Bill Gates On Educating the World

theodp writes During February, Bill Gates is playing Perry White at The Verge, expounding on the big bets the Gates Foundation is making to improve the world over the next 15 years. One of those bets is that online classrooms can help the world catch up. Gates' vision of universal online education extends to those who struggle with basic literacy and currently lack online access, far beyond the reach of MOOCs like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, which have enjoyed their greatest success with higher-level courses aimed at the middle class. "Gates' vision — a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers — is central to solving this problem," explains The Verge's Adi Robertson. "And unfortunately, we're not there yet." But eventually, Gates is betting that a world-class education will only be a few taps away for anyone in the world. And that's when things get really interesting. "Before a child even starts primary school," Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their Foundation's 2015 letter, "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start. Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace. She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way. If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation."

Comments

What's the evidence this will work?

[nbauman]

I don't think the people who come up with these schemes have ever sat a child in front of a computer, and watched while they tried to learn something from it.

The kind of information children can get that way is not much different than what you can get from reading a book. (Yes, I know the computer has sound and animation.) And for younger children, it's less than they can get by reading a book with their parents.

I would like to see published controlled studies that demonstrate that online classrooms can do as well as classrooms with a teacher.

Or that classrooms with a teacher plus Internet connections are better than classrooms with a teacher alone.

And they should be judged by the standard skills that good teachers are teaching students, not by their skills at answering computerized multiple-choice questions.

One good skill is learning how to tell whether a new innovation will work.

Re:What's the evidence this will work?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's particularly 'optimistic' given that we already have a fair amount of experience with what does (and doesn't) happen to children with access to books. With comparatively rare exceptions, mostly in slightly older children, not all that much.

It's pretty obvious that networked computers are, sooner or later, going to beat out printed textbooks(if only because it's getting cheaper to transmit a few megabytes to the ass end of nowhere than it is to ship tens of kilograms there, not necessarily because they are better, especially with the hardware in the cheap seats).

It is radically less obvious that our tiny monkey-spawn, with their few-hundred-million-years of experience in absorbing knowledge into their sponge-like brains by demanding interaction with nearby group members, are on the cusp of successfully being tutored by expert systems with some animated cartoon characters tossed on top.

If the trouble with teaching were a matter of text scarcity, Gutenberg would have mostly kicked its ass. That's not exactly what happened.

Seriously

[fred911]

We all have fun poking at Mr. Gates, warranted or not. And, we can all believe that the 31.6 billion dollars his foundation has GRANTED since inception internationally is not much of a personal sacrifice in relative terms. But a least he's taking a shot. Surely, figuring out how to grant money effectively is more than a full time job. Regardless of one's opinion of the effectiveness of his benevolent ventures, there's more than just a financial commitment here.

  I find it honourable and surely it has majorly affected recipients in a positive manner. Undoubtedly, he has made life changing or saving differences in this world. If you had the ability to do anything, anywhere, anytime, had the ability to make multiple errors, sans ANY change (personal, financial, etc), how long would it be before you would just disappear from any public exposure?

  If you plant seeds in every place in the world, some of them will produce fruit and some will fail. I see the motivation as benevolent and don't believe condemnation here is deserved or warranted.