This approach will allow anyone to prove that they have mastered a set of skills at a high level, whether they learned them on the job, at a physical school, through an online resource or, most likely, all of the above. Over the next 10 to 20 years blended learning will also allow us to decouple credentials from learning-today both these functions are done by the same institutions. Instead students can progress at their own pace and continue to prove their knowledge long after the formal course is over. If a lecture is removed from class time and we have on-demand adaptive exercises and diagnostics, there is no need to continue the factory model inherited from 19th-century Prussia-where students are pushed together at a set tempo. If a lecture is available online, class time can be freed for discussion, peer tutoring or professor-led exploration. Virtual tools are providing an opportunity to rethink this methodology. If the test identifies gaps in students' understanding of a basic concept, the class still moves on to a more advanced concept. Exams often offer the first opportunity for the professor to get real information on how well the students digested the knowledge. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 human beings in the room, there is little to no human interaction. Today students in most classrooms sit, listen and take notes while a professor lectures.

Instead we have an opportunity to blend the virtual with the physical and reimagine education entirely.

We should not aim to replace the physical classroom. In education, however, the virtual will create a very different type of disruption. They assume that the virtual will replace the physical with something cheaper, faster and more efficient. Whenever people imagine virtual anything, they immediately pit it against its physical counterpart-Amazon versus physical book stores, Wikipedia versus physical encyclopedias.

Salman khan education website