Mobile Education

Smartphones and tablet computers are radically transforming how we access our shared knowledge sources by keeping us constantly connected to near-infinite volumes of raw data and information. We enjoy unprecedented instant access to expertise, from informal cooking lessons on YouTube to online university courses. Every day people around the globe are absorbed in exciting new forms of learning, and yet traditional schools and university systems are still struggling to leverage the many opportunities for innovation in this area.
Recently frog has been researching how learning models are evolving--and how they can be improved--via the influence of mobile technologies. We’ve found that the education industry needs new models and fresh frameworks to avoid losing touch with the radically evolving needs of its many current and potential new constituencies. These range from a generation of toddlers just as comfortable with touchscreens as they are with books, to college-aged men and women questioning the value of physical campuses, to middle-aged and elderly professionals hoping to earn new skills in their spare time to secure a new job in turbulent economic times.
We have been focusing on the concept of mLearning--where "m" usually stands for "mobile" but also just as easily for "me.” The near-ubiquity of handheld devices and their constantly lowering costs will enable the idea of education that you can hold in your hand, so it becomes a widespread reality in so-called developed markets and resource-challenged parts of the globe alike. Thanks to findings from a frogMob--an open research tool that allows people to upload and contribute their own observations from around the globe--along with additional research and other insights contributed by our partners at the World Economic Forum, we have arrived at 10 key themes that are likely to drive the development of mLearning initiatives in innovative directions. Here they are.

1. Continuous learning

Up until now, most people relegated “education” to a finite time in their lives: entering school at around five years old and attending school institutions all the way to university. Education had an expiration date, then working life began. This model, which has its roots in the industrial era, is quickly becoming less relevant or applicable to the way we live our lives in the connected age.
Education is getting increasingly interspersed with our daily activities. On our phones, tablets, and PCs, we download and digest life or work-related articles with instructions on how to fix our appliances or how to use a new professional software program. Many people across age groups decide to take formal online courses in their spare time, including complex subjects such as artificial intelligence, computer science, and game theory--all real examples of free courses offered by Stanford University and taken by everyday people, including 11-year-old kids and retirees.
Continuous learning will simply be a given for the generations of today’s youngsters who are often literally born within reach of a connected personal device.

2. Educational leapfrogging

Continuous learning isn’t just happening in the developed world. With low-priced computers, tablets, and cell phones in the hands of children in resource-challenged communities, many kids who are engaging in technological leapfrogging will have the opportunity to skip past outdated formal school systems, too. This is especially relevant in the case of children living in poverty, who may be denied an opportunity to improve their condition through education because they start working very early to help sustain their families or do not live near schools.
The ability to interstitially access educational content during pauses throughout their daily routine, or at night, or even as a running “soundtrack” that accompanies them during their tasks are all novel opportunities offered by a classroom that can follow you wherever you go.

3. A new crop of older, lifelong learners (and educators)

A by-product of the continuous learning phenomenon is the fact that the grandparents of children growing up with a touchscreen in their hands--people in their 60s today--are being pulled into mLearning more than ever, motivated to adoption by the need to stay in touch with their grandkids.
The availability of tablets and other touch-enabled devices has radically reduced the perceived complexity of computers, helping older users to more easily communicate with their middle-aged children and grandkids via email, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype.
This is a demographic group that often has the time availability to take online courses for fun, but the same time availability also offers another untapped opportunity: Retirees represent a huge potential talent pool of educators who could address the scarcity of qualified teachers in many areas of the world--especially if they teach remotely, via mLearning.

4. Breaking gender boundaries, reducing physical burdens

In parts of the globe where, because of centuries of cultural practices, young women may still not be allowed to access a formal education, mLearning promises to be able to put girls and women of all ages in contact with high-quality education privately and on their own time. Along similar lines mLearning also helps bring educational material within the reach of people with extreme disabilities, who may not be physically able to get to a classroom or campus on a regular basis. In both of these cases, new freedoms can be exposed. As a result, these groups can take control of their educational and professional destinies.

5. A new literacy emerges: software literacy

MLearning could usher in a boom of interest in learning software programming languages, which could very well become a new lingua franca. This is already happening; Numerous startup web-based businesses today such as Codecademy teach people via interactive lessons how to understand and write software programs. Not even a year old, Codacademy has more than a million “students” and has raised about $3 million in venture-capital funds.
This scenario is particularly relevant in emerging economies, where gaining software development expertise can introduce new opportunities for economic growth, or give communities what they need to address unmet local needs. Consider the boom of homegrown startups in Kenya that has been shaping mHealth solutions to solve some of the many health care issues affecting the country, or the success of an organization like Ushahidi, which has been financing a social high-tech accelerator called iHUB in Nairobi precisely to promote software literacy and local entrepreneurship.

6. Education’s long tail

MLearning solutions are poised to tap into the vast amount of existing educational materials that could be made accessible via mobile channels. This is especially true with YouTube, Vimeo, and other video-sharing services already providing a critical mass of tips, tutorials, and full-fledged lessons that can be re-aggregated by theme and packaged as educational material. The recent TED-Ed initiative attests to the opportunity offered by the clever repurposing of existing quality lessons.
Others have leveraged the video-sharing social platforms to distribute educational materials created in an ad hoc way. It’s a model made famous by Salman Khan, an MIT graduate who, with his eponymous academy, flips the traditional education model by having pupils absorb lessons at home, and practice and discuss what they’ve learned at school instead.
The range of mLearning materials does not need to be limited to higher education but can easily encompass valuable, practical know-how, from grandmothers showing how to prepare traditional recipes to companies demonstrating how to install solar panels on mud huts.
The nature and complexity of educational materials can also vary greatly and not necessarily require a video-capable smartphone: Humanitarian organizations like MAMA have put to good use simple text messages to help mothers in developing economies learn about pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for their infants.

These examples illustrate how the power of mLearning lies in its ability to offer solutions for numerous niche audiences.

7. Teachers and pupils trade roles

The same handheld-connected tools that enable children and adults to access existing educational solutions also provide the opportunity for them to capture and share knowledge in return. In other words, imagine kids who are raised with programming and video-production knowledge from very early ages creating educational materials for their peers, or even to teach adults, exposing them to very young people’s points of view of the world. Imagine a 12-year-old boy explaining how effectively to communicate health information to him as a tutorial for nurses, physicians, and parents.

8. Synergies with mobile banking and mobile health initiatives

Developers of emerging mLearning ecosystems can learn a lot from their predecessors in mBanking and mHealth and such services as mobile money transfers or mobile health monitoring. Beyond adapting some ideas, including using text messaging to deliver short lessons, teacher feedback, and grades, mLearning, mHeatlh, and mFinance can also be synergistically combined. After all, better education can easily improve people’s financial condition and in turn positively influence their health. These three factors can be combined in different orders without changing the result, which will always be more than then sum of the individual components. Applied on a micro or macro scale, this virtuous cycle has the potential to become a very effective way to improve personal, regional, and even national economies.

9. New opportunities for traditional educational institutions

The mLearning phenomenon will not necessarily compete with well-established schools but actually complement and extend their current offerings. An intriguing new model was offered when Harvard and MIT announced that they have teamed up to offer free online courses via a joint nonprofit organization, edX. Both universities will observe how students respond to the courses to better understand distance learning.
After a few missed opportunities in the early 2000s, established universities seem to be looking beyond turning a profit and are turning to mLearning as a means to find new promising students or research how people learn. Traditional institutions could also help mLearning solutions scale quickly by leveraging their vast and established networks of students, faculty, and alumni. The business potential could also be big; a report published in February by Global Industry Analysts projects the global market for online and other electronic distance learning to reach $107 billion by 2015.

10. A revolution leading to customized education

The key for successfully channeling the mLearning revolution will not simply be about digitizing current educational systems. The real appeal will be allowing people to choose their own paths, leverage their talents, and follow their passions and callings. MLearning has much business potential, but the most exciting and rewarding aspect of these solutions is that students of any age or background might have the chance to pursue knowledge that is meaningful, relevant, and realistic to achieve in their own lives.

Coaching brilliant innovators

In the last five years, a growing number of studies and surveys have highlighted the importance of innovation for the economic health of companies and countries. Perhaps the most significant survey related to innovation was conducted in 2011 by GE, which interviewed a thousand senior business executives in twelve countries. They found that "95% of respondents believe innovation is the main lever for a more competitive national economy and 88% of respondents believe innovation is the best way to create jobs in their country."
Companies need innovators--individuals who willing to take risks and who bring a spark of imagination and initiative to whatever they do. And millennials--because they have grown up as "digital natives" who use technologies to learn, connect, collaborate, and create on a daily basis--are a huge potential talent pool for companies. They are driven to create and to make a difference in the world more than any generation in history. However, as I discovered many millennials are very averse to working for large corporations--and many companies, in turn, don't know how to work with this generation.
Ellen Kumata, who is managing director and partner at Cambria Consulting, works closely with senior executives in Fortune 100 companies. She told me that big corporations are "really nervous about the Millennial Generation. They work differently--and are not as focused on individual achievement. They don't want to 'make it' and see themselves in multiple jobs. The real question is, will organizations be able to capture their strengths?"
How do the Millenials work--what motivates them--and what must companies do to attract and retain highly talented 20-somethings?
The first and most important thing to understand about this generation is that they tend see work as a form of adult play--an opportunity to continue to learn and to express themselves. Secondly, they are more passion-driven than achievement driven. They seek experiences that are engaging in the moment, that excite them both intellectually and emotionally. People who interpret this desire as merely a wish for immediate gratification are missing a fundamental point: what many of this generation are most passionate about is making a difference.
Millennials are more interested in making a contribution than in making a lot of money--even those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Perhaps because they have been more exposed to a range of environmental and social problems than previous generations, every one of the young innovators whom I've interviewed wanted to solve an important problem or give back in some way. It was more than just a passion for these young people. It was a driving sense of purpose.
One of my most important research findings is the central importance of play, passion, and purpose in the development of innovators from a very early age. The best parents, teachers, and mentors encouraged these intrinsic motivations throughout the lives of the young innovators whom I interviewed. A central challenge for many companies, then, is to highlight elements of play, passion, and purpose in the work millenials are asked to do.
Millenials also work differently. They want to work more collaboratively. They enjoy learning from and interacting with others. They are also stifled by the requirements of a 9 to 5 routine. "Hold me accountable for solving the problem rather than punching a time clock," they say. If they are engaged with play, passion, and purpose, they will do whatever it takes and put in whatever time is required to get the job done.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for many companies, though, is breaking down hierarchies and creating far more two-way communication. At the senior management level in far too many companies w/ this top-down attitude--the belief that all the worthwhile ideas are created at the top of the organization, and everyone else is just an implementer. The CEOs believe that they are better at everything than anyone else, and if only they had enough arms and legs, then everything would be more successful.
The free flow of information up and down the organization is critical for innovation, but a top-down management style tends to severely restrict the emergence of any new ideas and inhibits the development of the 'collective wisdom' of the company."
According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, "In many highly innovative companies, great ideas come from all levels of an organization, not just from the top...At most companies, the problem is, employees have little input. Research has found that the average U.S. employee's ideas, big or small, are implemented only once every six years.
Brad Anderson, who retired as CEO of Best Buy in 2009, turned that company around by listening to his young employees and engaging them in new ways. "For most of my years in retailing, once a company had multiple stores, your goal was to dumb down the operations so as to reduce the number of variables. Now we have this extraordinary and singular opportunity to remake the workplace and dramatically improve productivity," he told me.
"With the new communications tools, you can have a much deeper engagement with people who work for you. Line-level employees at Best Buy can now have access to the same kind of knowledge as the CEO, but they also have access to knowledge the CEO doesn't have because of their direct contact with customers. And with the increased competition, you have to find competitive breakthroughs. So you now can, and must, engage your employees in much more creative ways, as opposed to telling them how you want customers to be dealt with. Henry Ford used to say that he wanted his employees' hands, but not their minds. Retailing was the same way through the nineties. Now we have to differentiate and adapt to customers' needs, using what we learn from our line employees, while also realizing the economies of scale."
When I asked Anderson what was the number-one obstacle he had to overcome in remaking Best Buy, he answered emphatically, "The hierarchy. Once you promote someone to executive rank, the vision of what it means to be an executive is so often counterintuitive to the idea of listening to your employees, developing them, and using their expertise. It was hard to find people who were authentically inspired by wanting to lead, and developing the people they were leading--as opposed to the financial rewards and the belief that they succeeded because they were smarter than everyone else."
Authority still matters for successful innovation, but it is not the authority that comes with a position or title. It is the authority that comes from having some expertise, but it also comes from the ability to listen well and empathetically, to ask good questions, to model good values, to help an individual more fully realize his or her talents--and to create a shared vision and collective accountability for its realization. It is the authority that empowers teams to discover better solutions to new problems.
Perhaps the more important take-away from all of my interviews is that whether you are a parent, teacher, commanding officer, or employer, to enable individuals to become innovators, you must rethink the sources of your authority. The word "coach" describes this new kind of authority at its best. Innovators need excellent coaching at every age and stage. When they are engaged through play, passion, and purpose, and when they have opportunities to collaborate and receive good coaching, millennials produce extraordinary results.

OS for DNA

The personalized medicine revolution is on it's way. We have the tools: the Ion Proton genetic sequencer, for instance, can sequence an entire genome in a day for $1,000. It took $3 billion and 13 years to sequence the first human genome back in the ancient days of 2003.

The rapid advancement of sequencing technology could dramatically change medicine, with routine screening for cancer-causing genes, genetic profiling of every tumor that reaches a doctor’s office, and more. Already, every child born in California has part of their DNA sequenced for genetic testing. sequencing is ultimately a big data problem.
There’s just one problem: DNA has evolved for millions of years to be an efficient data-storage device. Our computers are incredibly far behind, so it takes whole lot of computer memory to store everyone’s genome. The solution, as it is with so many memory-intensive things, is to store the data in the cloud.

DNAnexus, a Google Ventures-backed company, wants to be the one to do it.
We think that DNA sequencing is ultimately a big data problem. Each human has six billion letters of DNA in your body, but when you get that information out of your cells and into a computer, it tends to take almost a terabyte of data per human. That’s like 20 DVDs of information.

Doctors find all these different tools for analyzing DNA, visualizing DNA

DNAnexus’s fix is to have doctors upload lab data to the Internet, where it is stored in a cloud-based DNAnexus account powered by Amazon and Google’s cloud storage. The startup also has DNA analysis and visualization tools built into the service.
It should be as easy for doctors to log into DNAnexus and work with the data as it is for them to log into their Gmail. It’s almost like an operating system for DNA. We’re like this platform layer that sits on top of Amazon and Google’s clouds. In that environment, [doctors] find all these different tools for analyzing DNA, visualizing DNA, all the different databases of what we know about DNA.

Some of the largest medical centers in the U.S. are already looking at DNA sequencing and starting to use it for patient care--especially for children with rare genetic disorders and cancer patients. Sequencing will only become more popular as prices drop. In two years, Sundquist believes that we’ll see the first million people sequenced. In five to 10 years, it will be commonplace.
You’re going to sequence all of your DNA once, it’s going to be part of your medical record, and every time you go out to have a genetic test, they’re basically going to run a piece of software that will look at the DNA that has already been sequenced and tell you new information based on that test.
When that happens, companies like DNAnexus--and competitors like Bina Technologies--will (hopefully) be there to help us deal with the DNA data overload.

The photo sharing industry

You run through the latest collection of your party photos, psyched to share the best ones with a few good friends. You email them and post them on Instagram and Facebook. Then you realize what everyone will really be looking at in the pics. Hint: It’s not you, it's them. The first thing they’re scanning for is to make sure they look good. They then look at the people surrounding themselves in the image. In this case they’re not nearly as interested in how good looking the people are, they’re more concerned about how popular they themselves appear, and that they’re being seen with the "right people."

When we talk about ourselves, there is heightened activity in the region of the brain concerned with reward and satisfaction--and often associated with food, money, and sex.

Over the past year, I’ve used eye-tracking technology to study exactly how obsessed we are with ourselves. What I've found is that, more than ever, we’re hardwired to be this way--regardless of culture, age, or gender. This goes a ways toward explaining the latest craze sweeping Japan. It’s not a new gadget, or more exotic sushi. No, it’s something as traditional as a postage stamp. As part of a recent incentive to encourage the Japanese to send letters, Japan Post issued a series of stamps with an entirely new format. These stamps were not emblazoned with royal profiles, historical personas, striking flowers or rare birds; rather, it offered the opportunity for the consumer to place their own face on the letter.

How did we get here?
One need look no further than Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to get a sense of how willing people are to reveal all--to say nothing of the countless throngs of bloggers still clogging your RSS feeds. But surely this goes beyond mere narcisisim, which every one agrees is a powerful force. Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, along with her colleague Jason Mitchell, set out to study why we are essentially motivated towards self-disclosure and, well, bragging.
The researchers recently set up a series of laboratory tests to find out what value people placed on various opportunities for self-disclosure. Using MRI they tracked the brain flows of the respondents, to see what parts of their brain were activated when they answered serious questions about their inspirations and beliefs, as well as casual questions about pizza preferences, say, or what sports they like to watch. The scientists offered money as an incentive for the subjects to answer certain questions that nothing to do with themselves. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Tamir said, "We joked that this was the penny for your thoughts study."
And yet, despite the financial incentive, the subjects were willing to relinquish between 17-25% of their potential earnings, in order to reveal information about themselves. What Tamir and Mitchell found was that when people speak about themselves, there is heightened activity in the region of the brain belonging to the meso-limbic dopamine system. This is the area interested in reward and satisfaction, often associated with food, money, and sex.

If you are suddenly smelling a market opportunity, rest assured that you are not alone. So what might this pleasure of self-disclosure mean for the future of brands? For starters I predict we’ll begin to see unusual brand alliances. It’s likely corporate brands will offer consumers a "soap-box" from which individuals can pimp their own identity. Indeed Best Buy has of late been doing just this by featuring tech innovators as the faces of the products the chain sells--check out Instagram's Kevin Systrom, the guys behind Words With Friends, and other creators in the clip below.
The Japanese have also already grasped this notion. In fact I noticed this trend emerging a few years ago when Japan’s largest noodle manufacturer encouraged chefs from local eateries to feature their portraits on mass-market noodles produced in small quantities, and only sold in the local restaurant and the surrounding retail outlets. Pretty impressive, when you think about it. On the one hand, the noodle company is leveraging their big-muscle brand power, while at the same time they’re tapping into the brand equity of the local chef who is known and respected in the neighbourhood. I suspected then that this form of individual branding was merely the beginnin

In China they wanted to showcase an amazing new technology. Using an ordinary camera, the company demonstrated how they could capture a photo and convert it into a 3-D figure, in two short minutes. But that’s not all. There were hundreds of images at the ready. I could, for example, select Homer Simpson’s impressive midriff, and put a photo of my face on top of it. For good measure, I could add a pair of Mickey Mouse’s ears. The quality was as impressive as the versatility it offered. Oh, and it could all be done for the grand sum of $2.

As technology improves and the cost of production decreases, personal branding will no longer be in the domain of an elite few. Soon every Smith, Singh, and Lee, will become his or her own brand on anything and everything, everywhere. Printing centers have been offering this feature for years--we’re all well familiar the local plumbers’ fridge magnets--but there’s a new generation of merchandising making its way to you, and it promises to make you the center of the universe. It won’t be long before brands are forced to create alliances with each and every one of their customers. You might want to clear your calendar.

HTML5 code

It's hard to imagine now, but original sites on the web, written in HTML code were made up of little more than text.

Corporate web designers were well aware that most of their customers had slow connections and would not tolerate much of a wait.

Even a simple black and white image could irritate a user, as it gradually appeared on the screen revealing itself one painful line at a time.

That began to change as modem speeds gradually crept up and content makers used more sophisticated methods to encode their multimedia content.

Macromedia's Flash, now an Adobe product, made all the difference when it arrived in the mid-nineties. Animations, video sequences and graphics became more sophisticated.

But since its invention in the early 1990s HTML has not supported video natively.

That is why HTML5 is being received so enthusiastically by businesses in particular. The latest version can perform all kinds of dynamic tasks and visual tricks. The web is progressing faster now than it has in a long time.

Application developers, like Kevin Sweeney who works at Vimeo, a video-sharing website based in New York, have already embraced the new tools that are built in to HTML5.

 It will take time before all systems are able to work with HTML5

"We've needed to rely on third parties like Adobe Flash or QuickTime and had to embed this inside web pages. What HTML5 will do is remove them from the equation so this stuff is supported natively," he says.

Put simply it means that there's now much less chance that customers visiting a website will come across a black hole in the middle of the page, or get endless prompts to "download a plug-in" which may take several minutes to install.

 

By then it is often too late. The consumer has already clicked on a competitor's website.

The iPod Touch, iPhone and lately the iPad have been especially good at leaving black holes on the screen, because the former boss of Apple, Steve Jobs, would not allow Flash to run on any of his iOS devices from the start.

The success of these products globally means many companies cannot ignore the need to re-code their entire websites in HTML5, especially the multimedia content.

A lot of companies are not waiting for the HTML5 specs to be finalised and approved in a multi-year process. They have jumped right in, using early "unofficial" versions of the code to deliver a complete web page to every customer.

"If you are a recipe curator with a website, all of a sudden you can build pages that work on a touchpad that's built into a refrigerator. People will know what ingredients they have in their refrigerator and keep track of it using an HTML5 app on the screen."

 Google is pushing HTML5 hard, not surprising since the greater impact that web pages and apps have, the more advertising it can sell.

Its search homepage is traditionally sparse but many of the doodles, including the Jules Verne-inspired interactive submarine, are now being designed to take advantage of the newest code.

Jeff Harris, product manager for Google Docs, says HTML5 will change the way its services operate from the ground up.

"A simple example would be taking an attachment from your desktop and dragging it into the compose window in Gmail. That's a basic capability that you couldn't do five years ago because web browsers didn't support it."

HTML5 also represents another step to the "semantic web", a web structure championed by Tim Berners-Lee that cross-references, reacts to and displays multiple information sources from the internet in real time.

HTML5 is partly responsible for the browser wars in the past few years.

A decade ago Chrome, Firefox and Safari didn't exist, and browser updates for Internet Explorer were only occasional.

Today desktop and mobile browsers update frequently as new HTML5 functions get incorporated.

Companies favour HTML5 because it can also replicate experiences previously only available inside an app, on the web. This is especially true for the mobile environment.

And a lot of brand names don't like being part of someone else's ecosystem because they lose control of pricing and subscribers. The Financial Times recently announced it will shut off its iPad app completely following the success of its HTML5 web page.

This is a trend that is likely to snowball within months.
Flash forward
But where does this leave Adobe Flash?

 Adobe's Danny Winokur insists Flash still has a future

The company has already stopped supporting it on mobile devices.

Danny Winokur, the general manager of the Interactive Development Business at Adobe, says the future of Flash is not in doubt, especially since protecting high quality assets with DRM (Digital Rights Management) is not yet possible in HTML5.

"Flash is allowing things like 3D immersive gaming that you would normally see on an Xbox or Playstation to come into a web browser," he says.

"That's something that HTML may eventually be able to do but it has a long way to go. Flash will pioneer those most advanced cases like HD feature-rich cinema graphic content that needs to be copy-protected."

Ideally of course the end user will not notice, or even care, that the web is being powered by a new updated set of code.

If HTML5 does its job properly, no-one outside the web development community will ever know about it!

brilyuhnt teaching methods

We don’t need to memorize things any more, but we still need teachers to guide our students toward learning the best ways to problem solve. The question is: How do you measure that?

As you read this, students all over the country are sitting for state standardized exams. Schools spend up to 40% of the year on test prep, so that, shall we say, no child is left behind. Schools’ futures and funding depend on the number of students who fall into performance bands like “Advanced," “Proficient,” and “Approaching Basic” based on bubble sheets and number two pencils.

Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning:  I’m not opposed to standardized testing. Common assessments are a critical way of maintaining high expectations for all kids. Great teachers want benchmarks to measure progress and ensure that they are closing the gap between students in their classroom and the kids across town. What you measure should matter. The problem is, most American classrooms are measuring the wrong thing.

Schools used to be gatekeepers of knowledge, and memorization was key to success. Thus, we measured students’ abilities to regurgitate facts and formulas. Not anymore. As Seth Godin writes, “If there’s information that can be recorded, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number.”

We don’t need a human to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number.

Given this argument, many entrepreneurs see a disruptive opportunity to “democratize” education, meaning that everyone now has a platform from which to teach, and anyone can learn anything anywhere anytime. Ventures like Udacity, ShowMe, LearnZillion, and Skillshare increase the efficiency of the learning market by lowering barriers to knowledge acquisition.

Yet there is an inherent bias in the promise of these new platforms that favors extraordinarily self-directed learners.

But by itself, this “any thing/place/time” learning won’t lead to the revolution we seek. We also have the responsibility of unlocking the potential of every student because the world needs more leaders, problem-finders, and rule-breakers. Teachers are perfectly positioned to take on this challenge.

Teaching’s primary purpose should be to ensure that every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative.

The primary purpose of teaching can now shift away from “stand and deliver” and becomes this: to be relentless about making sure every student graduates ready to tinker, create, and take initiative.

Our schools should be producing kids who tinker, make, experiment, collaborate, question, and embrace failure as an opportunity to learn. Our schools must be staffed with passionate teachers who are not just prepared to foster creativity, perseverance, and empathy, but are responsible for ensuring kids develop these skills.

Most importantly, in these schools, old-fashioned gradebooks and multiple-choice tests aren’t good enough. Teachers need better tools to track several dimensions of student progress. Kids are more than just test scores. The narrative is important, and teaching demands a new type of CRM (classroom relationship management) to capture anecdotal notes and evidence of student growth. Teachers must become disciplined and analytical about identifying students’ strengths and skill gaps, continuously turning classroom data into a plan of action.

Schools like this exist in the dozens, but we need them in the hundreds of thousands:

But we’re shortchanging kids if we aren’t relentless about measuring outcomes in these new models. Teachers are the linchpins here. They’re much more than just motivational coaches, they must become results-oriented diagnosticians of student learning.

In a world where the sheer volume and accessibility of information is growing exponentially, perhaps what’s most remarkable is that to create, tinker, and take initiative in this new world doesn’t always require high-tech gadgets. Take nine-year-old Caine Monroy and his cardboard arcade for example. Monroy has shown the world that all you need is a little ingenuity and a cardboard box.

Imagine a world in which all teachers were relentless about fostering that same creativity in all of their students.