 Let me welcome everyone. Welcome to the Future Trans Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forum's creator. I'm your host, your chief catherter and your guide to the next hour of conversation. The Future Trans Forum is a conversation-based venue and we are very, very fortunate to have a fantastic guest this week. We've been talking about pedagogy here in the forum for years. We've been talking about different ways of making learning more effective, more creative and more inspirational, as well as just helping us learn better. And among other things, we've discussed active learning and how powerful that is as a pedagogy. Eric Mazur, who is a professor of physics and applied physics at Harvard University, is one of the world's leading experts and exponents of active learning. Since the 1990s, he's been researching, publishing, speaking about ways of transforming a passive classroom into an interactive learning space. His work has been an inspiration to people literally around the world, and I'm absolutely, absolutely delighted and honored to have him here as a guest. So, in order to talk about active learning, let me welcome Professor Eric Mazur. Greetings. Thank you, Brian. Great to be here. I'm honored. Well, I'm delighted to see you and I'm grateful to be able to host you. Where are you today? Where are you coming from? Lincoln, Massachusetts. I'm at home. Oh, good. I hope it's not too hot and steamy. It's on the hot side, but I'm inside where it's relatively cool. Very smart. Very smart. There are all kinds of ways to introduce you, and I just did my level best to just give you a taste. But a way that we like to have people introduce themselves is to ask them what they're going to be working on for the next year. And what are the big projects, the big ideas that are going to be taking up most of your calendar and most of your thought? Well, maybe we should go rewind the time a little bit. Of course, for a good part of my career, I've been working on finding ways to engaging learners in the classroom. And when the pandemic started to explode on the scene, my project was how can I take what I've done in the classroom, adapt it, transform it so that I make the online experience the best it can be for my students. And interestingly enough, I was able to obtain results. I think I did my best teaching ever last year online. I think that that's no exaggeration. Yeah, I doubled learning gains. I increased students' self-efficacy. I increased students' sense of support and community. I can send out a link to a little presentation about that if people are interested. So when the administration announced last May or June that learning was going to be, or instruction was going to be in class, no exceptions this year, my heart more or less skipped a beat because I was thinking, you know, it's almost unethical. I mean, for me to do that, given that I can do, can accomplish better teaching the way I'd structured it last year. So my project for the next months or so is to find, you know, a happy sort of compromise between what I did last year and what I did before and maybe make learning work even better. Well, first of all, that's a fantastic story to hear about how you did your best teaching of your career during the pandemic online and how now as we are kind of returning to in-person, depending on how things unfold over the next few weeks, you've got to figure out a way to bring that back in person. Thank you. Thank you. Friends, I have all kinds of questions for Eric Mazur. I can speak to him for hours and hours, but the forum is your venue. The forum is for you to put forth your questions and comments. So any questions about active learning and how to do this correctly and well during the pandemic, please just either use the question mark button or the raised hand button. And before I can even finish saying that, we already have a few questions coming up. So here is one from our good friend, Steve Ehrman, whose book I recommend incredibly strongly, by the way. And Steve asks, in peer instruction, has anyone discovered an easy way to pair students who responded differently to the question? I'm guessing that students who initially agree are less likely to learn from the discussion. Steve, that's a wonderful question. And I'm smiling here because I think back around 10 or 12 years ago, I was involved in the development of a platform called Learning Catalytics, which was later acquired by Pearson, where we did exactly that. I mean, if you have two students who agree with each other, they talk to each other, regardless of whether they have the right or the wrong answer, they're not very likely to change their mind. On the other hand, if you have two students who have different answers, they're more likely to have one of the two flip their answer or maybe both. So we actually, I should have pulled up a slide. I have it here ready, even though I don't know if I can easily share something. But anyway, I can explain it to you. So we tried out different pairing algorithms, and we found that we could usually improve the efficacy of peer instruction by pairing two students who have different answers. Maybe I should take a step back for a moment, because I'm not sure that everybody in the audience knows about peer instruction. Peer instruction essentially is an interactive engagement technique. Rather than focusing in the classroom on transferring information by lecturing, I moved the information transfer phase out of the classroom by either having the students read a chapter out of a textbook or watch a video or whatever. Let's put that aside for now. And then in the time that I have with my students in the classroom, I teach by questioning rather than by telling. So I talk a few minutes, I ask a question the student think. I have them commit to an answer. This could be with a clicker. In fact, shortly after I developed peer instruction, the clicker was developed to support that method of instruction. Or it could be by writing the answer on a piece of paper. It doesn't really matter, but I want them to commit to an answer. Then I tell my students, find a person sitting near you or if necessary, get up and walk around who has a different answer and try to convince that person that you're right and he or she is wrong. Complete chaos in the classroom. I teach large classes. But the remarkable thing that happens is that students tend to move in the direction of the desired answer. I'm saying desired answer because not all of you may be teaching the sciences where there is a correct answer. So it might be not as black and white as it could be in some of the more exact sciences. Why does the method work? Well, imagine you have two students sitting next to each other, John and Mary. Mary has the right answer because she understands it. John does not have the right answer and still has a problem with his understanding. On average, Mary is more likely to convince John than the other way around simply by the force of logic reasoning. But, and here's the important point, Mary is more likely to convince John than Professor Mazur in front of the class. Why? Because she doesn't suffer from what Susan Ambrose in her book How Learning Works calls the expert blind spot. He's only recently learned it, so she still knows what the difficulties are that are getting learners. Professor Mazur learned it such a long time ago. He cannot even understand why somebody doesn't understand it. So using that approach, I found that I could, you know, increase the learning gains substantially. Of course, actually. Now, as Steve asked, and thank you so much for asking that, students, you know, don't follow the instruction of find a person who has a different answer that well. There are much more inclined to talk to the person next to them who is likely to be a friend and who is more likely probably than a random person to think like they do. So finding a way to pairing students so that they talk to somebody who has a different answer is very beneficial. In learning catalytics, which now unfortunately has become a Pearson exclusive platform, you know, students would answer the question on their device and then after they answered it, they would say, please talk to Brian Alexander to your right. Even if I don't know Brian sitting, hey, you're on the left or on the right. I don't know. I can't figure out my left and right with the screen here, right? But even if I would not know Brian, it would say talk to Brian. It would give his name. And on Brian's screen, it would say talk to Eric Mazur on the opposite side. And it's not just limited to right and left. It could be in front or diagonally in front or whatever. It actually pairs you that way. So yeah, I'm not aware of any other solutions like that. It would be great to have something that is more publicly available. I agree. Steve, thank you for the question. And Eric, thank you for the detailed answer. It must be bittersweet to have a successful platform purchased and then put behind a wall like that. Friends, if you're new to the forum, this is how the question box works. And I think nine of you have already clicked it. So apparently this works for you. Now let me introduce you to how the video question works. Let me bring up Annie, I believe, and Fensie. Let's see. Hello, Anne. Hi, Dr. Mazur. I am a big fan of your work. Please call me Eric. Eric, okay. Yes. And I was so excited to hear you say that this was a great year for you in your teaching that you learned so much and you became a better teacher because that's happened to me when I began teaching in distance education and in adult education too. And I'm wondering for you, what is it that made distance education so much of a better teaching and learning experience and what are you going to miss when you go back to the classroom? Thank you for that question. Something that has kept me awake over the summer. So, you know, I think that when the pandemic hit and we were first online, I found that most of my colleagues were in the frame of mind where they were asking themselves, how can I do online what I do in the classroom? And I think if you think about it that way, it automatically becomes a challenge. Instead, I was thinking, are there things I can do online that I cannot do in the classroom? And one of the things I realized is that most of classroom instruction by virtue of the physical classroom tends to be synchronous, right? I mean, you all have to be at the same place in the same location. And even worse, it tends to be instructor-paced rather than student-paced. And I asked myself, how many things can I make asynchronous? And how many things can I make self-paced rather than instructor-paced? And so I made a list of all of the activities that I did in the class. And I asked myself, does this have to be synchronous? Of course, if you have a physical classroom, it has to be synchronous. But if you're on Zoom, you know, there are a lot of things that don't have to be synchronous. Yes, if the instructor needs to be there at the same time as a student, then there's some synchronicity there. But it might not be necessary to have the whole class be there at the same time. So I discovered to my surprise that a lot of things that I've done synchronously could be done equally well asynchronously, including peer instruction. And so using that, I freed up a lot of my time because now I could allocate the time to that normally allocated to synchronous activities to interacting with students. So that personalized the instruction enormously. The second thing is my initial, you know, the initial thing that I thought of was let's have a Zoom classroom just like we have a regular classroom. But I teach a team-based class where students meet in teams of four. So initially I had a big Zoom room and then I'd break out rooms to different teams. But then I thought, you know, what I should really do rather than having the students come to my Zoom room or my class room, each team should make its own Zoom room. And then when each one of us, they ask us to join their team room. So we actually use Slack to facilitate that, right? So when the team wanted us, they said, you know, can you join team five? And we click on the link and join that team. So all of that helped in making a class which tended to be large and impersonal, much more personal and intimate. As a student, it felt like a four-student class. The third thing that I did, which I can easily bring back in person, is that I changed my approach to assessment dramatically. In particular, I adopted a approach to grading called specifications grading. If you Google, yes, Virginia, there's a better way of grading. There's an article in Inside Higher Ed that refers to it. Essentially, specifications grading does away with partial credit. You either meet specifications or don't. If you don't meet specifications, you can try again. And I also broke down the course into something like 68 little microunits. It was almost like earning badges. And then at the end of the term, the number of badges determined the letter grade. It was a complete game changer for me. First of all, it freed students of the stress of completely derailing their grade and maybe even their career by one failure. You can always improve and redo. If you don't meet specifications, you can try again. I've never seen students work as hard as I did last year. Part of that, I have no evidence for that, but I attribute part of that to this approach to grading. So that was essentially the three main changes, make things more asynchronous and self-paced, break down the class into little four-person classes, and then the specifications grading. Great, thank you. That was great advice. That's a whole guide. And what are you teaching? I'm teaching computer applications and instructional technology for teachers, pre-service teachers. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you and good luck. Thanks. Well, friends, again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a video question. So if you'd like to join us on stage, you can tell that both I and Eric are very kind to you. So just click the raised hand button if you'd like to do that. And we have one more of those video questions, actually. This is from Kelly Walsh, a previous guest. Let's bring him up on the stage. In fact, let me just do some dramatic arrangement on the screen. Check this out. Wow. There you go. Hello, gentlemen. Can you hear me OK? Perfectly, Kelly. Good to see you. Eric, it is just a real pleasure to meet you. I lost audio. Uh-oh. Can you hear me, Eric? Yeah, now I can hear you. For some reason, I am momentarily lost audio. That's OK. Can you hear me as well? Yep. Very good. Well, it is a real pleasure to meet you, Eric. I'm a member of the Flip Learning Network Board and started by John Bergen and Aaron Samms back in 2014. And I followed their work and your work for many years. And being a real curious about education technology for going on 13 years now since I got into education, the whole idea of blended and flipped and peer and these kinds of constructs have certainly been the most, have had the greatest potential out of all this sea of ways to leverage technology to improve instruction. And I love the way you explain these things so straightforwardly. So my first question was going to be exactly what, I forget her name, but the woman just asked right there. And it was a great insight into that. Looking forward, the pandemic has been so interesting in the sense that folks like myself and yourself have been advocating at leveraging this technology to kind of flip the classroom and change the approach and put the content outside of the classroom for so many years. And it's grown slowly as a grassroots thing. But that was like, hey, you're kind of forced to really rethink it. And that was interesting. Now the big question is what's going to happen as we slowly, hopefully return to a more, I don't want to say normal, right? What's normal anymore? But as the opportunity comes to get back in the classroom in the traditional way, is higher education going to embrace the possibilities better? And I'm just curious for what your, and so far based upon your introduction, it sounds like you're already frustrated with no, things are going to start going right back to the way they were. But any particular thoughts on where we might go, the potential, the likelihood to embrace what we've learned? Well, as you know, I've been involved in educational change for 30 years. And sometimes it feels like moving a mountain one stone at a time, right? I mean, it's not easy. Change is just hard. We're creatures of habit. We like to continue to do what we did. And on top of that as educators, we're the product of the old approach to teaching, right? And therefore we sort of think it works for us. Therefore it should work for our students. So I think educational change is very, very slow. And it's very, very difficult to change the approach to teaching. In fact, I think the approach that is used in most educational setting, lecturing, is one that dates back to the Middle Ages. And over close to a thousand years since the University of Bologna was founded, very, very little has happened. I think the pandemic has been a jolt to the system. And I am very curious to see how much will be left. I'm afraid that we're going to revert back to a large degree to what we did before the pandemic. Now, there are plenty of examples of successful online learning. I mean, take, for example, the Mineral University, since they just got their accreditation, they're now called Bologna Mineral Schools but Mineral University. I mean, students live together on a campus. Their social life is together. They actually transfer from one city to another from one semester to the other to get a more global experience from, I think, San Francisco to London to a place in India and then Taiwan. But the learning takes place online. And on the other end of the educational spectrum, there is, of course, the Western Governors University, which is one of the largest institutions, I think, in the U.S., with 120,000 students. But essentially, all of the instruction is online and in this survey, which was done by the Gallup, they came out on top in terms of future life satisfaction. So I think there's plenty of evidence that online learning can work. There, where it's really important, I think, that we're together in person is for things like the performing arts, social activities, being together, having coffee together, having lunch together, sports and so on. But I think insisting that learning has to be in person is putting us, unfortunately, I think, on the wrong track. I would like to see this hybrid of following, in a sense, the Minerva model, where students spend their social time together on campus. But the learning is online. It's much harder. You see, this is the other thing, and I should have said that in my response to the previous question. Right now, the three of us, and in fact, all of us are sitting on the front row. On Zoom, there is no row two, row three. There's no escape, right? I can't even, on Shindig, I can't even turn my video off. On Zoom, you can't turn your video off, although when you're with four people in a team together, it doesn't feel right to turn off your video whereas the three other people have the video on. So you're sort of sucked in in a way that you're not typically sucked in into a physical learning space. Great optimization. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you for the great question. And Kelly was a great guest on the forum about a year and a half ago. And Eric, if you need me to turn off your video, just let me know. No, no, no, I don't want to. I know. We have more questions coming and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask them. And here's one from, I believe, Adria Uptike. Let me bring her up on stage. Let's see. Hello, is that Adria? Adria. Adria. Welcome, welcome. Thank you. Eric, I've been a big fan of yours for a long time. You gave a talk down in my area. I'm blushing here. Two years ago. I've looked at my classes a few years ago. I've been doing peer instruction for a long time. But when we, when we went online after spring break last year, we really ran into a problem with a lot of this online instruction because I have my students working in small groups. But our university told us we couldn't, for reasons of equity, require that our students turn on their video. So none of them did. We couldn't require they have their microphone on. And when I put them in small groups to work on problems, they didn't talk to each other. They didn't turn their video ads on. They just kind of sat there. Now I'm changing. I'm also moving to standard space grading this fall and all of my classes. And I'm hoping that might make a difference in terms of trying to move them along and give them motivated to actually work together and solve the problem, whether then get stuck a minute in and just wait to see the solution. But I don't know if it's just a matter of Harvard versus this fall university. Do you have any suggestions for dealing with that? Did you run into that at all? Yeah, I've certainly noticed that when the video is off, people are not as engaged. I mean, it's like sitting in the back row in a large lecture hall. Luckily, my institution said that we could ask our students to turn their video on. And not everybody was, but to understand that and understand that some circumstances students might have to turn their video off. I mean, students who had poor Wi-Fi, poor connectivity or whatever. But I also pointed out to students that, you know, you're much more engaged and therefore learn more if you can interact both visually and through audio with other people. So I think that might be a problem now in some geographical regions for equity reasons, as you say. But hopefully, that is a problem that over time, well, I mean, it's not that long ago that only a small fraction of the students had devices, right? And now I think even in the furthest corners of the world, people have internet connected devices. And I'm sure that 10 years from now, the situation will be much better. And at 20 years from now, we don't even think about that anymore. So hopefully, this is just a temporary pain. I'm a little bit, yeah, I can see your problem when the institution tells you that you can't ask your students to turn their video on. My institution had a slightly different approach. They said you can set the expectations, but you have to understand that not everybody might be able to comply. I do have one other quick question. When your students were working in groups, what did you have them working on? I have a whole bunch of problems that I wrote that I have been working on. But have you used simulations? Is there anything that you found that gets them more engaged? Yes. So we had essentially three activities that we had them work on as a team beyond the project. The whole idea, maybe I should very briefly explain what the course is. You see, the courses, I used to give my students the textbook and say, here, learn this. It's good for you. I happen to, since I'm a physicist, I happen to think that physics is a good mental skill. But if you put yourself in the shoes of an engineering student or a pre-medical student who has to take physics because it's a requirement, having your instructor tells you learn physics because it's good for you, sounds a little bit like your mother telling you, you've got to eat spinach because it's good for you. I mean, you don't want to, you don't like spinach, but apparently it's good for you. So I thought, you know, it's sort of a hollow statement to say it's good for you to learn physics. So instead, what I do is I put the textbook aside and I tell my students, and I already did this before the pandemic. The pandemic actually elevated this, but I told myself we're going to work on projects. And I try to add a component of empathy or social good to the project. And maybe that at first sight, the project doesn't have anything directly to do with physics, right? I mean, one of them deals with a system in Venezuela where, you know, where students place classical music, where classical music is used to do social good. Anyway, so after the students are really excited by the project, I tell them, here you may want to have a look at this book. It may help you with your project. So the content of the course, this is the basic message, the content of the course is no longer an end goal in its own right. It becomes a vehicle in the minds of the students. It becomes a vehicle to accomplish a goal that is more meaningful to the students. So that is the overarching glue for the whole course. But then I had a number of activities. One was P-instruction, which I did completely asynchronously outside of class. We can talk about that later. And then we had two which were synchronous. One was a tutorial, which was actually inspired by, for those of you who are teaching physics, which was inspired by the work of Lillian McDermott at the University of Washington in Seattle. And essentially, we took these tutorials and put them on Desmos, which is a platform that is mostly used in case 12 math education, but which works beautifully for any interactive work. So essentially, each student would fill out the Desmos form on their own before coming to section. And then in section, they would share, each student would share with the other students their work, and they would come to some agreement, which they then would have checked by the teaching team. And then on the last activity was essentially using, they would work on a problem set. So students would do the problem set individually, upload it to grade scope. And then in section, synchronously, they would share their work and try to essentially evaluate their work based on the work from the other students. It was very much meant to improve their metacognitive abilities. So those were the activities that I had them do online. Thank you for great questions. Thank you. And Eric, this is just fantastic. This is a seminar on how to do teaching well. This is terrific. We have more questions that are coming in. And there's one from a former student of mine, from Andrew. Let me just bring his comment up on stage here. How does peer instruction compare to team-based learning? That's more popular in med schools. That's very interesting. Michael Sweet, who is one of the authors of the book on team-based learning, which is on the table in my office, because it's played such an important role in my own thinking about education. The two have a lot in common. And in fact, from what I've said so far in this session here, I've adopted team-based learning. In fact, I have merged the two in a sense. So I think there are a lot of parallels between team-based learning and peer instruction. Thank you. Great question, Andrew. That's typical. One of our students was just wonderful. I'm always good to hear from him. And we have another video question coming from Lorena Barba. Let me just bring her up on stage. Hello, Lorena. Hi, Brian. Thank you very much. And hey, hello, Eric. I haven't seen you in a long, long time. I know. Good to see you. It's a great pleasure. And my question is actually it's almost the same as Kelly's question a couple of minutes ago. And, you know, when we met 10 years ago, we were talking about flip learning, flip classroom and peer instruction, and you've been doing this even more than that, more years than that. But, you know, you complained a little bit that in the beginning, that you fear that universities want everything to go back to normal, everything to go back to how it was in 2019. And so the question is, well, what's, how can, why is it so difficult to disseminate new forms of instruction? Why is this, this, this gravity pool towards how things were that now I fear is going to be like the opportunity of all that we learned in the past year and a half is going to be thrown away because people just want to go back to 2019. And all of the capacity that was built in the faculty may not be taken advantage of because there's this resistance to change. Yeah, I think in part it is a very, very, very good question. And I think it's not just 2021 to 2019, but any any educational advances taking place since 1060 or whenever it was that Bologna was found to 2019 as well. I think in part it is because of to some degree the lack of a good evaluation of education. I mean, how do we measure good education? Right? I mean, is it the student evaluation of courses? I think that student evaluation bears very little relationship to how much is actually learned. In fact, the only, the only way to really evaluate the quality of education will be to look at how successful our graduates are five years after graduating or 10 years after graduating or 15 years after graduating. And it would be very difficult if not impossible to really do that. What's more, many institutions like mine, and I have no problem saying this in public, filter on the input end. Right? I mean, we make sure if you were to plot, you know, quality of understanding or whatever skills or on the vertical scale and time on the other, we make sure that this is the beginning of the studies. This is the end of the studies. We make sure that the students at the beginning are as high as possible. Right? So even if we lift them only a tiny little bit, they'll come up quite high. Maybe that's some kind of community college which takes the students in here and lifts them up there where they still end up below where Harvard students comes in. It's actually a much better institution than my own institution because the differential is so much bigger. But unfortunately we don't use that as a metric. So I think that one problem is that, you know, we rely on metrics for evaluating our success that are not really telling us what we need to know. But you experienced some epiphany and, you know, when you tried a peer instruction tentatively for the first time and you said, well, this works and you wanted to continue investigating and you made changes. I experienced things like that when I made changes in my teaching and I saw, you know, clear. You can see immediately when things are more effectively. So even without a formal and serious assessment of the learning that would kind of move the needle something is missing on a to motivate change on a personal level among our colleagues. And I just like to understand what it is. Well, in part also it's, you know, I think the reward system, right? I mean, there's nothing that really I mean, in the private sector, these things would work very differently. And institutions, I mean, you do a really good job teaching what happens is you only get more teaching. It's not that your salary will get grows up or your status goes up. No, it's personal satisfaction which I don't want to belittle which is very important. You do great work in research and you get grants and you get invited and you publish papers that get attention and so on. So I think the reward system is not there to move things in the right direction. And I think we have very little accountability. This is the other thing. The whole assessment it's not just the assessment of teaching it's also the assessment of learning. I mean, you know, when I have a talk that is called assessment assignment killer of learning and when I put the talk together I suddenly realized something that had never really occurred to me. See when I changed to this project-based course the nature of my course changed completely, right? And the first year that I did that I like I'd always done, I was the one evaluating the project with the students and during a month I'd been coaching them for their project and at the project fair all of a sudden I felt like I made this Jacqueline high transition between good guy, the coach and bad guy, the judge. So in a sense with a lot of assessment in education we have this coach judge conflict who are both the coach and the judge this would not be permissible in any other human endeavor whether it's sports or evaluation of any other activity there are other people who evaluate what you do you don't evaluate yourself what you do how do we get away with that in education right? So I can always design whatever course I want and whatever assessment I want for the two to match each other I should be evaluating your students you should be evaluating my students but that's not what we do in education. There's a long time friend of the program Kiel Doomsch who argues that we should be doing more of this that we should be doing more of getting assessment away out of the media class environment. So I think that is one of the reasons it's hard to change you know I'm just going to assess the way that matches the way I teach and it's sort of a silent fact between the students and me and then why would I change? An assessment is often what professors hate the most right? Grading too much Lorena what a great question really thank you so much for that Thank you for having me great to see you again Eric Good to see you Thank you for joining Bye We have just a little over 10 minutes left to go friends so if you have your questions if you have your comments this is the time and again you can see if you click the raised hand button you can join us on stage for a video question and if you'd like to type in your question just hit the Q&A button and up it comes and we already have a bunch of questions some of which have already been answered but I want to give us a chance to hit a couple of these this is a really important one from Brent Anders here Brent asked were you given free reign to conduct your class how you deemed fit did you have to get special approval for personally deciding what would be synchronous versus asynchronous So I did not ask for permission I don't think I don't think I am given free reign but I'm just taking free reign you know if you ask permission and somebody says no then you can't really do it if you do not ask permission you just do it that's my philosophy so I I know I hope I'm guided by good principles and I honestly want to be the best I can be for my students I act in my students interest not in self-interest and I'm always curious as to how to improve the learning so I thought you know what I'm not even going to ask I'm going to do what I do so for example this coming semester the administration is insisting that all instruction is in the classroom I am not doing that in fact I am giving my students a choice they can they can so as they enroll and this is happening right now as we speak they're filling out a questionnaire where on a 7 point like a scale they indicate whether they would prefer to meet in person or prefer to meet online I only want to meet in person I strongly prefer meeting in person I somewhat prefer to meet I'm neutral and then it goes the other way to online I'm going to put students in teams of like-minded students so I'm going to take those who strongly prefer to be in person and who only want to be in person in teams of students who select the same thing and I'm going to have another group online and then I'm going to have another group who can go either way and then they can decide if they want to be online they go to the classroom they sit around the table they share the work they talk with us they don't need cameras and microphones but they still share the work on Zoom just like we do online and if they need me they reach out on Slack and I'll walk up to the table I'll have to have a mask but you know that's okay I'll have the mask I went to an oral exam yesterday I had trouble understanding what everybody what everybody was saying but anyway I'll be there sitting at the table with them and we'll go over the activity if they're on Zoom my office is conveniently right next to the classroom so I only need to go you know one well actually it's right underneath it so I need to go down the stairs I'll be in my office and I'll join their team Zoom room so that gives them a lot of flexibility I will encourage students to try both modalities so they can find out what works better for them and you know I think had I asked the administration they would have said no in fact a colleague of mine asked me earlier this this week if they could do this for their students and the answer was a firm no oh dear oh dear so that's asking permission would have not worked out for you in that case I guess not we'll talk we'll see if I'm still employed by the end of this yeah the future transform we give you dangerous advice for your career we have another question coming from a fellow with a wonderful first name we have Brian Mulligan and let's bring him up on stage hello Brian hi guys hi Brian hi Eric good to meet you I'll save your blushes here and say I've been a moderate fan of yours for quite a while well then I discovered Peruzal and now I'm in danger of turning into a big fan of yours I hope this question isn't unfair but to some extent it is linked to Peruzal because I see this as a tool that will lower the cost of improving quality improving interaction and lower the cost of assessment and I just worry that we're constantly talking about increasing the quality of learning when a big challenge in the world is access and cost the way I see it in higher education access and cost are more important challenges than improving quality I see it like a Pareto rule type of thing that if we could achieve 80% of the quality of what we're doing now at 20% of the cost that would be a far better achievement than these incremental improvements in quality that we're doing in higher education so I've been coming and I've been in higher education for 37 years and I've come to the conclusion it's the wrong model for the future things like your Peruzal are pointing to the way things are going because we know now it's easy it's cheap to deliver content the problem is how can we encourage engagement and to some extent measure learning or assess people we have to drive down the costs of those things and Peruzal works towards that but it does beg the question are we pushing the wrong way in education are we constantly trying to justify the high fees the high debt that either individuals in the US take on or the state is taking on in Europe because it's so heavily subsidized are we justifying these high costs by trying to improve the quality when in actual fact we should be trying to reduce the cost and this is particularly important for the emerging world for low income countries so maybe this isn't a fair question but because I'd love to get your opinion on that I think it's a very very fair question and I mentioned the Minerva School University pardon me they changed their name and Western Governors and both are example of substantially lowering cost and delivering high quality education and in Africa there is the African Leadership University ALU who is trying to do similar things so I think there's definitely a movement in the right direction but it's right now it's only a few outliers rather than most of the institutions I think for many institutions especially those like the one I'm at it's very very difficult to change right I mean they've been very very successful at doing things the old way and changing things is just very very scary because they may lose their status and they probably will anyway but yeah so I agree 100% with what you said and I also was thinking you know take my model that I presented of my class right with four students in their own zoom room online learning what I accomplished last year it challenges the university model the university model is essentially bringing students to a campus and the whole economic model is having the students on it's built around having the students on the campus but during the pandemic I had one student in Korea I had one in Bahrain several in Israel several in Latin America they were all over the globe imagine delivering a Harvard type education to many many more students at far less cost yours is not ready I think to take that step frankly well I mean there's the opportunity cost I mean I've slowly become I was originally in campus teaching and then I got into distance learning and I came to the conclusion that campus teaching should be more or less stopped we can keep it for the egg heads really we're channeling towards research but for the rest of us mortals distance learning is probably the best value for effort and we can achieve some of the wondrous things that people say you have to do on campus in other ways as well it was interesting you mentioned Minerva because Minerva is a high cost it's high cost compared to Harvard or many other institutions in the US it's a much lower cost but there is the opportunity cost of education the fact that people need to work and they can't work if they're going away to a campus and things like that so I'm coming to the conclusion is that full time education is for the really bright the brilliant and the rest of us should be moving towards some sort of higher apprenticeship system where we get our higher education and work at the same time because that's the only way to reduce costs well I agree almost entirely with you I'm not 100% sure how you would define the brilliant ones because I think ultimately learning is learning and learning whether you're brilliant or not that brilliant you learn the same way and I think integrating I mean I heard this fantastic talk this person who had the higher education division at Gallup he now works for Kaplan I can't think of his name he did this survey to look at what in people's education best correlated with future success and future satisfaction in life and he found that almost nothing in education correlated except for two things people checked off two check boxes the first one was to have some form of experiential learning in particular put the learning context of the type of career path that the people wanted to follow and the other one was to have had one or more instructors who care about you as an individual and in that respect it turns out the Ivy League schools Harvard is one of them do extremely poorly but then again Western Governors does extremely well I think that for everybody the model that you're describing there should work well and it could very well be that the days of a brick and mortar institution are numbered they may well go on for a few more hundred years given how little has changed in a thousand years but I could well imagine that in the year 2200 things might look very different well thanks very much Brian thank you for the great question and have a good evening Adam Slago you know as the as the futurist in this panel I just have to say you've completely stolen my thunder Eric thank you that was that was excellent but also as the organizer of this form I'm afraid I have to draw to a close we are at the end of our hour and we have raced ahead at top speed and covered a tremendous amount of ground Eric Mazura thank you so much for sharing so much with us this has been an absolute delight what's the best way to keep up with you and your work I don't know I try to make myself perfectly available I'm on most social media you can try and email me with email but I'm always happy to share my work and I typically post links to whatever I say or do and I'd love to stay in touch with every one of you thank you Brian for a fantastic conversation well thank you so much for coming and we'll have to pay attention to you especially if you have to hit the streets for a new job we would love to have you come back next year so you can tell us how this extraordinary year went I'd be delighted in the meantime please take care good luck and stay safe thank you indeed don't go away friends I've got to let you know what's happening over the next few weeks so thank you again by the way everyone for great questions so coming up we have sessions on education post-truth world session on STEM and equity we have one on an update on open access and scholarship, a session on rethinking learning, a forum on rethinking the university with great guests if you'd like to keep talking about this if you'd like to keep discussing online learning and should that dominate or how do we break students into small groups most effectively please feel free to just tweet using the hashtag F-T-T-E or tweet at me or tweet at Shindig events or use my blog brianalexander.org back into our archives and take a look at previous sessions on various forms of active learning including blended learning including gaming just head to tinyurl.com slash FDF archive and above all thank you all for a fantastic conversation today you made this all just brilliant good luck as the fall semester begins I hope all of you stay safe and that your educational experience is brilliant as I know will be from all of you and again please take care of yourself and until next week we'll see you online bye bye