 Hi, my name is Tracy Tecajana-Sminosa, and this is a video on Eru Eku. It's a proposal to elevate the quality of education around the world. I teach a course at Harvard University Extension School called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind, brain health, and education, and I have the honor of serving on the OECD expert panel on teacher's new pedagogical knowledge that includes neuroscience and technology. And I'm currently Associate Editor in Nature Partner Journal, Science of Learning. So we know there's lots of different ways that you can measure quality of education, depending on what your values are and what your priorities are. But we know some things are non-negotiable. Without good teachers, there is no quality education. And generally, we invest in strong curriculum, texts, resources, technology, instructional design, and methods, activities, and strategies. We know the teachers are pretty much responsible for all of these areas, for understanding the technological aspects, the subject area knowledge, pedagogy, and understanding a bit more about how the brain learns. We know that strong curriculum can support subject area knowledge. We also know that there is this kind of a symbiotic relationship between textbooks and strong curriculum. Sometimes the people who write the text are the people who decide the standards, and therefore that's the curriculum. And we know that technology, especially ed tech, is coming into its own. It's basically creating this space where we can save teacher time on the small things, on the knowledge bits, so that they can have more time for the more complex human aspects of the teaching and learning dynamic. We also know that the instructional design, how we lay out programs, how we leverage what we know about how humans actually learn and what's going on in the brain to create better organization of the introduction of new concepts, as well as the use of methodologies, strategies, and activities, are all part of great teaching. But sometimes we find that one or more of these elements is missing, either from our classrooms, our schools, our districts, or even in the country that we work within. And on top of that, we know that each country has its own challenges. For example, in Ecuador's case, in addition to always looking for high quality education, we're currently in a fiscal crisis, and we need to release funds that are used on things like the revision of curriculum, which happens with a lot of frequency, but not a lot of necessity. We need to release those funds for other types of activities. And in addition to enhancing the quality and general classroom structures in public schools, we also need to pay attention to a lot of the special populations. Refugees, people who have a high school diploma that's not yet complete and have dropped out of school, those with chronic illnesses or pregnant teens, for example. We also need to find some way to allow teachers to do what they do best and let technology do what technology does best by leveraging what we now know about neuroscience and technology to structure educational experiences in a different way. So this is the idea. Let's join the instructional design that we have at Connections with the high-quality content videos that Khan Academy has, with additional educational resources that are open and free to the public, and allow teachers to have more time to be able to connect with their students and enhance their self-efficacy as learners. We'd like to do all of this within the construct of things that are mobile, free, and digitally connected by using Internet in a Box. Internet in a Box, it's the remote area community hotspot for education and learning, is a fantastic new breakthrough which permits free offline educational content, either via a Raspberry Pi or Intel Capcomputer. And it can reach communities that have no Internet, which includes rural communities or an Ecuador case, the Amazon jungle communities, who don't always have the benefit of great teachers or Internet. The instructional design at Connections is quite special. We are now offering courses in Spanish and English at low or no cost to teachers using an instructional design that I developed at the Harvard University Extension School, which last semester earned a 5 over 5 rating from students. It's 100% online flipped classroom with individualized resources and differentiated homework structures, which permits learners from many different countries to work at the same time and share their experiences and to develop not only individual traits, but also strong learning communities that think critically and creatively together. Khan Academy, as many of you well know, provides short, high quality content videos. And these are organized by mastery concepts as opposed to grade levels, necessarily, so that we can compare this with this concept of neuroconstructivism. The main idea is that we can use the Khan Academy videos in a hierarchical structure that matches it with the brain's natural trajectories for learning in different subject areas, in which prerequisite or lower level concepts are in place before higher order learning is built upon it. And as we know, within a teaching learning cycle, all learning is based on knowledge or skills or attitudes, right? Knowledge is basically dates, facts, formulas, concepts. Skills is the ability to use that knowledge. And attitudes are values, culture, sensitive aspects of learning, context, self-efficacy, self-regulation. So the idea would be to use digital tools to teach those dates, facts, formulas, things that are Google-able knowledge. And in some way, introduce the skill sets through that digital technology. But that would then be reinforced by the teacher within contextual structures of what that skill set means within a specific community or society. This would then free up a lot of time for teachers to do what teachers do best and work on attitudes and values, things that a machine just can't do. This could be, for example, having a lot of error correction, using something like Grammarly to correct all these different comma splices or run-on sentences that a person might have. And then you could reinforce that, again, with some parts of technology to rehearse those skills but then use the real teacher to contextualize that information and those skill sets, which leaves a lot more time for teachers to be able to spend on things like building self-esteem and self-efficacy as learners. It's really interesting to see that as far as ed tech is concerned, there's a whole lot more resources on the knowledge side, a few on the skill side, but very few on the attitude side, most likely because it's recognized that humans do do some things better than machines. We've found and identified over 400 different ed tech resources that are free and available. They came from 20 different countries around the world in different languages. And we've seen how we could leverage that to create a different type of design. There are certain activities that facilitate an institutional organization of information and structures, for example, timetabling. Then there's other things that help save teachers time by doing certain corrections, for example, of grammar problems or math problems. And yet other tools that are basically educational apps that help facilitate or rehearse skill sets that students themselves can use. So this means we can use these open digital educational resources that support teachers and students and institutions and mix and match them for the benefit of each individual school. This means we're dividing and conquering at the time it takes to teach well and to go through a teaching and learning cycle successfully. In this medical model of inquiry, it means that we leave certain things to digital resources and other things to the teacher. So overall, once again, the idea is to have a new instructional design that's enhanced with content that is neuroconstructively designed that will be supplemented with certain resources and with quality teachers in our classrooms and delivered to any kid in any place on the planet. What are the next steps? Our plans would be to start with our pilot in Quito. We'll begin with the first levels of mathematics and in parallel, we're establishing alliances with Khan Academy, with World Possible, the Harvard University Extension School and with different types of app designers. So a summary of the benefits is that this is a highly scalable intervention. It reaches the most needy, including those people in remote populations, communities without good schools or teachers or without internet. It also reaches students with unfinished high school degrees because this can be used with or without the added benefit of a teacher. You can also be used with immigrants, refugees, orphans or people with long-term illnesses who have to spend a lot of time in hospitals and out of schools, pregnant teenagers, people in prison. But it also allows us to return to the foundations of quality education. And in the case of Ecuador, for example, to look at the profile of this exiting student and this person that we hope to shape and form, if you read that description, there's very little there about knowledge and skills and a whole lot more about attitudes and values. Edueku gives more time to teachers to spend working on these important characteristic foundations and leverages the use of other types of tools to digitally facilitate a hierarchy of learning. And finally, the most important thing that this does is that it creates learning with mastery concepts from pretty much zero, more or less around two years of age, all the way until you graduate, is 20, 22 years old, of conceptual understanding rather than by grades, which means we no longer have to worry about making a choice between whether or not we do local, national or international standards. We'll basically have a better conceptual understanding of learning achievements by mastery levels of conceptual knowledge. So you're bound to have lots of questions and I look forward to engaging with you in dialogue about Edueku. Thanks.