223 – Investigating Personalised Education

[00:00:06] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:16] David: Hi Santiago. What are we discussing today?

[00:00:23] Santiago: Well, a recent episode we published, the two of us, mentioned towards the end the idea of personalised education. And this came from the fantastic algorithms that were implemented into TutorWeb now, SmileyTutor, but it’s something that we strongly believe in quite widely, and we are in some ways hoping to work towards in our education work.

So I thought it was important to go a bit deeper into what we believe by personalised education. It’s not just personalised, it’s also the idea of adaptable education, which you touched on with Michele in the AI generated education resources, AI adapted education resources. Does that sound good to you?

[00:01:24] David: Sounds good. It’s an important topic, it’s one we are grappling with, a lot of people are grappling with, and yeah, it’s interesting, it’s a good topic.

[00:01:33] Santiago: And it also fits in with our general idea of not looking for silver bullets for what we do in general, we don’t think that there are blanket solutions that work, and a lot of our work tends to be adaptable to different contexts. But this, I think, goes a bit beyond that. It is obvious that blanket, or at least it’s obvious to me, that a blanket solution to education is never going to work because every individual has different needs.

[00:02:10] David: It depends what you mean by a blanket solution. Arguably, we have a blanket solution in the form of standardised tests, systems of exams, which are very much high pressured exams, which we work towards. So there is a form of standardisation of education, which has happened.

So, part of the questions are, what is the balance between personalised education and standardised education? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these? How personalised should you be versus how standardised should you be?

[00:02:47] Santiago: Yes. We also did an episode on a sort of thought experiment about gamification of education where we almost proposed a systemic change of education to repurpose examinations.

[00:03:05] David: But that was a thought experiment. Actually enacting that, what that would look like, that’s, as we mentioned then, this is a way off. We are going to have a form of standardised education for the foreseeable future, there might be other forms of education that complement that and that work alongside that, which exist already in certain cases.

These are challenging questions and I certainly don’t believe that standardised education is bad, it serves a certain purpose. Personalised education is not good or bad either, but it serves a different purpose.

[00:03:42] Santiago: I think that you are putting them as opposed elements when they don’t need to be. I think that within standardised systems, which we have and will continue to have for the foreseeable future at least, as I said earlier, individuals have different needs and different ways in order to get to success within the standardised systems.

So I think that my views at least of personalised education are more around what does the individual need to thrive in the standardised contexts that we have in place?

[00:04:31] David: And I think that’s a really good perspective to have. But I do want to put out to you that if we had a totally personalised system, then I think we could be having a fascinating discussion on what form of standardisation would add value to a very personalised education system. I would love to do that thought experiment as well.

But I guess what I want to come to right now is the fact that within the standardised system that we have, that exists, it exists fundamentally as a form of competition because the results that you get do relate to your opportunities afterwards.

[00:05:09] Santiago: Yeah, you called it a differentiator in the past.

[00:05:12] David: Exactly. These standardised exams serve as a differentiator. That is part of our society, how it’s set up around these systems, and for better or for worse, that’s what we’ve built our education systems around.

[00:05:27] Santiago: And I really like the idea that apprenticeships are gaining popularity because that is also a differentiator. People are sometimes more academic, people are more practical, people want to become skilled labourers or they might want to become academics, or anything in between. And the fact that apprenticeships are becoming more formalised in some ways, I think that is one way of personalising education within a standardised system that requires that differentiator.

[00:06:09] David: And it’s interesting that you say they’re becoming more formalised because it’s of course a cycle. Apprenticeships were a huge form of education for many, many years, and they were kind of lost as we put out a standardised system, which then unbalanced things in the favour of academics, everybody wanted a degree.

And now there seems to be a swing backwards, and it’ll be interesting to see how in the long run these different ebbs and flows go between different forms of education.

[00:06:42] Santiago: So there you are talking very much about UK, aren’t you?

[00:06:48] David: Well, no, not just in the UK I mean, I’m just talking on longer timescales. Maybe you need to go back a hundred years or more to be able to see some of these ebbs and flows. But there are these long-term ebbs and flows.

I feel we’re getting stuck into the details here, but one of the things which I think is important is that, in terms of the systems of education, there is an element of supply and demand where as the demand for certain forms of education suddenly outpace the supply, people push education in that direction. And then once the demand of those types of people outstrips the supply and there’s a lacking demand elsewhere, things flow backwards in a different way.

And so these ebbs and flows of educational systems are really interesting to see, and they happen at big scales over long periods of time, but they’re very interesting.

[00:07:44] Santiago: Indeed they are, but as you said, we’re caught up in the detail. 

[00:07:48] David: Let’s get back to the ideas of personalisation, because I think the key point is, and one of the things which I think led to us getting caught up in those details, is the fact that are we looking at trying to just use personalisation to enable individuals to succeed within a standardised system, or is personalisation beyond that, is it a form of education which is beyond that, which would include the ideas of apprenticeship and enabling people to have these differentiators maybe right through their education system because the education is more personalised? And there’s no easy answers to this.

[00:08:26] Santiago: Well, I think that we are getting towards the point of whether we want to have a thought experiment or whether we want to present the ideas and work we’re hoping to do to work towards a more personalised experience within the current systems. And I would do the latter in this episode and maybe reserve the thought experiment for the next one.

[00:08:51] David: Okay, sounds good, let’s get practical. So these systems that exist all over, enabling people to engage with content which is predefined for high stakes exam or some form of competitive examination system, preparing people well for that, as you know, good schools, such as some of the schools you’ve taught at, use good teachers very effectively to create environments for individuals to succeed in these contexts.

But part of what we’re interested in is saying, well, how can we go beyond just what you can do in a high resource school, in a high resource environment? That’s really what we are interested in.

[00:09:41] Santiago: Yeah, I just wanted to clarify. It’s not just good schools, very well resourced schools as well, where, in some cases, I had classes of four students because those were the students that needed more personalised attention and they needed to have 10, 15 minutes per lesson, just one to one. 

[00:10:03] David: Can I check? This might have been because they were weak students and they needed extra support, or it might have been because they’re strong students and they needed to be stimulated and challenged. Is that correct? Did you have both of those?

[00:10:15] Santiago: Neither.

[00:10:17] David: Oh.

[00:10:18] Santiago: So, what I had was relatively weak students. We are talking about highly selective schools, where not getting top grades is seen as failure. In any other school, well, not any other school, but in most other schools, this would have been very, very, very good students. I think that distinction is very important to make.

[00:10:55] David: Yeah.

[00:10:56] Santiago: That’s what I mean by high resource schools. They can allocate those resources to even those who are perhaps not as strong as most, but would be stronger than most in other contexts, get the best possible results.

And on the other hand, what we tended to have was the top end of those classes tended to be quite large groups because they tended to be very good independent learners. So you could just give them materials and they would crack on with it, and they would work very well collaboratively, they would already have high skills in terms of independent learning, collaborative learning, and so on, which meant that they didn’t need attention and they would thrive working like that independently, and in fact, it would better prepare them for the future.

So in some ways that is a way of personalised education as well, because you are giving them the context that they need to thrive. Some of them didn’t feel comfortable with that style and they asked to be put down to a lower set because they felt that they couldn’t work as well, and that was always considered.

[00:12:24] David: Yeah. 

[00:12:26] Santiago: So personalised education can come in so many different shapes and forms. But I think at the core of what we want in terms of personalised education relates to some of the previous episodes we’ve had, or you’ve had with other people. There is this interesting idea of the textbooks project, where, at least for mathematics initially, we believe that, of course with the right investment, with the right collaborations, we can get to a position whereby we can have a core infrastructure that can then be, as you said, with Michele, adapted to specific communities and groups in order to provide the materials that they need for high quality learning in a way that is relevant to them. And that is within these standardised systems.

[00:13:42] David: Absolutely. And I think that within that, the thing which I’m so excited about, which I don’t think was possible even just a few years ago, is that we can really think of the ownership totally different of these textbooks. Who is customising them, how are they being customised, how is it enabling learning?

And I suppose there’s the interesting distinction between customisation, localisation, and personalisation. These are really interesting distinctions, which are confused even in our own work on this at times because it is subtle. Is personalisation where you are adapting to an individual whereas localisation or adaptation is for context? Or are there areas in between?

Is it that the core materials are personalisable to individual contexts, but then the whole is localised to a context? These are really subtle, interesting questions, which I don’t think we yet have answers to. But what I do think is really powerful is that we’re starting to see how it is, thanks to some of the advances in AI, that we could be putting a human effort, in a coordinated way, into something which is more ambitious than I think would’ve been possible to conceive before.

[00:15:21] Santiago: Yes. And we’ve been talking about pieces of the puzzle. And I think what we’re thinking about now and what we’re potentially conceptualising now is what does the puzzle look like itself and what are the missing pieces? 

[00:15:44] David: Absolutely. So what would it look like to actually have, well, what we could just term as the textbook of the future. The previous similar revolution in education being the printing press, instead of needing to have handwritten textbooks, you can now get the same textbook out to a lot of people through the printing press. This is what we’re potentially talking about, a revolution of textbooks of that order of magnitude.

[00:16:13] Santiago: But I think that it’s worth highlighting that it’s not just a textbook, the textbook is the tool for the teachers and the specialists and those who understand the context to use.

[00:16:34] David: But think of what the revolution was before. Before you had a book, which was a precious thing because it took so much time, you had to treat it with, you know, reverence. Whereas once you had the printing press, they could be churned out and it was totally different. That revolution, of course, it’s not just a textbook as people see a textbook, because if it was, it wouldn’t be a revolution in that same way.

But you are right, so let’s articulate how this is beyond what people currently perceive as a textbook. 

[00:17:06] Santiago: Exactly, yes. That’s my worry because I don’t want this episode to be a message about textbooks are the solution. I don’t think any technology on its own is a solution, and I think you agree with that. The technology is a tool that enables people to actually do their job well.

[00:17:26] David: But again, I want to come back to this parallel. You know, the parallel was beforehand, before you had the printing press, the teachers had to be the source of the knowledge and you couldn’t have teachers teaching unless they were in a very high resource place where they actually had materials to teach for.

Whereas after the printing press, teachers everywhere, humans everywhere could now teach based on textbooks and the availability of textbooks. Even at that point that technological leap was really about enabling teachers, enabling the scaling of teachers in a way which is very powerful.

[00:18:13] Santiago: I didn’t think about it that way, I can see the parallel better now. We have discussed this in previous services, I believe, how, with the right materials and with the right tools, teachers who may not have the right level of subject knowledge, perhaps, in challenging context could become facilitators of knowledge through the tools.

[00:18:41] David: Yeah, let’s just take this parallel a step further. Broadly, before, the printing press as a very simple example that everyone can understand, once you have your printed textbook, your standardised content can now be presented to everyone in a similar way, and the teachers are enabling everyone to interact with the same content in a similar way.

Now not everybody can interact with the same content in the same way, which is what we know, which is where this is a differentiator. These education systems, even if everyone has the same textbook, different people interact with it, different teachers are able to get more out of people by bringing additional resources or other things.

So what is the parallel now? Well, the parallel now is exactly that element of, well, not only can a teacher get content to everyone, it can get adapted content and adaptable content to people, to everybody, potentially, in ways that actually make the personalisation or contextualisation of the content to individuals or to groups, is something which all teachers could now achieve.

So this is the sort of parallel that instead of actually getting just standardised content to everyone, we can now get potentially personalised or adapted content to everyone. And that’s potentially that leap, which is not yet possible in my opinion. People will tell you, you can have this personalised learning journey through these different systems, but without the central role of the teacher, or unless teachers put in a huge amount of effort. And there are systems which are built around that, but I think more could be done.

[00:20:32] Santiago: And the way we are thinking of this puzzle, let’s say, this textbook of the future, we are thinking of adaptations, we are thinking about contextualisation or localisations. But to my understanding, it would still require a substantial human effort from local experts. We’re not necessarily saying that the local experts would be the teachers themselves, but that human labour is essential.

[00:21:13] David: And to me, this is the part that the systems that I’ve seen don’t yet leverage. So at the moment, the technological systems that exist, they have the assumption that you have your sort of experts building the system or you have everybody building the system.

And what you need, of course, is something in between these two. You need to have this combination of experts building systems with individual teachers contributing, enabling to enhance systems, in ways that at the moment are very difficult within the technological structures we have. Combining those two approaches is really hard.

You have these wonderful open education resource banks that exist, but they’re horrible to navigate because everybody’s just creating lots of stuff and there’s not much curation. And then you have amazing commercial and other technological systems which have been built by a set of experts and which others can interact with in the ways that the system has designed.

Merging these two or marrying those two into systems where you have both that collaboration at the expert level and the individual adaptations into a coherent whole, that’s the thing which I believe could create this next sort of revolution in what’s possible. Achieving it is actually both a technological challenge, but also, of course, a social challenge. What’s the business model that works in this way?

Because the business models for open source systems, open educational systems, you get that money from grants and so on, whereas commercial systems, you get it from subscriptions. How do you marry these different systems? These are all interesting questions.

[00:23:07] Santiago: And we have a theory of how we could potentially work towards that, which maybe should be our next episode.

[00:23:19] David: Well, I think within that, again, it’s about pieces of the puzzle. The piece of the puzzle, which we mentioned in a couple of episodes, this five quiz model, which is at the heart of what we’re saying. That’s, I think, one of the insights that actually can lead to this sort of collaboration of actually some expert generated components, which can then be tailored and localised.

Anyway, that’s something we could really look into and discuss.

[00:23:48] Santiago: Yeah, and I think this is not a one episode conversation and we should potentially continue it in our next one if that’s okay with you.

[00:23:59] David: Okay, let’s keep this one short and sweet, well, short at least. We’ll trying to get more practical in the next one and actually have an episode where we dig into sort of the details of this.

[00:24:12] Santiago: Great. Thank you very much, David.

[00:24:14] David: Thanks.