MITili’s Associate Director, Jeff Dieffenbach, joins Wharton’s Business Radio to discuss changes to education and how science and information are impacting learning.
Dieffenbach says “We can start to instrument people with things like heart rate monitors or EEG to measure electrical activity in the brain.” He points out that there are so many scientific cues we can take from learners that can tell us when a learner is most ready to learn and how that physiological readiness can be replicated to make learning more effective.
Dieffenbach stresses the need to put practice into the classroom. “We know a lot, but practitioners don’t put it into play.” Practitioners simply don't have the time to scan tens of academic journals, identify potentially relevant papers, and then scour them to extract actionable findings. Researchers need to help with this translation.
Expectations are high for education in general, with new e-learning making time and space less constrictive to the average learner. Learning can be self-paced and done in groups or on your own in ways that were never possible even twenty years ago.
“Ultimately the promise of digital is personalization,” says Dieffenbach, who contends that personalization will help students with pacing their own education and allow teachers more time to help struggling students.
“One of the things that happen when you deliver learning at scale, and we do this through the MITx MOOCs and through OpenCourseWare, is that you can look at patterns that are successful and patterns that aren’t.” These patterns are what help guide students toward practices that will help make them more effective learners.
You can listen to the full audio clip of Mr. Dieffenbach's interview here.