Holders,
My platform for Chancellor is ‘Digital Aristotle For All’ Quizzes, or DAFAQs for short.
You are almost certainly asking yourself, “What DAFAQ,” or, “What are ‘Digital Aristotle For All’ Quizzes?”
I believe DAFAQs can be the future of the University of The East Pacific. How we educate the next generation of arbiters, magisters, and ministers shapes the future of the region. Regional universities are almost always a guy that knows all the things posting a topic and students don’t know stuff so the guy tells them. The guy posts things in a thread at the right pace for maybe one student during the lesson. Everyone else is either bored because they already understand the material or lost because they’re missing knowledge that they should already have, but, at the end of the thread, regardless of student understanding, the curriculum marches relentlessly on. Whether the guy uses IRC, threads or Skype, or whether he’s using telegrams, personal messages, or Skype again, the system isn’t really any different. It’s just technology doing the same thing in a shinier way, but DAFAQs are different. They are the shape of things to come. In a perfect university, each student would have a personal tutor, like Aristotle to Alexander The Great, but, if the education policy is Aristotle For All, then there is one big problem with this:
- Not everyone is as good a tutor as Aristotle
DAFAQs can solve this problem. Who needs teachers when the region can teach you all the things? Want to learn the military science? Then get started! Want to apply military science? Apply it along with a dozen different teachers. The East Pacific Sovereign Army massively multiplies the number of potential teachers, and that helps solve the problem.
Wait? Isn’t cheerleading a thread in the military workroom the same thing I was complaining about before, new ways to do old things, but with more shiny. After all, if you were a student with military inclinations, the University has always been a place to teach you all the things. Some people may have thought that the East Point Military Academy was going to revolutionize military science by giving teachers audiences, but here we still are. Simply joining the EPSA would solve the problem in a way that East Point never could. Practice missions can be difficult to conduct, and even the best get pushed aside for more popular operations that, not coincidentally, the EPSA is conducting. The costs to the student for joining the EPSA without attendin’ East Point is low, as is the costs to the EPSA, which is why a guy or gal who joins the EPSA can conduct over a dozen operations a month and doesn’t have to compete with the EPSA to conduct training missions.
This really helps solve the problem, but education still isn’t personalized to the student and that leaves joining the magisterium or the EPSA as a library, not a tutor like Aristotle. However, we can build on top of these organizations, and what I see is this: Digital Aristotle For All.
A testing program that tutors students individually by pulling from the library that is the University, but testing students on what they know, and, more importantly, adapting to what they’ve learned over time by comparing the effectiveness of experiential learning to discover, scientifically, what they don’t know. This doesn’t have to be a fantasy, if we start building these quizzes right now, even if Digital Aristotle isn’t your explicit goal. One from every holder. You can be more than just repositories of knowledge. Behind your eyes is incredibly complicated know how, but it’s not testing student learning, the effectiveness of different threads, different training, or even asking questions. While the University may seem primitive now, DAFAQs can only make it better, faster. Once the DAFAQs are written, the University will be less labor intensive and better than individual teachers ever could be. DAFAQs could free holders to float around the region helping students with interesting projects, and that could happen in the near term, not just be a long term reality. What happens when DAFAQs can get to know the student better than the teacher? When, for every topic of endeavor, they’re able to take the best and brightest students further down the path of knowledge than individual teachers ever could.
Thank you.
