Hybrid Logistics Project

HYBRID LOGISTICS PROJECT: WHAT IS IT?

A project to create a metamorphosis of all schooling through a holistic tech schema including several emerging types of A.I. and reimagined teaching roles. 

A metamorphosis is any complete change in appearance, character, circumstances – it’s a new form. Thus far education innovation in space use has operated with two-valued logic only -- either to online learning or always-on-campus. Within campus learning, various models evolved called hybrid, flipped, or blended learning. Each of these slightly modified time use but retained most school schedule assumptions. All were missing important ideas related to advanced logistics and what A.I. can now do.

Schooling continues to be an imprecise use of time, space and human teachers.  While schools have been overwhelmed with change wrought by a lot of great technologies, programs and methods, these things have not been brought into one schema to synergistically change the schooling form like technology has done in other industries.

For example, all formal learning remains organized around whole-group classes and courses with teachers trained to deliver primarily to groups. The motion across time through the curriculum is by age-grouped batches like a manufacturing line. This form was originally built to normalize, giving every student the same learning when the culture was highly homogenous. It is ceasing to work in an age when more customization is needed because of society’s dramatically different characteristics. Frictions based on the outdated form are threatening the survival of many schools.

It's also been said before that when time is the constant, learning is the variable.

Change the Form, Change the Outcome 

The Hybrid Logistics Project proposes a change in schooling form to unburden teachers and create better learning outcomes.

The change in form would affect time use, space use, and the intersection with teaching for students.  How exactly this is done will be individual to an institution. The Project has identified these elements:

1. Artificial Intelligence.

• Spatial-temporal logistics AI such as intelligent calendaring modified for auto-cohorting and managing patterns of learning entirely differently.
• Recommendations engines AI in systems and aps.
• Embedded AI in smart objects, smart networks.
• Generative AI for creating learning customizations and efficiencies.

2. Advanced networks and security.

3. Computing and experiential devices such as AR/VR, interactive whiteboards, digital signage, robotics, drones, digital science equipment, audio-visual enhancements.

4. Digital and paper resources in a complete curriculum plot with teacher activity intersections.

5. Space renovations.

6. Teacher training.

School hybrid logistics is not envisioned as all online or all distance learning. Neither is it merely flex time and spaces on-campus which are still organized by whole groups. Nor is it a tactical program to perfect some aspect of pedagogy or culture. It is pace-based personalized learning without sacrificing human teaching and socialization with other students.

Hybrid logistics envisions that space and time would alter through automatic cohorting of students with teachers based on student pace across the entire master schedule and all courses. A single teacher-led activity that would otherwise be partial class period like lecture, active learning or check-in, can be broken into multiple small groups with each group having that activity at different times based on prior completion of pace-based study materials. That prior reading and other work by the individual or paired students can be anywhere or flex space apart from teachers just like homework. Flex spaces could still be supervised by paraprofessionals or a rotation of teachers. A whole course may have students at highly varied points in the sequence of many teacher-led activity meetings that punctuate, in sequence, the asynchronous study by students.

Since the asynchronous study and teacher-led activities are separated, classrooms are now just meeting spaces but should be outfitted to be highly experiential. With this rearrangement of togetherness, the pace difference of students disaggregates across the sequence of courses over time. Individual students may suddenly surge faster in their studies while others are slower in parts of the sequence – the AI takes care of the re-cohorting for the teacher-led meetings parts. Some students could go through several study steps in a course sequence which each included post activities with the teacher and their cohort and are now ready for a hands-on lab as their next activity. Others who were put into the same course around the same time are about to be ready for the first activity only, an active discussion with the teacher. Meetings would calendar automatically as soon as a preset cohort is full of ready students. The AI finds the right time based on teacher’s held bracketed time and gives the teacher a reminder of what they will be doing in each one.

When not in an active group teaching meeting, teachers could be untethered from classrooms and roam to give specific help where needed in flex spaces where the studying is taking place or perform video conferencing check-ins if the teacher or students are remote. This new flexibility will give much needed time back to teachers to help students running behind or so far ahead that they need an adjustment to the materials or their personal schedule.

A course of study may have no specific start date, but be an open pathway joined and completed at any time for the length of time it takes that student. Disparate timelines of study can happen with AI without sacrificing intersection with live teaching or fellow-traveler socialization with other students. This new capacity to manage curriculum allows for late-enrolling students and also the disruption of by-age grouping on any course.

Visualizing:

Like Uber puts together drivers with riders for a transactional ride, hybrid logistics does the same but for live teaching activity.

Another way to think about hybrid logistics is an airport, where all travelers are in the airport hub awaiting being cohorted onto planes, each going to different destinations, where the pilot is similar to the teacher. The pilot flies that same route every other day or week for a new cohort. Travelers going a great distance may go through several connection airports where they find themselves with a new cohort for the next flight, but maybe a handful from earlier flights still with them to the final destination.  This is similar to how a course may look over time.

A final way to visualize hybrid logistics in learning is how the shipping industry manages each individual package with routing optimization, pulling them in to the local sorting facility (like a school), and managing them to get onto the right itinerary to reach their destination, going through several hubs along the way and at every point being joined by other packages also going that direction.

Hybrid logistics also has a lot of the same characteristics as small-batch manufacturing which gives manufacturing better quality control, greater staffing efficiencies, more flexibility and better affordability. Collaborative supply chain logistics and constant monitoring of availabilities mean low non-production time, which in education would be the time teachers need for prep anyway.

To get schools to this level of transformation involves a whole software and hardware technical architecture shift and the rearrangement of teaching and learning dynamics. It’s important to have a viable curriculum map so that teachers-as-uber drivers get there instantly, there are no delayed planes (meetings with teachers like the traditional “class), and packages aren’t left on some alternative doorstep (losses through imperfect personalization to alternatives or homeschooling.) It's important to understand that hybrid logistics is the ability to give a personalized path and pace easily at scale while still having all learning intersecting with live human teaching and other students.

Hybrid Logistics is an answer to:

• The teacher shortage, which is projected to get worse through 2023 and will be exacerbated by decreased funding.
• Chronic absenteeism of students nationwide. This problem has been partially identified to be a product of the forced normalization and whole-group orientation rather than full pathway personalization which can be partly remote if orchestrated that way.
• The inequity of normalization-by-age in all subjects, increasingly criticized by the present generation seeing complete customization and logistics in other industries.
• The relevancy of edtech as a dynamic for learning.  Much of edtech is largely being leveraged poorly because high-end logistics are missing that reduce overall teacher burdens and amplify personalization.
• The inflexibility of older school spaces being transformed without necessarily doing complete, and expensive, remodels.
• Alternatives like charters and online schools, homeschooling, and Choice legislation creating student attrition.
• Learning loss and general lack of achievement not always being successfully managed by arranging various curriculum programs over the top of the traditional schedule, space structure and teacher-centricity. Constant new programs exhaust teachers and the enterprise. Identifying the underlying structural “why” in need of change – how time and space are used – is strategic, not just tactical.
• Helping schools leverage their “human” brand more effectively against all-online alternatives.
• Social-emotional issues are of serious concern nationwide. Moving to use hybrid logistics would alter to a more socially supportive “homelike” environment.
• The science of learning indicates that lecturing needs to be less frequent and schools move to more active learning. The inherent time management restructuring of hybrid logistics will drive that shift.

What does the Project Do?

The Project works with education leaders on the vision’s practical utilities for teachers, helping get administrative master schedules rearranged, defining the outcomes of student personalization, meeting State laws on instructional time, accessing research and models, and input on the technical architecture.

Schools and District as well as gig teachers may join the Project through the Learning Leadership Society to be part of the journey and are strongly encouraged to help the Project become a reality at scale by purchasing one or more Innovation Services. Your school or district’s investment provides you with a documentation of your exploration of the shift for your institution and environment before you act.

We also encourage schools and districts to contact our underwriters who are familiar with the Project and can help define their parts of the transformation.

Underwriters support the Project by thought leadership contributions to the working architecture of technology and change which can be different for every school.

Schools and District as well as gig teachers may join the Project through the Learning Leadership Society to be part of the journey and are strongly encouraged to help the Project become a reality at scale by purchasing one or more Innovation Services. Your school or district’s investment provides you with a documentation of your exploration of the shift for your institution and environment before you would act.

We also encourage schools and districts to contact our underwriters who are familiar with the Project and can help define their parts of the transformation.

Underwriters support the Project by thought leadership contributions to the working architecture of technology and change which can be different for every school.