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Okanagan CEO Kristin Garn wants to radically reshape the way we learn
It didn’t take Kristin Garn long to realize working in a classroom wasn’t for her.
Garn has a degree in Education, Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Winnipeg, and for a brief time tried her hand at a traditional teaching job.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t last long.
She quickly left the classroom to run an educational consulting company where, as a high-priced tutor, she would “take like two weeks of lecture and give it to them [her students] in like 40 minutes.”
Even back then, Garn was subverting the traditional teaching techniques she thought were missing the mark. But when smartphones and mobile operating systems took root in society, Garn found an even better way to transform the teaching game.
Today, Garn is based in the Okanagan and is the CEO of Mathtoons Media Inc., a company that’s been designing adaptive learning software for mobile devices since 2011.
Garn, a “math head” who appears to put near-absolute faith in the power of data, sees incredible potential in smartphone-based learning—so much potential, in fact, she ready to radically reshape the way we learn.
She decries the fact that we send kids to school with textbooks, or that most of society’s teaching techniques revolve around sitting in rooms listening to people talk.
“We plunk people in a big room and talk at them, and then just cross our fingers and hope they remember everything,” she says incredulously. It’s something that bothers Garn a lot because she believes that, in many cases, for people to learn effectively teachers aren’t even necessary.
“It turns out that teaching has very little to do with learning. What’s really important is how someone learns,” she explains.
She says people are either effective learners, or they aren’t, and the quality of the person teaching them is way less important than how they’re learning.
An effective learner will learn regardless of how good a teacher is, and an fabulous teacher teaching an ineffective learner likely won’t make much progress.
Her company’s mobile app, Practi, takes teachers and classrooms totally out of the equation, figuring out how its users learn, and creating learning experiences for them based on that knowledge.
“It kind of pushes the information at you and watches your behaviour as you are acquiring your skills, and then facilitates your learning from there,” Garn explains.
“It basically takes the lecture and the classroom right out of learning.”
Garn admits she often comes up against strong resistance to this this idea, however, she still believes mobile learning is the future.
She draws a parallel between mobile learning, and the emergence of the fast food chain McDonald’s.
McDonald’s, she says, “untethered” the experience of dining out by giving its customers their food in a paper bag.
For a population used to sitting down to eat their meals, the idea that they could take their food anywhere was a game changer, eventually transforming the way society thought about eating out.
Mobile learning, she said, could be the same thing.
“People really have this feeling like, I have to be sitting in a classroom and there has to be somebody at the front of our classroom for me to learn. And we’re saying, ‘no, here’s your learning in a bag, buh-bye,’” she says
“You don’t need the teacher, you don’t need the classroom. The teacher and the classroom were never really what was teaching you. You were always learning.”
For years Mathtoons Media focused on classroom-based applications, but Garn says she faces such strong opposition to mobile-based learning in schools that they’ve recently shifted their focus and begun focusing on corporate training.
“I’d rather build something very big, and what I discovered was the textbook in the classroom is not moving aside very quickly,” she said.
She says everything from the tourist industry to call centres are finding use for the software, and things only appear to be speeding up.
Already, she says, she is experiencing less and less resistance to the idea of mobile learning, and she thinks it’s only a matter of time before a lot more people begin getting their learning “in a bag.”
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