It's tough to predict the future, particularly 20 years down the road. The global warming crowd will try and tell you they know what life on earth will be like 50 or 100 years from now, but I doubt it. When the current Natick high school was built back in 1954, the country was a much simpler place. There were no computers (well almost none), Al Gore hadn't invented the internet and the pace of technological change was much more managable. Then along came the integrated circuit and everything changed. We all know the story; computers are getting smaller and faster, access to the internet is ubiquitous, computers are everywhere, programs like the GOOGLE search engine seems to read your mind, etc.
If somehow you could take a teacher from a school like this from 100 years ago and magically put them into a current day school, it wouldn't take them long to understand what was going on there. Education is still "teacher centric", with groups of kids moving from classroom to classroom, getting their daily dose of "learning". There have been lots of "process" changes as teaching styles come into and go out of fashion, but the basics have stayed more or less constant. Lecture, discussion, tests. Perhaps the greatest innovation has been Microsoft Powerpoint (just joking).
I inadvertantly got a glimpse of the future during my sophomore year in high school when I broke my leg badly. Is there such a thing as a good break? The school didn't want the responsibility of my falling down a flight of stairs (pre ADA era) so they hired a tutor for me. The tutor took care of math and science, my mother taught me history and English. This was the ultimate in individualized education. It was efficient ( I was usually done by noon) and I got the best grades that year of any time in my high school career.
However I'm not suggesting that everyone break their leg and get individualized tutoring. Too painful and too expensive.
Fortunately, the technology now exists to provide almost the same thing. And it WILL happen, perhaps in just five years or so, certiainly by 2020. States are awash in red ink, there have to be changes and soon. Several enabling technologies are reaching maturity and just need to be integrated. This will happen through a public/private collaboration as some company with deep pockets, Google comes to mind, reaches an agreement with a financially strapped state to develop and deploy a computer/internet interactive learning system. There is a TON of money to be made; teachers are expensive, inefficient and of mixed quality. It will happen and soon. Once the first systems are deployed, the idea will sweep across the country like wildfire as states realize the magnitude of savings to be realized. Teaching staffs can be cut in half and the best thing is, the quality of the education delivered will not suffer. If exisiting research on computer based instructional systems is correct, quality will even go up.
Enabling Technologies:
Computer Based Assessment (from Wikipedia). General advantages of CBA systems over traditional paper-and-pencil testing (PPT) have been demonstrated in several comparative works and include: increased delivery, administration and scoring efficiency; reduced costs for many elements of the testing lifecycle; faster and more controlled test revision process with shorter response time; faster decision-making as the result of immediate scoring and reporting; unbiased test administration and scoring; fewer response entry and recognition errors; fewer comprehension errors caused by the testing process; improved translation and localization with universal availability of content; new advanced and flexible item types; increased candidate acceptance and satisfaction; evolutionary step toward future testing methodologies.
Underlying most modern computer based assessment tools (such as the GRE) is a statistical technique called item response theory (IRT). IRT provides flexibility to the evaluation process. If a testee misses an item, the next item they are given is slightly easier. If they get that one right, they next get a slightly harder one. This iterative process quicky identifies the testee's true level of competence in a subject and provdes an accurate test score with perhaps half the number of items of traditional tests. The key to a new generation of learning environment is to incorporate this technology with presentation of material to be learned coupled with quick feedback on progress.
A virtual learning environment (VLE) (Wikipedia) is a software system designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting.. A VLE will normally work over the Internet and provide a collection of tools such as those for assessment (particularly of types that can be marked automatically, such as multiple choice), communication, uploading of content, return of students' work, peer assessment, administration of student groups, collecting and organizing student grades, questionnaires, tracking tools, etc. New features in these systems include wikis, blogs, RSS and 3D virtual learning spaces.
While originally created for distance education, VLEs are now most often used to supplement traditional face to face classroom activities, commonly known as Blended Learning. These systems usually run on servers, to serve the course to students Multimedia and/or web pages.