 Yes, we want someone to go through a rigorous set of online courses with us, get a credential, go through a bootcamp, get a credential, and then we want to create an apprenticeship opportunity and have the person go spend three to six months at the United Nations, at, you know, perhaps FIFA, at a startup, at Pfizer, at a university, being an apprentice to a person who is on the cutting edge. And that, in its own right, then becomes a credential to end your pathway to a new opportunity in your vocation. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. Very excited to still be at MIT in Cambridge in Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about new pathways in education. We have Erdine Beshimo joining us on the show. Hello so much. Pleasure being with you. I'm super excited. And I'm very grateful to Sanjay Sarma for introducing us. That was also an incredible episode at MIT's Open Learning Center. I love this place. You guys are doing incredible work. And for those that don't know Erdine's background, he's the founder and director of MIT Boot Camps, MITX MicroMasters, co-created MIT's first MOOC on Entrepreneurship and is a lecturer at MIT. He's passionate about building a world where there are no barriers between motivation and opportunity. And you can find Erdine's links below. Let's start things off with our favorite question we love asking. We find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of humanity? It's a wonderful question to ask and an important one. I think the current zeitgeist is one of anxiety. Humanity has reached an impasse on a number of levels. We are concerned about the effects of technology on the world. And for the last few decades, we've lived with the idea that technology is a friend of humanity. And I think this idea is beginning to show cracks. In fact, serious, serious cracks. And so we as humans are anxious. We are anxious because we don't have the answers today. And so the current zeitgeist is one of anxiety and the current mission is one of finding the answers. I also think we have building various forms of managing our global society. The 20th century was a century of wars. But it was also a century of building international organizations that can prevent future wars. But now we see the departure from that model. We see a breaking apart of vital international organizations. Now, my view of this is our existing structures are, if not collapsing but weakening, not because people are bad and they don't want them, but because perhaps they are not answering the present realities, the present challenges. So I think the challenge upon us to invent new structures, to imagine new ways of being, that would be my answer. I wonder if every single time period, like 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, that they were constantly thinking, oh, this is such a challenging time to be alive. We have so many problems to tackle, but we do have all the exponential technology happening today, which makes it obviously different than in the past. And I think we can do it, especially with millennials and GenZ. I have a lot of faith in our ability to do things like tackle these challenges. Let's do the journey. So from Kyrgyzstan to the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom to Harvard and then to MIT, teach us about how you even got the courage and the motivation to leave home and to go pursue your career. Well, I appreciate you asking this and being interested. I think the simple answer is one of angels. Everybody needs angels. I was in Kyrgyzstan as a teenager, and my world seemed very small. And I think when it feels this way, you want to open up and you want to expand your world. But how do you do that? It's not so easy. And it just so happened that in our hometown there was a center established by George Soros, a well-known financier and philanthropist. And he opened the network of what he called Open Society Centers, where you could go and it offered a library that was free and you can read books in English, you could study English, you could read about universities in other countries. And so I would just spend a little bit of time there. And also I began attending a university in Kyrgyzstan called the American University in Kyrgyzstan. I didn't graduate from it. I ended up graduating from college in the United Kingdom. But that university was started with the idea of bringing liberal arts education to the former Soviet Union. And we had American and European academics going in teaching there. And as I reflect on them now, they had this fabulous dedication to teaching. And so they got me inspired. They got me inspired by learning. They got me inspired by learning something that young people like me in our country couldn't ordinarily study before. Political science and to study the liberal thinkers. That was a novelty. And so I got impassioned by that. And I wanted scholarship to Bradford. But again, to the topic of angels, yes, I did it in a scholarship. Did I work very hard? I did. But did I get lucky in some respects? Of course. Somebody on the other end at Bradford University had to review my scholarship application. And they had to be having a good day. And they had to say, you know, I want to see something here. I want to trust this person who's behind this application. And so I think the journey is one of working hard and then taking a chance, but also angels. In everyone's lives there are angels. And I've been very lucky with a fair share of mine in my life. And then you're pointing at the really important, these different stimuli that can be such crucial to altering the trajectory and maximizing the potential of people and like the resource center that was made available to you and then all of the next steps that you took, the doors that you saw and that you seized those opportunities and you kept going. This is a reoccurring theme of the people that we sit down with is exactly that. Then how about we do this journey when you get to this MIT Sloan School of Management? And so then you're figuring out that open learning is very interesting and you ended up being the co-founder and director then of MIT's boot camps, MITX's MicroMasters. This is all really cool stuff and it's all open, which is so interesting too. Yeah. You know, it's a journey that's been long in the making. When I first came to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Bradford, I actually came to a conference with the idea of perhaps applying here for graduate school. And I remember the day that I walked into Old Yard at Harvard. I remember clear as day and at that time we didn't have cell phones that we could take pictures with. The recollection of the moment is here and here only. I remember it clear as day and I remember this sense of intellectual vibrancy. You could feel it. It was an amazing feeling and I asked myself, how is it that only a few students in the world, those that are here in Cambridge, in schools at Harvard and MIT have the opportunity of access to this wonderful stuff and why don't kids in Kyrgyzstan, my home country, have it too? That was really a question that was on my mind literally the moment I walked in. And so when I later came to school at MIT, I actually started, so to speak, running and gunning. I would have a camera and I would go to different labs and take little interviews. But at the time there was nowhere to put it. There was no platform where you can achieve visibility with the content you're creating. And so I graduated from MIT, I ended up founding a company that went to a venture capital firm, but then suddenly things changed. I call it the second revolution on online education. We saw the emergence of new educational platforms, Udacity, Coursera, then MIT and Harvard joined forces and established the DEX. And I realized that that was the moment. I had to go back to MIT to be a part of this revolution. So I left the venture firm, came to MIT and began creating online courses because now, which was different from when I was a student with my own camera and my friends in different labs here, there was a place to distribute your videos online and reach a lot of people and have impact. Being able to see that why is this such a strong nodal cluster of intelligence and creativity and access to the tools that let you build the future and why is it not yet democratized other places around the world and then actually having the platforms to be able to put the content on to enable people around the world, just the computer and internet connection to be able to pursue that kicked in and then you're able to really unleash that. So then tell us about how you ended up picking up to be able to take all of the content you're learning here at MIT and putting it up for distribution. Oh yeah, my thought was relatively straightforward. I asked myself, well, what professors did I enjoy during my time as a student here? Who did I benefit the most from? And who do I think people around the world would benefit from as well? And the first person was Bill Ouellet. He was my mentor at MIT. He was the head of our entrepreneurship center. And I just knew that he had to be heard by entrepreneurs worldwide. And so I went to him and I said, Bill, can we create a version of your course for entrepreneurs at MIT, for entrepreneurs around the world? That's great. And we did it. The course was called Entrepreneurship 101. Who is your customer? And we wanted to teach aspiring entrepreneurs one of the most important learning journeys for any entrepreneur. And that is to begin seeing the world through the eyes of the customer. Entrepreneurs are idea-driven people, tend to be. And so it is very easy for them to see the world through their own eyes. And then there's nothing wrong with that. You actually want that because you want to have a person with a vision. But that also has a flip side that the vision can take over the reality. And you have to play with the balance. That was the goal of the course. We worked very hard. There were many sleepless nights. But I remember the day we launched the course. And in a DEX, in the course management tool, we had a dashboard that tells you how many students are enrolling. And I was amazed how that dashboard ticker kept rolling. And by the end of the course, we had more than 60,000 students in the first instance. People want to know about entrepreneurship. People want to know about how to start ideas, execute ideas. They do. They do. And that's because that's what I realized through that experience. I sensed it. I had a hunch that, yes, the passion that I have for entrepreneurship is not a unique passion. I think it is something that many of us share. And I think if we go back to the more established or historical roots of human society, we're all entrepreneurs. We're all small business owners before the emergence of very complex societies in which we live today. So I think that's natural. And what I realized in the course that was fundamental to me, I realized that people want to be entrepreneurs not because they want to be rich. That's what I think one would be apt to think by following entrepreneurship through the eyes of popular media. I don't think that's the answer. I think people want to be entrepreneurs because they want to be independent. It's not wealth, it's independence. It's independence of worldview. It's independence of action. And obviously sometimes that's correlated with economic independence. But economic independence and wealth are correlated. They are not the same. They are not the same. And so as soon as I discovered that, I think my professional worldview changed dramatically. Yeah. Ideas getting executed is a lot for us finding some sort of meaning in life as well. Waking up every morning and wanting to build the thing that we came up with and wanting to work on that is something that drives so much meaning. And yeah, it gives us that independence, especially that free thinking like you're saying. That's so critical. Economic freedoms, very critical. Yeah, and that's crazy. That MOOC that you started on entrepreneurship now has hundreds of thousands of people. It has 65 countries. No, all countries in the world. All countries in the world. We have students from every country in the world. Okay, it's boot camps that has the 65, I think, or something like that. I'm very happy to share about that as well. Yes, let's do that. So that's crazy that the entrepreneurship course has been just blown up like that. I love it. That means there's going to be lots more ideas executed. Yeah, let's hit boot camps. This is interesting. You guys actually just had you or you have a couple that are coming up over the summer across different fields too. So it's intensive. So what is it? It's a semester crunched into a week. That's right. That's right. That's correct. And this really connects to the online course. When we saw how massive, really, and the word massive is in the acronym MOOC, Massive Open Online Courses, when we saw the massive in the MOOC, we realized there was something special here. And at the time we started thinking that universities are no longer the same. And they do not just have to be places of research and teaching that are relatively local or regional at best. In fact, universities are innovation communities because we had students from every country in the world, they wanted to learn, but also, and that's equally important, they wanted to collaborate. And I said to myself, huh, what is possible here when you can combine knowledge that you guide people in the process of collaboration and then you can create links between people that are unprecedented, because previously how would an entrepreneur in Chile work with an entrepreneur in Vietnam? And I realized that you can build ventures and organizations that are radically novel. That excited me. And so, when the president of MIT, Raphael Reif, and the head of MIT Open Learning, Sanjay Sharma, who is my mentor, when they just saw the level of community engagement in our course, they said, hey, there must be something more there too. And so we decided to organize what we ended up calling bootcamp. It wasn't called a bootcamp in the very beginning. We didn't know what to call it. We just said, hey, there are some really outstanding people in this group of students online. Many of them have not come to MIT, have not studied at MIT, even, but we want them to be in our community. What can we do? And we organized a one week bootcamp, one week, because we wanted to make it relatively short so that very busy people can still take the time. We wanted very busy people. So we made it short. And that was a remarkable program. It was a personal discovery for me, I think. It wasn't just about knowledge. It was about self-discovery. These individuals came together and they discovered their new themselves. We call it the new you. They saw it. And when you see it, something special happens in your life. Yeah. One week of time on a deep dive into a subject and you can gain potentially a semester of experience and have your new perspective awakened to have a new lens on the world with that subject matter. And then that can compound over time and make you such a better entrepreneur or scientist or whatever field as well. There's so many different fields that you guys have. I wrote down the upcoming ones. Well, our latest one was on AI and robotics. And we explored the future of work through AI and robotics. And we held that bootcamp in Tokyo, Japan because we want to reach a global audience. We've made a decision to hold bootcamps not just here at MIT on campus but to go to different parts of the world. And we've offered bootcamps in Japan, in Australia, in Brazil, in Turkey, in Taiwan, in Korea, in Mexico. And we're going to be doing many more in different parts of the world. So we have three coming up, two in June here in Cambridge. One will be in partnership with the Harvard Medical School and it will be a bootcamp focused on innovation in healthcare. We will also have a bootcamp in June called the Deep Tech and it will be a fast, deep introduction to AI, cybersecurity, machine learning, blockchain. One very intensive work and so I think if you want to explore the frontiers of these technologies, this is a good place to be. And then we have a bootcamp coming up in September in Germany that is focused on innovation in sports. So around the world bootcamps and all these different subjects, sports, medicine, AI, cybersecurity, blockchain, these are all such pressing fields. And it's great that people around the world are able to do it. And it's cool that MIT has created such a process that enables it to happen. And then now I want you to explain also the MicroMasters that you're also co-founding and directing. This enables people to get a part of their master's degree online. Teach us, Bob. Yeah, so the MicroMasters idea was conceived by Sanjay Sharma, whom we discussed already. I think it's one of the most fundamental innovations in education, the underlying concept. Let me first describe the underlying concept because I think it is going to be interesting to your community because this is something they may want to undertake. The underlying concept is inverted admissions. And let me explain it in the following sense. Every year, thousands of people apply for graduate school at MIT. And in many of our departments, graduate school applications are reviewed by faculty members. At MIT Sloan, they are reviewed by an admissions committee that doesn't necessarily involve faculty. But in many departments, graduate students are admitted by faculty. Now, what matters in an application? You need to have a good recommendation that you have promised to do excellent research. That's what graduate school is for. Or you have promised to do excellent professional work of the highest caliber that integrates new knowledge into professions and creates new professions. You have to have excellent grades. But by virtue of the fact that people apply from all over the world, the majority of people who apply apply from schools and have recommendations from people that the MIT faculty members do not know. Right? Why is that a problem? Context is important. And it is often challenging for MIT faculty members to know, is this a good school? How do I know that grades in this school are worse than master? How do I know that the recommendation submitted is a recommendation that was treated with the greatest rigor that we expect at MIT? Very hard to know that. Right? Inverted admissions takes that problem out of the question. It gives you an opportunity to show what you can do. You can take a number of MIT courses online. If you do well and you take a proctored exam, and again, you do it online, but we verify that it's you, if you take it and you do it well, you have a chance to apply for a master's program at MIT. And if you get in, your online credential, we call it the MicroMasters, and it's a substantial credential. It is equivalent to a semester of coursework at MIT, right? So it is a serious amount of work. That credit gets counted, and so you can graduate twice as fast and twice as inexpensively. Big difference. And now we have the first cohorts of students who came from the MicroMasters to the master's program at MIT, and all of the faculty members who work with them say they are outstanding. Yeah, it's another filtration mechanism of there's so many applicants from around the world. How do you make it so that they can prove that they're capable of handling the rigor of the MIT graduate coursework? And you built a system that enables you to funnel the most optimal. Yeah. You identified it correctly. Exactly. The goal in admissions is to understand can the person handle the rigor of work here, right? Because we don't want to fail students. That's not a great thing to do. That's not a success for anyone, right? So you want to bring people here who will do well and take the best advantage of being here. But how do you know? Now, when the individual has gone through a sequence of rigorous coursework online, showed real persistence. In fact, persistence that is far greater than the persistence you need on campus, because normally you're taking the online courses while you're studying at another school or working for a company, right? It takes some motivation and persistence to be able to do it. Then we know that you will do well here and the MicroMasters students do. And that hit inverted admissions as well, which is a very interesting concept. And then the incubation group as well. Can you explain that? Very happy to do it. Again, the incubation group was a conception of Sanjay Sharma and he actually hired me into the incubation group. And the idea is simple. Can we create a group that will generate new initiatives? The DMUK was the result of the incubation group. The bootcamp was the result of the incubation group. And as soon as the new initiative attains its likes, we stand it up as its own independent entity within the umbrella of the organization here. And so it's a process of creating new initiatives, creating sustainable foundations for them and stimulating continuous innovation. And then this is now going from just the university to a global innovation community. I love your tagline of decreasing, making it so there's no barriers between motivation and opportunity worldwide. Let's unpack a little bit about these new pathways, apprenticeships versus internships teachers about. Very happy to do that. So, you know, here at MIT Open Learning, we want to imagine a new world of education and professional accomplishment. One of the challenges for us here is historically the world of education and the world of industry have been somewhat de-linked, right? Education was about the pursuit of truth, and that is very important, asking questions, and industry about creating value. Now we see increasingly the need to integrate the two worlds. Why? And that's because people's professional lives become longer, right? Therefore, you have to continue updating your knowledge. And we also see that people have to engage in many more fields of activity. And so exposure to education is essential throughout a person's life. And actually, even though I do have two master's degrees, I do think it's quite possible that I will go back to school at some point in the future. I do think this is possible. Probably it won't happen in a traditional sense, but this is going to be essential for me. Especially with the augmented reality, spatial computing area, so much easier to put. And I think this is actually the year where augmented reality is actually showing real science of making impact on the world of education. We've had some very interesting breakthroughs at MIT that I'm excited about. But now we need to take the two worlds that have been somewhat distinct, and we need to integrate them so that people are more successful. And if they're more successful, they're happier. And that's just a good thing. So that is why we're creating new pathways. We're integrating online coursework. We're integrating online credentials. We're integrating online bootcams. And now we're also focused on apprenticeships. What we want, we have this... This is so crucial because of Bloom 2 Sigma, especially. You'll perform two standard deviations past the mean if you have a one-on-one mentorship. Really? It's so crazy. So psychologists have been studying it, and it's just a fascinating phenomenon. So almost everyone that we sit with on the show has had mentors that have just vastly helped them on an upward trajectory. So this is great, these apprenticeships. Oh, it's not surprising. I would love a link because this is of interest to me. So I think after the show you could send it to me when you get a chance. But yes, we want someone to go through a rigorous set of online courses with us, get a credential, go through a bootcamp, get a credential, and then we want to create an apprenticeship opportunity and have the person go spend three to six months at the United Nations, at, you know, perhaps FIFA, at a startup, at Pfizer, at a university, being an apprentice to a person who is on the cutting edge. And that in its own right then becomes a credential to end your pathway to a new opportunity in your vocation. You can stamp that I came and worked under you for three to six months at open learning, and that's on potentially on a decentralized ledger as well, and then everyone can see that I've gained that experience. Correct, that's right. And I think to your point that you made before we began, that's what makes apprenticeships different from internships. You know, an apprenticeship is very focused and it comes with a credential and that credential is a hybrid educational and professional credential. Yeah, this funneling of taking online, democratizing online learning and then taking people that really want to gain further credentials through the system all the way up into the physical one-on-one apprenticeship world is very beautiful. And I think we've up to this eight billion population we're going to is we've kind of lost a little bit of that one-on-one apprenticeship and also being able to log that as something that is a major credential. And I really look forward to that rising back up into our world and that's so critical getting experience in the real world. I'm very hopeful of that. I think as soon as we begin thinking beyond the constraints of the current environment and how universities are constructed today, we will stand a good shot at creating a new system that is far better. And open learning is totally at the edge. Let's do the two quick questions on the way out. First question is, are we in a simulation? Well, that's a deep question. That's really a deep question. That's actually a deep question with very, very big consequences for philosophy, for sure, and possibly for action. No, I don't believe so. I don't believe so. And my answer to you stems from my children. When I see my children, I have five, three kids. I have a daughter Maria who is seven, daughter Lily who is four, and son Daniel who is two. When I see them, and I see their eternal beauty, the eternal beauty of that moment when your child smiles with the most sincere, vibrant, megawatt smile, I just don't think that there is a chance that that could have been simulated. And then to think about your children also and the way that they'll be using the exponential technologies today that we didn't have growing up to learn the way that their mind is going to understand reality as well as going to be profoundly augmented compared to how we grew up. That's possible. Yeah, I have a very, very strong feeling in faith in them taking on the world's biggest challenges. You have three of them. Molding minds into the world and exponential technology age is interesting too. And the last question is, what is the most beautiful thing in the world? Oh, the smile of a child. Tell us why. Oh, there's no feeling like it when you see it. I've not had a better, more beautiful, more light feeling ever. It almost defies explanation. It's a smile of a child, a smile of a child. Thank you so much for coming on to the show, Erdine. You're most welcome. Thank you. I appreciate you doing this. I think it's wonderful that you are reaching so many people with new ideas. You're making real impact. Thank you. We're very grateful for that. And we're very grateful for your work and the work of the MIT's Open Learning. Everyone, please check out MIT's Open Learning community. Check out all of the links in the bio below to do that. And go and share the content with other people around the world about how we can get the, eradicate the barriers between motivation and opportunity. What a profound statement. And also, support the artists and entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in. Support simulation. Our links are below. Also, go and build the future. Manifest your dreams into the world, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace. That's it, Erdine. Great job. You are great. You are great. I'm okay. I have a long way to go, brother. I have a long way to go.