Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see white spaces? I’ll give you an example. One of the things we’re learning in this COVID world is that at the elementary school level, distance learning is performing poorly. Clearly that is something that needs work. It needs to be thought through.

The other thing that I’m observing is that for a while as distance learning progresses, we said that we’re going from a sage-on-stage model to guide-on-side model. This expression has been used widely. People from edX, Coursera, and Khan Academy use this metaphor.

In this experience of COVID, it seems like we’ve gone to complete self-directed learning. The only guide-on-side are the parents who are trying to shepherd people through their distance learning exercises.

Many parents are coming up short. If a random parent has to teach high school calculus, that’s not so simple. That becomes then a complete self-learning scenario. All of these use cases are coming up short. 

Stephen Spahn: Let’s look at the high school level. You have the teacher who’s presenting the material. Students have lots of questions. Teachers have office hours so they can make sure that they answer questions.

One of the critical things is creating students’ study groups so they discuss and come back with the teacher. They are involved in thinking about how it can be used outside of one area. Everything has been very discipline-oriented.

Now the idea is when you’re learning things, what is essential to be learned? What are the key things that can be applied not only to math but also to history? We’re using, more and more, the essential fundamentals to be mastered that they can use across all disciplines.

Sramana Mitra: A good example would be what’s happening with the language learning apps and gamification. I use Duolingo to learn French. I would say it’s still the learner playing within the rules of the app, but you could use the principles of multiplayer gaming in drawing in this peer group kind of exercises.

I think it does need to be domain-specific or discipline-specific so that the nuances and learning models of that particular discipline are surfaced. You could create gamified experiences around disciplines that are study group enablers. That’s actually a very interesting idea for entrepreneurship.

Stephen Spahn: What you said is absolutely correct. They want to be able to  solve a particular problem, which might be a civic problem. The language area is one we’re looking at because we teach up to 17 languages. We’re looking at how to do this effectively. That is an area where somebody had a great program where an entrepreneur should focus on.

Sramana Mitra: Layering on top of that is a dancer’s area of interest versus a tennis player’s area of interest. If you’re teaching French to a dancer, you can use a different set of concepts.

Stephen Spahn: It’s a diverse playlist so you can actually personalize so you capture their interest. That’s absolutely critical.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Stephen Spahn, Dwight Schools Group
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