How are we solving education?
A qualitative analysis of the education market
The first step to making a product (or a service/system) better is to know about what aspects of it are not working. This essay is an exploration of the product which most of us subconsciously identify as not efficient â education. Our focus would be to understand the very basic meaning of education and identify loopholes in the system. This process includes reading previous work/perspectives on the subject, giving them a deep thought, and establishing an original point of view that we are most satisfied with. Overall this essay could be considered qualitative research on education.
What follows qualitative research? Once these loopholes are identified, only then there could be further steps like setting up focused brainstorming groups and interviews for validation or segregation of assumptions from facts. Further, the data received from such validation processes combined with implicit data from the internet can be structured into quantitative research (involving numbers and more âconclusionaryâ in nature). After this step, a specific problem could be chosen to solve and build an MVP for. Testing follows the MVP.
So, letâs dive into our exploration. If you are new here and donât wish to miss such talks on ideas, markets, and technology. Subscribe via the following link:
What is education? The process of education involves us receiving systematic guidance from an instructor, the whole process is aimed at learning a subject. In most cases, these subjects are the ones that lead to a prominent career track. This definition is not an individual perspective but rather what the internet as a single personality might perceive education to be. But if we explore more individually, ask X number of people around on what education means to them, we would end up getting varied answers. If you ask me, I would say âbeing able to operate my mind-body-soul in sync is educationâ. For a physics student, it simply might be âcontent on physicsâ. Individual perspectives lead to a lot of diversity and relativity. So is this question of any importance? Probably not for a simple individual who is just learning something because thereâs a direct output of that effort (if we call that âlearningâ as âeducationâ or not doesn't matter). But for us, asking this question makes us realize two core things, the fact that education means different things for different people and that a more absolute term that can be used instead of education is âlearningâ because the final outcome to practicing any activity consistently is learning.
What are the KPIs (qualitative) of a good education? The following flowchart visualizes the process of education. We can see that the Knowledge Repo, Content, and the Learning are three pillars of education. These pillars are subjective, their quality depends on the process they have gone through. Hence our KPIs lies in the processes, there are two processes in this whole system:
A. How knowledge is developed into structured content.
B. How the content is used to promote learning.
This makes us realize how the quality of education in its entirety depends on the art of teaching, our artists being the teachers.
The meaning of developing curious content: The same theory of content that applies to movies, novels, poems, and games will apply in the educational content scenario. Now letâs ask ourselves what a quality movie, novel, poem, or game is? For me, a quality movie, novel, poem, or game is the one that engages with one of my niche emotions and maintains a stable drip of that emotion or brings in new niche emotion and clubs them into a stronger blend of emotion. Like cooking a recipe with a rare spice or mixing certain spices to create a strong blend of taste sustained over a period of time (well with this analogy I figured, even food could be called content).
So with this how could we define good educational content? First, it has to create a specific curiosity (replacing emotion and taste with curiosity), and second, it has to sustain it over a period of time (constant).
Does the current grade-based education system help develop and sustain curiosity? Paul Grahamâs The lessons to unlearn has been a good read to think on this question. There's a difference between learning for curiosity and learning for grades. Much of the education system today is still about grades. If grades are the most important things in an educational system and if the tests are the only way to achieve grades, then the learning is about hacking a test and not about the subject material. Consequently, the education technology we are developing also ends up having value propositions focused on learning how to hack tests while learning the subject itself takes secondary importance. But why do we run after grades in the first place? Probably because competition has led grades to become more valuable than knowledge. The belief that grades always equate to learning is a big loophole of the system â the loophole that everyone knows but still ignores. Hereâs how I visualize the learning and grades relationship: grades a borderline set to the bigger learning set. The question to further explore is why arenât we focusing on sets that are entirely inside of the learning set, do we even know what these sets are?
The role of competition in the system: I believe competition is like the goldilocks zone to efficient learning. It has to be balanced, not too much and not too little. For the fact, competition does help develop curiosity about learning â the same curiosity that we have towards owning an Apple device, the pursuit towards novelty. Novelty is one of the key factors that develop curiosity in the human brain. We will be exploring more such factors by the end of this essay.
Currently, is there too much competition in our educational system? Over 9 lakh students appeared for JEE examination in 2021 and the total engineering seats in IITs, NITs, and IIITs combined is around 38,000. That means 4.2% of total students get a chance to study in national institutes. If we add seats from BITS, Vellore, and Manipal â an additional 11,000 seats, the percentage increases to 5.4%. These are very approximate calculations, but we get an idea. Is this too competitive or competitive enough? I will leave to decide. Drop your answers in the comments and also quote an ideal percentage that from your perspective would lead to balanced competition.
PS: A few more ideas on competition to ponder upon: A helpful link for this question would be Ken Robinsonâs TED talk titled How to escape education's death valley. He acknowledges that tests have a part to play in the system, but not a dominant one. The dominant part has to be about curiosity generation that in turn triggers learning. Recently, when I was reading Shoe Dog, the biography of Nike founder Phil Knight, he mentioned how the art of competing is actually the art of forgetting.
Why is the market so obsessed with grades? An attestation to this is how frequently we notice the front pages of the newspapers covered with photos of students who have achieved top rank. This is the case because it works, this type of marketing works. Ranks are KPIs easily understood by all the parties in the ecosystem, and they are absolute â their value remains the same all across India. I was reading a Ken article by Olina Banerji discussing this same thing, she termed ranks quite accurately as real estate in the current education ecosystem. The article explores how Byju at the beginning developed a different marketing technique where the advertisements emphasized learning instead of ranks. The weakness of this strategy is that we canât quantify learning easily, hence we depend on words like âwatch your kids fall in love with learningâ to speak in competition with the numbers i.e. ranks. No wonder Byju had to put a familiar face on their advertisements.
The way to get out of this loophole is to find a way to quantify learning. And quantify it in such a fashion that itâs âabsoluteâ everywhere and all the parties understand it. Hence the two KPIs we discussed in an earlier question, have to be developed into numbers. We have to find a way to measure curiosity and hence learning.
How I would like to solve education:
Curiosity leads to learning. This is defined. Now we need to understand how to develop curiosity in an individual. Before diving into the next paragraph, give yourself some time to think about this question. Comment your answers.
To find an answer to this question, we first need to understand what curiosity is. While searching for this answer, I came across astrophysicist Mario Livio. Mario wrote a book on curiosity, and I skimmed through it. Like we are at the moment, he was curious about curiosity. Ours might be a more specific kind of curiosity since we are exploring curiosity in the context of education, Mario had an epistemic curiosity which is basically lust for knowledge or drive to understand something in a much deeper manner (hereâs Marioâs ted talk if you wish to transition your specific curiosity to epistemic).
Apart from the two types we just talked about (specific and epistemic), Mario defines two more categories â perceptual (when you sense something for the first time) and diversive (less targeted, more like goofing around, exploring and less goal-oriented, attraction to novelty, for instance scrolling through the newspaper or social media). For education, we need to develop epistemic curiosity in students for that subject. We could add further scenarios that are focused on a specific curiosity. Like for instance, we need to develop an epistemic curiosity for IC engines, wherein thereâs a specific curiosity of how an F1 engine works compared to regular IC ones.
Now, what situations are required to develop the above-mentioned curiosities?
Minimum Viable Ideas that we can implement to build a healthier education ecosystem:
Create an information gap in every educational content: This could be done in two steps. First, by building a basic idea about the subject via gamified methods like quizzes, real-life examples, or linking the concept to be taught with something that the individual is already curious about. Second, show the vastness of the subject so that the brain knows the amount of unknown. This could be done by linking small topics in a branched and graphical interface instead of regular content tables, or at the very least taking the reader through the journey of what is still to be known. A good example is Feynman lectures, wherein among other things Richard helps experience the vastness of a topic before delving into the details.
The whole learning experience should be a narration instead of different topics tied by a thread. Storytelling is a good way to achieve this. An example is educational concepts explained via Manga-style comics.
Add social elements to learning. An example could be brainstorming in public. The recent popularity of CBCs over MOOCs addresses this factor, a community adds a curiosity factor to learning. In the case of MOOCs, a Ken article I read stated that only 10% to 15% of the total registrations end up completing the course. I think MOOCs do a great job on the information gap theory, but itâs not enough in todayâs age to keep everyone hooked.
Create a regular drip of dopamine activities. If itâs a video, we could give them points for every minute of watching or there could be a quiz question after specific intervals (Khan Academy videos do this). A separate competition dashboard could be developed so that people can compete in solving questions together and challenge themselves. Questions could be based on the difficulty of previous questions to decrease the drop rate. Gamification doesnât have to be restricted to one regular feature but the whole experience could be approached as if architecting a dopamine-inducing machine.
Inculcate goal-oriented curiosity. Goal-oriented curiosities are more likely to sustain over a longer period of time. The more period of time we could sustain a curiosity, the more period of learning we get. Goals could be the direct effects of our efforts. For instance, if we are learning geometry, the direct effect is that we would be capable of competing in a geometry exam. There could also be an application-based goal, for instance, we are learning geometry so that we could build furniture for our new house. Example: The DIY concept, helps sustain curiosity for longer periods of time. The success of DIY channels on YT points to this.
Include proven elements of curiosities into the system. The addition of elements like surprise, bias, desire, uncertainty, complexity, or novelty has been observed to have the potential to develop curiosities. A few examples are, One Plus selling their phones as invite-only â instigates novelty, Paytm awarding cashback or coupons after every digital payment â brings surprise element, Crypto markets â here uncertainty develops curiosity, A possible fowl in a sport that wasnât considered â bias, The concept of decentralization and the blockchain technology â the complexity of the subject makes it more curiosity inducing in nature.
There could be more such points. What I want to explore further is to add more such points and hypothesize each one into a sellable feature. Teachers today have more things on their hands: have knowledge on the subject, know how to distribute, and help develop curiosity. Maybe the last hurdle to solving education is mastering curiosity development. There might be a market for this â a product that helps teachers develop and sustain curiosity via a mix of digital-physical tools.
Parting words: The above points are not just about building more efficient education systems and products, they could also be applied wherever curiosity is to be harnessed, be it self-development or sales wherein we make the customer curious first and then pitch. Implementing all of these points in perfect synergy isnât easy at all, and hence this is a viable problem to be solved. Today, when we define teachers, we mean someone who has knowledge of a subject and also actively distributes that knowledge. From here on, we could add one more component to the definition of teachers, those who are able to help us develop curiosity. The ones who are able to build a synergy between all the three roles mentioned, we shall also call them artists.
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PS: This essay was entirely based on my thought and worldview. I would love to test these ideas by interviewing some people. Email or connect with me on Twitter/LI if you would wish to be part of the interview.