Billion Dollar EdTech Idea 5: Converting university libraries into learning gyms
Universities have gone back to in person learning, but if integrated well, online education could certainly elevate and create an impactful learning experience. As the world debates the future of hybrid education, here’s an idea on what that blend could look like.
The university learning gym is inspired from the fitness gym only that this is a place for students to flex their learning muscles.
The fitness trainers for this gym are called ‘learning engineers’. They look at the student’s learning history on classroom subjects and recommend a personalised set of learning exercises so students get better at achieving their learning goals. They also feed information to university faculty so they can serve a more relevant learning diet in the classroom.
In the learning gym, the time spent on the type of learning activity helps a student gain learning calories. The gym consists of a catalogue of activities (by subject) for students to:
consume content (read books, complete online courses, engage in conversations with industry)
create material (research reports, projects, internships)
contribute to the community (teach other students, conduct hackathons, facilitate debates)
A higher degree of learning fitness is achieved as time spent increases from consumption to creation to contribution. Students have kiosks where they can digitally enter the amount of learning calories gained, enabling the learning engineers to generate individual insights.
While the university library is already a place for students to read books and complete individual assignments, the opportunity is to turn the librarian into a learning engineer, and use digital means to transform the library into a multimodal learning gym for the 21st century.
