 Well, I think it's the top of the hour. So we should get started. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Featured Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today because we're gonna be talking about a fantastic topic with a great pair of guests. I'm Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm its host, its curator, its chief cat herder. I'm gonna be your guide to the next hour of conversation about where higher education is headed. Now I'd like to welcome this week's guests. These are the authors of a new book and a subject that we've been exploring. It's what I'm very passionate about and it's one that I think many of you are interested in. It has to do with the emergence of new science about how humans actually learn. The ability to look at brains, to look at nervous systems, and to look at our entire biological setup to figure out how we actually learn and how we do it well. We've had a couple of guests in the past who have helped us explore this and I'm really, really excited to welcome two more. They're the authors of a new book called Grasp, The Science Transforming How We Learn, which I recommend. And let me just bring them up one at a time. To begin with, I'd like to spotlight Vice President Sanjay Sarma. Now, if I'm gonna be talking about Sanjay, the number of titles he has is gonna get really, really daunting. And Dowd Professor, the author of hundreds of articles, member of a ridiculous amount of boards, starter of companies, Vice President MIT. The question I wanna put to you, Vice President Sarma is first of all, what are you gonna be working on for the rest of 2021? Great to see you, Brian. And I have lots of things I wanna do. I have research and virtual reality, augmented reality. Working on new massive open online courses. I'm trying to get some work done in artificial intelligence, in learning. There's just so much happening. Learning, I like to say that the 21st century begins in 2021. It didn't begin in 2000, 2001. Because Google and Amazon and all these companies were already there when we came down and the century officially turned. But we have just been through a one year of human digital transformation. My parents in India can give me Zoom tips now. And we're all sort of surviving on various online technologies, et cetera. So I am excited for all the opportunities for this new century. Fantastic, welcome. I'm absolutely delighted to see you. And just quickly, where are you today with that great bookshelf? Are you in Cambridge? Well, yeah, I'm in my house in Boston. Fantastic, fantastic. Well, hold on one second. I need to introduce your colleague, co-author and co-conspirator, Luke Uquinto. And Luke is a science writer who has worked for among others, Smithsonian.com and a few others. And he's your co-author. Luke, hello. Hi, Brian. Thank you so much for having us. It's such a delight to wander into this tightly knit group as I'm learning, as you know everyone by name. It's really fantastic. Well, it's my pleasure. Even though you have committed the terrible crime of shaving your beard off this morning. I did it, yeah. But Luke, I'm curious. Let me put the same question to you as I just put to Sanjay. What are you gonna be working on for the next year? What are you gonna be writing on and thinking about? Sure, so I wear a couple of hats and I'm involved with the MIT age lab which studies the future of old age. And we have this really cool series running with the Boston Globe where we're talking about turning Boston into an innovation hub for longevity. And so that's a monthly series that's gonna come out in the globe this whole year. So I'm really excited about that one. Oh, fantastic. Oh, that's great news. There's some interesting work being done in Toronto about trying to repurpose Toronto as their population gets older and older. Happening everywhere, not the side track it, but the idea is, can we do this in Boston sure? But it's also to spark kind of an upwelling of innovation around aging. Great, I'm glad to hear you're working on it. Even though you look like you're about 11, I think you'll be well-positioned for that. Very shaved. That's terrible, it's terrible. Friends, at this point, I just want to ask a couple of quick questions of our authors, but the key purpose here, the future trends is for you to ask your questions and to ask the authors because you have their attention for the next 55 minutes and we have a lot of ground to cover. One question I wanted to ask both of you, just to get the ball rolling is, when we think about higher education and try to transform it, trying to improve how we teach and how our students learn and how all of us learn, what are the major lessons that we can take away from grasp from the science of learning? What are the most actionable steps that we can really apply now? Let me take a quick stab and maybe, Luke, you should fill in all the things I'll leave out, but I said two quick things. The first is if we have a little bit lost the point, there are two extremes in learning. Every professor, one thing you want to do is transform the individual, but the other thing we do, which is a little bit of a conflict of interest is grade the individual and figure out how good they are. And there's a conflict, right? Where a student doesn't learn very well, is it my fault or is it the student's fault? And so that's a conflict. And I fear that our education system, the pendulum has swung too far to the grading or the winnowing aspect and what we write about. And we need to really focus on the first part, which is transforming the individual. So that's sort of one thing, right? The second thing is the science of learning, I expected it when I started this journey of seven or eight years ago to be clinical and cold and sort of just mechanistic. You must eat 13 grams of protein and exercise for 17 minutes before you study. But actually the science of learning is, when you look at the neuroscience, is surprisingly human and warm. And what reminds us is that we as human beings, I mean, assuming most of the audience is human as well, we are, that was a joke, sorry, we are actually evolved to learn and our learning instincts are those of children, even when we're adults and teaching instincts are those of parents, even when we are teaching adults. So it's a human thing, you know? And no parent sets out to teach saying, I'm gonna give you a grade and see if I can fail you for this year. Every parent goes in with a contract that I'm gonna transform you. And the science of learning, a lot of the things that come out of it are instinctive and unfortunately, foreign to what we have in our many educations. So those are my two big comments. Luke, what did I miss? There's probably about 10 things. Well, I guess I would say we don't know what you missed and that's part of the whole issue. So in kind of our journey of describing the how learning works in the brain, we've described the sort of multi-tiered structure of how things work at the neuron level and the brain systems level and the whole brain level, cognitive psychology level, educational psychology level, social psychology level way up here. And the number of things that has to go right for learning to happen well, let alone optimally is A, based on just what we know is a remarkable number of things that has to go right. B, there are certainly things in that stack that are happening that we don't know about yet. And so an analogy is sort of like for this book, I had the pleasure of sitting in on this renowned MIT engineering course, Course 2007, which is sort of the give birth to first robotics and all this kind of robotic competition education. And the professor was talking about engineering, the Saturn V rocket back in the 1960s. And he was saying, you know, there are so many things that go into this that every single one of them has to work perfectly or this thing's gonna blow up. And not only that, it's so complicated that you have to divide it up among people because no one person can hold it all in their brain all at once. And that's more and more, A, that's how I've been thinking about learning is all these things have to happen at the same time at all these different levels of organization. B, in the week leading up to sitting in on that course for the first day, I had the worst educational nightmares of my life. Oh. I just, I don't know if I was waking up in a cold sweat or what, but I was just dreaming about failing classes, dreaming about not having my assignments together, dreaming again and again and again. And you know, once I got there, it was a really wonderful time and I met a lot of great students and professors. Yeah. It was really stressful and it occurred to me, there's nothing in my past that I have so many nightmares about compared to education. And that's bad. Yeah. That is bad. And granted, I've, I've, I've stipulated, I've led a charm to life, but that tells you something about, about what we expect learning to do and what we internalize about, about learning, I think. And so I, that's a, that's a place to start, I guess. So between the two of you, you seem to share the same thought that our current education system is beautifully built for something that isn't learning. You have this early on in the book here of these, these passages and you keep coming back to this thing of winnowing where that seems to be more and more of the, the point rather than learning. But let me, let me, let me get back, let me get out of the way for a second because we have a whole raft of questions. I want to make sure people get to get to, get to ask them. We have one from Kiel Doomsch, who is a long time participant who asks, what are the author's views on letter grades, age segregated grades and the degree system, all flawed ideas put into place more than a century ago? Well, you know, I mean, I think that first of all, in making change, people have tried in the past to start from scratch and it's very hard to make progress. So do I like letter grades? Not a big fan of Churchill, but he had that quote, right? That, you know, democracy isn't a great system and I can't think of anything better. I think that we do in the end need to give some sort of, you know, certification that someone's learned. Is it letter grades? Is it a percentage? I grew up in a system with percentages. I thought it was horrible. We would fight for the last, you know, one, you know, 97 versus 97.2. That would determine your fate actually, because 10 people go into college and if you got 97, the other person got 97.2, you know? So I, degrees, I think degrees are too monolithic and also there's a sort of a social contract there that I don't particularly agree with. The social, just imagine if I told you, go to the gym for the first four years of your life and you're gonna be fit for the rest of your life. Wow. So the degree, you do a four year degree and you're expected to be ready for life. Right? I think the future is a much more granular form of education where you're sort of accumulating credentials as you go. Right? So I mean, I have mixed feelings about it all. I would just say that we're better off starting, the America system is pretty good. It's not great, but it's actually much better than what the rest of the world wants because trust me, I'm from there, right? And I think we have to improve it, but I think it's hard to start from scratch. So. I hear that. I hear that. Keele, thank you for the question. Sorry, Luke, did you wanna jump in on that as well? I guess I would just add, it's not just point about scraping for that 0.1 of a percent. You know, it reminds me of a marathon where they have those new Nike flyway shoes and it gives you a fraction of a percent advantage. And so now everyone has to wear those shoes and you end up striving for that little tiny advantage. And sometimes I just like to take a step back and say, why are we in a situation where every advantage matters? Why are we put students in a situation where every single little thing is such a fate determiner? And is the humane thing to do to be, just to say, you know, instead of changing the nature of the race, maybe we just find ways to make the winner circle seem a little bigger. It's the opposite of winnowing. Yeah. Well, I think we may have a response for you from a member of the participant group. This is Peter Wallace from UW Continuum College where he's the Director of Learning Systems and Assessment. Hello, Peter, your audio is off, I can't hear you. It's okay, take a second. Everyone goes through this. Now your video is off as well, now you're back. How about now? Perfect, hello. Okay, good. I'm gonna switch the microphone, thank you. Thank you both for speaking so directly to the issues that you've both seen in education. They're ones I've seen as well and I have talked to friends of mine about their educational experiences and almost all of them relate nightmares, right? All of them have that same story of my dad who's multiple graduate degrees still has nightmares of being in high school in his pajamas and having to go back to high school because he missed one class. So it's a very common theme. One thing that I have noticed particularly right now is teachers passing along stressed because those teachers are stressed and a lot of it from what I've seen has to do with those teachers trying to do too much, being asked to do too much. They have to know Zoom or Shindig or whatever technology, they have to know grading, they have to know how to give feedback, they have to know how to give a lecture, they have to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I often kind of say that I feel like education is one of the last, one of the last, the phrase is actually disappearing on me now, but one of the last cottage industries where someone's given a theoretically raw product and asked to turn it into something else from end to end. And I'm wondering what from both of your perspective is the role, is the better role of specialization, right? How do we create, should we create an educational system where there's a truly a specialist in assessment, truly a specialist in lecture, truly a specialist. And we're not asking teachers to be specialists in the whole gamut. Thank you again. Oh, thank you. Great question. As a professor and as the vice president for open learning, I'm a little bit biased, but I think that having every professor goes through this cottage industry of taking, as you said, the raw and making a new dish of varying quality and serving it up to students, I think is very flawed. I am a big believer in online asynchronous video education. What I mean by that is Khan Academy, you know, he's an MIT alum, by the way, several degrees from MIT. He's a fantastic lecturer. Honestly, and I'm a good lecturer. He does better lectures on the topics he gives lectures in than probably I could, all right? Why should I not, under those circumstances, become a coach? Because that is a high bar actually being a coach. We somehow think it's less, actually it's more, right? Now I, so that's a flip classroom. And then if you take software platforms like edX, what we do is we put the assessment that can be done on edX in the software. And then we can play all the cognitive psychology tricks that are human friendly and makes it much more fun. And then the professor or the coach becomes, that's the flip classroom, right? Gives curiosity, you know, gives guidance, context, maybe does some counseling sometimes, you know, you're struggling with something, that's the future. What are we doing right now? It's, I think it's a really bad what we're doing to our students. I'm sure Luke will disagree with me vehemently on this. No, you know, it's funny, I mean, you can, this is kind of where my worlds meet a little bit. There are other until recently cottage industries like that. So I, you know, I think about a travel agency which people thought was going to disappear in the last 20 years with the rise of kayak in places where you can book your flights online and stuff like that. And it's like, no, it hasn't disappeared. The travel agency has become very focused in on things that only humans can do. And you see that in financial advisors, that's like another example. So it's like, you do see the sort of cottage industries becoming less of a cottage, for sure. Thank you. I'm just, I continue to be interested in how we do that in education and I know that's a long road. I look forward to reading the book. I haven't gotten to it yet. Thanks. Well, thank you, Peter. If you buy only three books this year, buy just, just buy our book three times. I'll keep that in mind. Sorry. Well, that's one way of doing it. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that's our video question is going to work. We beam you up. It's that easy. And it looks like Sanjay and Luke are pretty gentle with you. It's a good entrepreneurial. So we're glad to, we're glad to hear you as well as to see you. Don't be gentle with us. Well, so far we're being, I think, pretty good. We have another question that's come up from our long-term friend, Tom Hames, is how do we get more marginal students to care about their education and to get away from transactional thing? Look, let me, if, can I go, let me take a stab at this as well. So there's a whole field of research called the situated cognition. And there's actually a lot of research on this. So let me just give you an analogy. So let's say that you have two children or two young people. One has a cobbler as a parent and the other has an accountant as a parent. And they're both studying, both the kids are studying math, right? Now the math teacher is saying to the students, listen, learn the math, trust me, it's going to be useful for you at some point in life. Trust me. The child of the cobbler is going to go back and watch, you know, dad cobble away, I guess, right? And the child of the accountant is going to go home and see mom working with a calculator and doing math. So the latter child has received instant reinforcement or the value of something. So one of the challenges with the folks who come from different circumstances is context and relevance and reinforcement thereof. So education that provides context part and parcel of the education itself reduces marginalization. And this is some great work that came out of, actually there's a lot of work on this, Jean Lave, Jean Lave, et cetera. And so for example, if you teach math to a fruit seller, you want to put them problem in the form of, you know, if you sell three bananas and two, you know. So there's a lot of work on it. And it all comes down to just making a pedagogy better. It's good anyway, but actually helps a little, quite a bit with folks who come from diverse backgrounds. Yeah. And I mean, just to add, you know, this goes back to Dewey, where he would say you don't want to be studying for the benefit of your future self, which I think would be the transactional example. You want to be studying because you're curious about it in the present, or you have some use for this knowledge in the present. So he would set up these sort of microcosmic society where students would have use for their new knowledge. And of course, you know, in some famous and highly reputable programs, there are chances for students to put knowledge to work, whether you're building a robot or building something else. You know, building a five-page essay, I think is still a beautiful thing to build, frankly. So, I hate to say the answer, it's just like projects that kids care about, students care about, but... So those are two very different answers, all they complement each other. The idea of situated cognition, which I just tweeted out about, and looks at you, of course, of having relevant germane to experience. We have a couple of more questions that follow along these lines, and I want to just make sure that we can put them together. Bart Trudeau asks that in-person interaction has a positive impact on diversity, equity, and considerations. Should colleges encourage students to choose on-campus learning whenever that is possible? Oh, 100%. I mean, just for the record, I'm not in favor of doing things remotely. I'm in favor of doing the things that we should be doing in person and doing the things we could do remotely, so that you can actually increase the time spent doing the things we do better in person, like coaching, right? Professor, in fact, I argue that when a professor stands on a stage, you have 100 people in the classroom, you're doing socially-disciplined learning to begin with. The whole room that was exposed that, right? So when we go back to the classroom, if we go back to the same old Zoom windows, except we're in the same room, what a tragedy. What we should focus on when we go back is for the in-person to really be in-person, right? We got to make the in-person count. It doesn't. We take it for granted until nature confiscated this privilege, you know? That's a great answer. And you mentioned this in the book several times. Hang on to that thought for a second, because we had another question which follows along those lines, and this is from Rachel Niemer, who went to Milo Nader, University of Michigan, and she asked us, how might your working grasp help inform how we created differentiated experiences so that students who come into college less prepared leave as educated as the privileged? Do you want to go that, Luke? Sure. And keep it up on the screen. That's a good question. Yeah, you know, my big takeaway, especially for equities, is that we don't think enough about how demanding we are of students in some ways. And so if you have a whole slew of students who are just kind of at their wits end trying to figure something out and perform really and compete against one another, you can imagine that those students who have come with a disadvantage of some kind would be just at the margins harmed. It's sort of like if you have a bunch of flowers in growing and some are in the shade and some are not in the shade, it's just at the margin the ones that are not in the shade are just going to have that much of an easier time growing and they'll get picked and so on. And so when I think about these things, especially from neuroscience, we're talking about working memory and so on, I say my takeaway is just to take a step back and say how are we imposing restrictions on learning in terms of kind of the nuts and bolts of how it actually works that's going to disproportionately harm someone who's coming with some kind of a disadvantage. Yeah, I mean the other thing I'll say is in fact MIT just had a task force to look at how we should rethink our learning post COVID. And one of the things that came out was the hidden curriculum. So what that means is that you're releasing these amazing students into what we think of as something in the garden, which is MIT, but some know all the byways and which store tells us good hot cross buns and which ones don't. And a lot of these students who come from different circumstances don't have that hidden curriculum. And there's also a matter of self-advocacy. There's frankly a little bit of, I'll use the word, there's a hegemonistic sort of thing where you feel like you don't deserve it. There's an imposter syndrome. These are the things we need to actively combat. Otherwise you end up regardless of what you, what your intentions are with disparate outcomes. And that takes a bite out of cognition too. That affects your performance on the day in the classroom. It takes a bite out of working memory. It's really harmful. I mean, we see that in the research on stereotype threat on test day, but it's also just in class. It's also when you're studying it. Yeah. And the cognitive load of being stressed about feeling whether you deserve to be there, exactly what Luke talked about, the working memory, all that stuff is depleted because you're spending your wasting cycles on things that someone from a more privileged background doesn't bother with. So having a structuring a campus to be more egalitarian is not just just and fair, but it is also much better for learning. Yeah. So for example, if someone doesn't reach out for an internship, it's one thing to say, well, they didn't reach out. It's another thing to say, what? Okay, can I help you with this? You didn't reach out. You know, you might want to really consider this and just bridging that gap because that gap is where the imposter syndrome just displayed itself. We had a kind of comment on this from the splendid Kelvin Bentley, who's been a guest in the program before. And he argues that adult students will not always be able to do things on site. We need to find ways to continue to enrich online learning environments. So they're not just basic Zoom sessions. And Kelvin, if you don't mind me building on that just a little bit, if I understand where you're going. What have you two found in terms of the science of learning that really applies to online learning? What are some of the cognitive approaches that we should be using to structure how we do synchronous and asynchronous teaching? So let me just frame it. But I'd like Luke to talk about it. But Zoom is not online learning done right. Zoom is jury-rigged, in-person learning where we just sort of found it literally, right? And the teachers are heroes. I mean, the people like to throw the teachers under the bus but they've been amazing, right? It's just the system. And as I said, our lectures were socially distanced to begin with. All that happened with Zoom is they became more obvious, right? Now, asynchronous online education, think of edX, think of Khan Academy. That's a whole other shebang, right? And then synchronous can be used differently. And maybe Luke, why don't you talk about it because they just wrote about it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I think, especially when we're talking about lifelong education and adult education, I think we're often also talking about just being respectful of people's time and delivering things as frankly efficiently as we can so that people have to go put food on the table and set the table and put their kids to bed and so on. And yeah, there's a way to do that asynchronously. That's a big help. Also, I would say it's funny. We get into in pretty deep depth kind of two different ways of thinking about the optimal journey for the human brain from a state of ignorance to knowledge or not having skills to having skills. And we devote five chapters to that or so four or five chapters to that. Then we have to take a step back and say, you know what though, there is no one brain. There's no the human brain. Everybody has a different brain. Everyone's going to, to a certain extent, be able to kind of want to move at a different speed through maybe a different pathway to follow their own path or their own speed to what they want to know. And so one thing that some of these different online ecosystems that Sanjay has mentioned offer is just an individualized pace and path. And that becomes especially important when you just don't have much time to devote to learning on a given day. So back to asynchronous and kind of personalized self-driven learning. This is great. Friends, there are more questions coming in. So don't be shy. And again, please click the raised hand button if you want to join us up here. Thanks for walking in here, Brian. You don't have to grab glass half empty. If you have no water, any water in a glass is worth it, right? So if you don't have access to art in person, good online is fantastic. But if you can have access in person, absolutely get it, right? That's the way to think about it. But good online can make a huge difference to both. That's the beauty of it. Yeah, depending on where we start. A couple of questions have circled back to some of the comments you all made before about the mental state and structure of learning. Catherine Wilberg asks about the role of failure in learning. We tend to do anything that might result in failing. Yet we only really learn when we fail, that we try again. Well, this is something I've had to deal with a lot, both as a professor and entrepreneur, as a student. And I think we have created such a revulsion to failure. We've erected such tight guardrails on the straight and narrow path. I worry that we sort of train out of our students the gumption and the courage. They do it anyway. Thank heavens to wander off the beaten track. I mean, for example, school grades. You've got to get, if you want to get an A+, you've got to get every homework just right and just can't mess it up. And if you want to take that kiteboarding vacation, forget it, right? But maybe the kiteboarding vacation is actually going to teach you more about physics that you've learned because it gives you some sense of it. So it's this very strange thing that we've created, very tight electrified guardrails. And I worry greatly about this. And by the way, for all my problems with the SATs and the GREs, you take them away and you leave it to the school grade. The school grade is based on how straight and narrow you work to some extent, right? As opposed to sort of goofing around and nailing the SAT. So do I have mixed feelings about this current trend? Yeah. I would say, in addition to that, we're talking about futurism for a little bit because I know this is a futurist place. Our current way of doing things is, in many respects, edtech. It's applied science and only the science is from the 1920s, right? Like, I think someone brought that up in a comment. And there's already not too many places for failure. We have to build that in. So this robotics competition, for instance, how you actually do in the competition doesn't have a direct bearing on your grade in that class that I discussed. When we talk about the future, if you talk about a more artificial intelligence guided pathway through something, for instance, and suddenly, instead of having high stakes exams, you have every single little thing you do become a point of assessment. Like, where does the failure happen? Are you going to have a sandbox where you can experiment and fail? Or are people going to think that through or are they going to always be assessing you? So it is a worry now. It could be a worry in the future. It's a really good question. Oh, thank you. Thank you. The next question ties into this, I think, pretty nicely. And this is from the awesome Roxanne Riskin that I mentioned before. She said that learning is social and emotional. Is this aspect addressed adequately in higher ed? And can you also talk about debunking learning styles because some of the educators and learning designers hold on to this concept? So two different questions. So why don't you start, Luke, and let's read debunked learning styles? Sure. So learning styles predates the work of Howard Gardner, but it kind of hits the ride on the wagon of multiple intelligences, which is a really interesting and frankly, well-supported idea about how intelligence works and how you can have this type of intelligence and that type of intelligence. And it's not all reflected in the more traditional, broad-based intelligence things. But Gardner has written about this. That was never supposed to imply the existence of learning styles where you can only teach a certain student one way or another. But people with the best of intentions kind of hit the ride onto that wagon. And I mean, there's really interesting stuff about you. You can have a stroke and have a lesion in one part of your brain and suddenly you're in trouble with math or something, and you never did before. But there's a lot of more holistic top-down research into whether these methods actually make a difference in terms of how students do. And there's a whole body of research that says it doesn't really help. It's hard to prove the negative, but it doesn't seem to help. And I think that in terms of social and emotional, yeah, learning is social and emotional, especially amongst young people, but also amongst older people. And that's why, and we did it right, the classroom would be a lot more teamwork, a lot more coaching, a lot more sort of counseling, all of the above, that's the Montessori system uses peers. And there was an earlier question about segregating by ages. And the thing the Montessori system does is it permits the ages to interact. And so net-net, I think that we can create much more sort of socially and emotionally warm and nurturing environments. But sitting in the back of a classroom, flipping your pen and looking at Instagram images, well, the professor drones on, isn't social, it isn't emotional, and it isn't valuable. One thing we explore is do you sort of, you do put a premium on these social-emotional connections, and do you burn it all down and start over with a Montessori, higher ed, or do you kind of shoehorn some emotional space into the existing framework that you already have? And we've seen some real success with that when we talk about the TEAL classroom and NMIT, which is a very peer-to-peer education-oriented setup for physics instruction. There are ways to, I think of it almost as like in the 70s when Monty Python would appear on the BBC. You'd have a news program, then you'd have Wild and Crazy Monty Python, then you'd have another news program, right? And so you can shoehorn the humanistic stuff into a framework. By the way, I will say medical residencies have an element of Montessori with an element of some distressing overwork thrown in, and grad school has an element of that as well, grad school in the U.S. Yeah, I can, although with its own enormous guardrails for failure, I just wanted to come back to something you said earlier when we began all of this, Sanjay, that again, this is still what you're describing as a way for people to learn without being cut out of the system, without being tracked out, or being no doubt. We have more questions coming in. I want to make sure that everyone gets a bracket. Two that are actually very specific about your work together. One is about MOOCs. Paul Walsh asks about, where is the data on how to use engagement to move the dial on progression, since we have millions of learners having signed up for MOOCs? Yeah, I mean, so as it turns out, the data from the MOOCs is actually not as easy as we expect it to use. I could give you, I could be glib about it, but the fact of the matter is that we have to be very thoughtful in using the data. In fact, there are two types of data. Data that you get incidentally when you're on the MOOC, and I'm telling you, that's somewhat valuable. You can see, from the commentary, this part of the video was difficult and I sort of tuned out there and things like that. But it's very hard to figure out where how engaged students were, et cetera. And so from incidental data, you can also do, on the other hand, intentional experiments based on cognitive science, where you can have some material and see how well people responded to that, as opposed to something else. And not much of that has been done. So engagement, in my view, is an open question. Games, simulations, virtual reality, augmented reality, things like that will kick in. There's also a slightly more intrusive approach of using cameras to see people's emotions, questions on that. And then the one thing I do not recommend doing, although some people are frightened, is putting EEGs on students' heads to see if they're paying attention. And please, let's go there. That's one of the interesting debate areas that's come out of 2020. As you said before, Sanjay, the beginning of the 21st century was just how much monitoring we can do of students. Thank you for the really good question, and thank you both for the solid answers. More have come in, and there was actually one very specific question about the hidden curriculum. This comes from Kate Sierra at Texas Wesleyan. And she asked, if you consider using tilt techniques created by Marianne Winklmas. I have read about tilt. I have not used it. I haven't actually thought about it as much as I ought to. So thank you for that. Let me go think about it. I did read it in a phone even where I was intrigued, but I haven't gotten around to it. In fact, let me just put that link out for everyone to see. Let me test a, there you go, testing new features in Shindig every week. I do that. So we'll see tilt higher ed.com. And then we have one more from Charles Findlay, not too far from all at North Eastern. And Charles asks, I like the idea of doing learning as efficiently as possible. How do we change the system to overcome ideas such as the car gear at a time per credit? What do you think, Luke? Do you want to answer that one? I mean, that's like, that is a really good question and something we go back and look at the history of things like the Carnegie unit and the push towards standardization. How do we get away from it? I don't know, Sanjay. Do you have any pragmatic ideas? Yeah, I threw you under the bus there while I thought about it. So it's an old interview technique when you have a friend and a colleague who can take advantage of it. So, look, philosophically, the last century or the last 10 or 50 years have all been about interchangeable parts and interchangeable people. First, we talk about interchangeable parts, but it was actually about interchangeable people, if you think about it. And to make people interchangeable, you needed to give them this NPT thread sort of spec so you could specify the, like on a pipe thread, right? So you got to really sort of standardize them. For that, the Carnegie unit is a very good measure because you can see how many, you know, their butt was in a seat in a classroom. And then you can sort of say, well, that's, you know, that's their metric. And also it helped with interchangeability of credits across institutions. The problem is that we are now beyond interchangeable people. We are now entering a world when the things that interchangeable people could do, automation can do, by definition. So in fact, we are now looking for people who are, by definition, human and different and brilliant and do the things that machines can't do and therefore are not interchangeable. And so I think net-net, absolutely, we have to get beyond Carnegie units. Having said that, oh my God, the inertia and the system and all the entire network effect built around it, it's going to take some major uprooting. And it's not going to happen instantaneously. I think it'll start with adult learning. That's where we can start. Do you think competency-based education can play a main role in this? Yeah. Yeah. I think the Southern New Hampshire has done great work on that. Luke, you were going to say something along those lines, I think, yeah. I was just going to say, just going back to the sort of the spaceship model of the brain where everything has to be working in perfect concert. But when I think about stuff like the Carnegie unit and other elements of standardization that were introduced in the 1900s, teens, 20s, a lot of that represents an early effort to reverse engineer all that stuff in that stack of neural necessities that we talk about in the book. And I think what kind of drives me nuts about the Carnegie unit is it's just this 1920s-era scientific idea that is just frozen in place. And as Sanjay says, the inertia is something else, right? So, yeah. And just as an aside, when I said NPT, I was referring to the National Pipe Thread Tapered Standard by the American National Standards Tapered Pipe Threads Association. You know what I mean? I mean, that's what we did to people. I assumed everybody knew what that stood for. But we have a, thank you. I love where this conversation is going. And I want to bring in a colleague of mine at Georgetown University, Ryan Downey. And he has, among other things, he does anatomy and physiology and does a lot of work in neuroscience. So let's bring up Ryan. Hello. Hello, Brian. And it's always a pleasure to be able to join you up here on this stage. One of the things that I've noticed running through this entire conversation is that we keep coming back to emotional aspects and affective aspects of learning. We spend so much time thinking about the effective elements of going into the classroom and teaching, but the affective qualities of what we do really make the difference between someone having a traumatic experience or having a really positive experience. And so my question here, what tips, what strategies, what things do we need to change about the educational system right now would encourage those positive, affective elements that would facilitate learning? It was just the funniest thing. I just started watching Ted Lasso. You guys watch that show? Maybe you're not over there. So he's an American football coach brought into the UK to coach a soccer team, a football team in the UK. And he has no idea how to do it. But he's the affect aspect of coaching down pat. He's an amazing affective, his EQ is off the charts. And he actually has an assistant coach who figures out all the soccer stuff for him, but he manages his players. And it's kind of a wonderful show to watch, to watch him do it. And I almost feel like that's, if we talk about the content of learning and we talk about maybe the possibility of you would have an online lecture that a teacher acting as a coach might deliver, then what is that coach teacher doing? That affect aspect of it is essential. It's a very human to human, it's the kind of thing that a computer cannot do. So it becomes almost century. It should already be central to the job, but it becomes extremely central to the job. Yeah, and I just add that the speaker and journalist Paul Tuff has written about it, there are a number of folks about it. And I recommend, I've read only a few, but I recommend them. For example, he talks about how children succeed and well, and the imposter syndrome and it's all sort of an affective thing, right? Well, he'd be on this program later this year. Very, very good writer. And now I really appreciate those insights because we spend so much time talking about nuts and bolts that human to human contact often is a topic we don't spend enough time on. So Rick really do appreciate that. If I've got time, one last question, that's related to one of the early topics, is how do we transition from the current model of four years you're in, you're done, you're out? That's going to keep you fit after a couple of sessions in the gym for the rest of your life. How do we transition into more of a lifelong learning model? Maybe going into those recurring learning loops that we've seen in the Stanford model of next generation education. Yeah, so I think it'll go, it won't start to undergrad out. It'll go work backwards. So happening with high school is in Europe, for example, in Switzerland, for example, vocational technology, vortex schools of vocational education is very important in high school. And you can almost get a community college like degree half while you're still in high school. I think we will end up with is college won't change, but folks who are working will get into continuous education. High school students will get more and more into skills. They can get them a job right away. And the pressures from both sides will cause college to rethink its structure into not a monolithic four-year sprint, but into stacked micro-contentials. We actually call it Agile Continuous Education. We didn't write about it in the book, but this is the future. We had a quick response to that from earlier question. I would kill Dooms who asks, if employers keep demanding attainment of a degree though, then people will keep getting them along with the debt. Yeah, the problem is the employers are the graduates of college and the students who look like them. So to prime the pump will take some time. But I think the 10 million people and many who are not even who we've even given up on the labor market out there today in America, I think we're going to see a lot of changes in the way employment works. And the proxy of the degree will be less important than your success in the last gig. And so continuous education is going to become a bigger deal in the near future. Well, good answers. And Ryan, thank you. Thank you for the good questions. Thank you. Really appreciate every week that we get to spend time together. Me too. Me too. We're almost out of time, friends, and I wanted to give you a chance to answer one more question from a question or another one from me. This is from a Kenan Solanero who asks, two whole system approaches that could be well suited for understanding learning processes would be Sadi Alalou's installation theory and Arawana Hayashi's SPT. Are you familiar? No, I'm not. And I made enough. And I'm going to, actually I did not make a note and I'd love to see that chat transcript at some point. So I'm going to put that in the chat right now and I'm going to flash that on the screen for everyone to be able to see if you just want to jot down these terms. And I'll also add them on Twitter as well. Maybe there's one thing which is I am an engineer. I'm not an educated, well, I'm an educator, but I'm not an education theorist. I read up the cognitive science and education theory. I am a big believer in when I see something new, I want to see randomized controlled files to see if they work. But I did look up installation theory and it has something called embodied cognitive competencies, which generally appeals to me, but I would have to do my research before I comment. I appreciate the honesty of that. And then a question for me is a little more basic, but a little more future-looking. If we can take Grasp and we can assign this to the brain of every college university leader in the United States and we let them follow Grasp's advice and thinking, what does higher education look like after say five or 10 years? What would be some of the differences that would really leap out at us? I'll request Luke to answer this because I'm too close to it. Yeah, sure. Well, so there's one sort of heartwarming story in the middle of the book about a law school, actually, that they start teaching study techniques and they start requiring it of their sort of their lowest quintile of performers, I think. And then, but basically all the students start taking this additional course on how to study for law school at law school. And the law school's ranking, and it's a school in Florida that is always kind of in the middle. It's been the top school ever since. It's just a meteoric rise since they started teaching these study techniques. And not only that, these are first-generation students, a lot of them from really heartwarming stories and they're succeeding and their bar passage techniques are through the roof, their bar exam passage techniques or statistics, rather, are through the roof. And so it's a heartwarming story. The flip side of it is every school that's not doing it, you have these same first-generation students who are failing the bar exam and not getting to become lawyers some of them. And so there's a dark side to it too, which is that if we're not doing it, there's a huge amount of attrition that's happening. And so one thing we could say is one way a school could adapt some of the stuff we talk about in the book is just by shoehorning into their existing structure and say, you know, in addition to everything we're going to do, we're doing here, we're going to teach you how to study to better perform within our school. Now the other thing you could do is say, take a step back and say, what are the things we do here that are hamstringing how we learn and how can we remove these impediments? Are we introducing hurdles to the cognitive science of learning for students that we could actually remove? And so like sort of the Florida International University answer is to say, you know, we're going to teach students to hop the hurdles and we're going to keep the hurdles there basically, but the students will learn to hop the hurdles. The other possibility is to get rid of the hurdles. And so, you know, maybe even you could do both. So if we paid as much attention to student success, I mean, like true success, as we did to the success of sports people, you know, NFL team really well. Well, that's a fantastic moment to end on because we've actually just shot through our hour and with incredible velocity and awful lot of great ideas, not just pipe fitting and how to unpiped fit people, but thinking about a real 21st century way of learning. Thank you both so much for all these great, great responses and thoughts. Let me ask, how can people keep up with the two of you when they want to get a bit more Sanjay and a bit more Luke? What's the best way? Luke has a Twitter handle. Sure. My Twitter handle is just my name Luke Yokwinto with the little ad symbol in front of it. Sanjay is wiser than me. He's off Twitter. But feel free to tweet at me. Well, very good. So you'll be the intermediary. Well, again, thank you both. I recommend graphs for everybody. And I thank everybody for your questions and comments. But don't go away yet. I have to mention where we're headed the next time. So we have a whole series of topics coming up over the next few weeks. We've got a really great session on supporting equity, another one on reinventing a university, sessions on analytics and leadership and how to close campuses. If you want to talk about this, I mean, the questions of what does assessment mean? How do we try to get away from failure? How do we teach teachers? How to teach better in terms of everything from asynchronous learning to social and emotional literacy? We can keep talking about this. We have all kinds of channels for that. And if you'd like to go back into the past and take a look at some of our previous sessions, we have nearly 250 recordings at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive, including several on this topic in science and learning. Thank you all again for wrestling with the ideas together. This is vital stuff as we progress through 2021, which may be, as Sanjay said, the first year of the actual 21st century. Thank you all for thinking with us. Please take care and above all, stay safe. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.