Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better – the Impact of Small Data in Education
Should I be worried that Amazon seems to know more about me than I do? Amazon definitely seems to know what I need to buy before I know that I need it. Should I be worried that Facebook seems to think it can manage my social circle better than I can? It decides which friends […]
Liberia’s First Successful Steps Toward “Getting to Best”
Students in Liberia lag far behind their peers in the developing world. Their education has been disrupted by more than a decade of civil war, post-conflict stress, and the Ebola health crisis. The international response has provided necessary funding for teacher training and educational resources, but has not been sufficient to realize the children of […]
Why Schools Need to Do What Works
I want to see – as I am sure do you – an education system which allows every single pupil to flourish, no matter who they are or where they come from. Yet far too often we see the same story in schools across the globe: the poorest pupils – those who can’t afford […]
Measure, Match and Mobilize: Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age
Digitization is both a challenge and part of the solution for lifelong learning. When we discuss its impact, we often focus on two questions: what and how we will (have to) learn in the future. Going beyond that I would like to draw attention to how these new technologies change our education system as […]
Maximizing the Contribution of Private Education: Policy and PPPs
The growth of private education in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has sparked robust debate about the private sector’s place as an education provider. In light of this debate, it is important to explore how governments—guardians of their countries’ education systems—can choose to encourage and regulate private sector participation. In what follows we explore the tools governments […]
Rethinking Liberal Arts Education for the Twenty-First Century
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the world was full of confidence about the inevitability of growing forms and processes of globalization—instantaneous communication, flattened economy, massive movement of people—and the resulting need for new forms of education. Intellectual and business leaders talked about how the world as we had known it in the […]
To Capture the Benefits of AI, Schools Need to Rethink Their Models
Technological advances over the last two decades now bring machines knocking on employers’ doors. Artificial intelligence (AI) software can already prepare taxes, drive cars, write news articles, and compose poetry; and recent reports suggest that roughly half to two-thirds of jobs today are at risk of computer automation. As AI handles a growing number […]
The Role of Private Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
Highlighting the work of Bridge International Academies in Liberia, Nicholas Kristof recently wrote in the New York Times: “Let’s worry less about ideology and more about how to help kids learn.” I couldn’t agree more with Kristof. Private education provision has an essential role to play in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and other developing regions. With rapid growth in […]
Who Moved My Intelligence?
The title of this article is inspired by a self-help book from the 1990’s called ‘Who moved my Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life’. Despite significant criticism, this book became a best seller and a popular tool in any change manager’s back pocket. The implications […]
What Will AI Do for Students and Teachers?
The hype is never far away from Artificial Intelligence. Back in 1953, Marvin Minsky, a founding father of AI, declared: “We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious,” to which his contemporary Douglas Engelbart replied: “you’re going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to […]