Congratulations, you’ve been accepted into ZoomUniversity! Who else is attending? Everyone.
The Upside ⇡
The very schools and universities who dragged their feet in offering online classes are now fully committed to it, breaking the trail for online education to become a plausible option for the future. Teachers are learning to adapt to new technologies and parents are coming to realize what it actually takes to educate their little monsters…er...children. Making both K-12 and university-level studies available on the internet has the potential to bring high-quality education to underserved communities around the world, cut costs for college, and provide the location independence many young people strive to find. Students with different learning needs can now self-pace their education in a Montessori-esque fashion, and many report to be thriving in an environment devoid of bullies and social pressures.
The Downside ⇣
Right now, kids at community colleges are paying wildly different price tags for a similar educational experience to those at elite colleges. This isn’t sustainable. As Nat Eliason writes in his article College After Covid, “No one will pay $50,000 a year to watch Zoom lectures.” Parents of younger children are struggling to help their kids do virtual homework and solve technical difficulties, let alone do their own work. Virtual classrooms allow for restricted hands-on learning and group work and make socializing more difficult. Some kids have vetoed online school altogether. The moratorium on traditional school triggers a domino effect, reducing or eliminating many things society hopes students acquire during their K-12 years: interpersonal skills, college prep, experience with diversity, exposure to harmless germs that build the immune system, friendships, communication skills, and independence, as well as classic rites of passage like excruciatingly long holiday concerts and football games.
The Future ⇢
In many ways, COVID-19 has been a brilliant forcing function for the education system to change. We’ve learned that most classes can indeed be taken online, but that not all of them necessarily should. Moving forward, we can expect a blended model of online and in-person classes at universities. Slowly, professors may chase higher wages and increased autonomy by going rogue from institutions and instead teaching both on and offline, where students subscribe to their lectures from anywhere in the world. Universities will still serve a purpose for socializing, signaling, and sports, but attending a top-tier college will no longer be a bottleneck to high quality learning.
In K-12 schools, there will likely be a push toward a flipped-classroom model, where students do the bulk of learning from videos at home and do collaborative homework and projects with assistance from teachers during school hours. Microschools like Prenda and tech-augmented homeschools like Primer will increase in popularity as education moves towards becoming a customized and humanized experience for each child. In the future future, technologies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink will allow educators to transmit information directly into students’ brains.
What’s Hot: Artificial intelligence technology that enhances education while keeping kids safe online, from filtering web pages in realtime to looking for suicidal indicators. See: GoGuardian.
What’s Not: Grades. “The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades,” Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham said. A move towards mastery-based learning will replace the grading system that leaves students behind and conditions them to be good test takers but poor learners.
Slice of Life:
To date, over 680k people have joined a meme-driven Facebook group called Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens and used it as a space to commiserate about the new normal, share jokes, and give each other tips for faking attendance in online class.
Listen Up:
For a deep-dive into one company’s vision for the future of education, check out Cam’s interview with Tyler Shaddix of GoGuardian