 Ben Blair is a husband and father and lives with his family in Normandy, France He's about tied for the person who came the farthest to join the conference today Ben is co-founder and president of New Lane University and online university mission-driven to deliver quality higher education accessible to anyone on earth New Lane is designed to facilitate and leverage decentralized curriculum development with distributed attribution Ben holds a PhD in philosophy and education from Columbia University Ben Blair So a brief summary of New Lane New Lane offers a college degree for $1,500 We currently offer an associate degree and a bachelor's degree in philosophy We had our first graduate in the philosophy program in 2020 and this graduate has since completed a master's degree from the University of Nottingham and has been accepted to a doctoral program At the London School of Theology. We're very proud We had our second graduate this one with an associate degree in 2021 and they're continuing with our bachelors in philosophy Our price Point puts our degree within the reach of many people who would otherwise be blocked from University education which is thrilling for us, but I'm even more excited about our overall model When I talk about New Lane, I don't usually start with a scripture But since this is the Mormon transhumanist association I think it may be fitting to start with a Mormon scripture as we read in the Doctrine and Covenants The glory of God is intelligence or in other words light and truth In order for this scripture to connect with us and not just be a truism Intelligence light and truth must be accessible to us to everyone Behold the university the bastion of knowledge Intelligence light and truth how grateful we should be for these magnificent institutions If you haven't done so recently I invite you as I did yesterday to go visit a university campus there are a few not too far from here and Bask in its glory picture in your mind the easy access to knowledge and expertise and education that is available there What a university can offer is stunning and beautiful as a society We are indebted to these amazing institutions for what they have done and continue to do and enable Universities are sacred spaces in as much as they are discovering and making knowledge accessible to others They are enacting the glory of God Now I'll move from the big picture of the university to look up close at the core offering I submit that one of the greatest untapped values is knowledge of educational pathways What's an educational pathway? Well if I ask what are the stars in the Orion constellation? Maybe you know the answer if not you can quickly find it But if the question is how do I become an astronomer? This is a much bigger question with much more value at stake with a question like this Now we're talking about an educational pathway and for these questions We're dependent on educational Institutions like colleges and universities to provide and verify these you can think of these pathways as courses or a degree Importantly and essentially because these institutions can provide and verify such pathways These colleges and universities hold an inordinate amount of power and control There may be competition between Institutions, but the deal is you sign up for an institution and it controls the terms cost offerings Schedule location records, etc. These are all designed for the convenience and maintenance of the institution Once enrolled the college or university is a de facto monopoly. You can try to violate the terms, but then you don't get a degree These institutions hold all the power as a student You're at their mercy as an expert or professor It controls the terms of your contract where you live your basic schedule your course assignments In short these institutions have us in a stranglehold. I Recognize stranglehold isn't a friendly term To be clear educational institutions aren't evil Well, some maybe But their strangleholds aren't the result of evil scheming For the most part these strangleholds were just the result of trying to do something different with different people at a different time With different resources The world's knowledge base wasn't always widely available and it wasn't accessible Nearly anywhere to nearly anyone there were limited seats in a classroom Professors who had the knowledge lived in certain places and could only teach and reach students at certain times Research libraries were only available in certain places. There were meaningful geographic constraints But now we're at a crossroads Many of the determining factors for how universities are structured have changed For many people the status quo isn't working or is acutely painful And we have also recently caught a glimpse behind the curtain with the switch to online school Where one of these key constraints geography suddenly dissolved So why isn't the status quo working or what are these pains or results of the stranglehold? I'll start with the most acute The average cost of a four-year degree in the US is a hundred and twenty thousand dollars Up until recently we just unquestioningly accepted whatever tuition costs were at any university When a couple has a baby and they imagine that child going to college in 20 years They start an an intense savings plan Because you can't just put aside a bit of extra cash a year or two in advance for a price tag like this But this big cost has real consequences people start out adult life strapped in debt or Parents are forced to take out a mortgage on their home or in other ways make make a major sacrifice for their child's school People who earn a good income can't buy a home because of their student loans We haven't really come to terms with the burden of this cost on individuals and society But though the cost is maybe the most acute it isn't the only constraint Schools only hold courses at certain times of day certain times of the year If the time of day or a year doesn't work for you, you're out of luck This has real consequences. Just think about the casualness We accept of telling a student they have to wait a year to graduate Because a certain course is only taught in the fall We're telling people to put their life on hold because of institutional scheduling There's also an issue of student records or a transcript This is your personal educational record like a medical record, but documenting the courses you took and what grades you received I'll talk about some shortcomings of student records in a bit But I wanted to highlight that we have just accepted that this can be withheld if you have a library fine or a parking ticket These are factors that are unrelated to your education and what this record represents A few years ago, I would have put geography higher on this list But because of what we've experienced in the last two years, we've seen this criterion dramatically shift For a long time, we've just accepted that school could only take place at a certain geographic location Until over the last two years or it wasn't going to be a quality education Until over the last two years we saw that it could take place anywhere The major hurdle, this major hurdle just dissolved overnight And the strangleholds don't just affect students, professors are also at the mercy of the institution If you're fortunate to get hired as a professor, you'll need to move to the city where the university is based You'll need to teach the courses the institution needs you to teach and do all the tasks related to that If you want to try another route like make your own course for Skillshare or some other forum, you can But the barriers to entry are high And beyond the strangleholds, because of an imbalance of power and control, it's easy for the institutions to build path dependence Some of the consequences of this are that it doesn't function as well as it could and it doesn't improve as efficiently as it could Let me walk you through some of these path dependencies Curriculum is siloed Introduction to philosophy at campus one can look very different from what it looks like at campus two Professor Clark may emphasize Erasmus because that's who she's researching While Professor Spencer may skip Erasmus altogether Because the courses are siloed and what is taught is more dependent on what has been taught in the past or how the professor How this professor was taught than on what should be taught It may be a fantastic course, but if so it is something like the luck of the draw As far as instruction professors who are working on their publications in niche areas of a field May not be the best instructors for introductory courses, and there's not much incentive to improve instruction especially past a certain level Since professors teaching the same courses are siloed Instruction doesn't evolve efficiently Improvements if there are any are typically in a single classroom or campus Assessments may or may not be rigorous and there aren't significant incentives to improve More often than not they're a reflection of what is convenient or the professor's preferences Our educational records are not very informative. They list the courses you took in the grade you got But what does a b-plus in introduction to sociology mean? Records are also notoriously difficult to transfer between institutions Even though we can see significant ways we can improve in all these areas yet We accept this situation because this is what we're accustomed to it's been difficult to imagine an alternative And even when we can imagine an alternative because of the imbalance of power. It's really difficult to affect change So let's return to the basic offering of these institutions Remember for questions like how do I become an astronomer? We're talking about an educational pathway and for these questions We're still dependent on educational institutions to provide and verify these but we don't need to be After all an educational pathway is formed when an expert Organizes and orders what discreet information must be mastered this requires expertise not an institution And let me dive a little deeper on this because this has some really profound implications If we consider a course like introduction to biology an educational pathway the discreet information that an expert Organizes are learning objectives or intended learning outcomes. A course is ultimately a list of learning outcomes For that matter so is a degree For a course like introduction to biology learning objectives might include something like explain the basic structure of atoms and molecules The course may include a lot of objectives, but in order to be meaningful each objective needs to be distinct So an educational pathway is made up of a series of discreet learning objectives. These pathways are formed by experts We've trusted these institutions for the pathways because they conveniently house Expertise and they can securely verify and store educational records But we can find expertise outside of these institutions and Current technology lets us now match or surpass their security in verifying and storing records We can find this expertise across the globe and now we can engage securely no matter where we are You might say the world is our campus Like we've seen through many examples today What used to only be possible through the intermediary of powerful institutions is now possible in a decentralized way And once we can match the key tasks the institution carries out but in a decentralized way a world of possibility opens We can escape some of the old path dependencies and can suddenly optimize for things that were really difficult to optimize for in siloed institutions We can optimize for continual improvement in curriculum. We can update learning objectives as needs are identified Experts can contribute to the curriculum and they can just improve a single objective or a handful of Objectives rather than a full course. Maybe you're an expert on Plato's Republic You can just focus on objectives related to that and make them the very best learning objectives can be better and better attuned to the structure of a discipline as Experts compete on curricular design Imagine competition for the best instruction. Can you explain photosynthesis better than others? You can be an educational publisher again. You don't need to do a full course a single objective is enough We can optimize for improved student experience. They benefit from better curriculum and better instruction they can also circumvent the exorbitant cost scheduling and geographical constraints and they control their record and their record is informative and transferable Experts benefit from more flexibility in their schedule geography and in choosing what they want to work on They can develop review or host assessments. They can articulate or refine curricular objectives or contribute better instruction at the objective level I expect that many of the improvements will emerge as we learn to pursue and complete educational pathways Unburdened by these institutions To ground this presentation on what we're currently doing I'm just going to walk through how New Lane works now to give you a taste for our efforts in these directions Here's a sample of jet objective from introduction to philosophy The objective is summarized how Western philosophy emerged and developed in ancient Greece There's a typical object objective for an intro to philosophy course It's easy to find great resources for this objective here here a couple YouTube videos One is from Crash Course and another is one I made a Student would work through these resources and when they were ready They self-assess mastery of that objective after they self-assess mastery they take a computer score exam that tests them on every objective To pass the course students schedule and meet up at a convenient time for them in an online video conference with a professor Who conducts a 20 to 40 minute oral exam? The professor first verifies the students ID by reviewing a government ID and a string of photos taken of the student The professor also takes a photo of the student and adds it to the string of photos The professor's role is to verify that the student has mastered all the goals and objectives of the course or not yet The professor asks open-ended questions and spot checks and ultimately makes the judgment on whether the student has mastered the content or again Not yet student can be anywhere and the professor can be anywhere When a student completes a course This is time-stamped verified by the professor and contains documentation of all the course goals and objectives the student has mastered This is how we currently work We're centralized at the moment, but we are working toward a decentralized version We're working now to encode the standards and protocols. So when we decentralized we've worked out the kinks and can Scale this is a rough token model to point in the direction of further Decentralization in the future you can see how we incentivize continual improvement in curriculum and instruction what we're calling content and rewards and We reward students with better education experts who improve the content and token holders Who state good content as its quality is proven with more coins? Though I sometimes paint institutions of higher education in a negative light we are all indebted to these Magnificent institutions for preserving teaching and expanding the great corpus of human knowledge that has enabled us in many ways to build a better world These institutions will continue to play an important role in shepherding and enabling new classes of Immature people through important learning training and life lessons and they will continue to expand our knowledge and understanding and Though we are indebted to these institutions for our great heritage of learning knowledge and skill We are no longer dependent on them to obtain these I began with a scripture and I'll end with a manifesto Early on in the life of New Lane. We wrote a manifesto that guides us to this day. I'm going to share a few tenets from this document Education should be available and accessible to every person on earth Making quality education inaccessible or exclusive is Immoral Education belongs in the same category as shelter clean water and basic food Education should be disconnected from a schedule The most effective time to learn something is when the student is ready not when the teacher or institution is available Educational records including learning achievements grades transcripts credentials and degrees should be owned and managed by the student rather than an institution Students should be able to move freely among any learning institution or organization at any time or for any reason Education should not be at the service of institutions, but at the service of learning Organizing education around institutional timelines schedules Expertise records and convenience is efficient for institutions, but limits the student and by extension humanity's potential Thank you Understanding is higher education is going to become unbundled into this lifelong learning anytime anywhere model that you earn badges and micro credentials and stackable credentials and there are new finance opportunities that are connected to blockchain based income sharing agreements or Potentially blockchain UBI that's feeding into this learning economy And so I'm just curious how your new lane fits like what you're looking at in terms of the scanning that horizon and how you Do you feel that's a good model of education that there's an expectation children are earning badges when they're six You know for their lifelong learning locker I would say I think Better credentials and better records is definitely part of the future I think we still have a while where a college degree is going to be Kind of this important marker and the kind of badges and that kind of thinking is what Silicon Valley is really excited about and I think that is part of the future and I think I think we're a ways until the college degree is Obsolete and I think but I think the the bigger point is more detailed more meaningful records is what's important Thank you. Thanks Ben Blair