Milestone Based Education

Our current education system has divided subjects into sections that are intended to be taught by semester. The division is entirely arbitrary. No one went to any effort to determine how much information is reasonable to learn over a given amount of time, they just decided where to cut based on personal preferences and opinions. The result is that some classes are excessively difficult in the time given and some are excessively easy.

Because classes are divided into semesters, the subject matter must be taught at a set rate, otherwise the class might get behind and will not have learned all the subject matter by the time they are expected to. This system expects all the students to learn at the same rate. It also expects each student to learn each sub-section of the subject at the same rate as all the other students. This causes two problems. The first is that some students learn faster than others and this system holds them back. This can make a student become tired of a subject that they are extremely good at, making them dislike that subject. The result is that a student that could be a great asset to industry and technological advancement ends up in some job that does little for society, because they don't like the things they are good at (or worse, they don't even know they are good at it in the first place). Second, and much more common, a student may struggle with some principle partway through the semester. Unfortunately, the teacher and the rest of the class will go on without that student. This student learns the rest of the subject perfectly fine, but that one thing they missed can result in a poor grade or even failing the class entirely. One extra day covering that missed principle might have prevented the problem, but with 20 or more other students in the class, the teacher cannot afford the time to give an extra day to every student that needs it.

The problem here is that in most classes, many of the students have difficulty with various principles of the subject. Some manage to figure it out on their own, but others do not. Many students come out of their classes with Bs, Cs, and Ds, or even Fs, because they missed something simple early on, that made the entire rest of the class impossible. Many of these students have to retake the classes, wasting an entire semester because they missed something simple that could have been resolved in only one or two days. In high school, this results in late graduation. In college, it results in additional costs to the student as well as potential risk of loosing scholarships and grants. The overall cost of these problems is enormous, to individual students as well as to the taxpayers. This also destroys the many students' confidence in their abilities, making them hate subjects that they might be good at and causing more difficulty the further they get in school.

This can be solved with a milestone based learning system. This sort of system does not have a formal semester based class structure. Students are allowed to learn at their own pace, so long as their rate of progress does not become too low. Subjects are divided into small milestones that should generally take less than a week to complete (but more complex ones may take more). Once the student provides sufficient evidence of understanding of the subject material of the milestone, is it passed off and they can continue to the next. Some students may find that they can pass off what would have been an entire semester class in only a week or two. Others (or the same student in a different subject) may take more than a semester for a particular subject. Students that are doing well in a subject may need little or no attention from a teacher, while slower students may need extra attention. This allows teachers to teach where needed and stay out of the way where they are not needed. This allows students that are good in a subject to complete that subject extremely quickly so they can spend more time on subjects where they need it.

Khan Academy is doing research using a milestone based system, with a lot of success. BYU Idaho is also experimenting with a milestone based system. So far evidence has shown that most students have a number of subjects that they will do enough faster than a semester based system requires that they can learn more in less time than a semester based system allows, using a milestone based system instead. In short, most students perform better and learn faster in a milestone based system than in a semester based system.

Another major benefit of a milestone based system is that it can be gamefied very easily. This helps to encourage students to work at as fast a pace as they can handle. Khan Academy has gamefied its system by keeping track of milestones with "badges". Many students have started to learn competitively in an effort to accumulate as many badges as possible. Learning has become a game, and thus fun, for these students. Doing something like this with our entire education system could dramatically improve the education of high school graduates in the US, not because the education system has improved itself, but because the students will be treating learning as a competitive game, where they are rated by how much they have learned (ie, how many badges they have accumulated). Many students will come out of high school with a deep knowledge and understanding of subjects that many college students are currently struggling with. I will discuss gamefication of education in more depth later, but this is quite possibly one of the greatest benefits of a milestone based education system. Making education into a game will encourage the students to become proactive in their education, which is more valuable than any other single improvement we could make to the education system.

Lord Rybec