Second, the army was abolished in this world.
I am ready to put a lot of money on the fact that the very next day universities will begin to empty. In another year, two-thirds of them will be closed, 90% of faculties will disappear, in two years no one will remember why they were needed.
When I think about it, it hurts me. I have a couple of friends who got kicked out of university. They like to say about it like this: “Do you know who else left the tower? Gates and Jobs! " I myself am not an enemy of higher education, but I do not want to argue with them.
I feel that education has big - just gigantic - problems these days. I think Valve founder Gabe Newell put it best: “I learned more about software development in a few months at Microsoft than I did in a couple of years at Harvard. At Harvard, I learned to drink beer while standing on my hands - it's a useful skill, but not so much. "
But I don't like to just scold something. I've spent a lot of time figuring out how education should actually work.
Lectures - not needed
And I'm not saying that you don't need a higher education. On the contrary - the university must teach to learn, socialize, teach to seek additional knowledge on their own, discipline.
But here are the usual everyday life of a student, which has not changed for a mountain of decades - lecture, lecture, lecture, lecture, practice, lecture, exam. Universities are getting worse at their task. Moreover, they themselves cease to understand it. When students complain about the program and methodology, the university turns its mission into an excuse: "The university shouldn't teach you."
At the institute, it becomes simply impossible to get actual skills that will be useful on real projects. People who have decided on a profession are looking for salvation in courses, because they say there: “The teachers do not know how to tell and give outdated knowledge. Buy my courses, you will find useful in them ”.
But the problem is not in the teachers and not in the information - the problem is in the very idea of ​​lectures
In the spring of 2014, Scott Freeman and his colleagues at the University of Washington conducted the largest analysis of research studies on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics teaching. Scientists compared groups of students who were given the most ordinary lectures, and groups where the so-called methods of "active learning" were used - that is, such forms when students get the theory themselves and consolidate it in practice.
For the analysis, the scientists selected 225 studies out of 642 that met strict selection criteria - they compared the same groups of students who had the same teachers, took either the same examinations, or on the same group of questions.
On average, 34% of students did not pass the exam in groups with ordinary lectures, and 22% in groups with active learning. The average grade of students from active learning groups was almost a full point higher.
"I get the impression that if you look at this data, it is simply unethical to continue lecturing," said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University, about the study. He has opposed lecturing for 27 years. "It's nice to see a clear picture emerging from the abundance of evidence - lecturing is irrelevant, old-fashioned and ineffective."
Lectures have become almost the main form of study
Memorizing huge volumes of theory has long been a fundamental principle of education. Moreover, the conflict between theory and practice is not new. This was argued about in ancient Greece, and even earlier. The same Socrates, a well-known debater, believed that the mentor should only ask the student the right questions, to which he himself would seek answers.
It has always been a big secret for me why lectures have become the generally accepted method of teaching.
For example, early 20th century philosopher John Deweycame up with a concept similar to what today would be called independent learning by doing - but by this time it was already considered progressive and experimental. Dewey believed that students should be given information only when they themselves seek to find it. It's just that, according to his idea, there is no need to study the theory - you need to solve practical problems that are encountered in real life, and the students will endure all theoretical knowledge themselves while these problems are solved.
But Dewey's approach led to strange excesses. For example, he said that all knowledge that cannot have practical application is not needed at all, but only what is useful is true. Nevertheless, his approach was popular in America and the USSR at the beginning of the last century.
At the moments when I see boring programs overloaded with lectures, I want to do my best to drown for such an approach (if only to discard radical ideas). Because from my own experience, I see that people start to progress wildly when they receive real tasks, get on internships or get a job as juniors for their first jobs.
My business partner Vasya left the institute in his second year, and this did not prevent him from becoming one of the best, in my opinion, IT infrastructure experts in our country.
I myself often conduct interviews and see that sometimes educated people talk about technology as if they saw how they work, only from the outside. It's another matter when a person solved problems with his own hands. This is immediately apparent. He speaks in a completely different way, he senses nuances, sees problems and different paths. And I'm starting to think that a year of active work gives many times more than five years of lectures.
But it is understandable - all this can be speculation, cognitive distortions and survivors' mistakes. Therefore, I began to look for scientific justification and research in order to understand why people begin to really progress only in practice and why students who are actively involved in business learn better than those who just listen to lectures.
The brain needs practice
Our mind, memory, skills are all the brain. And the brain is a material organ, and it has many banal physical limitations. I remember how I was stunned by the realization that all the knowledge we receive has a very real weight in our head.
“There is a famous story about London taxi drivers,” saidabout this Asya Kazantseva. - Just a few years ago, in order to become a real taxi driver in London, you had to pass an orientation exam in the city without a navigator - that is, to know at least two and a half thousand streets, one-way traffic, road signs, stop bans, and also be able to build the best route. Scientists gave [the taxi drivers] a tomogram to see the density of gray matter in the hippocampus. It is an important area of ​​the brain associated with memory formation and spatial thinking. It was found that if a person did not want to become a taxi driver or wanted to, but did not, then the density of gray matter in his hippocampus remained the same. But if he wanted to become a taxi driver, underwent training and really mastered a new profession, then the density of gray matter increased by a third - that's a lot. "
That is, when the brain learns, it grows connections between neurons - roughly speaking, it grows very real flesh. It is a complex process that consumes a lot of calories, sugar, oxygen and energy. And the brain saves them - because if it had an unlimited amount of energy and an infinite ability to process it, we would remember absolutely every second of our life perfectly.
But there are no resources and memory is selective - it costs the brain dearly. Naturally, he begins to filter information and grow new connections only for what he really considers necessary - not always asking us. So any conscious learning is a kind of biohacking.
“Cognitive scientists believe that learning is an internal process that involves thinking, memory, reflection, motivation, and metacognition, -wrote in her work by Maria Gianelli, educator at the American Museum of Natural History and graduate student at the City University of New York. - Information is perceived by various senses, processed by the operative memory, the resources of which are limited, and then enters the long-term memory, which has no limitations. Long-term memory organizes complex material into circuits, thus reducing the load on RAM and increasing its potential. The performance of random access memory can be influenced by both the essential characteristics of the processed material (its nature) and external conditions (methods of material presentation). If too much material is supplied so that it cannot be processed by the working memory and transferred to the long-term, cognitive overload occurs. "
In other words, to learn effectively, we are forced to look for ways to bypass the physiological limitations of the brain and the subconscious blockages that they generate. At the same time, the brain is incredibly complex, there are many departments, and they distribute work among themselves according to subtle patterns.
In his study, biophysicist Joel Michael of Chicago Medical College wrote: “Probably the first person to point out the difference between“ knowing something is true ”and“ doing something ”was Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind. Learning facts is declarative knowledge, but learning how to do something is procedural. These are two completely different processes. If you want to teach students how to solve any problem, you need to give them the opportunity to do it in practice. "
And if you simultaneously include different processes in learning and thus involve different parts of the brain, then the learning efficiency begins to grow.
For example, such a study was conducted by Aidan Horner, a psychologist at the University of York. He took two texts of the same length and gave them to a group of subjects to read. Then he asked me to reread the first text again, and the second - to try to write it down on paper from memory.
After that, he conducted three surveys on both texts after different times - after five minutes, two days later, and a week later. Everyone did a good job with the test, which took place five minutes later - people remembered both texts equally well. But after a week there was already a difference in the tests. To questions about the text, which the subjects simply reread, they gave 40% correct answers. For the second text, which people retold, 58% were correct.
A little effort, additional involvement of the brain from the additional side - and not just banal absorption of information - significantly improved the retention of knowledge in long-term memory.
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There are many approaches to active learning, each of which shows itself better than classical lectures - playful, problem-oriented, collective and various others. But most of all, the constructivist approach turned my head upside down - this concept seemed to me the closest to the education that I would dream of seeing in my ideal world.
The essence of the approach (or rather philosophy) is that no knowledge can be transferred to the student - you can only create conditions in which he himself constructs it in his head.
“Within the framework of this approach, students are provided with the opportunity to actively construct their own knowledge based on experience, information is presented from a variety of points of view, assistance from a specialist or mentor is provided, students are given time and opportunities to develop metacognitive skills,”by Maria Gianelli.
Roughly speaking - freedom of choice, interpretation, practice and feedback without strict assessments according to predetermined criteria.
It seems to me that this approach is best suited to physiology. In nature, there are no people with identically formed brains, everyone has different predispositions and different experiences. And when new knowledge hits the head, it merges in an absolutely unique way with an absolutely unique network of neurons. Therefore, naturally, all people understand and see everything in their own way. But this gives rise to a sea of ​​difficulties.
“The constructivist approach has limitations: it takes a lot of time and work to create context-oriented learning content, and even more time and work is needed to create content that is consistent with the individual interests and experiences of students. A teacher using a constructivist approach to teaching is inevitably limited in the ability to focus the attention of students and direct it in a certain direction, and students in the absence of external sources of motivation may lose interest in work. And finally, in the conditions of constructivist teaching, it is not always easy and not always possible to correctly assess the knowledge of students, ”writes Janelli.
Having learned about this, I seem to have begun to guess why the completely useless way to learn through lectures has become dominant - it is the simplest, and only it gives the teacher the illusion of control over chaos, completely false. It seems to the teacher that he can simply take and transfer knowledge into other people's heads in the same form in which it lies in his head, and then evaluate and direct the students in a direction that only seems correct and unchanging to him.
But this is not the case at all. And now, when the world is overflowing with information, people, professions, technologies, new ways to learn and apply knowledge - this illusion of control over the learning process has finally begun to burst at the seams.
Learning is a spontaneous phenomenon
Not so long ago I learned the story of the Indian scholar and educator Sugata Mitra. He is currently in the business of creating Self-Organized Learning Spaces - places where children can learn with little to no teachers. This is a very long and difficult undertaking. It began with an experiment that Mitra conducted in New Delhi in the late 90s.
He built a computer into the wall of a house in a slum, where the children had never seen computers, did not go to school, and did not know English - he connected it to the Internet and left it. Within a few weeks, all the local children knew how to use the Internet, taught each other and even composed music on the computer.
Then he conducted the same experiment in the Indian city of Hyderabad. Mitra gathered children who spoke English with a strong accent, gave them a computer with a program that converts speech into printed text. He asked the children to dictate the words - but the computer, of course, recorded everything wrong.
“Then I said,“ Okay, I'll leave the computer here for two months. Make the computer understand you. ” They asked: "But how?" And I said I didn't know and left. Two months later, thanks to this program, the children almost completely lost their accent and they spoke perfect English - this fact is documented in Information Technologies & International Development magazine, ”says Mitra.
Since then, he has conducted similar experiments in many cities around the world. He left a group of children with one computer, gave an assignment and left. And every time the results were phenomenal. For example, 12-year-old children from an Indian village have independently learned biotechnology in English. They passed the passing tests and the results of the experiment were published in the British Journal of Educational Technology.
Mitra just wanted to solve the problem with the teachers - because there were not enough of them in India. They went to where they paid, but did not go to where they were most needed. As a result, Mithra seems to have discovered something deeper.
“Do you know what happened? I think we've just stumbled upon a self-organizing system. Its structure emerges without obvious external interference. Self-organizing systems are always unpredictable, they begin to do things for which they were not intended. That is why we react this way, because it seems impossible. I think I can now put forward the following thesis: education is a self-organizing system in which learning is a spontaneous phenomenon. "
We need tasks instead of lecturers
Several years ago we opened our own company - Fevlake - to set up infrastructure for IT companies. We had a very wide technology stack, and it was very difficult to recruit a lot of strong devops to such a team on the market. Therefore, we decided to teach people for ourselves.
I went to study - I wanted to figure out how to properly organize online education. We ended up making a lecture-based course. We included a few tasks, about 20, conducted 2 streams and realized that we needed to change the approach.
I built the training the way I was taught, but intuitively felt that it should be different. It seemed to me that the student should face a problem from the very beginning of his studies. And it's okay that he won't have the slightest idea how to solve it. He must find a way, untangle, split and unwind - read, watch, listen, ask, discuss. This is where theory is needed - it should be the answer to the student's request. And the result of training is not a dummy ideally suited to the patterns conceived by someone, but a completely unique specialist with unique experience.
Then, on the next try, we created a program entirely consisting of problems that must be solved independently (and quite a bit of theoretical screencasts that are put into context). Instead of teachers, we hired active specialists - but they only check, evaluate and guide.
And here is the first pleasant surprise - it turns out that there are much more correct and cool decisions than we could have imagined. That is, we compose a problem, select the ideal correct answer for it, but in practice it turns out that there are two, three, four and more correct answers. People think differently, find different solutions - it's just incredibly cool!
As a result, Fevlake was staffed with specialists. The guys we taught are already working as leads in our company. In two years, this methodology was so effective that we had to open another company - Rebrain, which is engaged in purely training of DevOps specialists. The largest IT companies, banks and corporations order from us the development of similar programs for themselves and send their specialists to us.
And so I tell experienced specialists how everything is arranged with us, and I hear - "Cool, I missed this when I was studying."