Breaking Barriers

As we outlined last Wednesday, there are several significant barriers preventing low-income people and other disadvantaged groups from accessing quality education. How can new technology address these deficiencies?

1.      Technological advancement will lower the input costs of education. The traditional teacher-classroom education model is no longer the only game in town. With intuitive and flexible online platforms, teachers and learners will be able to meet in a virtual environment, drastically cutting costs. Before, this transaction would have had to incorporate the cost of transportation, a brick-and-mortar location, and materials, but now it only has to address the cost of hiring a great educator. Both the student and the teacher benefit.

2.      Online platforms will allow a teacher to interact effectively with a greater number of students. Currently, a major limiting factor in the efficiency of education is class size. Thoughtfully designed online learning platforms can eliminate the constraints of the physical classroom while preserving (and even enhancing) the teacher-student relationship. This will further hack away at the major barrier to entry for many people – cost – while improving quality.

3.      Online education technology will also bridge the quality gap by increasing accessibility. The beauty of learning online is that teacher and student can interact from anywhere in the world at any time. People in areas that are remote or lacking in quality teachers will be able to connect with great educators around the world – educational demand and supply will be connected in a dramatically new and more efficient way.

The possibilities are truly exciting.

Please check back with us all next week for more about educational problems and solutions!

Socioeconomic barriers

On this blog, we’re always talking about problems in education that need solving. One of these is the socioeconomic gap in access, quality, and achievement. What specific issues should stakeholders in education be aware of in solving this problem? Here are some examples:

High cost

Sure, in most countries public education is funded by the taxpayer, so it’s ostensibly free. Unfortunately, this isn’t the whole picture. Even in the developed world, public education is often of low quality, requiring learners to supplement their instruction with expensive, resource-heavy private services. And outside of primary school education, the world is full of people who want to learn something but aren’t able to because of prohibitive costs.

Poor access/low quality

In low-income areas of developed countries, as well as those in the developing world, access to quality education is in short supply. Good teachers are few and far between, and other educational resources are even more scarce.

Lack of relevance

As we discussed in our commentary on curricular problems and in our last post, the things that are being taught in public schools are often irrelevant to the learners. For example, often people who require instruction in a trade will receive an abstract education that is of little use in advancing their career aspirations. There are no services broadly available to effectively and cheaply educate interested people in a subject they find relevant or necessary to their life or career advancement.

In our next installment, we’ll be talking about the ways in which online education technologies can help to address these issues.