Leveraging technology to improve education
Roberto Priolo: There is a lot of discussion within the lean movement around learning and how the current education system is not equipping students with the skills they need. In your opinion, what are the shortcomings of the education system?
Priya Lakhani: Education systems around the world are designed to deliver a factory model of learning. They force students to memorize data (and find a way to regurgitate the data for the exam), and teachers spend a lot of time on administrative tasks. The tasks teachers have to complete regularly – such as grading – serve to keep track of each student's needs and difficulties, but they do not actually add value to the learning experience. Consider that an average classroom here in the UK has 27 students (the number rises to 50-60 in some African and Asian countries), and you can imagine the workload!
The main tool teachers use to understand how a student is doing and when an intervention is needed is the test. They have to mark all those tests, analyze the data and, for each student, figure out their difficulties and why they are having them. In the Western world, teachers spend 60% of their time on administrative tasks, and I guarantee you there are no teachers who enjoy that. Teachers are meant to inspire students – that is where their passion lies – not to drown in paperwork.
Moreover, education should not just be about memorizing content… it should be about making students confident, giving them a good attitude toward others and toward life, getting them to understand perseverance. So how can we provide a healthy kind of education? It all comes down to the different ways in which each of us learns. The problem is that education systems are currently focused on allowing teachers to manage a classroom rather than actually giving students the education they need. Our schools are not providing the differentiators in education that would make it truly effective.
RP: What is the solution to this problem, in your opinion?
PL: The only way I see to empower teachers and take into account each student's learning path is by enhancing teaching with advanced technology. Technology can understand how a student's brain learns, what is causing the student difficulties and so on. It can provide this critical information to teachers very quickly, and that is the goal of Century Tech.
RP: Tell us about Century Tech and how it came about, please.
PL: While I was on a government advisory board here in the UK, I had the chance to learn about the problems our schools face. I saw the problems from the front-line perspective and realized that the education we are offering today is completely inadequate. That is when I decided to help teachers make better use of their time and do work that adds value and really helps students, while the administrative work is handed over to machines.
I looked at technology and saw no innovation in this regard. Digitalization is more than software that does what human beings used to do manually; it is about using technology to advance processes, make better decisions and be more efficient at work. That is the idea behind Century Tech.
We designed a system that uses machine learning, artificial intelligence and other tools to understand how you learn and chart the best path forward in terms of curriculum. The data captured by the system provides all the information teachers need and saves enormous amounts of time so that, instead of focusing on bureaucracy, they can concentrate on what they really want – shaping our next doctors, lawyers, innovators, prime ministers and so on.
The UK is short of tens of thousands of teachers, and 74% of our teachers are considering leaving their jobs in the next three years. That is a national crisis! At Century Tech, we want to make teachers' lives easier so that they stay in their jobs. We also want teaching to be perceived for what it really is: one of the most rewarding jobs there is.
RP: Can you give us some examples of how Artificial Intelligence applies to teaching?
PL: Traditional education systems usually use tests to assess a student's understanding of a subject – in other words, whether or not they are learning. But a test tells you nothing about a student's learning behavior. What if you guess your answers? What if you hesitate? Technology can very quickly understand learning behaviors that might take humans months or years to discover. For example, our technology can create a dynamic path for each student, highlighting the elements of a subject that he or she needs to learn right now and identifying mistakes.
As I mentioned, personalization is everything. Imagine two students failing math at a college. One may have scored zero without even knowing what a common denominator in a fraction is, while the other may have scored 5.5 because of a simple difficulty factoring equations. As a teacher, how are you going to recognize and address these two very different needs? (Especially when you have more than 25 students to teach?). Artificial Intelligence tells you immediately what a student is finding difficult and helps solve the problem.
RP: How does using this technology affect teachers' lives and students' results?
PL: We conducted an impact study on our technology, which revealed an average 30% increase in results across all levels for students using our system. We also saw that it saves the teacher about six hours a week (reaching eight or ten for certain subjects). That is almost a full working day!
RP: Do you have experience with lean thinking?
PL: As a company, Century Tech has certainly embraced lean ideas. For one thing, we are very agile in our processes. We also take customer feedback very seriously, listening to customers all the time, not just to fix problems in our products, but to truly innovate.
I am excited to meet the lean community in the fall at the Global Learning Lean Conference in Chester, and to discuss how we can move education forward together.
