A Digital Age of Education

The classroom is the idyllic staple of what education has been for the past hundred years, yet a time is coming where modern technology finally has the potential to replace and supersede the old and ineffective practices of the past. In this day and age we have the all encompassing interlinked system of the internet We schedule our days, navigate through them, and put our trust in the future through the internet. Is it not only natural that we would find a way to use the internet as a tool in bettering ourselves and educating our students. The methodology used in this new digital frontier of education has surpassed the old stagnating lecture hall style of education with a more efficient and fiscally responsible programs and has brought about a new and important way of learning.

While the lecture format of education has proven effective in educating the mass populace, it only could succeed in the format of the group and not the individual. When we think about the ideal form of education, it’s not very difficult to imagine Aristotle tutoring Alexander The Great in ancient Macedonia, the legendary teacher guiding his discussions perfectly to mold and shape Alexander into what he would someday become. This kind of one on one teaching can be considered to be the most perfect style of education, yet it fails for three specific reasons. Firstly, there aren’t enough humans in the world to individually tutor every child born. Secondly, It would be wildly and impossibly expensive. Finally, not every adult would have the knowledge and wisdom of Aristotle. The internet deals with each of these problems directly. The internet ,while extremely cheap to use, is an extremely powerful tool for personalization. While there is no one lesson perfectly ideal for all children, the internet allows us to store thousands of different lessons teaching the very same subject if necessary, which would literally mean that there would be a specific lesson for any type of person. The internet also allows for the such lessons to be massively reviewed by any sort of intellectual or fact checker necessary to grant it a type of skill and knowledge perhaps even as astute as that of Aristotle.

To state the obvious, running a college is expensive. As an example, Kerry Temple, editor of Notre Dame magazine reveals a bit of how much one of the colleges considered a “best value” school, costs to operate. “It costs almost $2.5 million per day to operate the enterprise that is Notre Dame. A student’s tuition covers about two-thirds of the real cost of his or her education, says John Sejdinaj, Notre Dame’s vice president for finance. Tuition, he says, generates about 41 percent of the revenues toward Notre Dame’s $900 million annual budget. The rest comes mainly from various auxiliary operations, gifts, endowment income, grants and contracts.” (Sejdinaj quoted by Temple) This extraordinary yearly budget only covers the universities costs of operation; the students still have to find a way to finance their own food, textbooks, and housing. I reference this yearly budget for the sole purpose of outlining how ridiculous the costsof operating the old lecture hall style of education; the cost has become so incredibly high that student tuition doesn’t even begin to cover it. What does it cost for every student to purchase their own laptop, wifi, and perhaps even give a small chunk to hire educators. There is no researched price point to be found, but it is certainly and clearly lower than the $22,261 per year that the US national college board found to be the average cost of a higher education in the 2012-2013 year.

David Talbot in the MIT technology review described an experiment thought up and executed by the “One Laptop Per Child” organization actually that leaves a crate of digital tablets loaded with educational software in small isolated African villages. The leader of the organization speaks of the results as so, “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. But within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android software.” (Talbot) This situation speaks volumes to the power of a digital education. Not only were these children motivated to use the software to learn but by the end of the experiment they had even gone so far as to express their own curiosity through hacking the tablets. Such an experiment is not necessarily an accurate representation of where education is headed, but merely a good indication of what digital learning is capable of.

Many people have their qualms with an online education, but none is so widespread an idea than the lack of teacher to student communication within the lecture hall style of learning. I am here to proudly state that this issue is utterly misunderstood. In an online lecture, the students watch a recorded video and /or sound byte of a teacher's lesson. While impersonal sounding at a glance, this method actually allows for more attention to be paid to the student than less. Many teachers use a note taking submission system, where after listening to the lecture the student then submits his notes as not only a method of tracking attendance but a way for the teacher to be able to actually see how on track their student’s comprehension of the material is. This style of system not only allows for personalized review, it is also a much faster and efficient way of gauge the class's overall understanding as well. To accomplish this there are many readily available keyword checking softwares that can quickly highlight if the students are taking the correct sort of notes, as well as shorten the workload of the professor by the hundred. The potential for such classes allow for a situation where many more students can be actively engaged in a lesson than previously imagined.

There has always been a place where a person who wanted to learn could go and find all the information they would ever need. That place is a library, and although there may be teachers who have an extreme wealth of knowledge, no source of information will ever be as culmative as the thousands of years of information gathering that a library maintains. The elegance of a digital education is pronounced when one truly understands how much information can be obtained through a single keyword search. While old methods of research are not useless, the ability to narrow down search query’s to all things relevant to a single keyword or phrase is beyond convenient.

Of course naturally there is a pretty striking argument to the future of education in the digital format, and that is a historical one. The internet, though vast and unique, isn’t the first form of telecommunication on the verge of breaking into the education industry. Both radio and television which were equally as innovative at the time, have tried and failed at finding a new audience of students. One could argue that the internet is different in that regard due to the fact that the internet allows for back and forth communication that the television does not. According to Matt Novak in of Smithsonian.com: In 1935, New York University professor C. C. Clark conducted a class using a shortwave radio transceiver (a radio that can both send and receive messages) from his home. Because the radio went both ways, Prof. Clark was able to take questions from the class the way an online class would work on the internet. This I would argue is also limited in a way that the internet has overcome. At any point during the time a class isn’t being held, a student may have a question that would have to wait until another period of class time. The internet allows any student anywhere to simply message the teacher in a variety of different formats and get back an answer or help with a problem in a way that no other medium would allow for. There is no argument on whether or not education is important, but the methods and practices used in education are absolutely up for scrutiny. The internet is the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created for information's sake, and where there is information there is in essence also a kind of learning. The cost of an online education is negligible when compared to the gargantuan amount of upkeep associated with running traditional schools. It is time that we as a society grow to adapt our tools for the modern era in an effort to make education as efficient and elegant as we can for future generations come. To this extent, it can be said that no other method is so thorough and encompassing as that of a digital education.

Works Cited

Novak, Matt. "Smithsonian.com." Paleofuture Predictions for Educational TV in the 1930s Comments. Smithsonian Publishing, 29 May 2012. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.

Talbot, David. "Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves." MIT Technology Review. PaeleoFuture, 29 Oct. 2012. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.

Hardmen, Daniel. "College Data." College Data - Paying Your Way. Us.gov, 22 Jan. 2013. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

Timmerman, Luke. "Digital Aristotle". Xconommy.com, 26 Nov. 2008. Web. 04 Feb. 2013.

Temple, Kerry. "Notre Dame Magazine." Paying the Price // News // // University of Notre Dame. Notre Dame University, Sept.-Oct. 2007. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.