Tutor Connect Education Council

Tutor Connect's Education Council provide weekly insights into how education in itself is being changed because of disruptive thinking facilitated by the internet.

[tutorconnect]

We Can All Learn From The Finns.

I recently happened upon this article which, aside from being generally interesting to those who care about education policy, has a number of lessons which may be of relevance to TutorConnect.   First, it shows the merits in stripping the educational process down to what many people, if not always politicians, recognise to be its bare bones: training good teachers, and letting them teach. Much of the debate about education in this country - Grammar schools? Free schools? Academies? - skirts around this simple but fundamental point. Good schools are ones in which good teachers teach relatively small classes, and have access to the equipment, technology, and other resources they need. Focusing on the other stuff is at best a means to this end, and at worst a distraction from it. I'm a governor at a successful comprehensive school which has recently become an Academy; the governors thought that this conversion would help raise standards - not least because of extra funding - but not, in all honesty, by a huge amount. Far more important is the excellent leadership provided by the Head and the rest of the senior management, and the first-class teaching that goes on in the classrooms. This, of course, is implicitly recognised by TutorConnect, which is simply about connecting good teachers to motivated students. This simplicitly is a tremendous asset. And the emphasis the Finns place on good teachers is further emphasised by the tutor rating system that TutorConnect employs, allowing students to sort out the wheat from the chaff that often populates tutoring companies.   The second lesson is that collaboration is important. The Finns make time for teachers to talk to each other, work with each other, and learn from each other. TutorConnect should find a way of doing this too, so that best practice can be shared amongst its most successful tutors. I know this is something that Max is already working on, and it would be of great benefit to the quality of teaching that goes on.

Third, and finally, the Finnish education system shares with TutorConnect an emphasis on what the article calls "thinking-based" - as opposed to "memorization-based" - learning. Of course, remembering facts and passing exams will always be a vital part of a child's education. But there is so much more to education than that. In the modern world a successful career, and, I might venture to suggest, even a successful life, will depend both on developing so-called 'soft skills', and on learning in a range of subjects that goes way beyond the traditional academic range. This is why TutorConnect focuses at its core on stretching the existing boundaries of online tutoring by matching teachers and learners in subjects beyond those of traditional academics. Teachers can teach, and learners can learn, anything from Physics to Violin and from French to Business Start-Up strategies.  Anyone can learn, and anyone can teach. Teachers can also be learners and learners can also teach. As such, TutorConnect provides a platform for "thinking-based" learning that focuses on holistic development.

We should be cautious, as the article notes, of looking at what works in one culture and society and assuming that, unaltered, it will be just as successful in another, different one. But with that said, we would be mad if we didn't think there are lessons to be learned from such a demonstrably excellent educational system. The key, of course, is to make sure we learn the right ones.

[tutorconnect]

Tutor Connect, Globalization & the International Baccalaureate

  It’s easy to find, indeed hard to avoid, news reports about how globalisation is changing the way we think about things we have long taken for granted or assumed constant.  And of course there's more than a grain of truth there.  But globalization did not come about from nowhere, and while the necessary technological elements are recent developments, they have intensified and accelerated pre-existing cultural and economic imperatives rather than created completely new ones. Whatever you think of trade between the developing and developed world (plunder or mutually beneficial?), for example, it began when reliable shipping and land-transport made it possible several hundred years ago, and has not stopped since. That's not to say, of course, that recent changes are of the same order of magnitude as previous ones.  If we have just left the flat part of the exponential curve and are now starting on the steep part then things are going to be different, perhaps more different than we can imagine.  But it's instructive to locate the changes in historical contexts rather than simply focus on the new.  As far as education in the UK goes, we can look at the current schooling system and see that it is predicated on an industrial system of mass production. Hardly surprising, as the system was constructed at same time that industrialization was really getting going.  And it's not a terrible idea - if there is a basic set of tools that all students need, why not maximise efficiency by teaching 30 of them at once, in a room with an expert? I don't want to say this is a bad idea - but it was an idea located in time and place.  These days the brief of education has expanded well beyond the 'basic tools' idea, for better or worse (are some things better learned at school or at home or in the workplace?  I think that's a question worth asking, though not one we can purse here) and we look to education to provide far more than just the academic basics.  And again, we can see the socio-cultural imperatives at work.  Because we are interested in globalization, we want students to know about other cultures, about other literatures, other ways of thinking.  And because we are no longer about conformity, but increasingly about individual choice and expression, we also want to offer student choice and freedom.  Of course, conformity is hardly gone, and there’s a huge question about whether or not individuality has been hi-jacked by agents of conformity such as governments and MNCs, but individuality is at least on the agenda in a way that simply was not true fifty years ago. That has to be a good thing.  So what does this all mean in the broader educational world?  For one thing, it means that educational organizations which can tap into these two features of globalization – the need to go beyond narrow academics, and the need to individualise study  - are likely to be riding the crest of a wave.  The most obvious example of this is the International Baccalaureate (the ‘IB’  - www.ibo.org) , which has been growing steadily since the 1960s, and spectacularly in recent years.  The IB offers a coherent vision of combining cognitive and affective elements, and also offers students the chance to personalize their own programmes, subject to various constraints (which, interestingly are themselves being increasingly questioned both within and outside the organization).  So while students have to study literature from various traditions, they are free to choose the traditions and even the individual books; while they have to write a research paper it can be on any thing from Suicide Terrorism to Plato’s Republic; while they have to analyse a contemporary issue from an epistemic standpoint, the issue can be local pollution problems or the global banking crisis.  Seen like this, and alongside its compelling pedagogy, it’s hardly surprising that the IB is exploding around the world in terms of popularity. All this also speaks to the potential for an organization like TutorConnect.  The business model has the same two drivers I have identified above.  Of course the bottom-line is academic, but by offering students the chance to find tutors with whom  they have an affinity, I would hope that the relationships which can develop will be about much more than simply information-giving; that what will be exchanged will be insights about what the next stage of education is like, personally, practically and emotionally.  And of course the element of student choice and individualisation is built into the model right from the start; in terms of who signs up, who tutors and who, when and for what.  So if we can get things right, the possibilities are very exciting.  Tutor-Connect could be a model for the future in the way that the IB was in the 1960s.

While all this will be enabled by the wonder of modern technology, it’s interesting to note that it will more akin to the apprentice-master model of education which preceded the current mass-production model.  From the broader historical perspective we seems to be cycling back to harness old wisdom in new ways; an encouraging sign. 

-Nick

[tutorconnect]

Tutor Connect - P2P learning.

Graham Brown-Martin’s blog post on ‘The Napsterification of Learning’ is a bold, provocative and important contribution to the ongoing debate around the role that new technologies can and ought to play in education. It’s a short piece, and well worth reading in full, but the basic summary is this: technology can be ‘disruptive’; disrupting the way educational goods have traditionally been provided is a positive virtue; and the way this disruption will occur is through ‘Napsterification’, doing for education what Napster did for music – that is, cutting out the ‘middle men’ and connecting listeners directly with music. Technology, Brown-Martin believes, has the potential to revolutionise an outmoded ‘1950s’ style of teaching and learning by ‘disintermediating’ students’ access to knowledge in just the same way – though he leaves it tantalisingly open as to exactly who the middle men in question actually are. Brown-Martin makes two points that are, I think, especially relevant to Tutor Connect and which are worth reflecting on a little more deeply. The first is the implicit suggestion that new technology should replace existing, traditional forms of teaching and learning, these being inappropriate for preparing young people for a twenty-first century world. This seems to me to be an unnecessarily strong claim, for two reasons. First of all, our best schools and universities – many of which have been teaching in the same way for decades (while integrating technology into its methods as they have seen fit) – are extremely good, and appear to do a fine job of equipping students with the intellectual tools they need to thrive in the labour market and in society more generally. This suggests that it is not the teaching methods themselves that are necessarily flawed, but rather their delivery in some particular cases. Second, the fact remains that technology cannot replace every aspect of a child’s education, even if we wanted it to: it cannot teach children how to interpret the body language of others, it cannot teach them how to speak in front of a large physical audience, and so on. These two points suggest to me, therefore, that we should conceive of technology as augmenting, rather than replacing, more traditional forms of education. This is where Tutor Connect is seeking to add value. Rather than attempting to act as a rival to traditional schooling, Tutor Connect seeks to supplement it. Whether a student is struggling in a particular subject and is looking for extra help, or is excelling and wants to be stretched even further, Tutor Connect can perform that function. This flexibility is enhanced by what, to my mind, is Tutor Connect’s most exciting feature: that it eliminates the constraints that physical geography places on teaching and learning. If you’re in Basildon and want to learn maths from a highly-rated tutor in Baltimore, you can do exactly that. This suggests that we can view the ‘middle man’ highlighted by Brown-Martin not so much as a person, but instead as a physical place, which Tutor Connect allows us to bypass if we want to add to the learning we do at school or university. The second feature of the blog post worth considering is the precise model that Napster offers. Napster, lest we forget, was guilty of copyright infringement on a massive scale – something which was not just illegal, but immoral. Brown-Martin’s claim that “savvy artists and labels” were less affected is, I’m afraid, besides the point. To be fair to him, I’m sure that Brown-Martin isn’t actually promoting this model as one to be aped in the education sector: ‘Napsterification’ is, after all, a punchy term that gets the point across well, and that’s why he uses it. But it’s worth thinking about the implications for Tutor Connect. One of the major driving forces behind Napster was a feeling that the record industry was running a ‘cartel’, conspiring to keep prices artificially high. Whether or not there’s any truth in those claims, we should place this in contrast with the Tutor Connect model, which is one of a completely transparent marketplace, where tutors set their own fees and customers choose them based on their past performance as judged by previous learners. This model retains some of the attractions of Napster, but does so in a fair and legal way. Whether you agree or not with Brown-Martin’s underlying thesis, it’s undeniably great to see that there’s such a dynamic and vigorous debate going on. With so many people now thinking about how new technology can improve the ways we teach and learn, the future seems bright indeed.

-Alex