What if your math syllabus could tell you what to eat for breakfast to score higher on your quiz tomorrow? Jose Ferreira, CEO of Knewton, shares his vision for a future where every student receives a truly personalized curriculum best suited to his or her needs. Knewton collects millions of data points about student users in order to provide them with more effective timing and content to enhance learning. (See link above for Youtube video)This is becoming more of a reality in the USA because every child doing Common Core is attached to a computer. Mr Ferreira does talk very fast so here is a transcript of part of the talk:
"It is like the human race is about to enter a totally data-mine human existence and it`s going to be really fun to watch. It`s going to be one of those things where our grandkids our going to tell our kids, "I can`t believe you grew up in a world like that," just like our kids complained that we went to record stores..."
"The world in 30 years is going to be unrecognisably data mined. So what does that mean for education?"
"Well education happens to be today the world`s most data minable industry by far and it`s not even close. So maybe one day healthcare will be up there when they have little nanobots that are in your bloodstream that are doing real time analysis, but until then it`s not close. Education beats everything else hands down. So let`s look at other big data industries."
"We haven`t given that a name yet, what you figure out is everything in education is correlated to everything else down to the concept. Now this is where education`s different from search and social networking. If someone tagged every single line, every single sentence of all the world`s web pages for Google, or every single line of dialogue in Netflix, which no-one`s done, but even if they had they`re not really a whole lot of interesting correlations there. Everything in education is correlated to everything else. Every single concept is correlated in a predictable way to everything else using psychometrics. Right."
"So if you do ten minutes of work in Google you produce a dozen data points for Google. Because everything we do is tagged at such a grander level if you do 10 minutes of work for Knewton you cascade out lots and lots of other data, and here`s why. When you took that SAT there might be 40 different concepts about equal auto triangles that are tested on all the SATs ever given in any one year. But you didn`t get all 40 questions you got two questions on equal auto triangles because they figure if you`re in the top 14th percentile at those two questions, 13% on this one and 15% on that one, if your`re in the top 14th percentile on those two questions in equal auto triangles the odds are 98% percentile chance that you`re in the top 14% percentile at every concept about equal auto triangles. And there`s a 96% chance that you`re in the top 15% percentile about all triangle concepts, three, four, five, 30%, 60%, 90%, asceles, etc, etc,. You did a little bit of work for Knewton and we used just established signs of psychometrics to cascade out hundreds of other data. So we can produce incredible quantities of data per user per day."
"It`s really, really hard to get that, but if you can get all that tagging done D and that`s one of our tags it`s on D that`s a small part of our overall taxonomy, that`s just part of one course and we have dozens of taxonomies, then if you can do this, what you can do with the data if you actually do all that work is you can figure out exactly what students know and how well they know it. You can figure it out down to the percentile versus the rest of the population. So Knewton students today we have about 180,000 and next year it`ll be closer to ten million, and that`s just our Pearson partnership. So for every one of the students we can figure out within a few hours what they`re strong at and what they`re weak at, at the beginning of the course."
"So we can produce a unique syllabus for each student each day, literally unique. There`s not enough time in the universe to have the same syllabus on any one day, that`s how many there are. So it`s optimised for each kid down to the atomic concept. And then we can figure out things like well here`s your homework tomorrow night. You`re going to struggle with that homework or you`re going to fail it... "
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