Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies (Part 2)

Warren Barkley: One of the things we’ve seen worldwide is this movement in the pedagogy where teachers want to have very small bites of information which have project work attached to it. Then they let the kids work on that project inside or outside the classroom. A lot of teachers want that kind of learning to continue outside of the classroom when they go home. In providing that virtual learning space, it allows kids to work with whatever media they want and they can do their homework all together at the same time. It’s something that we see in many different countries.

Sramana Mitra: We are seeing this as well. Everything that you said are trends we are seeing as well. One thing that I picked up in your answer that I want to double-click down on is I imagine you work with K-12 mostly, right?

Warren Barkley: That’s right. We do have a little bit of higher ed, but almost 90% is K-12.

Sramana Mitra: In the configuration where there is learning happening outside of the classroom, is that learning bringing in teachers from outside of the immediate school along with its capabilities?

Warren Barkley: I’ll give you an example of a UK class and a class on the East Coast. The interesting thing is if you’re from the UK, how do you see the revolutionary war in the US? This is as opposed to how kids learn about it in the US. Even farther than bringing different teachers and different expertise into the classroom, this is about kids learning from kids from their different points of view. Creating that virtual space so that they can work together and show the different ways they’re coming from is really interesting to see.

I worked on a project quite a while ago where computer science wasn’t being taught in a lot of schools and we were trying to virtualize some of that. I think that’s interesting but when you’re looking at student-centered learning, if you think of the teacher as the facilitator and let them facilitate, it becomes more interesting than just the, “Can I get an expert from another place to be part of that?” That’s part of the freedom of being able to join this big virtual learning space that everyone can log in to and work together on.

Sramana Mitra: Your platform provides that kind of a learning space?

Warren Barkley: It does, yes.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Warren Barkley, CTO of SMART Technologies
1 2 3 4 5