 From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE, covering Imagine a Better World, a global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington at the AWS Imagine education event, first time ever as part of the public sector series. Theresa Carlson kicked it off earlier today. 900 registered people watch this thing grow like every other Amazon event that we've ever covered. And really, this is all about education. We're excited to be here. Our next guest who's been working on this for a while, he's Lou Polacy. He's a Senior Innovation Fellow and Managing Director of Technology Innovation Action Lab, Arizona State. Welcome. Thanks for letting me interview here. Absolutely. So just before we get started, kind of general impressions of this event. Yeah, it's amazing. I was just saying just a few minutes ago that you go to a lot of conferences and you go to so many conferences. The goal is to sort of try to meet 80% of the time new people. And you don't ever do that. Here you do. And so there's a lot of people here that I've known for years that I haven't seen. And there are a lot of new faces here too, so it's great. Right. It's really interesting. We cover a lot of conferences and kind of the life cycle as they grow. But when they're small like this and just getting started, it's so intimate. There's so much hall conversations going on. There's so much just genuine sharing of best practices because everybody's still trying to figure it out. Exactly. Exactly. That's what you're doing here now. Absolutely. One of the things you're involved in that got my eye on doing the research for this is working on research-based approach to really understand what works for the student learning experience. So there's all kinds of conversations we can have about higher education as a work, is it not work, is it broken? There's a lot of interesting things. Here it's been really interesting to just focus on community college specifically and this kind of direct path between skills and getting a job. It almost feels like the old apprenticeship model kind of back in the day. You're at a big four-year institution and really exploring what is changing in the education interaction between kids and teachers, kids and curriculum and how that stuff gets communicated and what's effective. Because it's a new world. It's not the old world. No, it is. And at ASU what's interesting is is that there is a significant digital presence. 35,000 students very historically back to 2009. So with that comes a significant amount of footsteps, digital footsteps that students have taken. And so now you have the ability to be able to analyze that at a much higher level. And so now what we can do and the part of what we're doing at the Action Lab is looking specifically at the efficacy of these digital programs, finding out what course design elements do work and what needs to be changed. And that gives us the ability to sort of feed that information back into the instructional design process and continue to iterate on that improvement. The unique thing about the lab is that it's a persistent lab. Most universities are sort of stop and start research initiatives and they learn a lot and they publish a lot of papers. We've been around for three years and we'll be around for 10 more and it's a persistent examination of what we're doing in a digital environment and we're taking it one step further, trying to understand how students behave in a digital environment. We know a lot about how students behave in a classroom or a traditional learning setting but we don't know how they learn in a digital environment. I love you said digital footprints, not digital exhaust and it kind of reminds me of these older long-term longitudinal studies because it's still pretty early days in trying to figure out how these educational tools, mobile and stuff are impacting the way these kids learn but we know they spend so much time on them that is their interface to the world. It's almost like your remote control to life is actually this little thing that you carry around in your hand. So I'm curious, what are some of the things you've discovered that are working? What are some of the things that maybe that were kind of surprising that didn't work? What's some of the early findings that's coming out of that research? Sure, so in the early studies we look specifically at how demographic populations succeed or don't succeed in an environment and what we found out is there are certain demographics of students that flourish in an online environment and consistently perform well. There are some that don't. The second thing we learned specifically is what types of design features within a course like the interaction within students or exposing learning objectives or getting students to really understand what rubrics of measurement, how content is being used and paced throughout a curriculum. A lot of really detailed information that faculty need to reorient and redesign their instruction and so we can see a direct predictive value of improvement based on those changes. Right, so are you getting stuff out now that's impacting curriculum development or are you still kind of pulling the data together and there has not been enough time to really implement it? We are doing that, absolutely. One of the elements that we're introducing into the research now is this notion of, it sounds like a fancy term, non-cognitive or social and emotional learning, things that are predispositions of learning about a student in their sort of soft skills world, grit, determination, goal orientation, a variety of different soft skills and their disposition and how that impacts, how they learn and how they succeed in a classroom. And how important is that? I would imagine it's got to be super important. It's a field that is just still early in its science but we're learning a lot, not necessarily just about how students will succeed in a course environment, but those types of social, emotional learning skills that are required for them to be successful in a workplace environment. Right, right, and then the other factors that were discussed earlier in the keynote are some of the, you know, what's happening at home, you know, there's all these other factors that are in a student's life that aren't directly tied to their education but can have a significant impact on their ability to learn either temporarily or full-time, that's great. So as you look forward now, and I think it came up too in the keynote, there's no shortage of data in this education environment. It's really been the time to grab it, analyze it and put it to work. So how are your engagement with Amazon kind of helping you to move your objectives forward? Well the Amazon engagement allows us to sort of offload all of the technological constraints and gives us ultimate possibilities of not necessarily focusing on the tough stuff, the hardware, the integration, the specific tool sets that are required to extract data and analyze data and focusing specifically on the research. So ultimately, it allows us to redirect our focus in what's really important in our world because it's not necessarily about the technology. It's how the technology can point and draw a direct line between what the data says and how we create an intervention with students. So I'm just curious to get your perspective you said before we turn on the cameras. You've been involved in this field for a long time trying to figure out how people can learn, how they can learn better, more effectively. Are there some big kind of macro themes that maybe people don't think about enough that you've seen repeated time and time again that people should be thinking about and they think about effective education and how to get kids to actually learn what we're trying to teach them? Sure, so a couple things. I mean, what we're focused on is not necessarily what we call big data. We typically know big data as, it's really more about small data which shows us causality. So for instance, one of the things that we are learning is that peer-to-peer engagement is really, really important in many courses in engaging in asynchronous and synchronous organizations within the course to learn from peers. Also avenues specifically to faculty. So faculty can actually look at the map of the entire classroom and understand who's achieving and focus just only on those people. Interesting, well good stuff. And I'm sure as you get more and more of the digital footprints, the insights will only increase by leaps and bounds. Absolutely. All right Lou, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time and look forward to catching up next year and getting some new information. Thanks. So I'm Jeff, thanks for watching. We're in Seattle, signing off from AWS Imagine to educate. See you next time.