The Role of Technology in Revolutionizing Education

Thurow ¢ The great promise for the revolution in education is in primary and secondary school levels in the developing world. A place like Thailand cannot wait the 75 years needed to train teachers , build classrooms, and focus the resources required to give everyone a basic education. You need to use electronic systems combined with teaching assistants to speed up the process of educating people.

The second place is in the business firms. How do you train people in Otis Elevator Company to be able to fix all makes of elevators all over the world? Give them a laptop. Then mechanics can have on-location assistance if they have to repair an elevator that is 100 years old. In business, most on-the-job training will be done in a virtual classroom.

In universities, it is more complex. If you would like to provide for student creativity, then there will be the need for "rubbing elbows." Distance learning cannot completely substitute for those relationships. At MIT, we run a master's program in systems design and management. At the beginning, it was completely done electronically . What we do now is bring the students in for three weeks in the semester. We found that the electronic interaction with the professor was pretty good. But the students would not interact online with each other. Once they met each other physically, then they would be more comfortable to interact online. So the future for university electronic education will probably be some mixed mode of electronic and classroom learning. The big problem at this time for university electronic education is that nobody has figured out how you pay for it. In the U.S., people are not willing to pay high tuition for electronic education.