 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hey, welcome back already. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today having a CUBE Conversation. Nobody can really travel, conference seasons that are all kind of on hold or going to digitals. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on, but thankfully we got the capability to invite some of our community in. We're really interested in hearing from some of the leaders that we have in the community about what's going on in their world and what they're telling their people and what can we learn. So we're excited to have a good friend of mine. We went to business school together. God, it seems like it was over 20 years ago. He's Ben Nelson, the chairman and CEO of the Minerva project. Ben, great to see you and welcome. Thanks so much, great to be here. Yeah, so you have always been kind of a trailblazer. I mean, way back in the day, they've only had like two jobs in all this time, you know, kind of changing the world of digital photography with Snapfish. Three or four, three or four, yeah. And after a really long run, you made this move to start something new in education, really to, you know, education's a big hairy monster. There's a lot of angle and you started the Minerva project and I can't believe I looked before we got on today that that was nine years ago. So tell us about the Minerva project, how you got started, kind of what's the mission and then we'll get into it. Yeah, so Minerva exists and it sounds somewhat lofty for an organization, but we do exist to serve this mission, which is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. So we think a wiser world is a better world. We think that really wisdom is the core goal of education and we decided that higher education is the area that is both most in need of transformation and also one that we're most capable of influencing. And so we set about actually creating our own university, demonstrating an example of what a university can do and then helping tool other institutions to follow in the footsteps of them. And it's a really interesting take. There's often times we're told where you say if a time traveler came here from 1776, right, and walked around and would look at the way we drive, look at the way we communicate, look at the way we transact business, all these things would be so new and novel inventive. If you walked him over to Stanford or Harvard, you'd feel right at home. So the education is still kind of locked into this way that it's always been. So for you to kind of take a new approach, I mean, I guess it did take actually starting your own school to be able to execute and leverage some of these new methods and tools versus trying to move what is a pretty, kind of hard to move institutional base. Yeah, absolutely. And it's also because we have to remember that universities as an institution started before the printing press. So if you go and talk to pretty much any university president and ask him or her, what is the mission of a university? Generically, forget your university or what have you. And they'll say, well, generically, universities exist to create and disseminate knowledge. That's why they've been founded 1,000 years ago and that's why they exist today. And the creation of knowledge, I think there's a good argument to be made that the research mission of a university is important for the advancement of society and that it needs to be supported, certainly directly in that regard. So much of the innovation that we benefit from today came from university labs and research and that's an important factor. But the dissemination of knowledge is a bit of an odd thing. I mean, before the printing press, sure. Yeah, I mean, kind of hard to disseminate knowledge except for if you gather a whole bunch of people in a room and pocket them, maybe they scribble notes very quickly, well, that's a decent way of disseminating knowledge because they can, one mouth to many pieces of paper and then they can read it later or study it. I guess that makes sense, that's somewhat efficient. But after the printing press and certainly after the internet, the concept of the university needing to disseminate knowledge as its core mission seems kind of crazy. It can't be that that's what universities are for, but effectively they're still structured in that way and I don't think any university president would actually challenge in that way would argue the point. They would say, oh, yes, of course, well, what we really need to do is teach people how to use knowledge or evaluate knowledge or make sure that we communicate effectively or understand how that knowledge can interact with other pieces of knowledge and create new ways of thinking, et cetera. But that isn't the dissemination of knowledge and that isn't the way that universities are actually structured. But it's funny that you say that, even before you get to whether they should be still trying to disseminate knowledge, they're not even using the new tools now that they had the printing press come along to disseminate knowledge. You know, it's really interesting as we're going through this time right now with the coronavirus and a lot of things that were kind of traditional or moving in to digital and this new tool called Zoom, which it never fails to amaze me, how many people are having their first Zoom call ever, right? I mean, how long ago was Skype? How long ago was WebEx? These tools have been around for a really interesting time, a long time, but now kind of a critical mass of technology that anybody can flip their laptop up or their phone and go. You know, you guys, just in terms of a pure kind of tools play, took advantage of the things that are available here in 2020 and 2019. So I wonder if you can share with the folks that don't have experience kind of using remote learning and remote access, you know, what are some of the lessons you learned? What are some best practice? What should people kind of think about what's capable and the things you can do with digital tools that you can't do when you're trying to get everybody in a classroom together at the same time? Right, so I think first and foremost, there's kind of the nuts and bolts, the basics, right? So one of the things that, you know, education environments have always been able to get away with is when you've got everyone in a room and, you know, you're kind of cutting them off from the rest of life, you sometimes don't realize that we are talking into thin air, right? That maybe speaking students aren't actually listening, they're not absorbing what you're saying, but, you know, they have to show up at least in K-12 and in higher ed, they don't bother showing up. And so the, you know, 15 people that do wind up showing up from the 100 person lecture, I guess you do, you say, oh, well, at least they're listening. But the reality is that when you're online, you're competing with everything. You're competing with the next tab, you're competing with just not showing up, it's so much easier to just, you know, open up some game or something, some YouTube video. And so you've got to make this engaging. Making and engaging isn't about being entertaining. And that's actually one of the major problems of assessing who is a good professor and who isn't. You know, people look at student reviews, right? They say, oh, you know, such and such, we're such a great professor. But when you actually track student reviews of professors to learning outcomes, there's a slight negative correlation, right, which means that the more, the better the students believe the professor is, actually that is an indicator that they've learned a little bit less. Now, that's really bizarre, but when, you know, going intuitively, but when you actually think about it deeply, you realize that entertaining students isn't the job of a professor, it's actually teaching them. It's actually getting them to think through the material. And learning is hard, it's not easy. And so you have to bring some of those techniques of engagement into online and you can do that, but it requires a lot of interactivity. So that's aspect number one. But really the much bigger idea isn't that you just do what you do offline and then put it online, right? Technology isn't at its best when it mimics what you do without it, right? You know, it doesn't, you know, technology didn't build an exact replica of the horse. Right, right, right. Ride that, right, doesn't make any sense, right? Instead, what technology should do is things you cannot do offline. One of the things that worked 300, 400 years ago is that you could study a subject matter in full. One professor, one teacher, they teach you pretty much everything that people needed to know in a given field. In fact, the fields themselves were collapsed, right? Science, mathematics, you know, you know, ethics were all put under this idea called philosophy. Philosophy was everything, right? And so there's really, we didn't have much to learn, but today, because we have so much information and so many tools to be able to process through that information, what happens is that education gets atomized and you know, when you go through a college education, you're, you know, being taught by 25, 30, 30 some different professors. But one professor really has no idea what you've learned previously. Even when you're there in a 101, 102 sequence, how many times have we been in kind of the 102 class where in the first month, all the professor did was repeat what happened in the 101 class because they didn't feel comfortable that you actually learned it or that the professor before them taught it the way they wanted it taught. Right, right. And that's because education is done offline with no data. If you actually have education in a data-rich environment, you can actually design cross-cutting curricula. You can shift the professor's role from disseminating knowledge, actually having students or mentoring students and guiding them on how to apply that knowledge. And so once you have institutional views of curricula, you can use technology to deliver an institution-wide education, not by teaching you a way of thinking or a set of content, but giving you a set of tools that broadly any professor can agree on and then apply them to whatever context professors want to present. And that creates a much more holistic education and it's one that can only be done using technology. Ben, that was a mouthful. You got into all kinds of good stuff there. So let's break some of it down that was fascinating. I mean, I think the asynchronous versus synchronous opportunity if you will to, as you said, kind of atomize education into the creation of content, the distribution of content and more importantly, the consumption of content. Because why should I have to change my day if the person I want to hear is only available next Tuesday at noon Pacific, right? It makes no sense anymore. And the long tail opportunities for this content that lives out there forever is pretty interesting. But it's a very interesting kind of point of view if you assume that all the knowledge is already out there and now your job as an educator is to help train people to critically think about what's out there. How do I incorporate that? What are the things I should be thinking about when I'm integrating that into my decision? That's a very different way. And as you said, everything is an alt tab away that literally the whole world is an alt tab away from that webinar. Very good stuff. And the other piece I want to get your take on is really kind of lifetime learning. And I didn't know that you guys are, you know, kind of applying some of your principles. Oh my goodness, why don't you actually like, measure effectiveness of teaching and measure how long people hang out in the class and measure whether it's good or not. But you're applying this really now in helping companies do digital transformation. And I think coming at that approach from a shift in thinking is really a different approach. I was just looking at an Andy Jassy keynote from a couple of years ago yesterday and he talked about the A number one thing digital transformation is a buy in at senior leadership and a top down priority. So, you know, what do you see in some of your engagements? How are you applying some of these principles to help people think about change differently? Yeah, you know, I think recessions are a very telling time for corporate learning, right? And if you notice, what is the first budget that gets cut when economic times get tough? It's the, you know, employee learning and development, right? Those budgets just get decimated right off the bat. And that's primarily because employees don't see much value out of it and employers don't really measure the impact of those things. You know what I'm saying? Oh my God, this is such an incredible program. My employees were able to do X before this program and then they were able to do 1.5X afterward. You know, if people had that kind of training program in the traditional system, then they would be multi-billion dollar behemoths in this space and they really are not. And that's because again, most of education is done in content land. And it's usually very expensive and the results are not very good. Instead, if you actually think about learning in tools as opposed to information and then applying those tools in your core business, all of a sudden you can actually see transformation. And so when we do executive education programs as an example, you know, we ask our learner, right? How much of what you've learned can you apply to your job tomorrow, right? And we see the overwhelming majority of our students are saying something like more than 80 to 90% of what they learned, they can apply immediately. Wow, that's impressive. That's useful, right? And why do you think, is it just kind of institutional stuck in the mud? I mean, is it the wrong incentive structure? I mean, you're talking about very simple stuff, right? Why don't you actually measure outcomes and adjust accordingly? You know, use a data-centric methodology to improve things over time. You know, use digital tools in ways that they can get you more than you could do in a physical space. I mean, is it just inertia? You know, I really think this is a watershed moment because now everybody is forced in using these tools, right? And there's a lot of, you know, kind of psychology around habits and habit-forming. And if you use something for a certain amount of time every single day, you know, it becomes a habit. And if these stay-in-place orders, which in my mind, I think we are going to be doing it for a while, you know, kind of change people's behavior and the way they use technology to interact with other folks. You know, it could be a real, you know, kind of turning point in everyone's opening eyes that digital is different than physical. It's not exactly the same. There's some things in physical that are just better. But, you know, there's a whole realm of things in digital that you cannot do when you're bound by time, location, and space. Exactly right. That's right. And I think the reason that it's so difficult to shift the system is because the training of people in the system, and I'm speaking specifically about higher education, really has nothing to do with education. Think about how a university professor becomes a university professor. How do they show up in a classroom? They get a bachelor's degree, where they don't learn anything about how to teach or how the mind works. They get a PhD, in which they learn nothing about how to teach or how the mind works. They do a post-doctoral research fellowship, where they research in their field, right? Then they become an associate professor or an assistant professor and non-tenure, right? And in order to get tenure, they've got seven years in order to make it on a publishing track because how they teach is irrelevant. And they don't get any formal training on how to teach or how the brain works, right? Then they become, you know, a junior tenured professor, a full-tenured professor, right? And then maybe they become an administrator, right? And so if you think about it, all they know is their field. And I've had conversations with academics, which is, which are, to me, be fuddling in the sense that, you know, they'll say, oh, you know, everyone should learn how to think like a historian. Oh no, everyone should learn to think how, like an economist. Everyone should learn to think like a physicist. And you kind of unpack it and you say, well, why? There's, oh, well, because we deploy tools that nobody else deploys and it's so great, right? And so it's, okay, give me an example. I had this conversation with a university president who was a historian and that president said, look, you know, what we do is we look at, you know, primary source materials hundreds of years ago and learn to interpret what they say to us and ascertain truths from that. That's an incredibly important skill. He said, okay, so what you're saying is you examine evidence and evaluate that evidence to see what it can actually tell you. Isn't that what every single scientist, social scientist, no matter what field they're in does? Isn't that what a physicist does? Isn't that what an economist does? Isn't that what a psychologist does, right? Isn't that what an English professor does, right? Actually thinking about, I remember, I took a mini module in my, when I was an undergraduate with Rebecca Bushnell, who was a literature professor, eventually became the dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Pennsylvania. And we basically looked at a text written 400 years before and tried to figure out what parts of the text were written by the author, what were transcription errors, and what was censored. That's looking at evidence. This was an English professor. It's the exact same process, but because people know about it in their field and they think the only way to get to it is through their field, as opposed to teaching the tool, they can't get out of their own way. And that's why I think education is so stuck right now. Yeah, that's crazy. And we're all victims of the context in which we look through everything and the lens in which we apply to everything that we see, which is one of my things that there isn't really kind of a truth that's what is your interpretation and that's really what is in your head. But I want to close it out in bed. I really appreciate your time today. It's been a great conversation and really kind of take it back to your mission, which is around critical thinking. There's a lot of conversation lately, this kind of rush to STEM as the thing and there's certainly a lot of great job opportunities coming out of school if you're a data scientist and you can write in R. But what I think is a more interesting conversation is to get out of your own way. Is the critical thinking as the AI and the RPA and all these other things kind of take over more of these tasks and really this higher order need for people to think through complex problems. I mean, like we're going through today, thank God, people who are qualified and could see ahead and saw an exponential curve potential just really causing serious damage when we're still to head into this thing to take aggressive action. Dr. Sarah Cody here locally telling the San Jose sharks, you can't play, that's not an easy decision, but thankfully they did and they had the data. But really just your kind of thoughts on why you prioritize on critical thinking and what you see with your students when they get out into the real world applying critical thinking, not necessarily equations. Yeah. Look, I think there's no better demonstration of how important critical thinking is than when you look at the kinds of advances that STEM is trying to make. What happens any time we get a demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence? Remember a few years ago when Microsoft released its AI engine, smartest engineers working on it and all of a sudden it spat back misogynist, racist types of perspectives. Why? The training set was garbage. It wasn't that the technology was bad. Actually it was amazing technology, but the people who were writing it couldn't think. They didn't know how to think two steps ahead and say, wait a second, if we train the information the kind of the random comments that we see on the internet, who bothers to write anonymous comments? Trolls. And so if you train it on a troll data set, it'll become an artificial intelligent troll. It doesn't take a lot of critical thinking to actually realize that, but it takes some, right? And when you focus merely on those technical skills, what you wind up doing is wasting it, right? And so if you ground people in critical thinking and we see this with our graduates, you know, we graduated our very first class in May and we had what, as far as I can tell is the best graduate school placement of any graduating class in the country, as far as the quality of offers they got. We had a 94% placement rate in jobs and graduate positions, which I think is tied with the very best Ivy League institution and the kinds of jobs that the students are getting and six months into them, the kinds of reviews that their employers are giving us is looks nothing like a recent undergraduate. These are oftentimes types of jobs that are unavailable to recent undergraduates. And, you know, we had one student recently actually just told me, Russian in my mind, even though he's the youngest person in this company, when the CEO of his company has a strategic question, he comes to him. And when he's in a meeting full of PhDs, everybody looks to him to run the meeting and set the agenda, right? He's six months out of undergrad, right? And I can give you story after story after story about each and every one of these graduates. And it's not because they were born with it. They actually had a wise education. Yeah, Ben, well, that's a great story and we'll leave it there. Congratulations again to you and the team at Minerva and what you've built in your first graduating class, great accomplishment and really great to catch up. It's been too long and when this is all over, have to get together and have an adult beverage. That would be wonderful. All right, Ben, thanks a lot. Thanks so much, yeah. All right, you've been watching theCUBE. Great check in with Ben Nelson. Thanks for watching, everybody. Stay safe, we'll see you next time.