On the heels of its Dec. 19 decision to raise internet connectivity funding for schools by $1.5 billion, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) urged Silicon Valley to couple funding with innovative educational material.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel spoke to the audience of tech entrepreneurs at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters on Jan. 8, highlighting the FCC’s recent efforts and encouraging the digital disruption within teaching and the textbook industry. The event was hosted by the tech advocacy group CALinnovates.
“In the rest of the world, we have an infinite array of digital tools to change our civic and commercial lives. Yet somehow we’ve put up some barriers at the school doors,” Rosenworcel said. “It’s time we started inviting them in and wrestling with them and doing some good things.”
Rosenworcel described the textbook industry as “unimaginative,” and as a segment of suppliers ripe for change. As a market estimated at $17 billion and with price increases in the last decade at 800 percent, Rosenworcel said the industry’s services burden educators and students alike--average school districts only able to afford textbook purchases every seven to 10 years.
(Next page: Digital textbooks and their potential)
“I just think it’s crazy if we keep on doing what we’ve done before because the world and the job opportunities that are out there look remarkably different,” said Rosenworcel.
Citing more statistics to support her call to action, she observed that 50 percent of the jobs in the current economy require some level of digital skills. Based on trends, this estimation will grow to 77 percent in the next decade.
In response, she said textbooks might be supplanted with digital counterparts. Software, online platforms or apps that do more than just present the facts about a subject, but engage students on an interactive level. Astronomy might have virtual tours of the universe, biology an exploration of cell structure, and other curriculums similarly enhanced through digital devices and applications.
Praise was also given for digital textbooks or sites that not only provide knowledge, but also hold students accountable to demonstrate their education with games, tests and other interactive assignments. Within the tech sector, tech education startups like Codecademy, a free platform that teaches coding in a variety of languages, and paid subscription services like Treehouse, that allow students to design their own coding curriculum and produce their own projects, are just a few innovative examples.
“If we can think about digitization in a way that makes kids not just consumers of educational content but creators, I think we’re going to develop a generation of students who are going to better serve our economy and better serve our world,” Rosenworcel said.
Representing ClassDojo, a tech startup that assists teachers to incentivize learning behaviors, Co-founder Sam Chaudhary joined the discussion to offer a perspective about the new shift for innovation in schools.
“We’ve always thought the job of schools is to deliver academic content--and that’s a really, really important job,” Chaudhary said. “But when we think of the future--and we think of the knowledge economy that we’re in--just delivering that academic content is not going to be enough. There are actually these other sets of skills that are a part of education that isn’t adequately or systematically addressed in schools.”
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