Our current school days are stuck in a rut – mostly because it is difficult to make adjustments at the last minute. We manage with sub-optimal conditions because that is what and where the schedule says we should be. Let’s take a look at the possibilities for dynamic and adaptive scheduling to bring a mobile culture to our bricks and mortar schools.
Here are my thoughts about the School Day of the Future.
I look forward to your thoughts and feedback – what frustrations do you have with scheduling and learning environments? How can your school become more flexible and adaptive?
Hi Janice,
Your website was easy to follow and the examples of the AI system making adjustments to a typical school day helped paint a picture in my head of what everything could look like.
Under “How Do We Get There”, the obstacles you listed are big hurdles to overcome. Your honest assessment of your proposed future technology was appreciated. Reading that page I thought “yeah, maybe we aren’t too close to implementing this technology.” Great job elaborating on the pros and cons.
Thanks Michael,
There are certainly some big hurdles. I think that the technology is possible, and the ideas are there, but the change itself will require a huge shift in the way we view our spaces and plan our lessons. There are exciting things on the horizon if we are open and able to let go of some things. That is always easier said than done.
Hi Janice,
I liked the idea of using adaptive and responsive scheduling for students.The resources can be allocated dynamically and in real-time as and when they are available for use. It looks like similar to project management and resource management systems used in industries.This concept is used by operating systems and by Central Processing Units (C.P.U) too where resources are allocated according to the availability and priority in order to increase the efficiency and throughput. However, I am wondering how the software is going to prioritize the resources for learners. Since the resources (teachers, working hours, spaces, equipment) are finite, how the system is going to resolve the conflict arising with the same priority?
Hello Janice,
Sometimes I think that our routine and the way we have learned are major causes of our incapacity to innovate. Your The School Day of the Future – Adaptive and Responsive Scheduling is creative and connects all stakeholders using available technologies. People learning in the digital scenario will probably demand this kind of schedule not only for the commodity but also for environmental issues. Congrats on your job!
Hi Janice,
Such a great resource and an under-appreciated topic. I really like how you have clearly articulated not only your future technology but the real, grounded problem you are trying to solve. I especially like how you have taken us to the future and then demonstrated where we are today and how we can get there tomorrow.
The site lead me to a couple of thoughts, will teachers need to make their lessons more flexible too in order to facilitate the kind of adaptive scheduling described here? Could it be taken even further by bringing the concept of micro-credentialing to the K-12 curriculum? There is a lot of potential to disrupt the traditional pathways through schooling.
I felt there were a couple of drawbacks that were not discussed enough, universal connectivity and device access as well as student supervision. For such a system to work seems to be predicated on students and instructors being able to be in contact with central scheduling near continuously and from anyway. Will sufficiently capable personal devices be available to every family member for every family in the school? Also, I fear that without some kind of student tracking, there is the potential for students to become lost in such a flexible system. For young students, the structure and consistency of schedule make it easier to notice if they are missing.
Overall, I think the potential of such a scheduling system and adaptive learning can over come the concerns but will require funding and champions to see it come to reality.
Thanks for your thoughts Stephen, you raise some good points. The access to technology is a key component and basically an assumption of something like this. I wonder if we will come to a time when that can be an assumption? Your point about student tracking is helpful and it’s easy to envision a student who might always try to choose the isolating options and have very limited interactions with peers and teachers. It would be important to build in smaller group check-ins with a system like this, something like an advisory system, but with the teacher actually checking on how the student is doing with classwork and how they are engaging with the system. One of the location tracking systems that I saw with a US university actually had programming built in that would monitor if students were alone or in isolated areas too often. I suppose this is something that could be built into a system, especially with AI; I think it would also be important to have human oversight and interaction.
Hello Janice,
I love the idea of adaptive and responsive scheduling. Your OER was designed well and I was able to navigate from topic to topic with ease. I was having a difficult time envisioning it but laying it out in the scenarios section of your OER helped cleared the vision. As you mentioned in your OER, the constraints of adaptive learning, security concerns in particular, are issues for everyone at this time. But In the future I believe the benefits of enabling location on your device outweighs the negatives. There will be too many services that require location to be on. I think in the future most people will say, “what’s the big deal If I can get XYZ to do XYZ.”
All of my assistants require it so for ease of use and filtering by content accordingly I leave it on.
Flex time in school is great, but I question the productivity of students during this time when they are not monitored. If they are at home or at a dedicated space in the school will the teacher be online remotely monitoring?
Also will students have the same teachers for subjects or does that change dependent on their scheduling?
I really like this adaptive scheduling idea and would love to see it working in the future.
Hi Andrea,
Your questions are ones that I wonder about as well. Students, especially younger ones, would need to be monitored or checked on, while learning online. If they’re doing online lessons while in school then they could be in a supervised collaborative space, if at home then there also should be a check-in of some type.
I also wonder about the teachers. For a schedule to be truly flexible then I think that students would have to be able to learn from different teachers, however, we know that there are also benefits of working with and getting to know one teacher and likewise for the teacher getting to know the students. It would definitely take some stong collaboration between subject teachers to be able to work with different mixes of students. I can imagine big advantages and disadvantages of this.
I think there are several ways that a system like this could be organized. As with the education system now, I expect that schools will experiment with many different models. It will be interesting to see where we go in the next several years.
Hi Janice,
I like you depict a big picture of future school administration through the website. As an OER, it is a well organized, accessible and elegant design. I also like your idea of automatically arranging optimal learning environments for teachers and students by AI assistants. This brings me to an imagination that, through IoT and smart technology, teachers can remotely set facilities in the classroom into the arrangement which they like on their mobile device before the class. As to flexible learning, AI can also be a powerful tool for students at different levels and grades. For example, in a secondary school, AI can help students conduct self-directed learning according to their interests and educational resources in the school; while in universities, AI can organize lectures meeting requirements of the future workforce market. In a nut shell, educational demands determine how AI is applied in future schools.
Hey there Janice,
I am a proponent for flexible schedules myself and would love to see them implemented across BC schools. The idea could give students the flexibility to self inquire in spaces around the school, almost like flex time, so that students may foster and grow their mental toolboxes at their own accord. I believe your idea is incredibly ambitious and could work on a smaller scale in private schools. A flexible schedule does pose some concerns for me when I consider younger grade levels. I believe students at the elementary school level could benefit from a routine. This has been an issue that has stricken students of all ages with Zoom classrooms’ dawn wince the outbreak of covid early last year. I would like to see further research to help gather how time spent away from a traditional class could affect student’s overall mental health. As well as accompanying case studies where adaptive and responsive schedules could be implemented successfully.
Hi Anton,
Thanks for your thoughts, you bring up some good questions. I think you’re right that this would be the type of technology that might be piloted at private schools, although I don’t think it would have to be limited to that. I certainly understand the need for a more structured schedule for elementary age students, although I still think that there are opportunities to make more efficient use of spaces within schools. My ideas around this topic are twofold – 1) adaptive scheduling to accommodate changes and disruptions for individuals and groups within the school days (e.g. traffic, travel for sports trips, illness, extra time required for a special project) and 2) flexibility of movement among spaces (e.g. Grade 8 PE has class from 10-11 and they are doing a yoga unit, the class is smaller than usual because a few of them are learning from home today; the air quality is bad this morning (a common issue at my school) so elementary students have had to stay inside. I imagine a system that can digest all of these details and move the Grade 8 students to another space and schedule slots of free play time for the elementary students in the gym. All relevant people – students, teachers, facilities people – would be notified and directed to the appropriate places.) This is indeed ambitious but given the rate at which AI is progressing and the adaptability that can be seen in other systems, I think that it could be attainable if it was a priority for institutions.