Machine Learning can transform
education
India
needs a massification and vocationalization of higher education at a cost that
only online learning can do. This needs machine learning
Futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The magic of software (giving data
and rules to get answers) is often confused with the magic of machine learning
(giving data and answers to get rules) but it is machine learning not software
that is transforming the world of computer chess.
So far, computer chess programs codified the actions of the best
human players and inevitably pivoted around the strategy of “material”, wherein
the number and value of pieces mattered most. But recently, AlphaZero playing
Stockfish counter-intuitively sacrificed a bishop for a pawn. Reports suggest
AlphaZero taught itself chess from scratch in just four hours by playing
against itself and rejected human rules developed over centuries.
As it started with only the basic rules, researchers suggest that
its lack of knowledge of human chess history may have enabled AlphaZero to see
the game in a fresh way. We’d like to make the case that machine learning is
transforming online education, but Indian online education is held back by
regulatory cholesterol.
Before diving into online education, let’s reflect on challenges
in education. Knowing must shift to learning because Google knows everything.
Metrics need shifting from inputs to outcomes because only money is not
working. Differentiation and personalization are not about making things easier
for children but making learning accessible by tapping into motivations and
abilities. Assessment needs to shift from annual exams to regular feedback.
Teachers knowing content is not the same as their ability to create learning.
There is an element of eat your spinach in education, but schools
largely work for front-row students. Lifelong learning needs a continuum
between prepare, repair and upgrade. Employability is an objective. Timetables
are an industrial-era model of one size fits all that blunt choices and learner
agency. Most importantly, if you think formal education is everything, then
just look at the president of the US.
Many educators agree online learning can transform education, but
they don’t know how. Textbook and PowerPoint repackaged e-learning—the digital
equivalent of paving the cow path rather than building a highway—mean that, so
far, online offerings have not been able to blunt the obvious downsides of
physical classrooms (one size fits all, huge costs, uneven teacher quality,
etc.) despite obvious advantages (teaching with different speeds to people with
different backgrounds and different starting points, class of one, cost,
on-the-go, on-demand, crowdsourced, gamified, etc.).
We believe that the massification of machine learning could be the
missing ingredient—enabling personalization, flip classrooms, rethinking
assessments, enabling non-conventional credentialing, etc. Personalization via
intelligent tutor systems that track “mental steps” and modify feedback,
exercises, explanations and intervention to promote self-regulation,
self-monitoring and self-explanation would revolutionize engagement.
A recursive and real-time meta-analysis of learning outcomes
across students, cohorts, schools would considerably improve the efficacy of
flip classrooms (where classrooms are used for discussions and students finish
the lecture and learning in advance). Natural language, computer vision, and
deep learning could answer student questions.
These systems are infrastructure to improve the signalling value
of non-conventional or micro-credentialing, which in turn would discover the
cognitive, behavioural and affective preferences for each learner. The biggest
impact would be in assessment by moving it from an event to a process and
reducing its labour intensity; for instance, tools like Sochobots, Lingolens
and Gradescope use computer vision and machine learning to grade students’ work
(even stuff like essays).
However, Indian online education is held back by regulatory
cholesterol that distinguishes between distance and online education.
E-commerce would never have happened if financial regulators had insisted on
separating the offline and online. UPI/BHIM have gone from 0.1 million
transactions in the month before demonetization to 140 million last month; they
will reach a billion in a year. Payments for Indian consumers are almost free
(marginal cost), while in the US regulations have protected margins for private
platforms.
India’s regulatory issues include hubris (the ability of
regulators to anticipate all situations), micromanaging (including defining the
type of web links on your website) and continuous lobbying because of poor
state capacity to effectively regulate, supervise and enforce. It is too late
for evolution; we need a revolution under which universities do not require
permission to launch any online courses.
Regulators can prescribe broad guidelines with a policy objective
of creating biodiversity and innovation in business and operating models that
would tackle the difficult trade-off between cost, quality and scale. Like with
most treatment of regulatory cholesterol, this revamped regulation would be
accompanied by improved supervision and strengthened consumer protection. But
drunk-driving is not an argument against cars and regulations that ban or make
online education difficult are silly.
Einstein once said that if you judge a fish by its ability to
climb a tree, it will live its life believing it is stupid. Physical classrooms—because
of the limitations of time and space—often make this error. India needs a
massification and vocationalization of higher education at a cost that only
online learning can do. This needs machine learning. But before that we need
changes to our regulatory cholesterol.
Source | Mint | 26th March
2018
Regards
Mr. Pralhad Jadhav
Master of Library & Information Science (NET
Qualified)
Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan & Co
Twitter Handle | @Pralhad161978
Mobile @ 9665911593
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