Instead of an epigraph
IN last years in our country, quasi-distance learning using modern information technologies is becoming fashionable. I added the prefix "quasi" here for a reason; distance learning is a great thing when physical contact between teacher and student is technically impossible. In this case, we are talking about the introduction of distance learning techniques in a situation where the teacher and the student may well (and should) be in the same classroom.
Example - in one technical university, where an old friend of mine teaches, history classes were completely transferred to a distance format. Students read lecture texts uploaded to the network and solve tests. The teacher's functions are minimal. Another trend that is gaining popularity (although, due to the high cost, it is being implemented in Russia very slowly) is the creation of video courses that are uploaded to the Internet and replace ordinary lectures in the classroom.
The attitude to these innovations in the teaching environment is ambiguous. Some greet them, others are indifferent, others (and most of them) dully express dissatisfaction. The argument for these third ones is simple: distance learning kills communication between teacher and student, which is the most important thing in a university! Only a few of them admit: in fact, deep down they worry primarily about their bets. After all, the more work the computer does, the less the need for teachers will be.
How do I personally feel about the introduction of such methods? Just like kitchen knives. With a kitchen knife, you can cut the sausage, or you can cut off your finger. Depends on how you use it. So let's first look at the pros and cons of replacing face-to-face training with distance learning.
Just in case, I will clarify: yes, I'm talking about replacing, not about addition (against which it is difficult to object to anything). In practice, this looks like replacing lectures in the classroom with a combination of video and text materials, replacing seminars with assignments at the computer (in this case, the computer program independently responds to the student's actions), finally, current and intermediate certification in the form of assignments that allow automatic verification computer.
1. Obvious financial savings on teaching rates. There is nothing even to discuss here. Theoretically, thanks to distance learning methods, instead of 100 teachers with a salary of 30 thousand rubles, you can leave 30 teachers with a salary of 100 thousand, for whom this salary will be enough to really do science, and not to run for extra money. How to deal with those who "did not fit in" is a social problem, to higher education as such has no relation.
2. Convenience for the learner. There is no rigid schedule, it is impossible to miss a lecture, it is easier to combine work with study. It may be objected that the need to attend classes is disciplined - well, self-discipline also needs to be learned.
3. Elimination of the "bad teacher" factor - that is, situations when the teacher is regularly late, cancels classes, jokes stories, evaluates how good it is. It is assumed that the course developer is indeed a highly qualified professional.
1. As I already wrote, any courses must be constantly improved. I very rarely read the same material for two years in a row without supplements, and never for three years in a row. Are universities ready to re-do, for example, a high-quality video course every year? No, because it will be too expensive. It's easier to admit me to the students. Therefore, once a video course is made, it will remain unchanged for many years. If it is done well - it will be called "classic", if not - you understand. There will be no chance of remaking it in two years. It turns out that a video course with accompanying text materials is a good alternative to a textbook, not lectures.
2. Whatever one may say, an individual approach to students is necessary. Even that conditionally individual, which is obtained when working in groups of 20 people. Again, when I have three seminar groups in parallel on the same subject, very rarely two identical seminars on the same subject come out. Some people grasp everything on the fly and want to get as much as possible, others need to chew the basics for a long time.
They say that you can come up with clever algorithms that will take into account the individual qualities of each student and adapt the material to his abilities and characteristics. Probably so. Moreover, ideally, an individual approach to each student is much more effective than a conditionally individual approach to a group. But think about this: all these algorithms with many additional options will have to be put into a computer by someone. It turns out that the volume of work increases significantly. Where an experienced teacher will quickly figure out how to best explain a particular material, the computer will be forced to turn to the options stored in its memory. Where a person will show creative imagination and find new way explain, the machine won't do it. Accordingly, the quality of adaptation of the system to an individual student will be the higher, the more options are initially included in it. And here we are again faced with the question of the cost of all this happiness.
Someone might argue that cost is not that important. Ultimately, everything can be done not at the level of a particular university. You can put together a large team, take a lot of money and make a great training module - one for the whole country. It will still be cheaper than paying thousands of teachers in hundreds of universities. Also true, but what do we get in the end? A single "canonical" version, which will be revised every ten years (see item 1)? The strategy, firstly, is extremely risky (as practice shows, shoals in such grandiose projects are almost inevitable), and secondly, the killing possibility of developing pedagogical methods through the simultaneous creative search of many really working teachers.
3. If we are talking about training not just a "qualified consumer" (c) or a person who needs to apply solutions already invented by someone, but about the formation of a researcher capable of solving non-standard problems, the teacher's personal example is of great importance. It is contact with the smart creative people plays a huge role in the preparation of students. Contact with a computer will not replace this. A computer program can teach, but it cannot motivate.
4. The computer program will have great difficulties with the assessment of student work. Even if we are talking about the exact sciences. The program will be able to check if the answer is correct - but it will not be able to appreciate the beauty of the solution. I still remember how at school I was praised for solving the problem in three steps, which the textbook suggested solving at nine. From point of view computer program there is no difference. And this is at best; at worst she will insist that, although the answer is agreeable, correct solution - in nine lines, not three. What can we say about the situation when it comes to the humanities, the optimal form of student work is a text that should be assessed according to many parameters and serve as the basis for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the student.
What is the end result? The picture is quite complex. Final result largely depends on what kind of specialist we plan to receive at the exit.
When it comes to teaching a certain set of skills that the student must master as best as possible, without trying to create anything new on his own, computerization can really bring good result... However, in this case, too, it is necessary to handle distance learning methods extremely carefully.
When it comes to training researchers, people called upon to create something new, then the complete transfer of education to the virtual space will bring more problems than benefits. All the more so if we reason not from the point of view of an ideal theory, but from the point of view of Russian realities, where all the shoals that can and cannot be allowed will be allowed. Video courses can serve as a very useful and necessary addition, but not a replacement for lectures in the classroom. All kinds of tasks and tests can complement, but not replace, seminars.
Mikhail Kushnir
Can a robot replace a teacher?
- by position?
- by subjective assessment in the life of a student?
- for complicity in the educational process?
Until it is impossible to accurately designate the object of replacement, it is impossible to determine the possibility of this replacement.
The development of distance learning technologies and e-learning has led to an awareness of the multiplicity of functions that have traditionally been associated with the teacher. This became clear when the first experiments with distance learning were conducted according to the same scenarios in which they were used to working in person. It turned out that almost nothing happens. This does not prevent many from repeating the same logic over and over again, but this should not surprise us. Remember the anecdote known from childhood: "Only a pale-faced man could step on a rake twice." It remains relevant.
Many remember the epitaphs to universities two to three years ago in connection with the first massive MOOCs. However, it has now become clear that not everything is so simple, and the news of their death is greatly exaggerated.
It became obvious that there are several completely different layers of activity in the work of a teacher. They were discussed earlier in the framework of methodological problems, but they were considered inalienable from the teacher. And only with the development of IT it became clear that not everything needs to be combined in a teacher.
Digitalization has shown that it is possible to shift the verification of some formal tasks to technology. With the advent of the network, texts in various formats went there. By text I mean not only arrays of letters, but also any informational material suitable for independent development. Moreover, the text has become non-linear - hypertext, which has the ability to freely transition between in different parts one text and / or different texts.
Back in the late 1980s, my students and I started developing an electronic problem book. The idea was not successful for organizational and psychological reasons, but this demonstrates the possibility of presenting such a product at the dawn of school informatization.
Today it is obvious to almost everyone that the function of a source of information has gone irrevocably from the teacher - no one is able to compete with the dynamically changing flow of information available to everyone. But not every modern teacher is ready for the new task - to teach how to filter this stream, to extract from it what is reliable and important.
The teacher's attention to his problems, the ability and desire to help the student in understanding the problems and successfully passing them are important for the student. By no means every teacher does not want and can devote attention for this to every student. Sad, offensive, but true. And the problems can be different. The most common problem is lagging. Against her background, there is no time for the problem of anticipation, boredom. Some teachers pay attention to strong students, give them special assignments, but their opportunities for real support are objectively limited.
The other side of teacher support is feedback - the teacher's assessment of the student's work, maintaining a positive attitude, and fighting laziness. The shaft of publications on the problem of school grades / grades from the Soviet times still clearly indicates that the problem exists and that it is quite acute. Most teachers sin with subjectivity. When formalized systems of categorized assessments are used, the problem of formalization, the loss of the meaning of feedback, arises.
Modern adaptive information systems can much better than a teacher track the student's current activity and offer him adequate tasks in terms of complexity, in terms of his level of development. They can provide prompt and specific feedback based on the results of assignments.
The level of intellectual complexity of tasks that can be solved by artificial intelligence is growing rapidly. Formal tasks are the easiest for artificial intelligence. Traditional school with traditional program very formal. If we do not change the approaches to the organization of education, then there is no need to think - the robot will oust the teacher.
If the teacher is considered an official unit, designed to "transfer knowledge" to the student in a certain standard volume and to work out the skill of solving typical problems in the program, then the robot will be able to cope with this, and better than a human. At least because he will do it as adaptive to the student as possible at any time convenient for him.
If the forms, methods, content of education will dynamically change following progress and society, then the education system will constantly face new tasks, which without adequate and modern teacher not decide. But:
- the composition of the teacher's tasks will be different, and it will also most likely change;
- the list of role functions of employees involved in education will be different (a teacher is one of them, and maybe he will not even be called a teacher);
- part of the training and organization functions educational process will lie on the shoulders of robots.
The logic of the development of information technologies, artificial intelligence is to free a person for more and more complex and non-standard intellectual tasks. It makes no sense to take away from the robot that part of the tasks with which it copes more effectively.
But the key problem in education - motivation - is solved exclusively in the social field on the example of other people. It's great when motivation grows from the family - and these are the most motivated children to learn. But many children in the family do not have such motivation. If not a teacher, then who?
« Digitalization of the Russian School ".
What does the upcoming digital modernization of schools bring us? What problems can it solve? This is not just a fashion chase. There are problems that Russian specialists and officials in charge of education want to solve with the help of digitalization. These problems first need to be described.
The first problem is the lack of qualified teachers in the provinces, from where the cadres are being washed out at an alarming rate. This is largely because the state has ceased to be fully a state. This is a separate topic altogether, as for a long time not a single country separates and separates people, creating strata, including by regions. For now, let's fix the first problem: there are not enough teachers in the outback.
The second problem is the different level of students, different abilities, different dynamics of the intellectual development of children. Yes, there are age characteristics, but there are also individual ones. Some of the students are clearly ahead of their age and ready to perceive difficult things, while others are lagging behind in development, not to pathology, but to difficulties in mastering the school curriculum.
Children have always been different. Worse or better, but this was done in our country. The natural-scientific personnel trained in the USSR were not inferior to the graduates of the best scientific and engineering schools in the West. And those who did not study science, for the most part, had a holistic, scientifically grounded picture of the world. I want to say that the usual russian school, which inherited the Soviet teaching methods, is quite capable of solving the problem of different levels of students. She was capable.
That is, by and large, main question that there is not enough good teachers at all. And if in large cities and especially in Moscow this shortage is not felt, in the provinces the situation, to put it mildly, is bad. The effective management of our state is simply not able to not only solve, but even set the task of training a large number of competent teachers. And it is necessary to build rockets. Enemies are a dime a dozen, and they are not imaginary, but quite real. So what do you do?
Can a book replace a teacher? Until now I couldn't. No book studying proccess impossible, but without a teacher too. Well, then a book. Education officials believe that what is not given to a book is given to a computer. Imagine students sitting and reading textbooks of varying degrees of difficulty. Each has a textbook according to his ability. And the teacher walks between the rows and waits for questions if something is not clear to the children. And if there are questions, he explains the difficult passages. Then the child reads the book again. Will such an educational process be more effective than the direct work of the teacher with the class?
We change the book to a computer with video lectures of varying degrees of difficulty for students with different levels of ability. Is such a process more efficient? Why should replacing a book with a video lecture work better? More visual material? So the book can also have illustrations. Yes, a moving picture attracts more attention than a static one. But let's admit to ourselves honestly, our experience of getting education suggests that there will be no qualitative leap when replacing a book with a computer. There were television lectures, there were educational programs on Soviet television. Someone became scientists thanks to them?
You can rely on your own experience only when there is no deep knowledge of the subject. I would like to get acquainted with the results of studies that confirm that the model of the learning process with video lectures and a teacher "on the spot" can be very effective. If there are such results, it would be nice for the advocates of digitalization of education to present them.
It is human nature to make mistakes, but robots do not. He works according to the program laid down in him. If the program is debugged and well thought out, then the number of errors of a robot assembler of electronic equipment, for example, is ten times less than human errors. Robots rely on accurate and repeatable operations. Advocates of digitalization of education see a robot as an ideal teacher. Even without arms and legs, although if suddenly it turns out that corporal punishment during training is irreplaceable, then the legs can then be attached. The program on the computer will not only speak the video lecture, but follow with the help of various tests how the student has learned the material. Depending on this, the program will adjust the further learning process. Every teacher should be taught this. The robot once taught all the intricacies of pedagogical work, and then stamp it. And then the question is on the agenda: why teach a particular person? But this is a question of a fantastic dystopia, and we will not raise it here.
But for now, I hope, dreams are still far from being realized, in which, nevertheless, they believe and which they are actively talking about. I very much doubt that a person can be replaced by a robot in the learning process. The point is the objections of teachers, which I heard when I discussed the problem of digitalization, describing how smart programs will select material according to the speed of assimilation and will interact with the student. They objected to me that in the course of explaining the material, the teacher sees the eyes of the children, reacts to how they learn the lesson. This cannot be removed. Can a robot learn to look into children's eyes with a human gaze?
When a child's eyes meet the teacher's gaze, this is both communication and learning. Does anyone have a doubt that no robot can replace such interaction?
Digitization, insofar as it gives the teacher additional illustrative opportunities, does not bring anything bad with it. But replacing a good teacher with the smartest program is an inhuman utopia. But if it is a question of replacing a bad or absent teacher with a program? Not all schools have enough good teachers. Some schools lack regular teachers as well. And this situation will get worse. Can a robot help in this case? In my opinion, no more than the book could help.
But that is not all. Digitalization will begin in Moscow schools, but it remains to be seen whether it will get to the hinterland. Why? The implementation of a digital school requires financial investments. In order to financial flows rushed to the Russian province, the most severe state control and serious efforts are needed. And our state cannot even establish the same salary for state employees for the same work.
What's the bottom line? Instead of trying to solve real educational problems of the provinces with the help of digitalization, Moscow schoolchildren will be deprived of communication with teachers, replacing teachers with computers, from which schoolchildren already rarely leave.
Yuri Popov, RVS.
And if we turn our attention to such a highly specialized stratum, then we are inclined to agree that this profession can already be found a replacement. Of course, with some reservations.
The most obvious example that comes to mind is tutoring in English... This is an expensive solution for those who want to quickly learn a language or simply have problems learning it and are willing to pay a lot for it.
But if you get your nerve, hide your wallet and do some research on the Internet, you can do the same without the help of an hourly professional. Studying the material, exercises, control and even games and entertainment - all these opportunities are quite real to get without the help of a living person. For example, recently the President of Kyrgyzstan Almazbek Atambayev said that he was able to learn English using a mobile application. It would seem that the president could afford a whole platoon of tutors, but he made a choice in favor of technology and, in the end, did not lose. 
The application, by the way, is called Puzzle English, available for iOS and Android, and with due diligence can really replace an English tutor. Firstly, the materials there consist not only of texts, but also of video lectures with the participation of speakers. And before starting training, how good tutor, the program will ask you to take a knowledge test to determine where your language learning is. 
The main feature of the Puzzle English service, which, by the way, is also available in the form of a web version, is that the material in it is presented not only in the classical form. To consolidate your knowledge, you will be asked to take part in drawing up a puzzle proposal from parts scattered in random order. Another nice feature is the parsing of the lyrics of popular songs and dialogues from cult films and TV series. This kind of language learning will appeal to everyone, and not every English tutor will be able to offer it. 
And the most important thing is that the President of Kyrgyzstan managed to save a lot. The application is available by subscription, the price of which is less than 600 rubles per month. And since the desired result was successfully achieved, we would recommend that English tutors really start thinking about getting other professions. 
Well, for teachers who share their life experience, shape their worldview and help them become worthy members of our society, just don't worry just yet. If we live to see the technological singularity, then teachers will definitely not be its first victims.
More and more spheres of human activity are moving to the computer, and education does not lag behind. Technologies of the XXI century allow modern schoolchildren not to repeat the feat of Mikhail Lomonosov and to study where and when it is convenient for them. On the eve of a new school year we talk about how remote school education in Russia and - most importantly - whether the computer has already been able to replace the teacher.
New Year's holiday in the nursery entertainment center... The presenter asks the second graders to write their orders for Santa Claus on the pieces of paper. The result lives up to expectations: puppies and kittens are pushed aside to the 3rd-4th place, much more schoolchildren dream of the latest iPhone model (and the most cunning ones immediately ask for a million dollars). The new generation knows exactly what it wants and cannot imagine life without modern technologies... But when they grow up a little more, they will learn to appreciate what no Santa Claus will bring them. And this is the time.
Russian schoolchildren spend 11 years in school. This is at least six hours a day, and taking into account the after-school groups, homework, and the road to school, this is much more. If you add in the time spent on clubs, tutors and other additional activities, the work schedule turns out to be harder than that of many adults. The question naturally arises as to whether this time can be spent more efficiently. This is where distance learning technologies come to the rescue.
High school students were the first to move to online schools, feeling an opportunity to save time to prepare for entering universities. They were followed by schoolchildren-athletes and musicians who are often left with no choice by constant tours and training camps. They were joined by children with disabilities or simply with poor health. Finally, distance education has become a salvation for children who emigrated from Russia, for whom it is not easy to immediately integrate into a new environment, or who are closer to the Russian education system. Moreover, in recent times gradually gaining popularity remote elementary education and even preparation for school, although these "clients", it seems, should not have problems with time. This means that besides saving time, online learning has other benefits.
How does it happen
There are many situations in which people choose distance education, and everyone needs their own. Someone listens to individual lectures in addition to the school curriculum, someone pulls up "weak" subjects, and someone rely entirely on online schools. The Internet has responded to this wide range of requests with a variety of formats. Here is a selection of different ways to get a full or partial education on the Internet.
1. Interesting little by little
Online education starts already with preparation for school and primary school. For example, in the "Academy of Mental Arithmetic" they teach how to count, read and hold attention quickly, and in the Distance School "Artium" they offer to develop preschoolers with the help of virtual scientific laboratories and an art studio.
Many additional advanced courses have been developed for middle and high school students (although sometimes junior ones too) who are keen on certain subjects. With rare exceptions, they are free and generally available. The Children and Science project records videos with leading Moscow teachers on various topical and challenging scientific topics. The UniverTV.ru portal collects lectures, educational videos, news and just thematic videos in many areas of knowledge, including the school curriculum. For educational videos and texts, you can still look at the "Salman Khan Academy" - a huge educational array that grew out of simple diagrams that Khan drew to explain to his cousin the incomprehensible moments of school lessons. Most of the materials of the Academy are in English, but by the efforts of volunteers, many subjects have already been translated into Russian and are available for viewing. Finally, for lovers design work the GlobalLab platform has been opened, allowing both individual students and whole classes to participate in research of various degrees of scientific nature.
2. In support of the school curriculum
For those who do not have enough school lessons to master the base, there are resources that duplicate school material. They tend to be better organized than projects additional education, but not free. For high school students, these are mainly programs for preparing for the exam - for example, the College.ru website contains posters, visual models, notes and tests that simulate a real exam. For schoolchildren of other grades, this is not only preparation for testing, but also consolidation of the basic program through video lectures (on the Teachpro portal) or webinars with teachers (Presidential School). Sometimes the “flipped class” method is used: students independently study the theory and examples of assignments, and only after that, at the webinar, the teacher examines the difficulties that have arisen with them - for example, teaching at the Znanika school works.
3. Sites-simulators
In addition to websites that provide students with additional knowledge and provide an opportunity to communicate with teachers, there are many game and test portals for training and practicing skills. At the same time, they can be used in different formats: the child can train independently in the evenings, or the teacher can recommend a particular site for additional classes to the whole class. At the same time, the teacher himself can use these sites during the lesson to practice the material or to automatically generate test papers.
The variety of such portals is great. It all starts with game sites for preschoolers: "Children Online" - a collection of games, songs, fairy tales, educational lessons; poskladam.ru presents its own method of teaching reading; The Russian Language for Our Children (a project of the Pushkin Institute of the Russian Language) offers educational materials on the Russian language, including for bilingual children.
Older schoolchildren are waiting for more serious sites where they have to learn, solving a sequence of problems compiled by methodologists. Sometimes it can be accompanied by theory. Such portals include Uchi.ru, Metashkola and LogicLike. Their peculiarity is that the tasks themselves represent a unique methodology that leads the student step by step to understand the material. The role of the teacher was played in advance by the methodologist who developed the system of assignments. As additional incentives, such sites often build an internal rating of students so that everyone can assess their own progress and level in relation to others.
In addition, Olympiads can become one of the types of training. Now they are held by almost every training portal (including most of the above). On the one hand, they motivate the student to make efforts to solve difficult tasks, since, as a result, prizes and certificates may await him (and for some sites this becomes the main function, for example, for the Prodlenka portal). On the other hand, when applied to olympiads, an analysis of errors or possible solutions to a problem is often given, which makes them an important learning tool.
Finally, there are many sites that act as job generators. Basically, they are focused on the GIA and USE and are databases on assignments from previous years, from which they randomly generate new options. Among them, it is worth noting the increasingly popular portal "YaKlass" - educational project Skolkovo. This is a large-scale simulator for schoolchildren of different ages, which stores not specific examples, but their templates. Using Genexis technology, the site generates the task anew each time, substituting random (or limited by any parameter) data into the template. This system is convenient not only for schoolchildren who no longer have to train on a limited set of problems, but also for teachers who can create tests with unique options for each student with the help of Yaklass.
4. School in the monitor
And, of course, the variety of opportunities for full-fledged distance education... Online schools are usually affiliated with or affiliated with public schools and are therefore eligible to issue a Certificate of Education. In this sense correspondence education does not differ from full-time. As for teaching technologies, they are approximately the same in all schools: theory in the form of a textbook or video (animation or lecture by a teacher), homework, which is checked by an individual teacher, mid-term tests of knowledge control. This makes it possible to work not only with schoolchildren at home, but also with orphanages (ROST project) and hospitals (Learn-we know project on the Mobile Electronic School platform). More subtle differences relate to details: the training is based on webinars with a large number of participants (Algorithm online school) or the student works with the recording of the seminar on his own (which is convenient if the students are in different time zones, like in the Center for Intensive Technologies of Education).
The thoroughness of knowledge control may also differ. For diligent students who are able to master the program on their own, or those who prefer not to spend a lot of time and energy on it, there are more formal schools (for example, "Learning in Dialogue"), when it is enough to regularly pass verification work... For those who are interested in detailed and thorough training with constant supervision, the InternetUrok school may be suitable. Mastering each topic in it consists of six stages: watching a video lesson or reading a synopsis, studying the corresponding paragraphs from school textbooks, practicing the material on simulator tests, a webinar with a teacher, supplementing the basic information, performing homework and finally, assessment and review of homework with a teacher.
In addition, despite the fact that all online schools comply with state standards, each puts emphasis in the learning process in its own way. The School-inter distance school relies on easy and playful learning, the international School of Tomorrow offers a joint program with an American school from Florida, and the Foxford externship is focused on motivated and motivated students and their preparation for Olympiads and admission to leading universities in Russia ...
What does the computer teach
Despite the well-established education system, it seems that you can learn even more effectively. And new technologies are constantly offering new possibilities. Already, online courses allow you to see and hear teachers better than in school class, and after the invention of the virtual whiteboard, remote communication with the teacher ceased to differ from the real one. Many schools use the "living book" technology: the teacher can constantly update the lesson material by adding any kind of content (texts, diagrams, animation, video, audio, links to other sites). Using the Moodle system, curriculum coordinators can track the progress of assignments and distribute them among students. That is, distance learning technologies are already able to recreate a full-fledged school in the Internet space. Now the question arises: can we make online education fundamentally more effective than real education?
The key difference between distance education and a regular school is that it is individualized. Every student learns when and how it suits him. The next stage is to learn how to select the very principles of teaching for the specific characteristics of the student. As a result, an individual educational trajectory... Among Russian educational portals, this direction is most actively developed by the creators of the Uchi.ru website. We talked with the PR-director of the project, Georgy Slugin, about how personalization of training works.
The Uchi.ru website was created not as an alternative to school, but as an addition to it. It is designed to consolidate the basic skills and knowledge learned from the teacher. Its main goal is to eliminate the gaps that often arise in children when, for various reasons, they misunderstood a particular topic. “Our course is not made exclusively for geniuses,” says Slugin. - Every child has the potential to master school mathematics. But if these gaps appear in the 1st-4th grade, then it will be like a snowball, and then already in the 5th-7th grade the child does not want to have anything in common with mathematics. "
Each student has been working with the site independently from the first grade. He is offered to go through different tasks in order of complication. For each topic, interactive tasks that are simpler and more difficult arise sequentially, and without solving basic tasks, access to complex tasks is impossible. “When we want to teach a child something, it is important for us to understand what he has learned, that he has appropriated this skill, and not just picked the right answer,” explains Slugin. The system monitors the number of correctly solved problems on the topic - in case of an error, the child must repeat the task. And this is the first stage of adaptation to the student: everyone has the opportunity to learn as much as he needs, at his own pace and with a new number of repetitions. If it turns out that the student solves tasks quickly and without mistakes, then the system guesses that it is an "excellent student", and easy tasks can be skipped by going straight to complex ones. Thus, the system tries to keep the interest of strong students so that they do not get tired of the same type of "too easy" tasks. But if this "excellent student" makes a mistake, his privileges disappear, and he continues to complete tasks on a general basis. It turns out that the system replaces the teacher not only in checking decisions, but also reacts instead to the student's learning rate.
If the student copes with the tasks poorly, then the tactics of the program are different. The system does not give correct answers, but it gives hints, offers to solve the problem from the very beginning in stages. It turns out that here the role of the teacher was fulfilled in advance by the methodologists of the site, who, when developing the assignments, prescribed error scenarios and work on them. But if, taking into account the prompts, the decision turns out to be difficult and the student continues to give incorrect answers, then the system concludes that he is tired or not ready to think. In this case, he will be recommended another lesson (for example, geometry instead of arithmetic) or even “sent for a walk” - he will be taken out of the site and offered to return to school later.
It takes a lot of programmers' work to train the system to track student actions and make decisions. “This is already big data analysis,” Slugin says. - We have over a million in the system active students... All these cards have been cleared many millions of times. And in the future, depending on the time, the number of mistakes and the level of training, we can build an individual trajectory even more accurately. " If you imagine what else the system can pay attention to, absolutely amazing pictures are drawn. “Modern devices have a camera, a microphone, if they are turned on, you can understand the level of illumination and noise in the room, if geolocation works, then the time and even the weather outside the window. And there might be interesting things. For example, it turns out that in Murmansk in winter, children are better at solving problems after lunch, ”Slugin fantasizes. And despite the fact that right now they are not doing this yet, in five years, according to him, it will already be normal. “This is no joke,” he continues. - We understand that the weather affects the psychological state. At minus 25 it is not very comfortable to master a new complex topic from the first lesson - you need to warm up and come to your senses after the street. These are some obvious things, but as soon as the observations are confirmed by the data, we will collect statistics for the winter months and see that at minus 25 students solve more slowly and make more mistakes ... Then yes, maybe on such days you need to give easier tasks for repetition or games for the development of logic ".
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But while teachers are moving online, and programmers are teaching their sites to adapt to the needs of schoolchildren, one should not forget about another important actor, and that is parents. Despite the fact that in every online school a student is assigned a curator who can help and support in difficult situation, despite the fact that the tasks on most sites are compiled in game formDespite the abundance of motivating Olympiads, parents remain the driving force of education, at least at first. In video courses for the first class of the project “ home school Internet Lesson "the teacher even addresses the parents directly:" Check that your child has learned such and such rules. " IN primary grades it is often difficult for a child to deal alone with what is required in the task and on what principle the system works. It is necessary to ask the novice student a certain mode and explain how the learning process works so that he can continue to study himself. Therefore, unfortunately or fortunately, it is still impossible to replace parents with a computer. But it turned out that they can also be motivated: according to Slugin, the parents “hung out” for hours on the Uchi.ru website in an attempt to pass the entrepreneurial game and get the maximum profit from the sale of lemonade. Teach and learn.