Background
Education has become an institution with its own norms and rules, its own internal qualification measurements and its own way of external comparing with the other education institutions. By demanding high output quality standards were lowered. This all resulted in worse education results and in institutes where more than 50% of the employees are not involved in the first line of operations, the teaching.
The main problem of an established institution is that it will not allow creative destruction as a threat to their own position: using new (technological) possibilities to lower the costs or improve the education. This has led to a split in the education in commercial private education and public education, where the public education sets the quality norms and requirements for certifications like bachelor, master and doctorate. The representatives of the public education assess private education regarding those quality norms and requirements limiting possible innovation.
The results can be seen all over the world. The comparison between the education institutes gives no indication of the absolute quality of the education, just the quality compared to the quality of another education institute. At the same time we see a major mismatch between what is taught and what is needed as knowledge and competences by the labor market. Next to that in most countries a minimum of 10% of students finished their study which results in unemployment.
Public education is mainly directed to teaching people in the age between 4 and 24, although it is known by now that education is necessary during all ages, especially because of the changes in the labor market. Education in the age from 24 to 60 has be left over to the private education institutes. On the other hand, when someone wants to get a master degree at later age and does so with support of a private education institute, the requirements and quality standards are set by the public institutes, independent of age.
The European Committee is supporting the idea of micro credentials, certificates for small education modules and states that this could make education more flexible. At the same time the European Committee clearly states that there should be standard and international accepted quality standards. When we would use the current structure for making these standards, people from existing public education institutes making the quality standards, creative destruction will be stopped.
In the case of chartered schools, which do accept the qualifications and requirements, but are not following government regulations, we can see an improvement. For instance in the USA we see that chartered school score higher in the ranking results, but again this is compared to the public schools and is no absolute measurement. The same can be seen at the school using personalized education like Kunskapskolan.
One could conclude that having qualification standards are necessary but that the regulations resulting from these standards make the difference. This is comparable with other results in economy; quality standards are necessary but regulations made by the government lead in the end to lower standards and quality of the products. Markets should not be “free” meaning everything is allowed including monopolies or misinforming clients, but giving privileges to certain organizations in the market using regulations leads to a worse economy.
There is a long track record of research in education, learning and the relation between education and economy. From this research two conclusions can be made: (1) there is a difference between transferring knowledge, knowledge exchange, and being able to apply knowledge together with others; (2) live long learning is necessary.
Apart from that we have to make a distinction between knowledge, skills and competences as is done by the European Standard Competences scheme (ESCO). Skills and competences are learned in a different way. Based on the research one makes a distinction between (a) the exchange of knowledge through “internalization” using lectures, books, video’s or any other way knowledge can be represented for acquiring knowledge and (b) the (creative) use of the acquired knowledge, skills and competences to reach a certain goal together with others. This can be linked to Bloom’s taxonomy of the six levels of cognitive learning, which are often used to describe the level of an education module: (1) remembering, (2) understanding, (3) applying, (4) analyzing, (5) evaluating and (6) creating.
One can make a distinction between the levels 1 to 3 and 4 to 6 Level 1 to 3 could be supported by “internalization”. The knowledge is offered using (online) education material including the assessments to check whether the knowledge has been acquired, understood and can be applied. The levels 4 to 6 need “socialization”, communication to learn to analyze, evaluate and create together with others (including the teacher). The first, “internalization” can be done with education material and when necessary local physical support to help the student; the second, however, requires communication. This distinction between “internalization” and “socialization” is important for the development of the education using the current new (technological) possibilities like global online learning and personalized learning.
Seen from an economic point of view, education is the exchange of human capital (knowledge, skills and competences) for financial capital. There is a trade between a party offering human capital in exchange for financial capital and a party offering financial capital to acquire that human capital. For this trade we need two parties and an exchange platform. Currently public education is offering that platform as a monopoly not only setting the prices but also setting the quality norms. They hire the teachers, who have the knowledge and are forced to offer that knowledge according to the requirements of the trade platform.
Proposal
All Institutes, including education institutes, are not willing to change because of the power they built over time. Creative destruction can only be established by finding a way of offering the same product according to the same quality standards but in a new way for instance by using a new type of platform. In our case, certification will be necessary to have comparable quality. But apart from that there are no restrictions: there are no laws forbidding you to follow certified courses at the age of 12 or 76 as long as you do the assessment for the certification.
The proposal is based on making a split between education on the Bloom levels 1 to 3 and Bloom levels 4 to 6. The reason is the following: the major costs for education are (1) personnel costs and (3) infrastructure costs. Personnel costs are separated in course developing costs and teaching costs; infrastructure costs are physical infrastructure costs and administration costs. Currently developing costs are lowered by giving the same course for a long period to as many students as possible. Teaching costs are lowered by making the classes bigger. Both actions lower the quality. Creative destruction should be in those areas being able to lower personnel costs and infrastructure costs.
In case of Bloom levels 1 to 3 course development is directed to the content, which is continuously changing because of new required knowledge in the labor market. This knowledge, however, is in most cases available in the cloud as “open access” material. Currently, however, one expects the teacher to have this new knowledge and to implement this knowledge into the course; this will not happen. This results in a lower quality of the content because it will become more and more outdated.
To lower the costs one can use self-generated courses where an AI platform analyses the request for knowledge and uses the “open access” material to generate a course including an assessment. The new course is then evaluated by a review board before being offered to the student. This could be done according to the MIT model, where the developed course is “open access”. The student does not pay for the module but when the student pays for the assessment and the certification.
There are some technical hordes to be taken. The student must be identified and there must be a way that nobody else or AI can do the assessment. There are new technologies to check on this, but it might be necessary to have local physical assessment rooms with a supervisor.
For the levels 4 to 6 of Bloom we need a different setup, because guidance and communication is necessary. There is no way that analyzing, evaluating and creating can be done by a student without communication with a teacher. Experience has shown that “action learning” is giving the best results; this means that the available knowledge is analyzed and evaluated in a specific project, which has to be guided by a teacher. The next step is then to define a new project, where the new knowledge, skills and competences are being applied in a creative way in another environment. The result of that project is then used to assess the student. The module owner, the teacher responsible for the module, is supported by local teachers but will work physically with a cohort of students during a week to be able to guide the students, communicate with them in person and measure their quality. The student will pay for that week of guidance plus the extra guidance of the local teachers in advance, and will pay an extra amount for the assessment and certification.