{"id":7384,"date":"2017-02-07T10:41:39","date_gmt":"2017-02-07T08:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newinsights.oeb.global\/?p=7384"},"modified":"2017-04-18T17:17:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T15:17:00","slug":"students-have-their-own-goals-communities-their-own-needs-an-interview-with-roger-schank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oeb.global\/oeb-insights\/students-have-their-own-goals-communities-their-own-needs-an-interview-with-roger-schank\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cStudents have their own goals, communities their own needs\u201d: an interview with Roger Schank"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Roger Schank<\/u><\/strong> is known as one of traditional education\u2019s harshest critics. A professor himself for over three decades, he quit in 2000 to run his own company and since then has been busy tearing up the educational rulebook. He is a vociferous opponent of the lectures and multiple-choice tests prevalent in undergraduate education, believing that the system they embody is fundamentally broken, and with his background in Artificial Intelligence, he may well have the technological means to fix it. We caught up with the educational iconoclast to get his views on how to redesign our failing learning systems.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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What explains the persistence of lectures within the education system, given their inherent weakness as a format?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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It is baffling that people voluntarily submit themselves to lectures. Maybe they don\u2019t. A study found that only 60% of Harvard students actually show up for lectures. Why do we keep on lecturing?<\/p>\n

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Lecturers like lecturing. Everyone is looking at the lecturer, and the lecturer is performing. People love performing in front of an audience. They feel as if they are the smartest person in the room and they feel important. They believe they are delivering content efficiently. Lecturers typically believe that facts are the currency of education. The more facts they provide, the better off everyone will be.\u00a0 People attend lectures because they are required to do so or think they are saving time. They get all the stuff they need in one place in a short amount of time, with the option to explore the subject \u201cmore deeply\u201d later. That\u2019s a nice myth. I am not sure that much of this so-called \u201cdeep exploration\u201d actually happens.<\/p>\n

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Lectures are really about money. It is more efficient to talk to 1000 people than to talk with each one at a time. Universities are addicted to the economics.<\/p>\n

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What are the current shortfalls of AI mentoring, and how do you overcome them in practice?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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There are no real AI mentors at the current time. Chatbots have no idea what you might be saying to them. They respond as a dumb friend might who only heard one word of what you said and had a canned reaction to that word. To build a real AI mentor, you have to have build a course in which students are trying to accomplish something, and the obstacles to accomplishing each step along the way are well known. You have to have run the course enough times to have gathered all the questions students have ever asked, and then you need to know what they were trying to accomplish when they asked them. At that point, a natural language parser can be inserted that maps known problems into known solutions (given that we know what the student is doing at any given moment in an online course). Computers can parse sentences well enough to do that today.<\/p>\n

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How would the exam-free education system you have envisaged interact with a job market that relies heavily on exams and tests to filter out candidates?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exams are the lazy way of testing abilities. We don\u2019t give our own kids tests. We help them do whatever they are trying to do, we answer their questions, and we assess where they need help. We do all this by talking with them and observing their behaviour. We can do this in school as well, but it takes more time and is thus more expensive. When it matters, we give performance tests. We don\u2019t give out drivers\u2019 licenses without seeing if someone can drive. We could do this in any area of life. Courses that teach students should include performance tests. They don\u2019t typically because most courses are about fact memorization and do not have anything to do with performance. This needs to change.<\/p>\n

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You have advocated abandoning an outmoded common curriculum. Is there no set of common skills you could consider essential to every individual\u2019s self-reliance?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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What skills matter? Here are twelve that I think matter a great deal:<\/p>\n

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