Article on future school have no school and no teachers
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rofessor Selwyn says the traditional features of a conventional school, such as a library full of books, will have been replaced by digital editions; laptops and PCs by palm-sized smart phones, tablets and ‘‘fablets’’, a cross between the small screen of the smart phone and the tablet computer; exams by online tests; and perhaps the school itself will have gone and a virtual teaching institution on the worldwide web taken its place.
‘‘Everyone will have their own personal computer device in their palm,’’ Professor Selwyn says. ‘‘And that will change many things in school in terms of communication, social networking, information-gathering and so on.’’
A professor of education who came to Monash University from the Institute of Education at the University of London, Professor Selwyn’s research and teaching focuses on the place of digital media in everyday life, and the sociology of technology use in education.
‘‘Another thing that will happen are online exams – NAPLAN is going live in 2016 and exams are already taken on the web by students in Europe on a large scale,’’ he says. ‘‘Instead of having an open-book exam, it will be an open internet exam.’’
By 2023, ‘‘virtual schools’’ will have sprung up where students learn online, just as Australian university students have been doing for the past 20 years. Professor Selwyn says the US is already far down the track of establishing online schools, with up to 2 million students enrolled in virtual K-12 institutions where they are taught via the internet.
‘‘In the US, 27 states now have official state-run virtual schools, and Philadelphia has just announced plans to open a very large virtual school,’’ he says. ‘‘But the rise of the virtual school is a result of budget constraints, falling enrolments and more kids beginning to take subjects online while also attending face-to-face teaching. Even now, if you live in rural Victoria, there’s nothing to stop a child taking a virtual class in languages or other subjects.’’
‘‘Blended learning’’, where students learn with others in a class as well as online at home, will become as much a part of Australian schools as it has in higher education, Professor Selwyn says. Sometimes this will be for logistical reasons such as remoteness or where students are unable to attend school because of medical problems. In other cases, the virtual school will serve as a ‘‘halfway house’’ where students can study online while also taking some classes in a regular school.
‘‘Then there are the massive open online courses or MOOCs that are beginning to be prepared for schools – with big online groups of school kids learning together. The first experiment with MOOCs is taking place in Florida and when you have big publishing companies such as Pearson involved, you can see where this is headed.’’
Looking a little further into the future, Professor Selwyn refers to the development by Monash researchers of a bionic eye that can manipulate the visual cortex of the brain: ‘‘This could lead to us having an external cognitive hard drive you could plug into your brain. Called metacognition, the idea is still very speculative but the potential is there to have this interface between the human brain and the technology.’’
The use of robots as teachers might also sound far-fetched but, he says, Japan has been using robots as teacher replacements for 10 years – in some cases even replacing the need for students to go to school. He refers to the case of a girl with a degenerative disease who has an ‘‘avatar robot’’ that takes her place at school and interacts with the other students.
This could lead to us having an external cognitive hard drive you could plug into your brain.
‘‘At the University of London, we had people who were embedding computer devices in a forest. Students could go into the forest and, holding a communication device, interact with microchips embedded in the trees and plants to learn about them. That would be great in a way but I like going on nature trips to discover things by myself so the danger is that technology runs away with itself and you end up with a solution in search of a problem!’’
Despite all the technological advances, Professor Selwyn cannot see the time when the bricks-and-mortar school will have entirely disappeared.