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Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally acclaimed expert on creativity and innovation, and the author of several bestsellers on creativity in education, passed away this August at the age of 70 after a battle with cancer. His TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” is the most watched in history, with 66 million views by people in over 150 countries. We are sure that his influence on the thinking of educators around the world will have a lasting and profound impact for decades to come. We offer everyone in the field of education to honor Sir Ken by reflecting on his ideas of ‘learning revolution’.
According to Sir Ken Robinson, reforming education is rightly seen as one of the biggest challenges of our times. He argued that the challenge is to transform education from a 19th century industrial model into a 21st century process based on different principles.
“Universities have important roles in bringing about the changes that are now needed in education as a whole. Some universities have long been centers of innovation and radical thinking. The cultural and economic circumstances we’re now living in require a radical rethink of how universities work as a sector and of what they’re really for.”
End of industrial system of education
Mass systems of education mainly came about in the 19th century in the context of the Industrial Revolution. Designed to meet the social and economic needs of industrialism, these systems are rooted in a relatively narrow conception of subjects, and consequently, narrow view of intelligence.
The industrial character of these educational systems is expressed through two main principles. First, they emphasize conformity and standardization, which s rooted in the need to inculcate certain skills in the people who were destined to take on certain roles in the industrial economies. At the same time, they are linear: they are designed around various ‘gateways’, which students need to get through to progress to the next stage. Within this approach, vocational programs are generally seen as a lesser species than academic degrees, which is why going to college to do an art course or a dance program is commonly seen as less demanding than studying for academic degrees in universities.
Despite the fact that such systems based on the manufacturing principles of linearity, conformity and standardization have long been out of date, they still exist, even in universities. However, human development is not linear and standardized, it is organic and diverse. “People, as opposed to products, have hopes and aspirations, feelings and purposes.” That is why the existing system often fails both students and teachers. “We have created artificial learning environments for the kids,” Robinson wrote. “We have them in classrooms, in desks, day after day and hour after hour, and then we wonder why they fidget and why they get bored. Because (school is) boring.” He believed education in the classroom should shift away from this kind of an environment to a more diverse one, which would accommodate all types of student learning.
Moving away from the standardized to the personalized
“Education is a personal process,” Sir Ken insisted. Addressing the 2010 TED Conference, he delivered a funny and refreshing look at education today, making a reference to fast food.
According to him, there are two main methods of quality assurance in the catering business. The first is standardizing. If you have a favorite fast food brand, you can go to any outlet anywhere and know exactly what you will find: same burger, fries, cola, décor, and attitudes. Everything is standardized and guaranteed.
Another quality assurance method is the star ratings guides, like Michelin. They set out criteria of excellence and each restaurant is free to meet them in their own way. Institutions can be French, Mexican, Italian, Indian, American, they can open when they choose, and hire anyone they want. Customized to local markets and personalized to the people they serve, such restaurants appear to be much better than cheap impersonal fast food and they surely offer a higher standard of service.
Sir Ken offered educators to address the reform in education system in the following way. “We have built our education system on the model of fast food,” he said – that is, on standardization and conformity. In his opinion, what needs to be done is not to take a single model to scale but to offer a much higher standard of provision based on the principle of personalized learning and to encourage schools and universities to develop their own approaches to the unique challenges they face in their own communities. Robinson said he believes every school should be different because the world is a community of learners, and diversity is an important base to facilitate learning.
“Standardization tends to emphasize the lowest common denominator. Human aspirations reach much higher and if the conditions are right, they succeed. Understanding those conditions is the real key to transforming education for all our children.”
Agile teacher
Robinson saw the main task in facilitating the learning process. Education should be ‘active, nimble and responsive’, while the teacher in it should be an example of vitality rather than passivity. Many forms of understanding that education has to cultivate include factual information, practical skills, and knowledge about the nature of human experience. These all require different strategies in teaching and learning. For example, to learn a foreign language, it would be better to practice with a native speaker rather than just doing grammar exercises. If you are learning to repair an engine, reading the manual is not enough; it needs to be supplemented with stripping an engine down and putting it back together again.
So, what does it mean to be an agile teacher? “People learn in different ways and at different rates… Good teachers are sensitive to those differences and tack and weave accordingly. They draw from a wide repertoire of activities, techniques, and strategies, and adapt them to the needs of the learners and the material.”
The challenge is in knowing how to use the tools
Robinson considered technology as ‘the design and use of tools’. “A pencil is technology. So is a piece of paper or a book or a laptop.” He believed, that good tools can do two things – just like they extend our physical abilities enabling us to do things that would be physically difficult or impossible, they aim to extend our mind: they enable us to think things that might otherwise be inconceivable. The bow and arrow enabled early hunters to capture prey which they couldn’t have done unassisted, while the telescope helped astronomers rethink our place in the cosmos.
“Technology has always gone hand in hand with human culture and innovation. The challenge is in knowing how to use the tools. Faced with the immense capacities of a desktop computer, some people just use it as a fancy typewriter. Others compose symphonies and elaborate works of visual art. The machine doesn’t have the ideas – at least not yet – the users do.” Notwithstanding the fact that digital tools today offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance education in ways that we could not before, they do not replace the need for teachers to understand how learning works and what their roles as teachers are.
Teaching is a conversation, not a monologue
When asked what one quick change that an instructor or professor could make to the way that they teach could be, Robinson opted for turning teaching and learning into “a dynamic process, rather than a one-way channel of transmission.”
Learning is a social and a cultural process, he believed: we learn with and from each other. It can be immensely valuable to stand in front of the class delivering the knowledge to students, but even more important is to engage their minds and hearts in the ideas and materials delivered.
Passion is essential in education. What and how young people are taught has to engage their energies, imaginations and their different ways of learning. “If you are doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you are doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour,” Sir Ken said.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy
This year, the top in-demand soft skill according to LinkedIn, is creativity. It has been at the top of the list for the last few years in terms of what employers are seeking most, and it is understandable. The world’s most pressing problems are not likely to be solved by applying a fixed set of rules to arrive at a single correct answer. They will rather be solved through creativity and divergent thinking with our imaginations running unfettered and any number of potential solutions generated.
The current system of education teaches us that there is always one correct answer, which instills in children the fear of taking risks. Robinson warned us against that. “We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make – and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” However, “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you are not prepared to think of something original.”
“Creativity is about new ideas. New ideas are challenging,” Sir Ken said. “They can disrupt the status quo; they can involve taking risks; they can make people nervous.’
“Creativity, and its good friend innovation, depend on collaboration,” he went on. Innovation usually results from people working across disciplines or connecting with people in different fields. “We live in highly complicated urban settings and our global systems are deeply intricate, and they all work through collaboration,” Robinson said. Collaboration is at the very heart of the sustainability and nature of human societies and we should have these practices being cultivated in our education systems.
The luminary passed away but his call for creativity caught on, as many educators around the globe start on their long and winding road to the personalized learning environment, with its diversity and collaboration, divergent thinking and agility in the classroom, teaching the people of tomorrow to shape the world they live in.
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For those considering their study options, university rankings might seem to be the best way to find the course that gives them the highest chance at a bright professional and personal future. Whether it’s international university rankings like THE – World University Rankings by Times Higher Education, ARWU – Academic Ranking of World Universities by Shanghai University, QS Rankings by TopUniversities, or local ones, these lists of the most prestigious institutions have their place in the education world, but they have their limitations as well.
If you take some top universities and see how they score on various rankings, you will be surprised. The difference can be huge, the rank given to the same university in different lists can vary between the 25th place and a 100-something. Who are you supposed to trust?
The truth is that each university ranking uses its own criteria. If you know how to interpret them, you can really benefit from the significantly differing outcomes of these tops.
Among the aspects considered by the major rankings to come up with the final score of a university there are academic reputation, graduation rates, research citations and papers published, internationality of faculty and students, and employer reputation. Student to faculty ratio, industry income, award winners among academia and alumni and funding offered to students also count. However, no ranking includes all the markers mentioned above. This suggests some rankings may be more appropriate for certain types of students. Based on the categories each ranking prefers, you can find out if what you are interested in is better represented by a certain ranking.
ARWU, also known as the Shanghai ranking, originated in 2003 with Chinese government backing to provide a global benchmark against which Chinese universities could assess their progress. As the ranking relies on long-term factors such as the number of staff affiliated with an institution who have won Nobel Prizes, number of highly cited researchers, as well as number of articles published in influential Nature and Science journals, it is a rather stable list. High-achievers and Ph.D. students may find the ranking useful, given the emphasis it puts on institution reputation and “raw research power.”
Those interested in teaching quality, however, could benefit more from the THE and QS rankings that have their peculiarities too. Before THE broke away to form its own table, the two ranking were one and the same. The reason for the separation lies in the preferred methodology and the ways the two metrics collect their data. Although both target students interested in an international environment, QS ranking is largely based on a global survey of academics, who are asked to identify the leading institutions in their field, while THE ‘stand up to more academic scrutiny’.
“We produce high-end rankings which are used by governments around the world,” says THE rankings editor Phil Baty. “And we’re the only global rankings that take teaching seriously.” All in all, THE has five different measures of teaching quality – a reputation survey, staff-to-student ratio, doctorate-to-bachelor’s ratio, doctorates-awarded-to-academic-staff ratio, and institutional income.
According to the Telegraph, both rankings use surveys to collect data, but while THE does some reputation surveying, sending invitation-only questionnaires to a limited number of institutions around the world, QS opts for quantity to achieve reliability, mass-mailing some 46,000 academics before weighting the results to preclude regional bias.
Reputation factors can be rather subjective, as academics participating in the surveys the rankings are derived from are asked to identify what university they consider being leading in their field. The answers they give may just reflect what institutions are already considered famous. Moreover, differences between ranked universities are not always obvious. In rankings, many universities have very similar scores, with only minor differences. That is why institutions that are ranked lower shouldn’t be immediately dismissed, for the difference is more likely just a perceived one.
However, higher education is not only about the best reputation, research, salaries, and internationality. Some important factors appear not to be taken into consideration by the major rankings, and some of them cannot even be measured. For rankings to be meaningful, it should incorporate factors like student experience, says the University of British Columbia’s professor Michelle Stack, who does not believe rankings to be the best barometer to use selecting a university. She points it out that many of the rankings are owned by businesses, thus their aim is on profits, not education. Stack finds methodology behind such rankings as THE, QS and ARWU problematic as well – in her opinion, the way they collect data changes too frequently.
Stack explains that most university leaders agree that the rankings are flawed, however, they know they need to be visible in order to attract international students, which the institutions need to make up for the state funds that have been on the decline for years. They cannot afford to lose international students.
Still, more and more international students set aside rankings to look and rely on more representative indicators instead. A survey by student recruitment company Hobsons shows they are now placing top priority on teaching quality, staff qualification and student satisfaction instead of rankings.
The experiences you gather during your study years, finding and connecting with people you share passions with, peers and academics who inspire you to continue on the path you have chosen, emotional support and campus diversity – all this results in a mix that is very personal, and often unique for each prospective student. An all these subtle elements are impossible for any ranking to capture.
“It really depends on what the student wants, and what kind of experience they want. That’s more important than a ranking,” Stack adds.
This is echoed by educators Richard Ashford, Shampa Biswas and Mohan J. Dutta. They point out that the popularity of alternative rankings such as Forbes’s America’s Best Value Colleges or the existence of metrics such as Princeton Review’s “Happiest College Students List” suggest that such tables operate like market signals. In a context of rising tuition fees, they communicate to potential customers – parents and prospective students – within an increasingly corporatized academy a very different vision of a higher education.
The authors are concerned that none of the major university lists includes academic freedom considerations in calculations of rankings, while free inquiry, creative practice and innovative thinking that are implied by this important educational aspect are “the hallmarks of sound education on any campus.”
A truly rewarding study experience is difficult to rank. Some lesser-known universities that do not have a budget to promote themselves or do not meet all the criteria set by the major rankings can be equally satisfying as far as the study experience is concerned. Educators warn students not to be misguided by the global rankings, for they are certainly not the only way to choose a university. Comparing study options, checking subject-specific rankings targeting a discipline you are interested in, and asking questions on forums and other platforms can also help.
“Rankings are a useful source of information that wouldn’t otherwise be available – but they don’t make your decision for you,” says Danny Byrne of QS. “It’s about knowing what they do, and applying them intelligently. More is more.
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Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize the education sector by providing a secure, transparent, and tamperproof platform for storing and sharing academic records. As blockchain adoption continues to grow, we will see new and innovative use cases emerging in the education sector.
Education has undergone tremendous changes, from traditional classroom settings to eLearning, and now we have progressed to blended learning. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital learning, and schools worldwide began using online platforms and Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to teach students. Blockchain technology is also poised to revolutionize the education industry. Blockchain has the potential to transform how academic data is managed, and how teachers and students interact. Let’s look into how blockchain technology might affect education in the future.
Smart contracts on blockchains could also make educators’ jobs easier. A smart contract comprises lines of code that are programmed into a blockchain and executed automatically when certain conditions are met. Smart contracts can also be used to manage course content and distribution. They can automate the delivery of course materials, such as readings, videos, and quizzes, and track student progress and completion of assignments. This can help to reduce administrative workload and improve the overall organization of courses.
The market for fake degrees (certificates) is increasing along with online learning. This is becoming a major concern for many businesses and educational institutions worldwide. So, a blockchain can easily solve this problem with certification management, where the universities can store the certificates on the blocks as immutable entries. Students may readily share these credentials using exact URLs in their email signatures, social media profiles, and resumes. Many blockchain development companies provide such certificate and identity management services. Since blockchain is decentralized, all the documents are stored in the blockchain and are immutable and verifiable since it is transparent.
Transferring documents and having them verified when a student changes schools is a laborious procedure that takes a lot of time for the student, the teacher, and the administration. Blockchain technology can be used to streamline the verification process in schools and universities. We are awarded scholarships, trophies, and rewards for our outstanding performance in extracurricular and academic activities, but blockchain technology also enables us to provide kids with tangible prizes in the form of cryptocurrencies like bitcoins. Teachers can use gamification to reward their students in online learning environments for finishing modules or other assignments. Learning Management Systems’ gamification features aid in tokenizing all rewards as a digital currency.
One of the most important applications of blockchain in eLearning is the creation of secure digital badges and certificates that can be easily verified and displayed on one’s digital portfolios. Smart contracts can be used to incentivize and facilitate peer-to-peer learning and collaboration. They can be programmed to reward students for contributing to online discussions, or for providing feedback on their peers’ work. This can help create a more engaged and interactive learning environment, and help students develop their critical thinking and communication skills.
Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology can enhance transparency and accountability in the educational field. It can create an immutable record of educational data, including transcripts, degrees, and certifications, that is verifiable and tamperproof. This means that academic achievements can be validated with complete accuracy, and employers can be confident in the skills and knowledge of job applicants.
When a student transfers from one school to another, the transfer of documents and their verification is a time-consuming process. The verification process can be streamlined by introducing blockchain technology into schools and colleges. When a student transfers from one institute to another, the student records can be easily transferred to the new institute by granting access to the blockchain. Some blockchain development companies develop and issue certificates that are immutable and non-forgeable, but easily verifiable for authenticity.
This can also be extended to situations in which the grades of students, who travel to other institutes as part of exchange programs, can be easily shared across institutes by providing necessary access, which reduces the administrative costs.
The convergence of the physical world with Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality has accelerated, causing disruptions in various economic sectors worldwide. Blockchains, a newer technology when compared to traditional centralized databases, provide increased efficiency and storage capacity. Cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and metaverse initiatives are already changing the financial industry. Thus, incorporating these into an academic curriculum will not only provide more opportunities to the youth, but will also establish a framework that is effective, economical, and easily serves all strata and provides more outreach for all students. while making learning a pleasant journey. Overall, a blockchain development company can help education institutions streamline their processes, reduce costs, and enhance the quality of education through blockchain technology.
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