 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle Open World 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your host, John Furrier and Peter Burris. Welcome back everyone, we are here live in San Francisco for Oracle Open World 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program theCUBE where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris, our next guest is Allison Durbin-Wick Miller, who's vice president of Oracle Academy. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much, it's nice to be here. Thanks for spending time, we love your mission. I want to just start by just having you take a minute to explain what is Oracle Academy? Because we talked about DTEC yesterday, the Digital Technology High School. That was a phenomenal, amazing thing. A lot of amazing things going on, but what specifically is Oracle Academy? Well, I agree with you, DTEC is a fabulous project and Oracle is actually committed to supporting education in a lot of different ways. DTEC is one of the projects. Oracle Academy is actually our flagship program in education philanthropy. We're focused on supporting computer science education around the world. We currently support 3.1 million students in 110 countries every single year. And we've grown the program by 300% basically in the past five years, which is really fabulous. It's an exciting place to be. We focus on teaching teachers how to teach computer science as part of our Oracle Academy mission so that we can reach as many students as possible over a very long time period, right? A teacher's in the classroom and teaches students years after year. So if we can teach a teacher once, that teacher can carry that forward for years. Train to train is a great, great tactic. It's paying off too. Certainly we've seen the results at Stanford. You've seen some of the enrollment in the computer science program at Stanford up. And Carnegie Mellon just announced 49% of the freshman class. I think those 49% are women. Which is fabulous. Which is interesting. Now the question is, does that point to any flash point in the industry? Is there a trend driving this? Obviously the digital natives. Is it the desire for science? Is there cultural norms changing? What's your thoughts? Is this just phenomenal news? On what's driving more women in computer science. I think there are a lot of factors at play. They're geeks too, right? I guess. I think a lot of it is, you know, they've done some studies that show that women are actually more focused on what they're going to do when they get out of school than men tend to be going in. And women are smart. They look where the jobs are. And there are a lot of jobs that are going unfiltered in computer science. We all hear about the digital skills gap. I think that's true. I also think that there's just a difference in the way that girls are brought up these days, right? There is an expectation that you can go out and you can do anything. And we're really starting to see things shift. And honestly, places like Carnegie Mellon, Harvey Mudd, Stanford, Berkeley have done some amazing work to really revolutionize their curriculum in computer science so that it is friendly to women as well as men. Well, super exciting. Congratulations on that. Thank you. The next question is, you always hear the studies and discussion around, I don't know what the percentage was, but it was large, that the jobs that are going to be coming have not yet been invented. Certainly AI, Larry, showing chat bots is kind of a sexy example, but really it's about the shift in this digital industrial revolution. Those jobs aren't there. So what's the feedback on that from the teacher standpoint? How do you approach the teachers? What's the strategy? How do you train the trainer on what's an unknown potential position? Well, I think that- Critical thinking, is it like coding? I mean, what's the- It is. It's actually really what we need to be teaching. There are two things we need students to know. They need to understand computational thinking, which means they need to be able to take hard problems, break them down into parts and solve them in logical ways, right? So that's basically what we're teaching. The other thing students need to learn is how to learn and to love learning because it's true, their jobs, what they're going to be doing 20 years from now, you can't guess, I can't guess, but they need to be ready to figure out how to make it happen. They are the innovators of tomorrow and that's really what we're trying to teach them to be. Let me pick on one other thing that I was talking to the CTO of a very large user organization about a month and a half ago. And he said something very interesting to me. He said, I need those skills, but as my business starts applying technology to deeper problems within my business, I need people that can also facilitate conversation, that collaborate, that aren't focused on the narrow outcome but focused on the win-win for everybody. And he specifically mentioned he wanted to bring in more women, specifically into the organization to complement the computational thinking, to complement the other stuff, but to also drive more collaboration between all the different domain skill sets that are necessary to solve some of these crucial problems. Are you seeing that as well? I think there is a very broad interest in everyone developing soft skills. I think we risk reinforcing stereotypes when we say you have to have women because women are collaborators. I think men can be just as collaborative and I think it's a skill we all learn from. That may be the case, but in his specific statement, he was talking about the need to start breaking down the barriers between the technocrats and the business people. Absolutely, I think technology has really become ubiquitous in our world, right? And this is what's driving this need for every student everywhere to have access to computer science education. Computing, you will use a computer in the course of your daily life going forward. And so I think this need to understand how to integrate computers effectively into what we do every day is definitely a growing need. So I got to ask you about the notion of social justice because I know it sets on your Twitter handle and we have the tech truth, our new fellowship which we're passionate about with the ground truth. The intersection of technology and social justice is actually a conversation we're kind of having here but with computer science curriculum, but it's also expanding to this next generation computing environment. Do you guys bring that into the fold or is that part of the academy because now there's societal issues that are impacted by one, changing workforce, technology changing, whether it's the digital natives, is it good to be on social media 24-7 or is it not, Minecraft is out there gaming culture, all of this is coming together. Is there a social justice perspective or is that more of a personal hobby or what's your thoughts? No, no, so Oracle Academy, one of our pillars is really ensuring that there's broader diversity in computing and that translates to a social justice issue because it really is about ensuring that every kid everywhere has access to computer science education as part of their educational pathway. And I think that's where the social justice element comes in because if you don't have access to this in school, you can't get a living wage job and that's only gonna get more and more true as we move forward. We don't teach that as part of our academy curriculum. What we're really focused on is, because there are a lot of good courses out there that talk about cyber ethics and engaging in how computers work in society, computing and society, what we're really focused on because it's really lacking is actually computer science. So we have a course in Java, we have a course in database, we're very narrowly focused. We actually have three years of curriculum but it's very focused on how to use the computer. What's your biggest learning that over the past few years, most recently with the growth, that you've walked away with from being involved with the academy, the personally and also from an Oracle Stanford? What's the biggest learnings you could share with the audience? I think for me personally, I grew up, my mom is a teacher so I grew up with teachers and I always knew teachers work really hard but I think the biggest learning for me has been how underappreciated teachers are in this country and how hard they really work and how much more we need to do to really ensure that they're recognized as professionals. One of the problems we have is a real shortage around computer science teachers and people who want to be computer science teachers because they get jobs in industry instead and earn like seven times as much money, right? Not that much but, and I think we really need to be aware of that gap in our society and that's probably been my biggest learning on a personal sort of front. On an Oracle front, I really think what's been amazing to me has been the appetite for computer science and the dedication of educators to come give up their summers and learn this stuff because they get this as important and they want to bring it to their classrooms. Allison, really support your mission, congratulations. It's really, really super important and we're certainly behind it and congratulations and thanks for sharing on theCUBE. Excellent, thank you so much for having me. We are here live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE, Oracle Open World 2016. Cube, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris talking about computer science and social change. We should have a new course called Cloud and Social Chances and theme of the show since everything's moving to the cloud. This is theCUBE, we're right back with more live coverage after this short break.