"The fact is, factory learning is dead, we just don't know it yet. We have spent the last 250 years in factory schools, built using factory ideas to populate our factories with workers. Today, we need a change in how we educate people, so that they are ready for information jobs. This requires scrapping the 'one size fits all' education model that is clearly dying (NCLB, Common Core etc), and replacing it with student paced education system where each student has a customized curriculum, based on ABILITY and WILLINGNESS to learn."
This argument has been around for what, a century or more now? And individuated software learning systems have been in use for over a half-century. See: the PLATO computer instruction system, starting in 1960. The truth is, the research on how well these systems work in practice has been consistently pretty dismal (I don't have time to get links at the moment, feel free to research). Last week a fellow at MIT and former MS researcher released a book basically saying that after a career of attempts, he's now convinced that technology cannot solve this problem. The most basic beginning instruction requires human guidance, and unfortunately that creates some bandwidth limitation in how many students a given teacher can attend to.
"But no matter how good the design, and despite rigorous tests of impact, I have never seen technology systematically overcome the socio-economic divides that exist in education. Children who are behind need high-quality adult guidance more than anything else. Many people believe that technology “levels the playing field” of learning, but what I’ve discovered is that it does no such thing."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/06/04/technology-wont-fix-americas-neediest-schools-it-makes-bad-education-worse/
