In 2033...

 

“What will online (or blended) learning look like in 2033?”  Facing this prompt, my first instinct was to throw it into an AI text generator just to see what it would spit out, and then BAM! I’d have an instant post.  Like three-minute Ramen without the three extra minutes.

Unfortunately, what I got out of it was what I almost always get from AI text generators: the sinking feeling that I should have just done it on my own anyway.  Which, ironically, leads me right to where we will probably be in 2033: using AI extensively, but still spending a multitude of  (I used AI to find a synonym there, success!) human hours to sift through the products that AI creates to find what is actually viable.

I foresee this situation creating two different supply-and-demand fiascos for the educational field: a rapidly increasing demand for digital literacy courses that teach students (of all ages) how to analyze the content produces by AI generators, and a rapidly decreasing demand for educational standards that do not involve this type of analysis.  The assumption that every student should or will be able to create the same content that the AI generators can make will (hopefully) become as outdated as the abacus.  In their place, there will be an increase in educational standards that require students to develop and demonstrate the proper skills needed to interact with these AI generators effectively.

Here are two examples.  The first is a standard from my own course, a senior-level high school math course:  “Solve trigonometric equations” (Arizona Department of Education, 2016).  This could be revised to state “Analyze trigonometric equations solved by an AI generator to identify potential errors.”  This would require the students to learn the same material, but it opens the gate to including the new technology (which will be prolific in 2033) and the crucial skill of error analysis.

The second example is from a third-grade Music standard.  “Demonstrate knowledge of expressive attributes and how they support creators’/performers’ expressive intent” (Arizona Department of Education, 2015).  This could be revised to state “Compare perceptions of creators’/performers’ expressive intent to analyses generated by AI.”  By revising the standard in this way, an opportunity is created for the students to first form their own conclusions and then use AI to perform research and use newly-developed “compare and contrast” skills to determine which seems more accurate and why.

Although I anticipate seeing much more AI by 2033, there are also two conceptual ideas that I am hoping will take deeper root and spread to become commonplace in education by that time.  These are mastery grading and gamification.

Mastery grading is the concept that students should be graded on a rubric (not a percentage scale!) based on their mastery of individual skills, not collected sets of skills lumped into “chapter quizzes” or “unit tests” or even “midterms.”  This is the source of the whole Give Students Fifties Instead Of Zeroes Debacle.  (Sidebar—the reason for that problem is that people are trying to cram a rubric system into a decades-old percentage scale the allots 59% of the scale to one letter).  Anyway, the reason that Mastery Grading is so amazing is the same reason that we look at GPA scores and only count from 0 to 4—each respective bracket communicates (fairly clearly) where the student has been performing.  Now, imagine if there where six additional ranks on the GPA scale, but they were all just name “0”.  Wouldn’t that be confusing?  Yes.  Yes, it would be.  And that is why, if we just got rid of percentage grades all together, I couldn’t be happier.  And this is coming from a math teacher!  All of this number talk doesn’t even touch on the benefit to students, though.  Explaining to a student, “You showed some knowledge, so you are at a level one, but with a bit of practice you could easily reach two or three,” has such a HUGELY different impact over telling that same student, “Well, you only got 10 right, which is a failing grade, but maybe if you do some extra credit you can make up for it and balance out to passing with a low D.”  In the year 2033, I hope everyone is using Mastery grading.  Yes, even online classrooms.

Another trend I’d like to see hit the big time by 2033 (and its stats are currently increasing exponentially, so it is likely this will happen) is gamification.  Gamification is bringing game-based elements, such as points, currency, or leaderboards, to non-game environments.  Like classrooms.  This has been done in physical classrooms very well—any teacher with a points tally on their board can tell you all about it—but it can really hit its stride in an online environment.  In order to bring gamification to an entire unit or an entire course, the instructor needs a structured way to keep track of student currency, rankings, rewards, and/or penalties.  The old-fashioned way—pen and paper—has already been replaced with highly advanced systems managed by sites such as ClassDojo, Classcraft, or Canvas Badges (Badgr).  This could be integrated with an online course by including a section of the LMS that has the current leaderboard (or team leaderboard) posted along with other key information for the game, such as objectives/quests, currency/shop details, and reminders about course policies that may cause students to lose currency.  Students will feel motivated to log in to the course, if only to check their standings.  They will feel the desire to attempt assignments multiple times, just to beat the high score.  And maybe, if the game is designed well, they might even forget that they logged on to do “schoolwork” because they got so distracted by all of the learning they ended up doing.

 

References

Arizona Department of Education. (2015, May 19). Music Academic Standards. azed.gov. https://www.azed.gov/sites/default/files/2023/05/Music%20Academic%20Standards.pdf

Arizona Department of Education. (2016, Dec 16). Arizona Mathematics Standards. Retrieved from http://www.azed.gov/standards-practices/k12standards/mathematics-standards/.