Education Week - January 13, 2016 - S6

EDUCATION WEEK

January 13, 2016

Extending the Digital Reach > www.edweek.org/go/digitalprogress

CONTINUED FROM PAGE S4

retail-analytics firm RetailNext, George Shaw helped
large stores usher in similar changes.
Mostly, that meant using video cameras to monitor shopping floors, then applying software and algorithms to the resulting footage to categorize people
into shoppers versus employees, for example; track
their locations and movements; document each item
they touched; and connect all that information with
what they ended up buying.
Now AltSchool's head of technical research and
development, Shaw is at the forefront of developing
similar "passive observation" techniques for education.
"The idea is to lay down the path for understanding
everything that happens in the classroom without the
need for any sort of intrusive sensing at all," he said.
The first big step toward that goal is the company's
AltVideo camera system, now installed in every classroom across all six AltSchool campuses. For now, the
footage is mostly used by teachers and administrators on an ad hoc basis-if someone wants to review
a particularly fruitful interaction with a student, for
example.
But Shaw is helping lead the company's efforts to
begin what he calls "automated metadata production" on that footage. To begin that process, AltSchool
is, now testing motion-tracking algorithms similar to
those used in both the NBA and retail analytics. Eventually, that could expand to include applying advanced
facial recognition, affect detection, and computervision algorithms to the footage to generate digital
data on students' engagement levels, emotional states,
and more. (See related story, this page.)
AltSchool leaders are still imagining the potential
uses of such information, said Bharat Mediratta, the
company's co-founder and chief technology officer.
"First, we need to generate the big data," he said.
"Then, we start figuring out how to use it to transform
education."

Reasons for Skepticism
Before dismissing such a plan as hopelessly audacious, consider Mediratta's pedigree.
For a decade, the 45-year-old Colgate University
graduate was a top engineer at Google, where he
was responsible for the technological and analytics infrastructure behind the company's home
page, through which users enter billions of Internet
searches every day.
At AltSchool, Mediratta said, he's trying to apply
similar processes to another "humanity-sized challenge": replacing the top-down, slow-moving bureaucratic structures that currently shape public education
with a "networked model" in which students, teachers,
and schools are connected directly by information and
thus capable of learning and adapting more quickly.

TRACKING
STUDENTS'
EMOTIONS AND
MINDSETS

AltSchool

"Heat maps" of activity in AltSchool classrooms are generated by applying motion-tracking algorithms to video
footage from constantly running cameras. To date, the information has been used primarily for operational
purposes-to guide the company's real estate team in finding properties easily converted to classroom space.
"We will get to the point where we have the same
kind of big-data opportunities that Google has,"
Mediratta said, "and we'll be able to take advantage
of them."
Even so, it's difficult to envision the country's
100,000 or so public schools-in many places still
struggling just to get adequate Internet and Wifi connections-adopting such radically new methods.
"It's not difficult to find many others who have been
very accomplished, and brought a lot of money to the
table, and still fell short of their own lofty goals," said
Douglas A. Levin, the president of EdTech Strategies,
a consulting group on school-technology issues.
For their part, AltSchool's founders say that's why
they are playing the long game.
The company isn't trying to create technology tools
that have to be quickly sold and shoehorned into traditional public schools. It intentionally avoided the
charter-management route taken by other presumptive innovators with big plans to change American
public education.
Instead, AltSchool's strategy is to invest heavily in
research and product development, while also continuing to open more private "micro-schools" that

serve as labs for those tools to be deployed, tested,
and used to generate the data that is ultimately the
company's lifeblood.
The idea is to first establish a network of schools
delivering high-quality education; then develop the
technologies that can support the expansion of that
network; and ultimately leverage the ever-growing
amount of data the network produces to continually
make the whole system, schools and technology alike,
smarter and more effective.

'Montessori 2.0'
And what does a "high-quality education" look like
at AltSchool?
Ventilla describes it as 'Montessori 2.0': a kind of supercharged version of the progressive, project-based
learning often found in elite private schools and privileged enclaves within traditional school systems.
Play and hands-on learning are stressed-the
less time students spend in front of screens,
the better, Ventilla said. Standardized tests are
viewed as an inadequate, outdated mode of measuring student learning. Involving parents in the

he race is on to provide students with
personalized learning experiences
based on their individual emotions,
cognitive processes, "mindsets," and
character and personality traits.
Academic researchers, for example, are
busy developing computerized tutoring
systems that gather information on students'
facial expressions, heart rate, posture, pupil
dilation, and more. Those data are then
analyzed for signs of student engagement,
boredom, or confusion, leading a computer
avatar to respond with encouragement,
empathy, or maybe a helpful hint.
"The idea is that emotions have a powerful
influence on cognition," said Sidney D'Mello,
an assistant professor of computer science
and psychology at the University of Notre

Dame, in Indiana. The increasing power and
affordability of eye-tracking, speech-recognition,
and other technologies have made it possible
for researchers to investigate those connections
more widely and deeply, he said.
"Ten years ago, there were things you could
do in a lab that you couldn't do in the messiness
of the real world," D'Mello said. "Now, you can
get a reasonable proxy of a student's heart rate
from a webcam."
Still, widely available classroom applications
of such work might be a decade or more away.
More prevalent now are digital resources that
seek to measure and support the development
and self-identification of such "noncognitive
competencies" as self-management,
perseverance, and a "growth mindset" that
recognizes skills can improve with effort. The

http://www.edweek.org/go/digitalprogress

Education Week - January 13, 2016

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