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Comment by aramadia | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical online education will have any significant impact at an elementary school level, especially when you consider the cost effectiveness of such a strategy. If were talking about video lectures (especially live) you need to figure out how to hook up reliable internet into these schools. Most of the internet access projects are just enough to get wikipedia loaded. And not to mention the cost of the hardware itself, a tablet per student isn't even feasible in western public schools.

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Have you seen Batman (the Chris Nolan movie)? It's pretty frickin' awesome. You've got incredible special effects, great script, multiple takes, amazing actors, and great sound and it's very engaging. ... If instead of having movies- say we're going to have that script performed by the local town troupe. So in every small town in America (if movies didn't exist), they would have to then recreate The Dark Knight. You know, with home-sewn costumes and jumping across the stage and not getting their lines quite right, and not really looking like the people in the movie, and no special effects or anything. That would suck! It would be terrible. That's education.

-- Elon Musk (chatting with Sal Khan)[1]

I think there's a ton of improvement to be had in the education space. People have used technology to make many forms of entertainment more compelling, but education is pretty similar to half a century ago: classrooms, teachers, lectures, etc. A lot of the stagnation is due to bureaucratic and legislative inertia, which isn't such a big problem in countries lacking widespread public schooling.

With regards to cost and bandwidth issues: Remember, Gates's predictions/goals are for the next 15 years. Technology is only going to get cheaper and faster. In 2000, iPods didn't exist. In 2030, even low-end tablets will put current hardware to shame.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDwzmJpI4io#t=2280

In fact in Japan atm I use a starboard (basicly a large projector with touch capabilities), in my classroom. If things like this became more common, I'm sure education could be shaken up a lot.

It is an excellent medium to teach a class withe.

I watched some classes on MIT OpenCourseWare and was blown by the fact that they use chalk boards (!). I mean, one of the best universities in the world use the same tools as mine: a teacher, chairs and a chalk board. Don't that make us think about how important is the culture, the environment of those famous institutions. It's not about tools, it's all about people.

School isn't about learning. It's about socialisation. If school was about learning there'd be a great deal more interleaved practice and spaced repetition. [http://www.salon.com/2014/04/20/ditch_the_10000_hour_rule_wh...]

> Gray is mostly right: forager kids learn all they need when free to play all day, forager adults work all they need without toiling, and kids can learn modern skills this way today. But there is no net trend toward free schools, and I expect a wholesale move would be a disaster. Yes, it works for some students, including most who stay until they graduate at free schools, but parents of kids for whom it doesn’t work probably pull their kids out. And free school graduates probably avoid the ugly jobs schools were designed to make kids accept. School isn’t about learning “material,” school is about learning to accept workplace domination and ranking, and tolerating long hours of doing boring stuff exactly when and how you are told. Others seem to agree: - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-lear...

Additionally - and particularly at the elementary level - school is only partially focused on developing 'academic' skills. A significant amount of teacher time/effort is funneled into social/emotional development as a child will not learn effectively if they are cognitively/emotionally/socially unprepared to learn (or undergoing crisis/stress).

To suggest that all children need to develop fully is a tablet with exciting learning materials is to ignore that learning is a social activity (both in reference to learning about/from the people around you, as well as learning from the recorded knowledge of others).

I also doubt that online education at that level will have a big impact, but that's because of the properties of that age-group.

Online education usually already requires some educational foundations -- an app to help you learn trigonometry might be effective, but I doubt that an app to help you learn to read would be very effective. I also think that young children in this age-group tend to learn more by watching, interacting with, and mimicking adults than from objects. The educational foundations of the primary school level will likely have to be supplied by adults.

We definitely have had a long history of "this changes everything for education!"[1], but 15 years is a long time for internet infrastructure to change and spread. The article seems to allude to such innovations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEmuEWjHr5c

The video makes a good point

There are many one-to-many device models which can work. Shameless plug to what we're working on at onebillion:

https://onebillion.org.uk/oneclass

That looks kind of cool. Reminds me of hanging in Malawi. It's interesting that all the educational materials I studied from birth to getting in to Cambridge would probably take about 30mb of storage and could fit on pretty much any modern device (excluding science practicals). We didn't have video etc. just ~13 text books and some teachers with chalk/white boards. It's always seemed to me that motivation is probably the biggest thing. A kid with a photocopied text book who is enthusiastic about reading it and doing the exercises will probably do better than a similar one with all the facilities who is unmotivated.

I think you need bit more fantasy. Tablet with 60 gigs of videos on internal card, could cost around $50, not everyone needs ipads. 3G is enough for 90% of cases. And many African countries have (or soon will have) better and cheaper mobile connectivity than US or Europe, since there is no other infrastructure available

No need to doubt. There are already some very encouraging stuff going on:

Malawi app 'teaches UK pupils 18 months of maths in six weeks' : http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29063614

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