Facebook's Solution To 'One of Education's Biggest Problems' Is a Dashboard

theodp writes: Gushing in July that Facebook engineers had solved one of education's biggest problems, Melinda Gates perhaps set up Segway-like expectations for Facebook's education software. And while The Verge sings the praises of what appears to be progress-tracking dashboards that connect students to mostly free 3rd-party lessons — not unlike Khan Academy or even the 50-year-old PLATO system — it's hard to get jazzed based on the screenshots (1, 2, 3) that Facebook provided in a .zip file accompanying its announcement. The "personalized learning plan" dashboards are a joint effort of Facebook and the Meg Whitman-led and backed Summit charter schools. In a nice circle-of-tech-CEO-education-reform-life twist, the first Summit high school opened in a building in Redwood City after students attending the Bill Gates-touted and backed Silicon Valley High Tech High charter there were evicted to make way, and the Gates Foundation is now spending $8M to bring HP CEO Whitman's Summit charter schools — and presumably Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's personalized learning plans — to Seattle children.

Comments

What's wrong with a good dashboard?

[SuperKendall]

The article summary was a bit of a hash, but a per-student dashboard that customized learning and displayed progress made would be a pretty great step up from the Mass Education we have today, that ignores student interests or rates of learning on various topics.

As a parent who would not not want a dashboard like that to keep track of what students are doing well and poorly in? Report cards do that but with less frequency and thus opportunity to correct problems as they arise.

customization

[fermion]

There are two things that are going to be a reality. One is that students are going to receive personalized instruction. Most schools already expect this is some way, but it is cost ineffective. Automation through software will make this personalized instruction possible, and while the technology is improving, it is far from adequate for some subjects. For instance physics is increasingly taught through exploration and modeling. Just letting some students listen to a lecture and other students read and then pass a multiple guess test does not teach physics. Students have to go through certain labs. The personlization might be how a lab is set up, which still requires significant human intervention and discussion with a live professional, though eventually an AI might be able to do it. Second, despite what the luddites say every student is going to have a computer and every student is going to need to learn to use it. While there are some jobs that require limited computer literacy, those jobs are going to become fewer. I mean everyone says how great education was in the 50's but what did they really need to get a well paying job? Not as much as today. As students get computers, they will be used to personalize when possible. Otherwise they will be used to teach kids the skills they need to get a job.