatars. It could provide raw computing power on demand as Amazon’s model does.

So how do we use this new metaphor in the case of school education?

It might sound simplistic but here are a few bullet points that are in my mind:

1.       Build content: Whenever a student enrolls the content needs to be created and entered into the servers in the cloud. This activity will become simpler if the regional school education boards collaborate to create and put up the content in their own local servers that can be accessed through a cloud.

2.       Build medium of instruction: The basic requirement is that the teacher needs to be able to write on a special whiteboard that would be connected to the PC in front of her. Remember digitizer tablets we had in the past? A little improved version of that interfaced to the PC / laptop will do. Then we need software that would be able to interpret the teachers’ writings and reproduce the same on the screens that would be seen by the students.

The rest of the steps would be “cloudy”, in the sense that the above service needs to be distributed to many students reading the same subject anywhere in the world. If the students’ PC / laptops have built-in webcams, then they can experience a virtual classroom from their homes. The service is charged on an hourly basis on a pay-as-you-use basis, which is one of the basic properties of cloud based service.

Benefits

With corporate support, such a service can easily pose serious challenges to the brick-and-mortar schools and colleges and universities. A select few schools today, such as MIT, have published their courses online and there are several educational institutes that offer online courses. However, this “industry” (if I am allowed to use this terminology here) is at best fragmented. There has been no effort to integrate using modern technology.  Once this integration is achieved, this will be a behemoth of an industry from where every section of the world population will benefit. With scale affordability will increase, which will mean that children of the poor nations will be able to afford this education with the help of some local entrepreneurs who will open such “educational centers”.  Problems due to lack of education will slowly go away.

Secondly, with technological advances, a number of offshoot industries will spring up. One could be content building; the second could be localization of the content in different languages; third could be course design; fourth could be those that improve the medium through which such classes are delivered, and so on and so forth. And to think that all of it is happening through the cloud is a modern day wonder. Some so-called elite institutions might build their own private clouds to cater to their own students.  In effect, this will be a big forward push to the economy.

Conclusions

In the present economic climate, education / school budgets are tight. Conditions are favorable for adoption of cloud. It promises to convert a capital expenditure into opex (operating expenditure). Subscriptions go up as the operations scale up and go down if business ramps down.

Further, cloud computing has raised concerns around security, privacy, costs, lock-in and reliability — all of which have to be addressed robustly.

Last but not the least, to quote one of my fellow bloggers here, for the disrupters and innovators of the world, the price of the entry to the game has just been slashed. There is a roar in the clouds while a new paradigm is born. Expect a burst of innovation and a challenge to the gods who have become complacent.