Classroom Innovation from Bones to Tablets

If you think the idea of tablet-based education is radical, watch a baby try to figure out why her finger isn’t working when she touches a magazine and it doesn’t swipe or let her click.

Changes in education are often met with stern opposition. I learned this years ago, when my family first moved to upstate New York from Brooklyn. My father and I joined a merger committee to study whether our new school district should join forces with the neighboring district. We put our hearts into this research, only to learn that the locals had already made up their minds a long time ago. Some of them were still furious that the one-room schoolhouse had merged with the school in town, and they made it known at the meeting at which our findings were announced. I don’t remember fielding any questions about tax implications or academic benefit. Instead, people demanded to know what we expected the new mascot to be when the two districts merged. Not surprisingly, the districts remain separate.

This early setback only ignited my passion for education.

I was thrilled today to see that The Chronicle of Higher Education featured Flat World, where I serve our Science House client as the Director of Future Systems. Flat World’s transition to learning experiences recently made the news when the company announced a $9.5 million round. Now the company is in the news for its seamless hybrid education experience. In January, Flat World announced a partnership with Brandman University—to create a new online bachelor’s-degree program in business administration, the first in the world to be delivered entirely via a tablet. One exciting thing about this program is that it will be competency based, so students who need extra time can take it, while those who master the subject matter more quickly aren’t forced to do seat time in exchange for a degree.

No company, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, has yet emerged as the Apple of education. Fragmentation between content providers and platform developers is still extensive. But several, including Flat World, are trying: “Flat World Education is one company that is trying to make ‘student experience,’ in the holistic sense, into a killer app.”

That’s exactly right.

We recently created a timeline of classroom innovation at Flat World. While advances in education have led to new tools, classrooms themselves haven’t changed much since Plato created the academy concept in 398 BC. The first American public classroom from 1635 looks a lot like the classrooms we still have today.

The learning process, however, has been shaped by innovation since the first humans drew animals on cave walls with a stick. In ancient China, people even wrote on bones to communicate ideas. In 1453, society was completely transformed by movable type. Pencils are so synonymous with learning that it’s hard to imagine another whole century passing before graphite was discovered. When blackboards came on the scene in 1862, people were worried about monks being put out of business. In 1872, the now-familiar QWERTY keyboard was introduced. It wasn’t that long ago at all that the first calculators made their way into classrooms in 1967, and it wasn’t until 1975 that the first computer was introduced. With each new innovation came disruption, and an increased capacity for learning better, faster.

These weren’t the only changes in education. Even after the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregated Memphis schools, they remained divided until 1973, when a federal court ordered Memphis to integrate using busing--a program that was itself met with resistance. Come to think of it, even buses are an innovation that made school accessible to more students.

None of these changes were easy, even though looking back, we can’t imagine school before pencils or electricity, which not only illuminated the classroom but enabled the use of typewriters, computers and now tablets. The same way movable type and paper enabled the delivery of textbooks, tablets enable Flat World to deliver a personalized learning experience at scale, using algorithms to measure performance and engineer classes for maximum benefit. It’s the future, and I love every minute of working with them to shape it.

Photo: mitikusa.net / Flickr