Editor’s note: Tom Snyder is executive director of RIoT, an Internet of Things users group based in Raleigh.

RALEIGH – A grand experiment has been playing out the past few weeks as schools of all types and sizes have launched fall semester education.  Almost universally, within a few days of launch, each school and school system from pre-K to college has made significant changes to their initial plans, based on immediate feedback on what is working — or more commonly — what is not.

As leader of a nonprofit organization that has education as one of the pillars of RIoT’s mission, I’m not writing to debate or criticize the various approaches that schools have chosen to follow.  There is plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking going on right now, which has questionable value.  But I am interested to explore greater trends in education that COVID may accelerate.

First Principles

In the RIoT Accelerator, like most startup accelerator programs around the world, we begin working with entrepreneurs by teaching first principles.  Most importantly – listen to your customers.  Understand what problem you are solving that the market is hungry for.  Companies that build a solution first – then try to sell it – regularly fail.  Companies that find out what customers want, before building a solution, have the most success.

Education has been delivered in a relatively consistent manner for a long time in the US.  We cluster students by geographic proximity to physical buildings.  We teach students in groups divided by age.  We measure success with standardized test scores, by achieving total time milestones in a classroom and by counting credit hours completed against a small set of curricular paths.  Many of these education solution approaches date back to early manufacturing and factory measurement systems of productivity.

Continuing to offer an education “solution” that mirrors how it has been done previously is highly unlikely to address the new needs of a post-COVID world.  But most of the debate around education right now is centered on how we recreate established educational solutions within the practical constraints that COVID presents.

Tom Snyder. Photo by Sarah Glova.

We take a traditional classroom and hold it virtually.  We submit the same research papers and do the same assignments and quizzes, but with online platforms.  In other words, traditional educators are making huge efforts to do the same thing we have always done, just with additional technology sprinkled in.  The outcome is to maintain the old educational solutions (and associated measures).

Very little debate is centered on how best to achieve educational outcomes required for our children and employees themselves.  I challenge that the desired outcome for education should be twofold.  First, that each person learns how to continuously learn, which benefits them for a lifetime.  And second, that they become skilled enough to be hired (or promoted) into a job that provides them financial freedom and stability.  In some cases, the education outcome provides the confidence to create a new job through entrepreneurship rather than simply hope to be hired by someone else.

These outcomes are the market need to which new educational solutions should be architected.  We see early indications of the business community validating these outcomes as their hiring practices put lower importance on traditional resumes and four-year degrees and stronger emphasis on skill assessment and ability to learn new tools.

Continuing Education in Business

Since March, I have been worried about how to help my employees with their own career development.  Historically, I have coached, mentored and educated employees in real time, based on observations of their day to day work.  Often the best coaching occurs “in the moment” through trusted feedback and minor steering and course correction.  I have found it extremely difficult to adequately observe individual employee development when the only contact is during phone and video conferencing.  I worry that over time, employees will not learn organically and develop new skills that enable them to take on new challenges quickly or effectively.

The employees themselves lose the observational learning of working in groups and overhearing conversations.  They are no longer benefiting from quick introductions as colleagues have visitors to our facilities.  They are much further shielded from seeing other parts of the business operate or learning from colleagues over lunches and coffee breaks.

RIoT has hired new employees that have never met their teammates in person.  All of this is part of a new reality that all organizations are adapting to.  How do we coach and develop employees in a predominantly remote-worker world?

There are trends emerging that I expect to be components of new “solutions” to the education challenges in early and advanced education and within industry, post-COVID.

Experiential learning

College and high school students were hit exceptionally hard this year when nearly all summer internships were cancelled.  There is no faster way to learn than by doing.  You learn to swim most quickly by jumping into the deep end, not by reading a book.

RIoT is doing a small part, connecting UNC students to startup companies through the RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP).  RAP would not be considered a traditional educational path, but we anticipate in the 12-week program that students will learn a broad and cross-functional range of business and technical skills, while also helping startup companies that do not have developed HR systems to recruit interns through traditional channels.

Code schools offer another non-traditional path to rapid education, often helping people land high-paying developer jobs in as little as a few months of hands-on learning.  Compared to the massive cost of a 4-year traditional degree, the code school option is becoming increasingly attractive.  A degree from a known institution used to be the gold standard for candidate credibility, but with quick online skill assessments as a candidate filter, no longer does that degree hold the same value.

Project-based courses provide a strong analog to real-world job experience.  At very young ages, we “get this” having kids draw pictures and make crafts and play on the playground.  They learn, both socially and intellectually, through active experience.  In later years, we tend to move predominantly to a lecture and test approach. In part, this is due to the efficiency of delivery a traditional school must achieve in order to conduct 1080 hours of instruction per year and have upwards of 35 students per teacher within a limited budget.

I expect the most successful educational institutions post-COVID will be ones that bring much higher focus to project-based learning, where groups of students have to create things from scratch, learning along the way – with much of that learning self-directed by the students themselves.  Teachers can become coaches and motivators more so than lecturers and evaluators.

The same will apply to enterprise managers, who will more often need to give new challenges to employees and employee groups remotely — and then be available to mentor and advise online as projects come seeking help.

Most content delivery will be screen-based, but the “deliver anything, anywhere” economy that e-commerce has driven unlocks the potential for physical learning as well.  Phase Dock is a local startup that sells portable (and shippable) electronics prototyping platforms.  The units include all the parts students need to learn hands-on electronics design, taught by teachers with the same kits on the other side of a video chat.  High school teachers are clamoring for these kinds of tools to augment their online content. Early adopting school systems have signed on with strong results.

Unfortunately, not all skills are well suited to truly experiential learning through a digital platform, even with shippable aids.  Even with advances in virtual and augmented reality, for the foreseeable future welders will still need to spark fire and electricity to steel directly to truly perfect that craft.  That said, I expect that we will see a significant increase in the production-quality of online resources for education in all areas.

Students will gravitate to entertaining, interactive, highly produced (think movies/TV/games) content before dry webinars and powerpoints. VR and AR will shine as those technologies achieve broader adoption. Highly produced content is more experiential, engaging the mind and emotions, leading to faster learning and better retention of knowledge.

Diversity matters

A national shift to near 100% remote learning provides a unique opportunity to disrupt geographic, economic and age-based student grouping.  There is substantial research showing positive outcomes occur in the presence of many different measures of diversity.  With students engaging online, it becomes much easier to bring students from widely different backgrounds into project groups together.  It is less important to have a student team member that lives across the street or comes from the same economic, ethnic or racial group as another.  In fact, we do not even need to know what those parameters are.  By obfuscating that data, we can purely distribute learning groups without bias.

Digital tools make it significantly easier to connect students to a diversity of learning resources.  No longer should students have access to only the resources of their particular school system.  I have learned more practical knowledge in the past 10 years from watching YouTube videos than from any formal classes or courses I’ve taken.

Khan Academy, Coursera and other learning platforms have curriculums for far more topics than any school could offer, when that school is required to have a minimum number of students in each class to make the economics work.  With virtual learning and relaxation of geographic constraints, the classroom-unit-economics are completely disrupted.

RIoT runs an annual Developer Day, which this year has expanded to a full month of no-cost online learning sessions [Editor’s note: Free registration here].  We’re excited to have had people of all ages and backgrounds participate in person at our programs in the past.  I expect this month to see middle and high school students mixing with seasoned professionals as they learn new IoT platforms and tools together.

A diversity of participation and a diversity of learning resources lays the foundation for truly customized learning.

Customized Learning

Today’s education-industrial complex moves students, factory-style, through a limited number of curricular paths (majors/grades = assembly lines) on a year by year basis.  Students have very little control over what topics are available to study — and there is near zero ability to dig deep into widely disparate topics.

Colleges, nor high schools are architected for the student that wants to study genetics, corporate finance and machine learning analytics.  But the student that wants to launch the next 23andMe would want exactly that mix of knowledge.

Students likewise have had little control over the methods of learning that work best for them.  Some retain information better when reading it.  Some when hearing it.  Some by viewing charts and graphs.  Digital platforms give the flexibility for each student to consume the same information in a variety of ways, rather than only the way a teacher chooses to present it.  It also opens the possibility for students to each learn at their own pace.

Business professionals have long had the opportunity to steer their own educational path by job-hopping or taking evening courses at a local community college or university.  No one really questions the intelligence of people pursuing their own interests in this regard.  Why do we not push that same mindset at earlier stages of development?

The broad availability of digital tools and resources enables students of any age or background to now study what they want.  There is a lot of nervousness right now about how to prove that a student is actually attending and paying attention in an online class.  That question is rooted in an underlying belief that attending a traditional (now online) classroom for a set amount of time is the correct solution and measure for learning.

We see affluent parents spearheading customized learning as small groups hire tutors to work with a few children at a time to supplement their traditional (online) school curriculum.  I expect this trend to show significantly higher educational outcomes.  Those outcomes will be in part due to the additional coaching from the tutor, but also because of the stronger voice of the student in steering their own direction.

I have a 6-year old grandson that is learning chemistry and compounds by playing Minecraft.  He absolutely loves it and is learning something new every day.  I am certain that if he hits a traditional chemistry lecture in 10th grade he will be bored beyond belief.  But because his learning is self-directed, and fun, he begs for more.

I’ve seen the same behavior from young learners in code-camps.  When they can self-select what project to build or game to create, the learning becomes addictive.  This past summer there were more online summer camp opportunities than ever before, across an incredible number of topics from cooking to coding to science and nature.  I expect to see many more startups address the educational opportunity that COVID created, developing engaging content for interests of all kinds.

We see dramatic drop-off from early ages of women pursuing STEM education as they progress year-over-year through school.  I suspect this has far more to do with the method of how those courses are taught and the traditional classroom culture around them than with the actual skills or interests of those women.

When given the opportunity to self-select from a myriad of different learning resources, would we see sustained interest as talented women continue to develop their skills?  Would more independence to select projects of interest better motivate than being assigned a specific course of action?

Time to Innovate

Now is the time for experimentation in completely new forms of education delivery, both for our school-aged children and our corporate employees.  The organizations that bring the most focus to experiential learning, diversity and customization have the highest probability of achieving educational outcomes that truly matter — lifelong learning and the economic stability that comes with the jobs people land and create.

I look forward to watching the current grand experiments in education continue – and I hope continue to adapt – to our new market conditions.