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How did we get here?

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All knowledge that there ever was is at the finger tips of everyone at any time (2006-7 Cloud & IPhone go live)

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Challenges & Opportunities

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Got to be starting something -Michael Jackson

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50% of jobs won't exist in 10 years time

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50% of jobs won't exist in 10 years time

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What does this mean for children entering the education system now? For their teachers? For education providers & the Ministry?

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What skills will they need in the future?

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What skills will they need in the future?

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How do we help the Learner find their Purpose

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Engagement, Beliefs & Expectations, Support & Relationships then Knowledge/Content

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Educational Ninjas at every level

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Educational Leadership
Disruptive Leadership
Cultural Capability
Digital & Collaborative Learning
Creativity & Innovation
Diversification of Education
Democratisation of Education

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Education providers, Teachers, Students, Whanau, Community...Teams, trusted to get the job done... flattening of hierarchy & removal of 'notes' (blocks within the organisation, people or systems)

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Say hi to Alexa

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Using Amazon Alexa Echo Dot in the ClassRoom

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Online teaching assistant

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Ambar presses her hand to her forehead, nose crinkled in concentration as she considers the question on her screen: how many sevens in 91? The ten-year-old has been grappling with it for about a minute when she smiles: "13!".

Her tutor responds by posting a large smiley cat picture on her screen - the virtual equivalent of a pat on the back. He is sitting on the other side of the world in an online tutoring centre in India.

Ambar, who attends Pakeman primary school in north London, is one of nearly 4,000 primary school children in Britain signed up for weekly one-to-one maths sessions with tutors based in India and Sri Lanka. The lessons, provided by a company called Third Space Learning, are targeted at pupils struggling with maths - particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

From next year, the platform will become one of the first examples of artificial intelligence (AI) software being used to monitor, and ideally improve, teaching.

Together with scientists at University College London (UCL), the company has analysed around 100,000 hours of audio and written data from its tutorials, with the goal of identifying what makes a good teacher and a successful lesson.

Tom Hooper, the company's CEO, said: "We're looking to optimise lessons based on the knowledge we gain. We've recorded every lesson that we've ever done. By using the data, we've been trying to introduce AI to augment the teaching".

Initially, the company's 300 tutors will receive real-time, automated interventions from the teaching software when it detects that a lesson may be veering off-course.

Pupils on the programme have a 45-minute session with the same tutor each week. They communicate through a headset and a shared "whiteboard" (they can't see each other). The lessons at Pakeman school are tailored to the individual, including visual rewards linked to the child's interests. Premier League strikers for nearby Arsenal, cute animals and pink, iced doughnuts flash up on the screens of Ambar's classmates.

In addition to the raw audio data, each lesson has various success metrics attached: how many problems completed, how useful the pupil found the session, how the tutor rated it. Using machine learning algorithms to sift through the dataset, the UCL team has started to look for patterns.

An early analysis found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that when tutors speak too quickly, the pupil is more likely to lose interest. Leaving sufficient time for the child to respond or pose their own questions was also found to be a factor in the lesson's success, according to Hooper. These observations are likely to form the basis of the initial prompts that the tutors will receive, probably in the form of messages flashing up on their screen.

"We're going to be drip-feeding it in in relatively simple ways to start with," said Hooper.

As the technology evolves, the interventions could become more sophisticated and the software might play a more active role in teaching, raising questions about the extent to which intelligent software could replace human teachers.

Rose Luckin, a professor of learner centred design at University College London, who is collaborating with Third Space Learning on the project, said: "What we are very interested in is the right blend of human and artificial intelligence in the classroom - identifying that sweet spot."

According to Luckin, AI provides a unique opportunity to assess which teaching strategies are working and to individualise teaching.

"It would be able to say, for this child at the moment, Jolly Phonics is working well," she said. "You would be able to look back over their reading process and see which interventions worked. The potential for the use of AI to make education tractable and visible is huge."

However, she predicts that the insights gleaned from AI will often be applied by human teachers. "What I'm really concerned about is that people don't run away with the idea that kids have to be plugged into the computer," she said. "It's about so much more than that."

Hooper agreed that the aim is not to replace teachers with robots. "There's a slightly dubious conversation about how AI will make humans irrelevant, but it's not at all about replacing humans," he said. "Our whole belief is that for children disengaged with the subject, who are lacking in confidence, people is what matter. An algorithm can't provide that."

He said he does not expect his tutors, most of whom are science graduates, will be concerned about the automated feedback. "We'll need to be considerate about it," he said, adding that it would not be "a bossy algorithm barking orders at people".

Shazli Mahroof, 27, a tutor team leader based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said he was not worried about being replaced by a teaching robot in the near future. "It's not the computer who is going to teach," he said.

The tutors already have one lesson each week assessed by supervisors, and it is fairly obvious, subjectively, when things are progressing well, according to Hooper.

"We're asking 'how do we promote those teaching events at scale?'" he said.

Companies entering this sphere also need to convince parents and teachers that the data being collected is both secure and will ultimately benefit pupils. A previous data analytics project in New York state schools, run by the company InBloom, collapsed in 2014 after becoming embroiled in privacy concerns.

"The whole thing became toxic," said Luckin. "It's really important that we do it right."

At Pakeman primary, it is the last maths session before the Christmas holidays. An infant class in the school hall is rehearsing a performance and the school has an end-of-term feeling in the air, but the atmosphere in the online learning session is one of hushed focus.

After finishing the lesson, Ambar said that maths used to make her anxious, but since starting the weekly tutorials in Year 5, she has started enjoying it. "When they give you horrible sums, they help you," she said. "I was scared to do it, but it was actually fun."
Topics

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Could online tutors and artificial intelligence be the future of teaching?

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Ambar presses her hand to her forehead, nose crinkled in concentration as she considers the question on her screen: how many sevens in 91? The ten-year-old has been grappling with it for about a minute when she smiles: "13!".

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This is happening now... MOOCs, Micro-credentials, online learning, bricks & mortar???

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Hello YouTube, it feels good to have arrived! We are IMAX, an education organisation led by passionate people with a common interest in improving teaching-learning outcomes in schools. In just two years since inception, we have been adopted by more than 180+ schools, 80000+ students and 2500+. How are we doing it?

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What is the purpose of formal education?

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What is the purpose of formal education?

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To prepare people for the future?

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Introduction to Exponentials | SingularityU New Zealand | Kaila Colbin

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Wondering what all this exponential tech stuff is about? Start here. Kaila Colbin is a co-founder of the non-profit Ministry of Awesome, the starting point to make things happen in Christchurch and the founder and director of New Zealand social media consultancy Missing Link.

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The Democratisation of Education

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Future of Education | SingularityU New Zealand | Singularity University

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How can our education system better prepare us for an exponential future? Sue Suckling on The Future of Education Subscribe: http://bit.ly/1Wq6gwm Connect with Singularity University: Website: http://singularityu.org Singularity HUB:http://singularityhub.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/singularityu Twitter: https://twitter.com/singularityu Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/singularity-university Google+: https://plus.google.com/+singularityu About Singularity University: Singularity University is a benefit corporation headquartered at NASA's research campus in Silicon Valley.

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Professor's Teaching Assistant Jill Watson

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Professor's Teaching Assistant Jill Watson

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Students unaware Jill Watson was an Artificial Intelligence bot

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To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor's overworked teaching staff.

But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot.

Ashok Goel, a computer science professor, did not reveal Watson's true identity to students until after they'd turned in their final exams.

Students were amazed. "I feel like I am part of history because of Jill and this class!" wrote one in the class's online forum. "Just when I wanted to nominate Jill Watson as an outstanding TA in the CIOS survey!" said another.

Now Goel is forming a business to bring the chatbot to the wider world of education. While he doesn't foresee the chatbot replacing teaching assistants or professors, he expects the chatbot's question-answering abilities to be an invaluable asset for massive online open courses, where students often drop out and generally don't receive the chance to engage with a human instructor. With more human-like interaction, Goel expects online learning could become more appealing to students and lead to better educational outcomes.

"To me this is a grand challenge," Goel said. "Education is such a huge priority for the entire human race."

At the start of this semester Goel provided his students with a list of nine teaching assistants, including Jill, the automated question and answering service Goel developed with the help of some of his students and IBM.

Goel and his teaching assistants receive more than 10,000 questions a semester from students on the course's online forum. Sometimes the same questions are asked again and again. Last spring he began to wonder if he could automate the burden of answering so many repetitive questions.

As Goel looked for a technology that could help, he settled on IBM Watson, which he had used for several other projects. Watson, an artificial intelligence system, was designed to answer questions, so it seemed like a strong fit.

To train the system to answer questions correctly, Goel fed it forum posts from the class's previous semesters. This gave Jill an extensive background in common questions and how they should be answered.

Goel tested the system privately for months, having his teaching assistants examine whether Jill's answers were correct. Initially the system struggled with similar questions such as "Where can I find assignment two?" and "When is assignment two due?" Goel tweaked the software, adding more layers of decision-making to it. Eventually Jill reached the point where its answers were good enough.

"I cannot create chaos in my classroom. Jill had to be almost perfect as a human TA or I am," Goel said.

The system is only allowed to answer questions if it calculates that it is 97 percent or more confident in its answer. Goel found that was the threshold at which he could guarantee the system was accurate.

There are many questions Jill can't handle. Those questions were reserved for human teaching assistants.

Goel plans to use Jill again in a class this fall, but will likely change its name so students have the challenge of guessing which teaching assistant isn't human.

"A really fun thing in this class has been once students knew about Jill they were so motivated, so engaged. I've never seen this kind of motivation and engagement," Goel said. "What a beautiful way of teaching artificial intelligence."

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What happened when a professor built a chatbot to be his teaching assistant

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To help with his class this spring, a Georgia Tech professor hired Jill Watson, a teaching assistant unlike any other in the world. Throughout the semester, she answered questions online for students, relieving the professor's overworked teaching staff. But, in fact, Jill Watson was an artificial intelligence bot.

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Programmes to upskill the teaching workforce

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Programmes to upskill the teaching workforce

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The Mind Lab offers learning experiences that support the development of the next generation of makers, doers, inventors and creators who will shape the future with new ways of working, thinking and living.

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Parenting, Technology, Impatience, Environment

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Simon Sinek on Millennials in the Workplace

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The Ministry & The Mind Lab

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The solution to understanding the new digital curriculum

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The new digital curriculum is here. Don't get left behind. Start your digital journey with the Digital Passport today.