Is having many choices a good thing?
Lately this question about content for K-12 has been popping up very frequently in my mind. In my role at CK-12, I meet with teachers and administrators, attend education conferences, and work with other non-profit people who are all working towards improving education. I have heard from teachers who are looking for ways to pass on their self-made supplemental materials, or from administrators who are frustrated with the amount of funds that states are spending, such as California spending $600 million per year on textbooks. And then there are others that I have met with who are making amazing progress in multi-media educational material and creating fantastic videos, such as renderings of how the heart works, or the showing the lifecycle of a virus. Yet, as I meet and share ideas with all of these people, I cannot help but wonder, “is something in our system fundamentally broken?” All of us are working to create more and better educational materials, yet we spend billions of dollars a year and still find many of our students are under served and unmotivated in the classroom. What is all this content creation leading to?
In order for us to educate our children we provide many choices- isn’t this equivalent to feeding a baby who won’t eat? We keep presenting different kinds of foods in the hope that the baby will eat something! Because we have to educate many kinds of learners we have to offer many different kinds of content in the hope that something maybe will make it clear to them and learning or understanding will happen. Here is an incomplete listing of the kinds of choices we provide:
- Printed material, such as:
- Core Textbooks
- Supplemental material
- Other Source materila
- Library material
- Museum content – science kits, written material,
- Special created material by the teacher themselve
-
Online
- More text
- CDs of more text
- Collaborative media – Wikipedia, YouTube
- Interactive media –
- Flash animations
- Videos
- Musicals
- After schools activities related to academics
- Clubs – Sciences clubs, math clubs, writing clubs
- Summer schools
- Gaming
- Others
Clearly, the question we have to ask is how much choice we need to provide? How much do the basic tenents change? In mathematics 2+2 is always 4. Of course these tenents never change, what changes is the relevance to the times, culture, the technological advances, updates in recent findings, and other factors. What changes is the answer to the question “how can we engage every kind of student with content”?
I cannot but help think about how some of the most accomplished people did their work with so little choice. How much choice did Einstein need to make his predictions that impacted the future of the human race? During his time he had some basic information from reading books and 
from conversations with other people, plus something to document his ideas – book and pen, or chalk and chalkboard.
How much choice for learning did Srinivasa Ramanujan have at his beck and call? Yet, this man, born to a very poor family, had only an old book and street lamp at night become one of the most celebrated mathematicians. I remember a few years ago I went to the State of Kerala, India I was constantly surrounded by children who kept begging for “One pen please….”implying all I need is one pen and I can learn. Luxury!
The candy sellers of Brazil were young children who had no schooling or any mathematical training, however they could all do very complex mathematical computations because of their need to sell candy and maintain their market edge compared to the other children selling candies. How much choice did they have to study market economics? No learning tools, or even no notebooks or paper or pen…………
In another example, Professor Yunus gave 42 women in Bangladesh $27. The most impactful outcome of this act was these very poor women’s ability to change the way they lived and to send their children to be educated not only in a four year colleges but to become professionals such as doctors. How much choice in instructional material do you think they had?
How much content choice do we need? Already we have so many choices, yet we cannot make much of a dent in the outcome for our students compared to other nations. It’s not clear how much choice we need, but perhaps we need to provide students content that they can relate to, i.e. personalized content. This is the premise that CK-12 is founded on – lower cost of content as well as individualized content. No matter how much content we provide it will not make much difference unless the content is individualized for each students needs. For further cost impact, CK-12 will house the content in one place as an open resource such that we don’t have to recreate the content over and over again.
We need choices because we are not educating one child but many students at the same time. Even though we need to be able to provide content for all students, it has to be affordable. Providing content to all for free so that we don’t have to pay for everything over and over again is the only way that we can make education affordable. Let’s provide choices that are useful and impact learning.
