2035: School as a Service

I recently visited a brand new teacher training school in Eastern Finland. The school was so nice that a couple reporters from New York Times had told the principle that they had only seen one other school like that — and Tom Cruise’s daughter went there.

This was a free public school — as all schools are in Finland — but it was located in an area with highest unemployment rate, highest immigration, lowest level of parents’ education, and biggest drug problem.

Almost half of the students needed some form of additional support, but unfortunately there are less resources available than they need. In the classroom, teachers may have students from eight language groups who are not capable of speaking or studying in the native language. Getting students on the same level even in terms of basic vocabulary and concepts is extremely difficult. What can teachers in this kind of situation do?

The principle of this particular school, Mikko Ripatti, wants to create a virtual version of his school in the cloud. He has taken over a hundred 360 images and is planning to augment those images with our technology. Why? Because, he has started thinking about school as a service. His vision is to make the school accessible to all its students, every day, in multiple languages, even if the students were not able to physically come to school every day.