The future of learning:
Grounding educational innovation in the learning sciences
R. Keith Sawyer
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
To appear as the final chapter in Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.) The Cambridge Handbook of
the Learning Sciences, Second Edition, to be published in 2014 by Cambridge
University Press.
The education landscape has changed dramatically since 2006, when the
first edition of this handbook was published. In 2006, the following innovations
did not yet exist; today, each of them is poised to have a significant impact on
education:
Tablet computers, like Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Surface. In
2012, Apple released iBooks Author, a free textbook authoring
app for instructors to develop their own customized textbooks.
Although smartphones were well-established among
businesspeople in 2006 (then-popular devices included the
BlackBerry and Palm Treo), their market penetration has grown
dramatically since the 2007 release of the iPhone, especially
among school-age children.
The App store—Owners of smartphones including Apple’s
iPhone, and phones running Google’s Android and Microsoft’s
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Windows Phone, can easily download free or very cheap
applications, choosing from hundreds of thousands available.
Inexpensive e-readers, like the Kindle and the Nook, have sold
well, and are connected to online stores that allow books to be
downloaded easily and quickly.
Furthermore, since 2006, the following Internet-based educational
innovations have been widely disseminated, widely used, and widely discussed:
Massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are college
courses, delivered on the Internet, that are open to anyone and are
designed to support tens of thousands of students. The products
used for such courses include Udacity, Coursera, EdX, Semester
Online, and FutureLearn (founded by the UK’s Open
University). MOOCs have gained legitimacy because America’s
top research universities are involved. Coursera delivers courses
offered by Brown, Caltech, Princeton, Stanford, and many other
schools; EdX delivers courses offered by MIT, Harvard, and
others; Semester Online delivers courses offered by Northwestern,
Emory, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and others. In 2014, Google
released MOOC.org, an open-source platform that any university
can use.
Learning Management Systems (LMS). LMS are now used by
most colleges to support their on-campus courses with full-time
students. LMS provide online discussion forums, electronic
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delivery of readings and assignments, and electronic return of
graded assignments. The market leader is Blackboard; others
include Moodle and Sakai. Newcomers like Piazza and
Classroom Salon are increasingly integrating social networking
features long associated with sites like Facebook (Kaufer,
Gunewardena, Tan, & Cheek, 2011).
The flipped classroom. The Khan Academy, which began as a
series of YouTube instructional videos, popularized the notion of
the “flipped classroom,” where students watch videotaped lectures
at home, and then use class time for peer collaboration and handson,
interactive learning. iTunes U offers full courses from MIT
and Stanford (www.mit.edu/itunesu). Instructors can create courses
for the iPad using iTunes U Course Manager.
Online college degrees. The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill began offering an online MBA degree in 2011,
MBA@UNC; this has been extremely successful. In May of 2013,
Georgia Tech announced the first online master’s degree in
computer science, at one-fourth the cost of their traditional oncampus
degree.
These innovations contrast sharply with the schools of today, which were
largely designed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide workers for
the industrial economy. And the potential is that these innovations might be more
effective than traditional schools, which are based in a pedagogical approach
sometimes called instructionism—with teachers delivering information to passive,
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attentive students. In particular, it seems that instructionism is largely ineffective
at helping learners acquire the skills and knowledge needed in the 21st century
(Sawyer introduction, this volume).
The world has changed dramatically since modern schools took shape
around 100 years ago. In the 1970s, economists and other social scientists began
to realize that the world’s economies were shifting from an industrial economy to
a knowledge economy (Bell, 1973; Drucker, 1993; Toffler, 1980). By the 1990s,
educators had begun to realize that if the economy was no longer the 1920s-era
factory economy, then traditional schools—instructionist, standardized, focused
on memorization and rote learning—were designed for a vanishing world
(Bereiter, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Sawyer, 2006). In the first decade of the 21st
century, it became increasingly clear that the world had entered an innovation
age. Today, it is widely accepted that companies and countries alike now have to
continually innovate, to create new knowledge—not simply to master existing
knowledge.
Leading thinkers in business, politics, and education are now in consensus
that schools, and other learning environments, have to be redesigned to educate
for innovation. In May 2013, in language typical of such reports, education
consultants Michael Barber, Katelyn Donnelly, and Saad Rivzi wrote “Our belief
is that deep, radical and urgent transformation is required in higher education
much as it is in school systems” (p. 3). These arguments have expanded beyond
consulting firms and policy circles to reach the general public; for example, a New
York Times Magazine cover dated September 15, 2013, had this headline: “The
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All-Out, All-Ages Overhaul of School Is Happening Now” (The New York Times,
2013).
Everyone seems to agree that education in the 21st century is in need of
transformational innovation. But what sort of innovation? And what will the
innovation process look like—how do we get there from here? Most policy
makers and media stories tend to focus on two drivers of educational innovation:
1. The application of market models to the education sector. Advocates
of market models argue that introducing competition and increasing
customer choice will drive innovation. Advocates of market
competition argue that today’s public schools have a monopoly on the
delivery of education, and in general, monopolies reduce effectiveness
and innovation. Because public schools have a guaranteed revenue
stream in government taxes, they are not forced to compete on quality
and cost.
2. The increasing involvement of the private sector in education. Many
influential business leaders have given high-profile public talks
arguing that schools are failing to graduate workers for the 21st century
economy. The list of CEOs, companies, and business organizations
calling for change is long—Bill Gates of Microsoft; Louis V. Gerstner,
the former CEO of IBM (Gerstner, 2008); Lockheed and Intel (Chaker,
2008); the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association
of Manufacturers (Hagerty, 2011). Two of the most influential recent
education reforms in the U.S. had strong private sector involvement:
the Common Core standards, now adopted by 45 of the 50 states (with
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early involvement by CEOs and senior executives at Intel, Prudential
Financial, Battelle, and IBM), and the 21st century skills movement
(long sponsored by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, with its
founding organization including AOL Time Warner, Apple, Cisco,
Dell, and Microsoft). Many of these same successful business leaders
have also funded the push toward market reforms in schools, including
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family
Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Michael
and Susan Dell Foundation (Ravitch, 2010).
But to date, these potential drivers of educational innovation have not
resulted in schools that are more solidly grounded in the learning sciences—the
participatory, project-based, constructivist, and collaborative pedagogies
suggested by the chapters in this handbook. In many cases, just the opposite has
occurred: introducing competition and private sector models into schools has
resulted in even more old-fashioned, traditional forms of teaching and learning—
instructionism on steroids. To take one example: successful market competition
requires a quantified measure of quality and success; consequently, the United
States has invested in outcome measures of learning—the famous “high stakes
testing” associated with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. (Most
other countries already had high-stakes national examinations.) And yet, the
relatively recent U.S. focus on these high stakes assessments has, for the most
part, resulted in a reversion to instructionist pedagogy. (This is consistent with
international experience; in most countries with high-stakes national
examinations, instructionism is deeply rooted.) To take another example, one of
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the most widely touted educational innovations, the MOOC, for the most part use
“a transmission model, relying on video lectures, recommended readings and
staged assessment” (Sharples et al., 2013, p. 3)—exactly the opposite of what
learning sciences research would advise.
After several years of attempting to “fix” schools with technology, a
growing number of techno-skeptics have emerged (see Collins & Halverson,
2009). For example,