Aaron Barth about Online Learnings Killing education

When I started teaching as a university professor I did what we all do when we start out as educators I relied on my intuitions about what good education looks like and I let everyone in our little secret my intuitions were really really bad they were based on my experience in the lecture model of education that's where we talk at people for really long periods of time gives them some text books to read and then give them a test that's what I did I talked at people kind of like right now that was my original sin but I didn't stop there years later when I was working as an education consultant I was asked to design some e-learning and I hadn't done that before and you'll never guess how I went about it by injecting all the same terrible intuitions into it and it looks something like this virtual instructor in front of a virtual whiteboard delivering virtual bullet-points I'm pretty sure when we thought of using virtual reality and education this isn't what we had in mind unfortunately this is what e-learning looks like today and no one's learning anything from it think about how absurd that is so how did we get here well I talked about intuition but let's actually go a little bit deeper our earliest instincts around education are actually based on storytelling we know this from archeological data people telling other people stories people teaching other people using human stories it's how we learned and it's how we communicate it fast-forward 40,000 years we now have beautiful scalable mobile enabled eLearning that we can use to teach people on opposite ends of the world the same thing at the same time but somewhere between the caves and the clicking we got so focused on building this technology that we forgot about the one and only thing that matters in education the people elearning can be used to teach everyone everywhere good hygiene practices to stop the spread of disease elearning can be used to teach everyone everywhere sustainable living practices to combat the climate crisis these are global problems they require global solutions an e-learning should be making a contribution to them but it isn't it isn't because we've forgotten about the people we've forgotten about the way people actually learn if there's one thing that everyone in this room can do to start refocusing your efforts on people and to start doing elearning that works it's this start telling stories again not because it's what we used to do but because the science says it actually works we know that scenario and story based learning can accelerate our time to expertise on a given task it does that because stories simulate the way we learn through experience we know that scenario or story based learning is more engaging than clique than quiz eLearning the reason why is that stories create empathy empathy in turn creates personal meaning and it's personal meaning not clicking that drives engagement and finally we know that scenario or story based learning is the best way to teach complex skills like problem-solving collaboration and creativity precisely the skills that the workforces of today and tomorrow need to solve our biggest problems let me show you how this works Steven and his 12 year old granddaughter rose her going to the bank to open up her first bank account she just made a traveling basketball team and he wants to be able to send her money while she's on the road they're super excited they booked a meeting way in advance and it's a big moment for their family when they get to the bank and start filling out the paperwork things start to go sideways the bank employees immediately suspicious of them both she thinks there's a discrepancy in their bank accounts but more importantly she thinks that the identification that they provided is fraudulent grabs the ID abruptly leaves the room and escalates it to her superiors shortly after that the cops roll in they handcuff Stephen they handcuff 12 year-old robes bring them out to the police cruiser and arrest them so I know you might be thinking I mean maybe this is just a big misunderstanding or maybe the ID actually is fraudulent but let's add some color to the story the truth is that Stephen and Rose are indigenous Canadians and the ID that the bank employee thinks is fraudulent is actually their official government-issued status card this is a true story happened a few months ago in Vancouver.