Smart in Singapore

Building the 21st century classroom with 3G smartphones in Sengkang New Town.

GUEST COLUMN | by Tan Chun Ming

Education has come a long way since the era of chalkboards and book-based learning.  While we as educators deeply value the written word, we embrace ways in which education can become more efficient, and more accessible, to children.  An evolutionary transformation is underway; today’s industrial era-schools – developed over a century ago for a different economy and society – are moving to a 21^st century model based on personalized learning which is made possible using cutting-edge mobile technologies.

Using wireless technology and smartphones as an extension to traditional information and communications technology (ICT) learning has been in place across many schools and popularized by the media for some time. In its infancy, adoption of smartphone related teaching tools complemented existing methods of instruction. Today, entire smartphone-centric curriculums are being designed and piloted across schools for the first time – bringing a fresh perspective to the ways mobile technology can be used in today’s switched on and continually-connected learning environment.

I am the principal of Nan Chiau Primary School. About a year ago, with the support from Singapore’s Ministry of Education, the Learning Sciences Laboratory of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University (NIE/NTU), a group of private technology companies (including Qualcomm, Microsoft, Nokia and SingTel) and two American professors (Dr. Elliot Soloway from University of Michigan and Dr. Cathie Norris from University of North Texas), we started a pilot project called “WE Learn”.  This groundbreaking project is based upon the principle that we can enhance education with technology. We have provided 650 third and fourth-grade students with 3G smartphones, all equipped with a customized mobile learning platform, MyDesk, and six educational applications.

Central to the curriculum is MyDesk which is designed and built by undergraduates from the University of Michigan.  Applications populating MyDesk include concept mapping, drawing and animating that allow students to express their learning and understanding on a personalized platform. Work done by the students on their smartphones is backed-up and synchronized to a cloud-based Learning Management System where teachers can easily and conveniently review, assess and provide feedback.

The results of this pilot project are encouraging. Most importantly, the students have adapted to the new teaching methods and embraced the technologies for personal use in order to improve their learning abilities. Using the inquiry-based learning platform, students are given the opportunity to ask questions and express their point of views. By adapting a Philosophy for Children (P4C) approach for English and an inquiry-based learning model for science, students are able to better articulate their thoughts and ideas. Through English lessons, they will be exposed to philosophical questions such as “What is happiness?” For science, students are encouraged to extend their learning of science concepts beyond their classrooms through activities designed for their smartphones.

Test scores on 21^st century skills (defined by Singapore’s Ministry of Education as self-directed and collaborative learning) have improved significantly. And we’ve seen the children flourish – with children showing significant improvement in their spoken English skills and ability to ask and respond to philosophical questions.  And in our science classes, there has also been significant improvement in the children’s ability to answer open-ended questions.

With the availability of affordable mobile devices layered with a technology-driven curriculum, every student is now able to develop higher order thinking skills such as critical and inventive thinking. Students are given the opportunity to log onto smart phone applications during lessons and for homework. This way, 21^st century skills, such as self-directed learning, are evident as students take ownership of their own learning anytime, anywhere. Learning is no longer confined to classrooms and students are able to demonstrate their learning through applications found on their mobile devices.

The teachers are also adapting to new teaching methods, enjoying fresh ways of interacting with their students.  They have found new and effective ways of engaging their classes and evolving their methods in line with the positive reaction from students to implementing technology into learning.  Parents are also more open to using technology for learning after witnessing the positive benefits to be achieved through smartphones.

As a further extension of the project, Nan Chiau is sharing our experience with other schools in Singapore that are interested in implementing a similar curriculum.  We are thrilled that the pilot has worked so well and are eager for more children, parents and teachers to experience the benefits of mobile education.

Singapore is a technological hub and a city of innovation. As individuals and businesses are quick to embrace technological advancements, so is Singapore’s education system. In this environment, young students are growing up and maturing with technology. Students are more engaged and excited by tools that they enjoy and are familiar using. With the 21^st century technological backdrop, it is simply not feasible to educate students the same way that their teachers were educated. Times change and the use of mobile technology is at the forefront of education reform and development.

—

Tan Chun Ming is the Principal of Nan Chiau Primary School in Singapore. Over the past few years, Mr. Tan has built Nan Chiau into a Future School, the highest accolade from the Singapore government for schools in terms of the adaption of technology in education. He is also instrumental in setting up a Centre for Educational Research and Application (CERA), the first research center of its kind in Singapore and South East Asia that brings together corporate partners and academics to translate technology into daily classroom practices. Mr. Tan sits in a number of professional bodies and policy review committees at the national level. Write to: ncps@moe.edu.sg   For more information about WE Learn, please click here.

Cool Tool | Net Texts

Here’s a cool, new, free tool called Net Texts — The Net Texts system is an open educational resources (OER) content curator for teachers, that provides customized mobile learning for students. This system allows schools to supplement or even replace textbooks with free, curated, high-quality OER combined with teachers’ own materials. All can be easily updated as needed. Much more than just a content management system, it effectively and efficiently distributes a teachers’ customized course material via an easy-to-use app on a student’s tablet or laptop for later use — even without Wi-Fi. Current estimates suggest that schools that use it can save upwards of $250/year per student, costs that traditionally would have been spent on incomplete, non-interactive and quickly obsolete textbooks. Check out this story to see it in play.

Platform Future

The future of mobile education belongs to platforms.

GUEST COLUMN | by Andrew Cohen

“What’s your go-to-market strategy?” “How are you going to cut through the noise?” “How are you different than ‘X’?” These are increasingly common questions that mobile education startups are getting asked by investors these days, and few entrepreneurs have great answers. Indeed, with over 50,000 education apps on the App Store, today’s app developers must spend more and more resources on product and marketing in order to cut through the noise. No longer are standalone, single-purpose learning apps able to strike easy riches by simply getting discovered on the App Store. Succeeding as a mobile education app has increasingly become a game of economies of scale. The future of mobile learning belongs to platforms.

Large education publishers are naturally among the best-positioned to create such economies of scale, thanks to their broad customer bases, huge troves of digital content, and significant financial and technical resources. Publishers like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are thus already partnering with apps like Kno to create e-reader platforms that serve the formal K-12 and college textbook markets in whole new ways.

But the most exciting platform innovation is coming from startups in the retail education space (B2C), whose innovation is not encumbered by slow moving school and university procurement systems. Companies like Udemy, Voxy, Fingerprint Digital, and Brainscape are creating their own global communities of learners, where word-of-mouth and broad differentiation of content gives learners reasons to keep using the product for years. This allows learners to continue discovering new ways to use the platform even if they are not using the app in a formal class setting. It also gives the platforms’ developers the loyal users and scale needed to justify ongoing product investment.

In general, there are three major types of mobile education platforms that are establishing themselves in the App Store:

Evergreen content platforms provide a curated marketplace where learners can discover courses, games, exercises, and other types of learning materials within a single app environment. These can range from pre-K app platforms like Agnitus and Fingerprint Play, to foreign language, test prep, and general knowledge course marketplaces like Brainscape. Even professional skill-building platforms like Udemy are rapidly expanding on the iPad in order to give their community of instructors a new channel to sell their video-based courses. Evergreen content platforms provide developers with a continuous, multi-year stream of returns for each individual content investment, as users increasingly discover existing content archives with every year of the community’s growth.

News-based content platforms teach key concepts through the lens of relevant, real-time, real-world scenarios. Voxy, for example, provides foreign language learners with access to actual news articles that have been translated into their target language and wrapped in an engaging level-appropriate curriculum. TuvaLabs (still in beta) is currently emerging to teach math lessons based on real-life news such as Sports and Economics. These types of platforms tend to rely more on recurring subscription revenue models rather than large individual content sales. As the movement toward increased career readiness continues to increase, we will likely see more platforms emerge to bridge the gap between the real world and the classroom.

Group learning environments motivate learners by encouraging peer-to-peer collaboration and allowing learners to see each other’s progress. Edmodo’s iPad app accomplishes this by providing teachers and students with social network-like features and tools that allow teachers to assign and track student activities and grades. Socrative accomplishes this through a smart student response system that quickly pushes teacher-generated exercises and games to all of the students’ in the class. And Learnist and Brainscape allow learners to collaboratively author their own study materials with or without the teacher’s involvement. Group learning environments tend to employ “freemium” revenue models where only the “power users” are asked to pay for certain advanced features.

The aggregation of so many learners into these massive mobile education communities means that retaining each user, or securing each repeat purchase, becomes increasingly more affordable for the platforms’ developers. Such resulting higher profit margins allow these developers to invest more resources into product development, social and game mechanics, and the further solidification of their position on the App Store, without having to rely on the whims of Apple’s and Google’s search algorithm gods.

The mechanics of the mobile app markets thus provide edtech startups with an opportunity to compete with educational publishers in a way that they never could do on the web. Over the next several years, teachers, universities, and school districts will continue to take notice of these B2C learning platforms, and will probably integrate some of them into the formal education system itself. Whether that happens independently from the leading textbook publishers, or as part of a consolidation with them, remains to be seen.

—

Andrew Cohen is the founder & CEO of Brainscape, a mobile education platform that helps high school students, college students, medical students, lifelong learners, and foreign language junkies all over the world. Previously, he worked as an international development economist with the World Bank and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. He created the first version of Brainscape in Microsoft Excel in order to study Spanish and French more efficiently while living abroad, and further developed the project during his Masters degree in Education Technology from Columbia University. Andrew has dedicated his career toward optimizing the way people learn. Write to: acohen@brainscape.com

Ticket to Your Dreams

Promising access to the very best instruction from the world’s experts could be interesting.

INTERVIEW | by Victor Rivero

In 2010, renowned sports photographer Chase Jarvis partnered with Craig Swanson to create an online space where professional photographers could teach specific skills in multi-day seminars to aspiring photographers via live video. The results were astounding. Within months, tens of thousands of individuals had watched the live, free classes and a huge number of them had purchased copies of the courses. creativeLIVE’s most popular classes have drawn over 150,000 participants at a time. More than one million individuals from over 200 countries have participated in creativeLIVE’s free online seminars since the company began in 2010, and creativeLIVE has paid out millions to its instructors.

As a photographer, Chase’s mission from the beginning has been to create a platform that offers highly curated content, advice, inspiration and access to the very best instruction from the world’s best experts. “In building my own brand and a name for myself, I had no mentor and had to carve my own path to becoming a photographer and building a successful business,” he says. “Everything I built was from the ground up. I wanted to find a way to help people succeed, so I developed creativeLIVE with my co-founding partner, Craig, in an attempt to provide creative entrepreneurs worldwide with more than I had. I can say from my head and my heart that I think we’re providing a ton of value: high quality, free resources that will show those interested how to transform their passions into tangible results around their lives, hobbies, and careers.”

Victor: What does the name mean?

Chase: The name is a simple yet dynamic moniker, combining two key elements of our platform. “creative”, the type of knowledge we deliver to our worldwide audience, and “LIVE”, the avenue through which we are able to present this knowledge with the help of some slick technology. No need to make it more complex than that.

Victor: How would you describe it, exactly, and what prompted you to do it?

Chase: creativeLIVE is an online education company that unleashes the creative potential of millions of people by connecting them LIVE with the world’s most talented and inspiring experts. I co-founded creativeLIVE in 2010 with my partner Craig Swanson. It was more art than science… alchemy, really. Craig was working on transitioning out of a tech service business into online training via webinars and I was enjoying a great dialog with a million or so photographers who followed me socially and were interested in sharing information on the web.

Both Craig and I were flirting around with the “live” Internet platforms in our respective circles and had a lot of respect for what the other was doing. Over about six months of brainstorming we collaborated on a vision for an online space where aspiring artists and entrepreneurs worldwide could come together to and learn from the world’s best experts for free (the “freemium” model was Craig’s brilliant idea!). So we developed these concepts into the creativeLIVE platform. And now the best of the best teach on our platform to millions of aspiring learners from all over the world in multi-day skill-specific seminars.

Today, creativeLIVE connects viewers with a highly curated family of instructors — the best of the best — those who have top-notch, real world experience in their field — Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times best selling authors, Emmy nominated directors… You get the picture.

Victor: What does it do and who does it benefit?

Chase: creativeLIVE provides an online learning space for both amateurs and professionals alike to come together in a community environment to learn or fine-tune real, tangible skills that improve their lives and careers. Although the platform by focusing primarily on photography we have successfully expanded channels like film and video, design, business & productivity, software and beyond.  And we’re adding courses all the time.

The skills taught on creativeLIVE really serve to benefit an infinite range of people. For example, a sports photographer looking to expand their business by breaking into wedding photography can take a week long “wedding boot camp” from some of the top leaders in the industry; a new mother looking to capture those precious first few months of her baby’s life could take our workshop on infant photography; and a young entrepreneur looking to get their small business off the ground can take advantage of one of our courses on creating a business plan or establishing a brand.

The sheer numbers and diversity of viewers we have seen for these types of courses is a testament to the breadth of the demand out there for instruction pertaining to creative pursuits and the creative side of business, and we are excited to be able to bring that type of instruction to people all over the world.

I’m floored at what the learners on our platform have been able to accomplish. We receive amazing success stories almost every day from people in every walk of life, from 200 countries worldwide.

Victor: What’s your take on online learning, and where do you fit in?

Chase: Online education platforms are growing at a breakneck rate, and there are a number of very effective companies out there that are disrupting the world of education as we know it. Many of them are positioning themselves as cheaper alternatives to traditional brick-and-mortar universities. creativeLIVE is offering something very different. Rather than replacing traditional education, we hope to supplement it, providing a resource for lifelong learning that viewers can take advantage of before, during, and long after they finish school.

Additionally, we’re unique in that our focus is around creativity.  There is an ardent belief at creativeLIVE that creativity is the new literacy. It is one of the most desirable characteristics in any line of work – the ability to make, to create, and to solve problems in new, insightful ways.

Our platform is also different because of the level of interactive elements that we incorporate. We are 100 percent social from the ground up. People use social channels as primary means to connect with experts and one another in REAL TIME via social media team while we’re deploying the most highly produced, high quality content in the industry, bar none. The quality of the engagement is off the charts high due to the fact that our classes do not have a grading or certification system. People are there because they want to be there. We attract viewers who are truly interested in learning for learning’s sake, and are therefore more involved and motivated to actively participate in their classes than students on other platforms. This creates a super rich learning experience for our viewer base as a whole.  Not to mention how engaged the experts are knowing that there are 40,000 students on the other end of that live video feed.

Victor: When was it developed and could you share something interesting or relevant about its development history? 

Chase: It was developed over the course of about a year in sort of ‘beta’ formats, but we launched in 2010. A couple interesting things… One that stand out is that we’ve been profitable since day one. That’s highly unusual, but something we’re very proud of as a team. Additionally are our numbers… more than 2 million people from 200 countries have participated in our free online courses, we’ve had more than 10 million viewer hours of content consumed. And a recent week-long Photoshop course alone attracted over 150,000 people from 178 countries. That’s crazy cool. And we expect these numbers to continue to grow thanks to an amazing community of learners who are spreading our message everyday.

Victor: Where did it originate and where can you get it now?

Chase: creativeLIVE has always been available as an online platform. You can accesses our live class schedule at www.creativelive.com. You can also download any classes you missed live for a small cost to watch at your leisure.

Victor: How much does it cost and just what are the options?

Chase: Anyone looking to participate in any of our classes can do so for free during the live event. If a student wants to own a copy and view the course again later at any time, the courses are all available for purchase at a reasonable price — usually around $100 for about 15-20 hours of content. There is no obligation to buy, ever. You only buy if you want to own it. The free part is exciting because we wanted to make sure our material was accessible to anyone who was truly eager to learn. The business model based on those who are happy to pay for the ability to consume the content on their own timeline offsets the other costs and we’re left with a sustainable model.

Victor: You’re doing some amazing things! What are some that come to mind?

Chase: As mentioned before, one notable example is the Photoshop week course — a weeklong intensive seminar on Adobe Photoshop, during which world class photographers and digital artists taught classes on specific photo editing techniques for both beginners and professionals. We had over 150,000 people from over 178 countries, and we received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback on both the quality of instruction and the breadth of the material covered. It was the largest event of its kind ever held in the world.

Another recent example was New York Times Best-selling author Tim Ferriss bringing his newest book “The 4 Hour Chef” to life before 100,000 people on our platform even before you could purchase the book. And yet another example would be our recent “Build Your Brand” class with Porter Gale, the former VP of marketing for Virgin America. The three-day long course provided business owners and entrepreneurs with insight into how to develop a cohesive vision for their company and successfully market it to their customers.

Victor: Who is it particularly tailored for and who is it not for?

Chase: creativeLIVE is tailored particularly for people looking to learn about things they care about. They are not usually aiming for a grade, or a certification, but aiming to grow, learn, and  develop a skill, whether it be to better their personal life or their business. Unlike other online education platforms, creativeLIVE classes are not trying to be a part of a standard undergraduate education. Those days are numbered. We do not offer basic chemistry or English literature 101 and we don’t plan to. Our audience is largely made up of people who want to get real results and learn from people who have changed the world.  Whether our viewers are complete novices or creative professionals looking to further perfect their craft, the quality of our instructors combined with the interactive element of our courses makes creativeLIVE a hugely effective platform for anyone eager to grow.

Victor: Now for a broad question – what are your thoughts on education these days? How would you characterize our present situation?

Chase: I’m very critical of the current, traditional educational landscape — especially in the US. Student loan debt now out-weighs credit card debt and the average student graduates college with around $27,000 in debt. So, as this younger generation emerges from traditional educational paths we are saddling them with debt, telling them to get “real” jobs — which translates into mind-numbing, soul sucking jobs — and training them to ignore their most priceless resources… their creativity, uniqueness and the real world opportunities to create a life and a living for themselves doing what they love. Why?  Because we haven’t taken stock recently of the times in which we live. We no longer live in an era of the factory, where we need to produce student/citizens like widgets to perform certain functions just like the person next to them. We are in a whole new era — so we need to act like it and build an education platform for our future that recognizes it too.

Victor: What sort of formative experiences in your own education helped to inform your approach to creating creativeLIVE?

Chase: I only narrowly saved my own life by quitting every career path that everyone else wanted me to do… be a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant…  not that there’s anything wrong with those jobs – but they were just the jobs that other people thought would be measured as ‘successful’ for me. Well I quit those paths – all of them – to pursue the things that I wanted to do more than anything in my life, which was to be a photographer.   And when I quit those things, I realized that there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to learn outside of formal training from people who had really done what I wanted to do. I vowed at that point that if I was ever in a position to change that, I would. So it was after building my own career and meeting so many others like me who had done the same and wanted to help shift the paradigm that I was able to connect the dots and contribution to the genesis of creativeLIVE.

Victor: How does creativeLIVE address some of your concerns about education?

Chase: Put bluntly, creativeLIVE teaches real skills. And it’s inspirational as all hell to learn from someone who has DONE what they’re teaching. It’s a FREE empowerment engine for anyone with an internet connection.  And it does so by breaking down the typical barriers to education… It transcends geographic barriers since the courses are online;  it transcends the problem of access to the very best expert by enabling conversations between any student — whether you’re in Nairobi or Nebraska — with that expert, regardless of how important, influential, famous or smart that expert is….  And it transcends the cost issue — because it is offered entirely for free.  Frankly speaking don’t see very many types of subject matter that couldn’t work with our model – we’re just focusing on “creativity” because we think it’s the most valuable and important skill set in the world today.

Victor: Your outlook?

Chase: I’m excited to see how the future of education — delivered meaningfully and at scale — can transform our culture. The future of education is several things. It is skill based. It is life long. It is free or highly democratized. And it is here now.

Victor: Got any good stories? Something quirky?

Chase: Sure. Note that I think quitting is underrated. They might call it a “pivot” in Silicon Valley, but I had to quit so many things to put myself on the path to do what I wanted to do for my life. I quit a career as an athlete, I quit the medical school path, and I dropped out of a Ph.D. to finally understand what I wanted to do. And yet I couldn’t be happier with my choices. So quitting ain’t so bad — especially if it’s a ticket to your dreams.

Victor: Anything else? Parting thoughts for EdTech Digest readers?

Chase: I think the best thing is for me to tell them to try it. Try creativeLIVE. Take a course on creativeLIVE.com in something you love, from someone who is in the top 1 percent in their field. And if you’re not honestly impressed by the quality of the content, the quality of the broadcast, the experience, etc. — then I’ll eat my socks.

—

Victor Rivero tells the story of 21st-century education transformation. Get your story told through case studies, white papers and other materials you can share at trade shows and on your website. Write to: victor@edtechdigest.com

Stating the Obvious

Closing the ever-gaping digital divide with a little bit of help.

GUEST COLUMN | by Steve Lee

Sometimes we need to state the obvious in order to effectively demonstrate how bad things are for some segments of society. So, it is pretty obvious that just to keep pace in modern society requires regular access to the Internet and supportive digital technologies. If you’re reading this you no doubt have access.

That’s not the way it is in our nation’s poor communities where broadband access to the Internet hovers around 10 to 20 percent of residents. This has serious implications for education. While urban and suburban schools, public and private, in middle and upper income neighborhoods, have become fully integrated with the Internet and are replete with smart boards and other classroom technologies, schools in poor neighborhoods are being denied what have become basic tools for a 21^st century education. It puts students in these schools at an overwhelming disadvantage.

Our mission at CSMI, an education management company, is to empower students to be lifelong learners. However, I can’t imagine bringing students through our schools without the technological foundation necessary to keep pace and compete in today’s society. What chance does a student have without it? At Chester Community Charter School we are closing that ever gaping digital divide by providing students in grades three through eight with laptop computers as well as smart boards in the classrooms. This investment in students does not come out of the school’s budget, which is publicly funded. It comes from private donations. In today’s world corporate and foundation support for technology is critical if students at schools in poor neighborhoods are to have hope of a better education and access to the technology necessary for them to be successful.

The recently announced Camden Community Charter School to be managed by CSMI is a prime example. First, a little background. Camden is the worst performing school district in New Jersey. In fact, last month Governor Christie announced that the state would be taking over the Camden school district. In mapping out our plan for the new school, we realized immediately that to emulate the success we’ve had in Chester; technology would have to be a critical component. But modern technology comes with costs.

In Chester, our school is able to meet the technology challenge through private donations, principally from the Vahan and Danielle Gureghian Foundation. (Vahan Gureghian is CEO of CSMI.) The donations enable the school to provide laptop computers to all students in grades 3-8 and the purchase of smart boards for use in classrooms. We realized the same technology needs exist in Camden and our plan is to bring the same types of technology into the Camden Community Charter School.

With the Gureghian Foundation already on board, a new opportunity emerged from one of Philadelphia’s homegrown companies, Comcast. Comcast has a program called Internet Essentials where qualified families can get low-cost broadband service for $9.95 a month and can buy an Internet-ready computer for under $150. Combined with a donation from the Gureghian Foundation it means that all students in Camden Community Charter School will have free computers and free in-home access to the Internet.

Student success in the 21^st century depends on access to modern technology, and the ability of schools in poor neighborhoods to provide that technology is heavily dependent on investments from the private sector. This important partnership between the private sector and public education is critical in helping to prepare tomorrow’s workforce to compete on an increasingly competitive global stage.

Private donations and partnerships like these with private sector companies can help struggling schools keep pace in the digital age.

—

Steven Lee is Executive Vice President/Chief Academic Officer of CSMI, the education manager of Chester Community Charter School and the newly announced Camden Community Charter School.