A data-driven approach to customising learning experience
Are academic conference-goers set to abandon their time-honoured routine of chatting to colleagues, sitting through some presentations and checking their email, all in favour of a personalised and data-driven learning experience?
That is the implication of Island 10–22, a conference held in July to advance digital higher education in Russia. Every delegate’s position and speech were tracked in an attempt to optimise their use of time and their learning. And this is only the start. The organisers claim that this approach will lead to new models for education and training, especially by allowing older people with outdated skills to enhance their value in the digital era.
Andrey Komissarov, head of research and development at University 20.35, one of the organisers of Island 10–22, explains the rationale for this radical approach. “On the one hand, the time constraints [of the conference] mean that we need to make the course as intensive as possible, sometimes pushing the participants to their limits. On the other, we need to maintain their physical resources and well-being and keep the mood up.
“All this becomes possible with deep semantic analysis and biometric data. By assessing the sentiment aspect of verbal communications, we can keep track of moods and see what they are related to.” This allows physical and mental exercises to be custom-designed for groups and individuals.
Measuring understanding
Komissarov adds that this is not the limit of Island 10–22’s ambition, despite apparently exceeding current practice to date in the West. “Then comes a second challenge: how to measure understanding. We could give tests to see what data has been successfully memorised, but humans aren’t storage devices, and their cognitive patterns are way more complex.”
Instead, the aim is to explore their understanding via discourse analysis. The organisers claim that it can reveal what participants have learned and point to gaps and misconceptions in their understanding.
Little-known outside Russia, Island 10–22 is one of the year’s biggest higher education events, with over 2,200 participants this year, among them over 100 university presidents, plus about 4,000 people who turned up for an open day. And it can certainly claim to be one of the longest. Its title comes from the fact that it ran from 10 to 22 July this year.
Its objective, too, is an ambitious one. The organisers want Russian universities to become more digital in their approach to teaching, research and management, itself a major task; and to embrace a near-Californian culture of spinout businesses and other entrepreneurial activity in a difficult economic and bureaucratic setting.
The first iteration of the Island event was held in 2018 on a real island. This year the organisers simplified matters by running it at Skolkovo, a newly developed area to the west of the Moscow city centre that perfectly illustrates the problem it was intended to solve.
About half an hour from downtown, Skolkovo was earmarked after the fall of the Soviet Union as a centre for high-technology, market-led Westernisation. It is home to two ambitious higher education institutions, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, the site of Island 10–22, and Skolkovo Business School, and has futuristic architecture that would look the part in Silicon Valley.
But it also has a large area of bare land set aside for commercial start-ups, which have remained elusive even in this enterprise-friendly corner of the Russian system.
While it offered plenty of opportunities to sit in an audience, Island 10–22 was primarily intended to provoke action. About 130 universities, mainly Russian, entered teams of up to 15 people for competitions based on digital entrepreneurship, designed as learning opportunities without winners and losers.
Komissarov says that even this lengthy process is only the beginning. “One hundred universities whose teams participated in the intensive course have signed an agreement under which they will start introducing our technologies and methodology into their educational programmes starting from the new school year.” Today, he says, 37 of them are introducing courses based on University 20.35 techniques.
While it was primarily an event by and for Russians, Island 10–22 built in a range of international speakers to provide both inspiration and instruction.
In the first category was Sung-Chul Shin, president of KAIST, South Korea’s specialist science and technology university. His talk, ‘Miracle on the River Han’, pointed out that in the 1950s, after the Korean War, the country had a GDP per capita comparable to the poorest African nations. Now it is prosperous, in large part because of its ambitious pursuit of technology education and applied research.
In 1962, he pointed out, Korea had exactly zero papers in journals forming part of the canonical Science Citation Index (SCI), and obtained no US patents. In 2018 it managed 59,628 SCI papers and 19,494 US patents. The creation of KAIST was itself a government action in pursuit of high-technology national growth, undertaken at a time when Korea had a GDP per capita of US$200.
Alongside this can-do content, other speakers stressed the management advantages of the digital approach in running a university. While some of the possible benefits are organisational and financial, others are pedagogical and can have direct benefits for learning.
Stephanie Teasley, research professor in information at the University of Michigan in the United States, blew the trumpet for the fashionable field of learning analytics. As she explained, students’ growing use of educational technology produces so much data that it can now feed deep insights into individual learners and their academic progress. Whole new jobs are being created in the process, such as the post of ‘Data Concierge’ at Michigan itself.
She added that data on behaviours such as lecture absences or the late submission of coursework is used in Michigan to identify students at risk of dropping out or falling behind, outcomes to be avoided in the expensive and competitive US system.
That insight is used to assign extra supervision, but it carries risks. The institution needs to worry about data protection but must also be aware that students assigned extra time with their supervisor sometimes react by becoming discouraged about their studies rather than turning around their performance.
Early adopters
While these methods are becoming accepted in universities around the world, Island 10–22’s organisers hope to see Russian higher education leapfrog the competition as early adopters.
In a post-event interview with University World News, Vasily Tretyakov, one of the organisers, explained the thinking behind the event and plans for future growth. He is CEO of University 20.35, which was set up as a non-profit digital university in 2018. It was one of the main organisers of Island 10–22 along with events specialist EdCrunch.
Tretyakov says: “In the near future, millions of people will lose their jobs as a result of digital transformation. [The] digital economy requires appropriately qualified personnel and it is hard to imagine that traditional universities could prepare relevant educational programmes for people to work in the digital economy. University 20.35 has no buildings, walls or desks, and no chancellor, exams or degrees.”
Instead, says Komissarov, the university is powered by artificial intelligence tools and methods that can be applied all the way “from primary schools to the mass retraining of the older generation”.
A priority is to bring workers with out-of-date skills into the digital economy, matching the thinking styles of individuals to jobs in the new technological landscape.
“Former accountants turn into accurate and pedantic junior data engineers helping to train neural networks.” This promises, perhaps, to be more scientific and evidence-based than the now largely abandoned “learning styles” approach. And on a more down-to-Earth note, he adds that the massive size and low population density of Russia favour retraining that can be delivered online.
His observation that employment is changing in unfamiliar ways was supported at the conference by Saadia Zahidi, managing director at the World Economic Forum. Zahidi thinks that future working patterns can be an improvement on the past. But this can only happen if education and training are reformed to build the right skills for the emerging economy.
The Island series is also affiliated with the National Technology Initiative, Russia’s state programme for high-technology transformation. Digital technology is one of its main emphases, along with green energy and biotechnology. Himself a former digital expert at the Russian education ministry, Tretyakov plans to restage the event in 2020 with more international participants.
