Communication and entertainment trends change at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, we can't say the same for educational methods and practices. Thirty years ago, when students wanted a break from study, they would listen to music on cassette players. Alternatively, they would use landline telephones and pagers to arrange dates.
Today, they are communicating through messenger apps and video calls. Their favorite music is being streamed from distant servers, directly to their smart device. Unfortunately, in many public schools in the United States and internationally, printed textbooks, and lecturing to large groups of students are the only available teaching methods.
Education is much less pragmatic and tech-obsessed than the corporate market. It is a strict and heavily regulated system. Although many groundbreaking technologies were patented by universities, educational institutions are not good at using their own inventions for improving the learning process.
One of the biggest breakthroughs in the development of artificial intelligence and natural language procession happened when Georgetown University and IBM joined their forces and presented the first demonstration of machine translation.
Today, there are many similar partnerships between corporations and educational institutions that try to make the institutional learning transparent and more efficient. In 2016, Bill Gates has announced that the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation will invest more than $240 million dollars in a tech project. It personalizes institutional learning. Facebook has also followed the Bill Gates’s example and joined the world-famous Summit Learning project.