What we can learn from racing
The Grand Prix circuit hosts some of the fastest auto races in the world, with higher speeds and twice the lateral g-forces of NASCAR. Unlike NASCAR, where individual cars are built to precise specifications (it is, after all, the National Association of “Stock” Car Auto Racing), Formula One cars are allowed room for customization and innovation.
In stark contrast to NASCAR, Formula One cars are built to give drivers maximum control—even during a race, drivers have the ability to monitor and modify the air-fuel mix, the aerodynamic wings, the oil level, and other components in order to adapt to the course, weather, or other conditions. In order to win a race—and part of the approximately $700 million in yearly prize money— Formula One teams must have both a talented driver, as well as a well-designed car that gives the driver the control he or she requires.
Professors require similar control over the technology they use to facilitate student learning, with similar abilities to make modifications along the way to adapt to the needs of their students.
From powertrains to pedagogical ownership
When seeking tools more powerful than Word documents or PowerPoints (to allow students to engage with interactive simulations, for example), professors unfortunately find that the available online courseware or instructional media resembles a stock car—content, problems, solutions, feedback, and even adaptive learning pathways are all standard and “hard coded” (i.e. they reside in the program’s software code). As a result, these tools do not provide the flexibility that educators seek in order to exert Pedagogical Ownership.
Dror identified this challenge as part of his PhD thesis, while working to develop interactive lab simulations at the University of New South Wales. He and his team realized that despite building innovative courseware (with cutting-edge simulations, intelligent feedback and sophisticated adaptive learning pathways), as soon as professors began engaging with it, they wanted to tweak it, change it, adapt it – or in other words “make it their own”.
The type of “ownership” that his colleagues were seeking was not technical control (“I want to be able to code that simulation myself”), but rather, pedagogical (“I want to determine what feedback students receive, and if students get this question wrong, I want to take them down a different learning pathway”). His colleagues didn’t want to drive a stock car; they wanted to be Grand Prix professors, modifying aspects of the student experience to better meet the learning objectives they had set for the course.
Responding to these requests, Dror and his team quickly realized that playing pit crew to other professors, manually editing content and structure to meet their individual pedagogical strategies, would be neither efficient nor scalable. Instead, they built what eventually became Smart Sparrow: an authoring tool that allowed professors to deploy simulations while incorporating their own questions, explanations, and learning pathways. Smart Sparrow’s mission is to support professors by providing control over how and what they teach, as well as giving them data to reflect on the outcomes and make changes as needed.
The tool allows students to “learn by doing,” while also supplying immediate intelligent feedback. It offers reporting capabilities (via a purpose-built analytics dashboard), providing professors with the data necessary to meaningfully reflect on the learning experience they created and gauge its efficacy. This reflection is a critical component of Pedagogical Ownership. If a question or explanation is not fulfilling the pedagogical intent, a professor can modify or delete it, or choose to present the material again in a future class to clarify misconceptions.
Both inside and outside the classroom, professors need to fully own the teaching (and, therefore, learning) process. However, just as a great driver will never win a Grand Prix in a Kia, so too are great teachers limited by the constraints of technology that doesn’t allow them to exert pedagogical ownership. Technology has many opportunities to impact higher education; we want to use it to put professors back in the driver’s seat.
Dror Ben-Naim is founder and CEO of Smart Sparrow, an ed-tech startup in adaptive and personalized learning technology. Peter Cookson is a principal researcher at AIR and teaches in the Department of Education Policy and Social Analysis at Teachers College, Columbia University. Peter is also a senior advisor with Whiteboard Advisors, which works with Smart Sparrow.
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