(From The Washington Post)—Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been touted by some as the breakthrough that will transform education. Top universities such as MIT, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley are scrambling to make their lectures available online. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) described one such program—a trial effort between online course platform Udacity and San Jose State University—as being “about our society, our future and how we can all improve our skills, how we can exercise our imagination.”

Brown is right, but today’s online courses are just a baby step forward on education’s path to transformation, particularly early childhood education. Khan Academy founder Salman Khan will likely be seen in the near future as the modern-day equivalent of the radio star who first appeared on television, microphone in hand.

Early education used to be delivered on a one-to-one basis. The craftsman passed down what he knew to the apprentice and parents imparted knowledge to their children. Then came the one-to-many model, with classrooms and eventually textbooks to facilitate learning via standardized lessons. The video-based learning of MOOCs is another incarnation of this one-to-many model, offering a window into the otherwise traditional classroom.

Social networking is allowing for some of the more profound changes in modern education, offering a viable many-to-many model. MOOC platforms such as Udacity, Udemy, and Open Study are beginning to use Facebook-like applications to enable students to share ideas and coach one another. These applications allow students to rank online content and discuss what they learned. Gooru provides a search engine to help find pieces of knowledge and then assemble them into comprehensive lessons. Think of it as crowdsourcing the course-creation process. The collective knowledge of millions could lead to dramatic improvements in the quality of online education while growing the volume of courses exponentially.

But all of this is still just the beginning of the education revolution. We are headed back to the one-to-one model with instruction geared towards the individual rather than the group.

Adaptive learning platforms, such as the one Knewton is developing, start by understanding a student’s strengths and weaknesses and then suggest an appropriate learning path. These keep improving their recommendation engines by keeping track of what videos students with different backgrounds and strengths watch and how they perform on tests.

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