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tackle what colleges were doing poorly: graduating students. Half the students who enroll in post-secondary education never get a degree but still accumulate debt

school spends millions to employ more than 160 “admissions counselors” who man the phones, especially on weekends, guiding prospective students into the right degree program

“College is designed in every way for that 20 percent—cost, time, scheduling, everything,” says LeBlanc. He set out to create an institution for the other 80 percent, one that was flexible and offered a seamless online experience

online courses are created centrally and then farmed out to a small army of adjuncts hired for as little as $2,200 a class. Those adjuncts have scant leeway in crafting the learning experience.

highly standardized courses, and adjuncts who act more like coaches than professors

The top five benefits of e-learning identified by respondents are: It increases access through location and time-flexible learning. More resources and information are available to students 24/7. Teachers can use a wide variety of tools and methods for teaching. It is a good supplement to face-to-face curriculum. It can lead to a richer learning experience if integrated correctly, freeing up class time for more engaging activities. This experience is often referred to as “flipping the classroom.”

Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution,

fooling a high proportion of people into believing they are talking to a human.

algorithms

believes it will come in the next few decades.

But he is betting that AI is going to be a positive force.

destroy millions of jobs.

Elon Musk has warned that AI is "our biggest existential threat".

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."

"More must be done by the internet companies to counter the threat, but the difficulty is to do this without sacrificing freedom and privacy."

write much faster with his new system.

he didn't want a more natural voice.

children who need a computer voice

Teachers are observed by colleagues and get feedback weekly, and they have four weeks of full-day professional development each year.

Many teachers don’t last. Of 43 hired during the four years studied, 47% didn’t return for a second year, in most cases because they weren’t asked back.

Critics of charter schools say, among other complaints, that they drain money from regular public schools, skim talented students and nudge out disruptive ones.

How do we set ourselves apart? In our case, by the development of these interactive learning space classrooms, we are demonstrating to everyone that we are committed to the concept of faculty development.”

researchers found at-risk students who took the course in classrooms that promoted active learning (which included some rooms other than the renovated ones) were 2.8 times more likely to succeed -- that is, to earn a grade higher than a D -- than students in traditional classrooms.

The company has surveyed hundreds of students and faculty members at the universities it has worked with, and says it has found a statistically significant correlation between classroom configuration and student engagement. The survey doesn't include any academic results.

“Perception-wise, students are telling us ‘I can do better when I’m in these spaces,’ ” Jones said. “Maybe that’s enough of a win?”

The levels of engagement were much better in the first year under the block schedule, while in the second year the ratings were the same as under the traditional schedule.

Students reported “thinking hard about ideas” and “having indepth discussion” significantly more often under block schedules.

his may also be supported by Bexell (1998) who found teachers on block schedules using teaching strategies requiring more interaction than teachers on a traditional schedule

It would seem that the small amount of change in the way teachers teach after switching to a block schedule would be disappointing to block scheduling advocates

Important questions hover over these findings. What is an effective amount of teacher lecture? Or group work? Or individual work?

One thing that is missing from the observation instrument used in this study is any judgment about the quality of a lecture, quality and depth of a discussion, or the complexity of group or individual work

Daniel and Jakobsen argue that the information dense textbooks characteristic of natural and social science subjects are not a good fit for current e-textbooks, but there are exceptions for subjects like chemistry and math that include doing formulas and other activities. The liability, Daniel emphasizes, comes when math and chemistry teachers hope their students will learn the explanations, not just the formulas, “Students tend to skip the text and go straight to the formulas, especially if they are graded.”

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

project-based learning

highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.

When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.

“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

fact-finding

problem-finding

Next, idea-finding

there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.