 Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Stink Tech, more specifically at Stink Tech Global, and we have the honor of talking to Matt Jacobson. He is with Dusserre Global Business School. He joins us from Australia. I didn't get to city. What city is it, Matt? Melbourne, of course. Actually, of all the cities in Australia, Melbourne's my favorite. I'll tell you why, because it has that eight block business grid there with the trams that are free and all that, and so much vitality. My wife and I really loved that we went there earlier this year. So good for you in Melbourne. So tell us about Dusserre Global Business School. What is your association with it? I guess you're a founder or the founder, and what does it do? Okay, great. Thanks. Well, and also thanks for the positive and kind words about Melbourne. It is absolutely the greatest city in Australia. Great fashion, design, food, so it's a really vibrant and great place to be, and very cosmopolitan, very friendly. So I think that's why Americans in particular love it, because like Americans, we're very friendly and kind of easy going down here. In terms of Dusserre, I founded Dusserre about seven years ago after I just sold a previous education company to a publicly listed organization and was really trying to take a little bit of a backseat and think, what do I really want to do that's going to create significant impact? I wanted to do something that was going to be quite meaningful. So I set up Dusserre from the beginning, essentially as a social enterprise. So we have a business of delivering higher education, which then fully funds the Dusserre Foundation, which provides education resources to 24 countries in Africa as a self-funded, self-sustainable philanthropy. So I can tell you a little bit more about that maybe, but I know that's not the focus of what you wanted to chat about today. The focus around higher education, what we do with the Dusserre Global Business School, is to really tackle a fundamental problem of access and relevance of higher education. You can't go anywhere in the US without hearing the problems relating to higher education, which are fundamental and widespread. Problems of affordability, problems of access to higher education, but even if you can afford it and you can get a university place, there's an even bigger problem. And that is that you spend four years attending lectures in university, only at the end of that period after many years and a lot of debt to be told by industry, pretty much nothing you've been doing learning in lectures in a campus is relevant to our job in the workplace. Yeah. So there's this really, really big fundamental disconnect between higher education in terms of the traditional education delivery model and what employers are looking for. And so that's a real problem because who loses out in that model? It's the students that lose out. Because universities are still getting paid and there's a lot of revenue around that model. It's a massive industry, but the problem is the students who don't really know that there's a problem until the end of the process because they don't think they're doing all the right things, right? They're working really hard in school to get good grades and get entry into a university. So, you know, thumbs up, they've worked really hard and they've got into university. Then they work really hard in university, take on a lot of debt, spend all that money thinking again, I'm doing all the right things, what my parents tell me, what the community tells me, setting myself up for the future. And then they realize they graduate and they can't even get jobs. Or if they do get jobs, they're getting an entry level job that's not even really relevant to the course they study because of that disconnect. So, that's really what we need to do. Are you saying, Matt, that I should not study the classics? I should not study, you know, French literature? I should not study the history of Europe? Because that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. And when I come out of college having that, you know, it makes me a rounder person. I grant you, it doesn't help me in the business world, but at least as a human being, I'm probably a better, I appreciate the world better, you know, the old story about, if you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it. And so, don't we need that? Maybe you're, are you talking about undergraduate or graduate? Where do I get the skills that make me marketable? Okay, so that's a really good question. And the threshold question always is, what is the purpose or what is the intention, right, of university? What is the intention for students? So the universities might say things like a liberal arts education or a broad education is what we say as a university is good for you, the students. But are they actually communicating with the students? Because the vast majority of students, over 80% of you asked them the question, they'll say they're at university because they want to get a job and they want to get a career, not to get this kind of broad liberal arts style education. So there's already a disconnect between what the supplier is providing and what the consumer actually wants and is asking for. But that question of should we be teaching philosophy or sociology or history and does that provide a more rounded student? It's really interesting because we have very, very industry relevant. We win awards around the world having the most industry relevant, industry engaged curriculum, very, very tied to corporate objectives. But I, when I studied the first things I did were a degree in literature and a degree in philosophy. So I certainly am not going to advocate that broad arts and humanities are not a good idea. The problem that I have, and this is actually very unique to the US market, that in the US market, you actually force people to do those things. In most countries, it's an elective, it's a choice. So America is bastion of freedom, free will, free speech. But ironically in the education space, you say you have no choice, you will do these broad based courses and you will pay for them. Now, if the government thought this was good for the community and was going to fund that on a good will basis, maybe that's okay. But to tell students they're going to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the foreign language, the history, the philosophy that they don't believe necessarily is going to help them in their career. That's putting students under an immense burden that they're not necessarily asking for. So the question you ask, are these good, well rounded pills? Sure. Should students have to pay enormous amounts of money for them? Absolutely not. Why don't you join a book club? They're free. You can be joining a book club meeting every week and reading literature, right? You can do online philosophy classes for free. So there are lots of ways to get a well rounded education without a huge burden on the student. Well, let me let me throw this thought at you. You know, we've been talking about it a lot lately about the failure of American education, whatever the coursework is, not only, you know, to prepare people for for industry, but also to prepare them to be citizens and to do critical thinking on voting and to understand the Constitution and the compact, the social compact between the citizen and the government. You know, over the past several decades, both undergraduate, well, high school education and undergraduate education has failed to provide those lessons to our population. And there are therefore tens of millions, maybe more, people who don't understand the compact between the citizen and the government, don't understand the Constitution. And when somebody comes into power, who sets those things aside, they have no background, you know, with which to deal with with that with that change, which is what we're having now. So can we as a country, can any country as a country fail to educate its students with the things that are necessary to be a citizen? Yeah, I mean, I think that's just a fascinating topic and such an interesting topic that, you know, is very pervasive in terms of the areas that it impacts. It's actually even far more basic than the example you gave. So you'll have students coming out of high school that said they have to memorize the and identify a parallelogram. And like, how many times in business am I going to need to know what a parallelogram is? And they don't actually come out of school or university knowing how to open a bank account. They just aren't taught the most basic things about interest, about investment, about taxes, about good communication skills and networks and the fundamentals of what you need in life are very disconnected from the sorts of things like memorizing the periodic table. I mean, you can just look it up on your iPhone, right? Why go through this intense process of having to memorize those things. So it is really important to be thinking about broadly, which is what we try to do, to think broadly about what are the skills that are necessary? What are the skills and competencies that are going to actually help students? All the other stuff, the broader stuff they can get in other ways. We are trying to be very, very focused on the skills and competencies and networks that will help students in their careers. But this is something that's really interesting that, you know, being in the US, you might find interesting. We operate in multiple continents. We work with numerous universities and we operate in multiple continents around the world. And everywhere we work, we partner with major public universities. We provide the curriculum, we deliver the education, and it's accredited by public universities. In the US, we're planning to launch in the US in 2019. And we are not intending to partner with universities in the US. We're planning to just go it alone. And the reason is, even if a university decided that they could really redesign and rethink what education will be for the 21st century, they literally can't do it. The bureaucracy and the accreditation procedures will not allow a university to do that. For example, what about delivering a degree in a shorter period of time? The UK market, a bachelor degree is three years. In the US, it's four years. In the UK, they're actually the government is incentivizing universities to do it in even shorter than three years. And who pay you more money if you can deliver an undergraduate degree in two years? So they're going in that direction. The US regulated, even if a university thought four years is too long, it's too costly for students, the actual accreditation requirements require an undergraduate degree to be four years. Now, that's just one example. But my point is universities can't really just sit there and think we're smart guys and girls here, we can design something to be really meaningful. They're blocked at almost every level where every time there's a good idea, but our stated creditor won't allow it for this reason. What about this idea? Well, the regional accreditors got this regulation we need to meet with. So there's just such a level of bureaucracy that we tried to navigate that for a while. And we came to the conclusion that we're going to totally disrupt and innovate in the US market. I think that's quite going it alone. But aren't you going to be subject to the same accreditation problems? If you go say for three years or two years, that's a great idea, very, very 21st century as it were. But you're going to run into the same accreditation problem. So can you tell me the model of the school that you're going to build where and how and, and how does it compare with the college that's accredited down the street? Perfect. So what we're creating for the US market is called IQ University. And IQ University is the intention is that it is not actually academically accredited by any Education Department authority, because it's not a requirement to do that. We will be accredited essentially by industry. So when you think of IQ, IQ University, you think, oh, intelligent, smart, what's your IQ? But actually for us, IQ means industry qualification. And so what we want to create is an academic school, if you like, but the degree is approved and accredited, not by some regional Education Authority, but accredited by NASA, and Space Air, and Bank of America and Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs and Price Waterhouse Coopers and Ford Motor Company. And so we want the industry to be partnering with us in the design and curriculum in the actual delivery. So we do practical projects where students assignments are actually solving real challenges of these organizations. And you get an IQ piece of paper at the end, which is essentially an endorsement from industry, saying you have done all the skills that we as industry believe are relevant and necessary and providing you with the networks and competencies to get a job. Yeah, the proof is in the curriculum. It's selecting the curriculum. What it sounds like is you go to industry, you talk to them, what do you need for an entry level job, or maybe not a maybe a higher level job. Tell me what you need. And I'll give these kids a diploma with a curriculum with those subjects. But that means you got to go industry by industry, company by company. That's a lot of work, Matt. A lot of work. Have you done that work? Yeah, so that's what we do. So we have partnership with global banks with global telecommunications companies with PWC with KPMG. That's essentially what we do. And we're designing not just asking them what do you need. We actually build the curriculum with these organizations. So they help us and give us advice and instructional design and information so that we're actually building the curriculum with industry. So we have as one example of what we do, we have what we call a global leaders faculty. So again, this tries to battle the disconnect between academic learning in the lecture room and real life. So normally, the stereotype is you learn from an academic in university in a lecture room from someone who's probably never actually even worked in a business that they're lecturing about. They're a pure academic and they spent their career in academia. So that's fine at one level. It's fine for the underpinning knowledge in the theory, but it's not fine for any terms of practicality and competency and skill. So we have a global leaders faculty that is hundreds of people that are presidents, prime ministers, Nobel Prize winners, billionaires, entrepreneurs, and we design and build the curriculum and case studies with these world leaders the best in the world at what they do. Well, this is getting more and more interesting. Let's take a one minute break Matt. We'll come back with Matt Jacobson and we'll talk about more about Ducere Global Business School and how it finds the faculty and connects these high level faculty members with the students wherever they may be. We're going to come back in one minute. You'll see. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening guys? They told me they were making music. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m. I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. I told you we'd come back. We came back. That's Matt Jacobson. He's the founder of Ducere Global Business School in Melbourne and he's aware of things happening all over the world because A, he's global and B, he travels and C, he has got connections in terms of faculty and university connections everywhere. So this is really interesting. And let me add a point. I have found that Australia and particularly Melbourne has a lot of innovation, a lot of a lot of global creativity over and over again. I keep on finding that. You're part of that, Matt, aren't you? Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for that. I think one of the things that's interesting is that because Melbourne and Australia is so far away from the world, we actually have counted that by instead of staying isolated and remaining kind of at the end of the world, where just this really, we have this enormous culture of traveling and getting out into the world and seeing the world. So anywhere you go, you'll always bump into Australians and we have this fascinating desire to really push the boundaries and open new frontiers. And I think that's what leads to innovation. Yeah, it's fabulous. Anyway, so I mentioned during the break that I would like to talk about MOOCs and compare MOOCs against what you do. MOOCs is a massive open online course. It was all the rage 10 years ago. I'm not sure what it's global status is right now, but the idea is you get the best instructors, you get people to sign up everywhere online. Sometimes you have classes of hundreds of thousands of people, and they learn, you know, the most sophisticated subjects imaginable on MOOCs. So how does that compare with what you do with your high level faculty? Okay, really, really great question. And MOOCs is, you know, a huge area that's got lots and lots of media and publicity and big question marks around what actually it's achieving. So one of the issues with MOOCs fundamentally is the marketplace, the industry doesn't know how to get its head around it. Okay, so if I came to you because you were looking to employ someone now for your fantastic show that you put on, say as a social media content developer, social media writer, and do some of that marketing work, and I came to you and said, Oh, I did three MOOCs online. Your response will probably be, What are those MOOCs? And how do I really know what you did in them? And how do I know what the quality was? And you can't really get your head around what that means from an industry perspective. So the content is out there, but it's hard to make sense of it. So we actually use MOOCs as part of this model that I was describing to you earlier, because we're a believer in curating content and using the best content that's out there, rather than reinventing the wheel. But we still embed that within the structure of a university degree. So you're still doing a full curriculum that is the equivalent of a full university curriculum. You have all of the subjects that you would need to do all the courses for a full degree. And then elements might be, Okay, we're going to get you to go to NYU to do this MOOC on this particular topic within this course. We're going to get you to go to Washington University to do this MOOC within this unit. But we're building that in to a structure that makes sense that it's a full credit equivalent of a university degree and all of the subjects and endorsed by industry. So when you do our program, you not only will come out with a university degree, you'll also have certificates from a whole range of different MOOC providers. So you'll have certificates from Harvard, NYU, Washington, et cetera. But it's part of an overall package that makes sense. Well, I'm glad you mentioned NYU. That's my school. I went to the law school twice over there at NYU. I have a great, great feeling for NYU. And I, I agree that NYU is a top school. Anyway, if I if I get into this program, I don't necessarily have to be in New York or whatever you decide, whether you have decided to set up the Ducere point, so to speak, in the US, I could be anywhere, right? I could be any country. And I can still deal with that online. And I can still take those courses, whether they're dedicated MOOCs, MOOCs, you know, that you find or maybe MOOCs that you create, so that it's easy for me to do that. And gee, it sounds very attractive if I if I want to be qualified for certain industry. I suppose as a student, I tell you, Matt, I want to be qualified for NASA. That's what I want. Now tell me what NASA wants and what you can offer me. And then you will train me to be qualified for NASA. So you're asking me those questions, you're asking NASA those questions, and you're making a sort of intersection where I get what they want. Yeah. Right. So we we essentially are very similar in the sense that overall what we're doing is a range of bachelor and master's degrees. So in various fields from entrepreneurship or marketing or management or business or digital communications and digital design, data security, data management, whatever the qualifications are. And then you don't really have a choice as a student to just say, I'll go up and do a few different things that I find interesting. You actually have to go through the structure and the rigor of a full curriculum. The difference is simply that we believe our curriculum is much better because it's built and designed with the best people in the world in industry. And the delivery is better, because we don't have theoretical essays. The projects and assignments students do is actual assignments of these companies, real projects. So a company says, we've got this challenge, you know, our historical demographic for our product is, I'm making this up, a company that says our historical demographic for our product is 30 to 45 year olds. We want to work out how we can be attractive to 18 to 25 year olds. And a student team would be formed and working on that project as part of their assessment for their degree. Now that does two really important things. It means the theory and the knowledge they're learning has to be applied in the real world. So it's more relevant. It's more practical skills based. And they're learning the team play too. They're learning to be a team. They're learning absolutely collaboration, team skills, working in the real world. Because like you said, you could be in New York, you could be in Canada, you could be in Melbourne as a team working together. They got to look at things like time zones and, you know, setting meetings and communication with that industry partner. So they've got to create all of those real world skills. But the second thing that's vital in that process of going through an industry based qualification where you work on lots of projects with lots of different businesses. You've heard the saying before, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And that's to a large degree true. And I'm sure if you look back at your, you know, career and some of the great things that you've done yourself and think, oh, you know, I had a chance encounter or a meeting or a network with a person. And if I didn't meet that person, you know, there's, you know, a good chance that I wouldn't have been able to get where I am today. But the networks are critical, not just the knowledge. So when you go through and do this industry based curriculum, by the time you graduated, you've worked on 30 or 40 different business projects. You've networked with hundreds of people from industry. Now you want a job. And I call up Jay and say, hey, Jay, I've just graduated. Remember that project we worked on 18 months ago. And you like, yeah, you're actually pretty sharp. And you really came up with some good ideas on that project that we were, you know, having a challenge with. Sure, I've got some part time work. We think that is as important as the fundamental and underpinning skills that we're teaching. So, you know, a question about this is, I guess you're saying that you can do a team. You can do a collaboration with people in different cities. I mean, what, for example, I think about video. So I want to make a film making team. Okay, well, they're in three cities or five cities. Can you do that? I mean, I know the technology allows you to send your product and to receive, you know, Dropbox type, you know, content over the miles. But is that is that what happens? Or does the team have to physically get together in order to perform under the program? Yeah, so keep in mind that we're talking really about a business school. So there might be greater challenges if you need to actually produce a physical product or do something like a film. For us, we're talking about a business school, and we're not only talking about those students interacting and working together, which they do in different locations. No, they don't have to physically get together. They work in remote locations as a team, but not just as a team on their own. They're then working on a project that might be with, say, Bank of America. And so they're going to have to engage with that organization. The bank says, this is a challenge that we have. We're looking at launching a new kind of youth style brand. This is what we're trying to achieve. And we want you, the student team, to come up with an analysis report and a set of recommendations that you think will will work for us. So it's very much leading into practical experience, apprenticeship based learning, almost like consulting. And it's a win-win. The companies love it because they're getting really talented, young, interesting cross section students working on real problems that they have. And the students love it because they feel like the work they're doing is much more practical and relevant. Everybody wins. The students get paid for their time. It's not like an apprenticeship, if you will, or an internship. And that always raises the question of whether they're paid for their time and effort and the contribution they make to the company. Are they? No. So they're not paid, but it's also not an apprenticeship or an internship in the traditional US sense. So I know that there's a little bit of discussion around whether it's appropriate that interns are not paid. But I think there is a problem in the current US market the way internships work because students are expected to turn up to work, work on actual just day to day activities of a business for say three months and get no money. That's not what we're doing at all. So you could be based in Honolulu working on a project for Bank of America, as I mentioned, with the stakeholders being in New York. You're not going into that business. You're not there day to day and not working on daily activities. You're working on a strategic and complex project for them. And then you're submitting that as part of your actual university work. A internship really is disconnected from university. You're not really handing in your internship work as part of your assignments, whereas with us, it actually is the core of the way we deliver the assignments for your university. And as I work on my team, as I work in the project, you have faculty that's going to be advising me and coaching me and teaching me how to do it better. So it raises the bar for everyone now. Correct. Do you have academics assigned to each of the projects working with the team of students working with the industry? And then you get to really, I guess the end of the line outcome that we're trying to achieve. What is the end goal that we're trying to achieve? What we want is that ultimately when a candidate, if I'm being interviewed for a job with you, instead of just handing you a Word document as a CV, doesn't really tell you very much. Here's the list of units I did and the scores. So, you know, you've got an 82 in organisational behaviour. What does that really mean? It doesn't tell you much about me. What we really want is the creation of a digital portfolio for students. So what a student is actually doing is showing you they're thinking their skills and their competencies. An analogy I use is let's say you wanted to renovate your house and you want to find a great interior designer to renovate your house. Would you go through three or four paper based CVs that talk about what university the interior designer went to and what subjects and courses they took? That would be irrelevant, right? Show me your portfolio. Let me see some samples of your work and what you can do. You'd look at that and say, you don't really like that guy's work. Oh, that girl's work, she's awesome. I really like her great style. I can see that kind of fits with. So we're trying to replicate that. But in a business world where employers and industry can really see the projects that students worked on. What were the problems within that project? How did you tackle that? And what were the solutions you came up with? Do I also get grades? Yeah, absolutely. So it's graded just like any other qualification would be. But the other big differences that are vastly different to typical university are the entry and the cost. So we want to deliver education in the US for full degrees for between $7,000 to $9,000. Not per year for the full qualification. So that is incredibly affordable. Yes. And the second part is that there's an enormous challenge. All these deficiencies with university education now and not meeting industry needs. And part of the irony is it's so hard to get in. And there's so much work in your, you know, grade point average over years at school and entrance exams. And it's so difficult to get in for something that's not really that useful to industry at the other end anyway. We actually have no entry requirements for what we're launching into the US. So it's a university degree with no entry requirements. Now the first question you probably think is well, hang on, how do you have any quality control? If anyone can just go in and get this qualification, then essentially you have no standard of quality. But that's not correct. Because what we're simply saying is we have open enrollment to the first two courses. We don't need some external SAT or GMAT or whatever to tell us if a student is competent. We just say we'll allow you anyone to take the first two courses. We don't even care if you finished high school. You could be really bright as an individual, but for some reason life got in the way, challenges, problem, something happened. You couldn't even finish high school. So we say well, we'll allow you to take the first two courses. Now if you complete those courses at a sufficient standard, well that means you're at a competency level to do the career. And then we give you full enrollment into the university. So once we break down that barrier, now all of a sudden we can be thinking about team mums. We can be thinking about undocumented migrants, all the people that don't fit the standard mold, we can now open up to a huge marketplace of very bright individuals that could have succeeded, you know, had they had all the right backgrounds of, you know, great family with money, with good schools, with private tutors, and maybe life could have been different. But for someone who grew up would say a single family income in New Orleans with struggling finances, and it was hard even just to finish high school. Well, we think that that's a really unfair situation, and everyone should have access to great quality education. So this democratizes the whole system. That's really a social contribution. What if I, what if I don't do very well in those two courses? Do I flunk? Am I finished? Or will you allow me some other pathway? So for us to, for doing a university degree, you would need to get the right level of competency completion for those two courses to then get a full enrollment. So that's to actually get a university qualification. What we would recommend is various things that you can do in various support services. So we're actually working with in the US foundations and associations for people who have been victims of abuse or maybe teen mums or maybe, as I said, undocumented migrants. And so we want a very broader support base, not just about the academic learning. So the point to your question is, depending on what the deficiency is, we can then provide recommendations and pathways because it could be that one person didn't succeed simply because their English proficiency wasn't high enough. So what we can say is, look, here's a couple of English language programs, go off and do those programs and you can come back once you successfully complete that. Boy, this is really depending on it's really 21st century what you're talking about. And it's innovative, incredibly innovative. And and I agree with you that the American system is a little bit calcified after all these years. And it's into when you say education industry, you really mean industry here because it's all locked into money. So this is maybe a model that would be catchy. And one of these days, Matt, somebody else is going to copy you and then you're going to have competition. That's my prediction, Matt. Anyway, it's a great idea. How do I sign up for this? Where do I go? OK, so in terms of anyone who's got any interest in looking at this at the moment, you can simply go on to the IQ. So just the letters IQ dot university website and send through an information request or go through to DeSera Global Business School. But you'll see a lot more information in the marketplace early next year when we actually launch into the market. Well, thank you, Matt. This was a great discussion, a great idea. I'm so I'm so pleased to meet you and hear about this. And I think I'll be hearing more about it. And maybe we'll connect with you again, find out about your progress and especially how it how it how it deals with other changes in the world coming soon. Thank you so much. Brilliant. And thanks so much, Joe. Really appreciate it. As they say in Australia, cheers. What are they saying in Australia? Ah, cheers. Can I anything really that's friendly with a smile? But I haven't mentioned the fact that because you talked about Melbourne a bit and your base in Honolulu, that this initiative is actually going to be headquartered in Honolulu. Oh, I'm really excited about that. Oh, major point. OK, well, we have to talk again when more comes down the pike on this, you and I will connect. We'll talk about the detail here. Thank you so much. Awesome. Matt Jacobson. Have an awesome day. You too.