A vision of today's students

Here is proof that most education systems are not adequately keeping up or preparing students to deal with tomorrow today. That’s almost OK, because students are eventually going to adapt their experience and their educational choice accordingly, so something will have to give. But in the meantime, today’s students are in a major transition stage, where their education is not fully responsive to their fast-changing lifestyle and professional skills. And the students are suffering for it.

Professor Wesch at Kansas State University, together with 200 students from his Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class, wanted to find out “how students learn, what they need to learn for their future, and how our current educational system fits in”. They created an online document with some questions, answered by the 200 students, which effectively meant they were surveying themselves. They then turned the results into a video:

“… the basic idea is to create a three-minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today — how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. We already know some things from previous research (and if you know of any interesting statistics, please list them along with the source). Others we will need to find out by doing a class survey. Please add whatever you want to know or present.”

Here are some of the findings:

The average college class is 115 students large.

18% of a student’s teachers will know his name.

A student will complete 49% of his assigned readings, and only 26% will be considered relevant to life.

A student will read eight books per year (range 0 to 200), but 2 300 pages per semester (105 days) and 1 281 Facebook profiles per semester (12 per day).

A student will write 42 pages for class per semester, but will write 500 pages of email (five per day).

A student, per day:

sleeps for seven hours;
watches TV for 1,5 hours;
goes online for 3,5 hours;
spends two hours on the cellphone;
listens to music for 2.5 hours;
spends three hours in class;
spends three hours studying;
spends two hours eating; and
spends two hours working;
Total: 26,5 hours.

So students are multitaskers, which is nothing new, really. But they have to learn early on how to manage the information overload, how to prune out the nonsense and still have time to make Facebook so popular. That skill will bode them well when they start bringing home a pay cheque. Professors have to jump on to the learning curve and make sure that they are using the teaching tools that hit home. (The chalkboard is so Nineties.)

I was reading someone’s blog the other day, and he complained that the lecture room at Stanford University where he had attended a day conference did not have plug points at every seat, to power laptops and PDAs. Now, I spent four years at a pretty good university in the US not that long ago, and no seat had a plug point. Few students brought laptops to class, and certainly nobody used them while the professor was lecturing. Forward 10 years, and every student has a laptop, open, in class. And they are demanding faster adaptation.

The good thing is, they will probably get it, because they will be the driving force behind the change. Private high schools will follow. I fully expect my daughter to have to have a laptop for school when she starts high school (in seven years’ time).

The tendency is to think that this will widen the gap between the haves and have-nots, but maybe not. If podcasts and video streams of lectures become even more popular than they are now, the whole world will benefit. Already, I have taken online courses from Harvard University while sitting in Jo’burg. The lectures are streamed, the assignments stringent, and the two-way communication between my professor and me was probably not much different than between him and a student living on campus. The future can only be brighter (and cheaper!).

But new, innovative educational bodies should not make the mistake of thinking that technology — just because its usage is so prevalent among students — is the Holy Grail of a perfect system. Now, more than ever, it is important to encourage creativity, the power of original thought, critical analysis and ethics in the students. Everything else, they can find online :-)

For now, though, I think students and teachers are trying to find their feet. It will also be interesting to see how technology is used when combined with the old classic subjects such as philosophy or old English literature. It would also be interesting to see how receptive students are to studying those subjects now. It is important not to leave them behind.

But it is equally important not to leave oneself behind, either.