Archives: Expert Predictions

There will soon be hundreds of network activities that will advertise hands-on, computer-based, collaborative project activities based on constructivist principles and consistent with all the standards. A few will be excellent but the vast majority will be junk. It’s easy to generate the form without the substance … With lower costs of publication, these dregs will flood the networks. Because it is easier and faster to produce bad material than good, the junk will be there first, giving educational networking a black eye.

The network offers many ways to support improved student evaluation. Student portfolios can be put online and subjected to peer and external professional review. The network offers many new opportunities to automate and track reliability, increasing the pool of potential evaluators and the consistency of their judgments. It is likely that network-based, for-fee evaluation services will spring up … [This] will have a major impact … throughout the precollege level, relaxing the need to have a nodding acquaintance with many topics and rewarding thoughtful engagement with a few … An automatic tracking utility might be able to note what kinds of information the student was exposed to, sample some interactions, and record exemplary work at the student’s request. The resulting record, itself a hyperlinked network resource, would be invaluable to students, teachers, and parents.

A large number of net schools – schools purporting to offer an entire curriculum – will also be created. Some of these will have curricula consisting of other network resources supplemented by professional guidance and solid evaluation. Many will be terrible, but some will be excellent, offering far better learning experiences than some local schools. The best will not be cheap, because there are irreducible human costs associated with education – essentially the cost of paying someone who understands the current intellectual level of each student across all disciplines and can prescribe experiences appropriate for each. Compared with comparable schools, quality net schools will be less expensive; they will have reduced physical plant costs, fewer administrative costs, and lower faculty costs because they use a mix of advanced students, volunteers, and low-cost international expertise.

There will be lots of junk graduate netcourses and net diploma mills. The network will make it easier to get credit from impressive-sounding institutions for little learning and less effort. Teachers will undertake the extra effort to master difficult courses only when excellence in scholarship, knowledge, and breadth of learning are more highly valued by schools, communities, and unions.

The availability of excellent graduate netcourses will substantially improve teacher preparation and professional development … Entire departments and schools of education will find themselves out of business unless they improve their teaching and scholarship, because their students will be recruited to stronger, more aggressive graduate schools throughout the world.

There will be an explosion of network-based courses for teacher professional development. The best of these will offer world-class learning opportunities that will intermix cognitive research, educational philosophy, subject matter, content, and just-in-time support for in-class experimentation. Participants can work with local study groups and larger virtual groups that span the world. The faculty … will include international experts, experienced teachers, and outstanding researchers. Graduate credit from leading institutions throughout the world will be available … The result will be a growing teacher-generated literature of immense value to education, and increasing appreciation of the importance of lifelong learning for teachers and teacher-researchers who are making contributions to education, science, and mathematics.

As teachers gain familiarity with network resources, they will increasingly describe how they weave multiple resources together with more traditional resources to address specific learning objectives. These descriptions, or “hot lesson plans,” will be available on the network and contain hot links to other network resources used in the lesson. They will be of great interest to others and will pass around the network like wildfire. The best will have a small royalty fee that offers authors the opportunity of an impressive reward based on the number of potential users. Current events with scientific implications, such as natural disasters, earthquakes, space shots, major discoveries, and astronomical events, will generate particular interest when quickly incorporated into hot lesson plans.

Most good education involves irreducible human costs. Students may be able to communicate with scientists, but not many, so this form of education will not be significant on a national scale. And discussion groups need moderators. In essence, a teacher or similarly knowledgeable person must be available to interact with students and assess their understanding, and that person needs to be compensated. As a result, most resources that can be scaled to reach large numbers of students will cost money that eventually will have to be paid directly by the end user or their schools. Network resources, because they involve bits and not atoms, will be less expensive than their physical counterparts; in effect, textbook funding will be transferred to network resources.

Soon, there will be billboard-free toll roads, and many of these will have educational value. They will be important to education because most useful education resources take people time to create, operate, maintain, and update, and involve intellectual property that often requires income reward. Some of this time and property will be provided free by public-spirited volunteers, foundations, and companies. But donated resources will always be a small and unstable fringe effort, rarely able to scale up to have a significant impact on education. All the large-scale, network-based educational programs will be on a fee-for-service basis.