Future Classrooms Would Require No Teachers

"The sheer volume of experimentation that is happening right now, just that volume and calibre of the technologies of improving education and the frequency with which it is coming out is creating this crescendo effect that will break down castle walls," Courier Mail quoted Dr as saying.

He said that within the next decade there would be a fundamental shift away from a "sage on stage" model with a teacher at the front of a class imparting knowledge, to a model where teachers were more like coaches.

Dr Frey said this was a logical transition but that there would still be areas where teachers were necessary, but maybe not quite as many as already exist today.

At the rate education technology is advancing, most developed countries were not equipping teachers with the skills they needed to survive the changes to education syllabuses over the next decade, Dr Frey said.

"The fact that people are going to have to shift careers more than ever before in all history indicates we're going to have get used to being in this constant changing mode," he said.

New kinds of "rapid learning" programs are being developed all over the world that are designed to cut in half the time students need to spend at school.

US engineer and entrepreneur, Nolan Bushnell, is one of thousands of educators developing "speed learning" courses designed to cut in half the amount of time children spend at school.

Benghali-American educator Salmon Kahn founded his own online academy that provides more than 3000 free online mini-courses on topics ranging from physics to art history, computer science to medicine. The micro-lectures are designed to teach students everything they would learn at school in half the time.

Dr Frey is also developing his own education competition that will run around most colleges where people from all disciplines from video game developers to film makers are challenged to create engaging educational programs that take less time than existing syllabuses.

"If we can create this competition and run it successfully for 10 years in a row, by the end of 10 years what comes out of this competition will be so staggering and mind-boggling than anything we have in the world today and everybody can say 'I wish I had gone to school with that training,'" Dr Frey said.

"It will consist of 15 minutes sessions instead of days of classes," he added.

Doctor Frey will be presenting his ideas at the Creative Innovation conference in Melbourne in November.

Source-ANI