STEM Around the World
From Richard C. Larson
 For those of you who do not know it, LINC 2013 is coming up: June 16-19 at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. LINC is Learning International Networks Consortium founded at MIT 11 years ago. LINC brings together leading thinkers, practitioners and administrators of TEE (Technology-Enabled Education) from around the world, to share best practices, emerging ideas and difficulties in using technology to bring quality education to underserved populations. You may want to attend LINC 2013, and the early-bird reduced registration fee ends on April 7.
I’ve had the privilege to read the over 80 papers contributed to LINC 2013. And one recurring theme: STEM, STEM and more STEM! It’s not difficult to see why. Technology has erased forever many once well-paying manual labor jobs. In 1900, over half of the U.S. workforce was in agriculture. Today it’s less than 3%, and the U.S. produces more food than ever. Factories once offered well-paying manual labor career jobs, positions not requiring very much formal education. Today, in many parts of the word, the majority of ‘workers’ in factories are robots where the role of the few humans there is to repair and maintain the robots. In the past 60 years, much of this hollowing out of the manual labor jobs has been due to exponential increases in the capabilities of technologies, often associated with Moore’s Law –which says that the capability of computers doubles every 18 to 24 months, starting way back in the 1950’s.
The only solution to the removal of millions and millions of manual labor jobs is to educate the populace to ever-higher levels, representing the so-called information age or knowledge age. Let’s call it the STEM Age.
So, many of the speakers at LINC 2013 will address the teaching and learning of STEM subjects. There will be the world-class STEM-teaching countries represented, such as Singapore, Korea, Japan and Finland. But there will be many more where basic infrastructure such as reliable electricity and safe school buildings are problematic. Then there is the continuing issue of teacher training and teachers’ overall knowledge of STEM. How does computer and Internet technology come into play here?
Here is a short sample of the STEM ideas to be presented and discussed at LINC 2013:
- “Less is more.” That is, we would like to teach students fewer STEM topics but to go deeper in those than we do at present, to help develop the critical thinking skills so needed by workers pursuing STEM careers.
- Assessment. There is emerging agreement that “Teaching to a Test” is bad, as it rewards rote memorization but not deep understanding. Here ‘teaching’ is merely content delivery and recall. Research has shown that students forget memorized but little understood topics very quickly. But how to evaluate deep knowledge in an economically viable way? Multiple-choice tests are therefore still preferred even in leading countries of the “Less is More” philosophy. Broader and more nuanced Assessment of a student’s knowledge remains an open question.
- MOOC’s. A MOOC is a Massive Online Open Course. LINC 2013 will have one of the most extensive coverages of MOOC’s to date. Stanford, MIT and many other universities have recently begun to offer MOOC’s, with first-day enrollments worldwide sometimes exceeding 100,000 students. Enrollment is usually free and certification, obtained by passing a test, can be gained with a modest fee. Advocates say that MOOC’s are the inexpensive solution to worldwide education, including in STEM subjects. Detractors point to the typical 90%+ dropout rates and the lack of a compelling e-learning pedagogy.
Some of the many other topics to be covered: (1) the “lecture-free” course; (2) teacher training in STEM; (3) use of handheld devices in lieu of computers, especially where Internet and/or reliable electricity are not present; (4) synchronous shared classes across international borders; (5) experience with MIT BLOSSOMS in Pakistan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the USA.
Come see us at LINC 2013!
Richard Larson is the Mitsui Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. He is also the Director of MIT LINC and the Principal Investigator of MIT BLOSSOMS.
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