An Internet Education Infrastructure

 An Internet Education Infrastructure

Australia has proved a popular destination for tertiary students to get University degrees. This has been good for the economy, but is not going to come back soon, and it may never come back. And yet what are people going to do during the coming period of high unemployment? Many will choose to improve their education. 

Meanwhile the Internet has developed into an important adjunct to education. Explicitly:

Youtube (and other video and podcasting and blogging services) provide a lot of brilliant educational material. Unfortunately they also provide an equal or greater amount of well presented false information. For educational purposes there is an urgent need for curation, and to free the material from providers who are subject to so much legal and commercial pressure from various bad actors.

Wikipedia (and other attempts to organize knowledge, such as nLab and kerodon), are a wonderful resource, but they are not oriented to education. For example if you want to understand a particular entry, it will have links to things that you also need to understand, but if you go to those links they are just as complex with just as many links, and not restricted to the level of understanding you need. For educational purposes subjects have prerequisites, and when we have links to material from the prerequisites then we want the exposition to be at the level of that prerequisite. Then, when you go down these rabbit holes, you must come to an end. That is because subjects and prerequisite subjects are organised in a tree structure, and things get simpler as you go down, and there is a limit to how simple you can get. Educational web pages might also have links to other parts of the same course but they will naturally be clearly marked as such.

Let's suppose we do the work, so that we have a wonderful curated collection of educational material, and we have a tree structured curriculum containing links to recommended educational material that covers the course. There are two more things we need for a working education system, which are, in reverse order:

• Evaluating, in a secure way, that students have acquired the knowledge and skills taught by the course, and providing widely accepted certification of that.

• Practising the demonstration of the acquired knowledge and skills and receiving feedback and help. 

There are extra problems when the skills to be demonstrated involve real-world interactions, and not just screens. Students will then be limited to particular places even for practice. There will already be a requirement for students to get to particular places for secure evaluation.

Every part of this looks doable. We will assume that we have a collaboration of government and semi-government organizations (such as universities). All the people involved are identified, not anonymous. Identification is naturally from authorization by one of the participating organizations.

Curation of Educational Resources

Some of the people in some of the organizations will be authorized to do curation. This will include all the people preparing courses and curriculums. Where copyright permits the items should be moved to a secure repository. Otherwise a cryptographic hash of the item should be taken so that it can't be changed while staying at the same URL.

The person adding an item indicates why. The main reason will be because it honestly presents the views of a significant number of experts in the field, preferably all of them. Another reason might be that it has historical interest of some sort. The educational level and clarity of presentation would also be assessed.

Curriculum and Course Construction

A curriculum describes the knowledge and skills for a particular subject area at a particular level, and how these should be assessed. It should come with something like a wikipedia entry, except that the links should always point to information in the prerequisites, or perhaps to information from earlier in that same course. This collection of web pages should actually be a very terse course for the curriculum.

A course for a curriculum is a set of curated resources that cover the curriculum, plus example assessments with examples of the successful completion of those assessments.

Assessment

It is envisaged that assessment will be separated from instruction. Instruction can be provided by independent training services. However institutions going to the trouble to produce curriculums and courses, will often be running the course for some students, and providing at least enough assessment for those students. 

Assessment should be secure. Students need to be biometrically identified and the circumstances need to prevent cheating. For example screen based testing should use the assessors screens and should be done in a faraday cage to prevent communication with the outside world.

Training

Separating training from assessment has been quite common. For this to work the curriculum and assessment have to be well defined. The payoff is innovation and flexibility in training. If people already know the subject then they only need to make sure they use the same terminology and notation to get certification.

Summary

A dynamic educational environment can raise productivity, and also make the world a lot safer for democracy when voters need to resist an avalanche of misinformation.