 So good afternoon everybody Welcome to the Berkman Center's Tuesday speakers series really excited to see such a terrific crowded room of folks that are really interested in Education in the future of education Online my name is Amar Asher. I'm on staff at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society Before we begin I just had a couple of housekeeping things. I will then introduce Anya and let her take it from there Just please note that these talks are being webcast and recorded for posterity So during the Q&A the Q&A will be recorded. So if you're not comfortable with that You can always talk to Anya afterwards And then this video will be posted to the Berkman Center's website We also have the speaker series that runs throughout the summer on Tuesdays And if you're not already on the weekly events email list, you can go to our website and sign up to receive weekly announcements about Upcoming talks as well as videos that we've posted in the past weeks of previous talks So we're so happy to welcome Anya Kamenetz to talk to us about who can learn online and how Anya is a writer at Fast Company magazine and she's the author of two books DIYU and Generation Debt and two ebooks focused on the future of open education and education The Edpunks Guide which was funded by the Gates Foundation as well as Learning Freedom and the Web Which was produced in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation So we're so glad to welcome Anya and we'll have a Q&A after she does her talk and welcome All right Thank you so so much for this opportunity and thank you all for coming I'm gonna serve free food at all of my talks from now on Super excellent. So I'm really pleased and honored to have this community kind of helped me think through Some questions that have been on my mind lately as I've been you know I've been talking about and writing about the future education for a while and a lot of stuff is kind of hitting the big time now And so there's a whole new set of questions I feel like that are they're just kind of getting out there and and and new eyes are on the problem So this is a really great opportunity. I think to try to To shape the future and shape solutions. So Just to give you a little bit about where I'm coming from, right? I'm I am the daughter of two college professors. So that I think shapes my Feeling about the the academy the university. I am a journalist I'm not a social scientist everything I have to say is strictly anecdotal and based on asking questions to other people that are experts and I've been in my career. My first book was about was about student loans. So Very much biased toward looking at education first of all from an economic perspective But also I think subtly I didn't realize this at first But it's very different to look at education from the point of view of what students want and what they what they Need as opposed to what institutions have to offer or what professors have to offer And so I'm kind of going to be pursuing that through this talk like what does students need? What do they want and then I'm a mother so that means I'm really interested in education right now from a Very hands-on perspective of how we learn in the world and looking at learning as a natural process and opening process Not something that necessarily needs to always be planned out in advance But something that we all do all the time as long as we're awake so Why do why does education need to change? Why why are we talking about radical innovation in higher education? Or maybe we're not maybe you're not interested in radical innovation, but stuff is happening. It's coming. So I The three major impetus that I see for radical change in higher education or the movement of higher education Online the integration of higher education with greater use of technology is cost access and relevance So cost obviously this is a really big issue right now. It's been on the table in a new way People are marching. They're marching a Montreal. They're marching in Chile. They're marching in You know Occupy Wall Street This is a picture of the right the March route that the Montreal student Protesters sent to the police they asked for you know their route in advances What they sent to police with the help of Google Maps people are mad kids are mad students are mad about the cost of college. Why are they mad? Because it's going up a lot. It's gone up twice the rate of inflation for my whole lifetime So since 1970s twice the rate of inflation every single year more than anything else in the economy essentially even more than medical care and this obviously leads to this really huge problem of student loan debt, which is something that I could talk about for hours and hours and hours, but it's you know, it's a growing problem It has sort of succeeded the mortgage crisis as a major debt problem that people are curious about and interested in and I'm happy to Feel any questions that people have but let's just take for you know, establish for a second that it's a problem, right? However, you know the question to access is a little bit different from the question of cost Because a lot of people can't access higher education even if they could pay for it Because they're on enough classrooms in the countries where they live, right? So we have an issue here in the United States where we have about 37 percent of people get some kind of post-secondary Credential we'd like it to be more like 60 percent. So that's a pretty large leap But then you have entire regions of In the world that want to go from 5 percent to 35 percent with a post-secondary degree So there's very very large numbers of people that want a degree and you know, it really Kind of insane illustration of this was last in January in Johannesburg There was a stampede at the gate to get into entrance exams at the university in which someone's mother was actually pushed down and killed Because this is the you know in in regions in areas where they haven't built a higher education system All of a sudden they need to get from 5 percent to 35 percent It takes a lot to build and there really isn't any you know The UNESCO kind of thinks this is gonna double over this decade the demand and we don't really have the Physical resources to build the seats let alone never mind if we somehow could find the funding to do it So that's access and then there's this crazy question of is it even relevant Are we to are we teaching people in the right ways or people learning the kinds of things? They need to know in the ways that they need to know them in order to be part of the 21st century So this is a whole other Set of questions and you know you look at books like academically adrift or there's books You know sort of interrogating and criticizing the the academic system And you know it's really strange because you've got a whole continents worth of people trying to get into the classrooms And then other people are kind of who are in those classrooms are saying this is no good This is useless what we're learning here It's it's not changing fast enough and it's a rote learning and it's industrial age learning for a post-industrial era And so there's all these you know Very strange Problems there, you know, I probably the people the people in Johannesburg would say give me that industrial age learning I want more of that, you know, I can't get enough of it But then people here are saying no we can't we don't have it so so my kind of way of looking at this and I started to try to answer the question of why is higher education Why is the cost growing so much? and you know and The very basic way of answering that question the very common way of answering that question is with reference to this Thing called Balmole's cost disease. So does anyone familiar with the cost disease? string quartet so This this paper in 1966 William Balmole and William Bowen one of Bowen later became the president of Princeton Two economists and they wrote this paper called performing arts the economic dilemma So if you look at this, you know, if you look back at the CPI graph From you know 1978 this goes even beyond, you know back to the 1960s that The cost of lots of things has been flat or even declining because of industrialation because of mass production because of Automation because of globalization Clothing is cheaper cars are cheaper food is cheaper But then there's other things where the cost continues to grow up and they said, you know Why is the cost of a string quartet keep going up? Well, you can't You can't cut any of the members of a string quartet, right? And and have the same music you can't perform the music any faster. There's no way of speeding up the production line And you can't actually export the string quartet to China if you want to have a live concert So this is highly skilled labor intensive type of work. It's not easily, you know translatable to automation and They later extended this Metaphor to to health care and obviously of course to education if you have a large number of people It's very labor intensive and those let labor is very skilled It takes time to teach those people to do it and then it kind of becomes a little bit circular because it's like the reason Education costs so much is that the people who are doing education need a lot of years of education which costs a lot so therefore the cost keeps going up because it keeps going up and This is really a problem, you know If you think that we keep needing more education and everybody needs more education You know it as our society progresses and yet the cost of it keeps running away past inflation You know I used to have a graph in my In my presentations where I looked at that, you know that tuition line And it's very similar to something that you see in sort of an ecological presentation where you say like, you know Population when when when something starts going in a curve like this you start to see a crash Like that's what happens at the end of a curve like that generally It doesn't just go up forever because most things can't go up forever So I started to think about well, maybe there isn't lots of people are thinking about this Maybe there's some way to somehow escape this dynamic, you know We don't want to have a crash and have an extinction of universities but we want to have to escape the dynamic of Balmo's cost disease and You know, we started to think and people started to think and talk about maybe the way to do that is To kind of go into a realm where the rules are really different, right? So people are here have heard of Moore's law Somewhat maybe somewhat familiar Moore's law is this this observation made by Gordon Moore at Intel in 1974 73 where he said You know these these chips they're getting faster and they're getting cheaper And so the number of transistors is going to develop is going to double every 18 months or every 24 months And the chips are going to get faster and faster and faster and cheaper and cheaper cheaper as they get smaller and smaller and smaller And that has held true by this for this entire time, right? Moore's law actually interestingly very interestingly is might be coming to the end because silicone We've gotten we're getting to like an atomic level and the only way we're going to be able to continue doing this is either with Cloud computing or nano computing or quantum computing, but that's like a whole that's a really really interesting question But nevertheless, it's held true for a really long time Technology keeps getting better. It keeps getting faster and it keeps getting cheaper at the same time And the cheaper part is very interesting to me because I think that a university like this one Never thinks about getting cheaper It never gets cheaper because no one thinks about getting cheaper. No one wants to get cheaper No one wants to even think about how things are paid for it's anathema It's completely outside the realm of the conversation. So when people start talking about improving education They start talking about using technology to improve education, but they leave the cost completely out of it and the point that I'd like to make here is that the reason that technology improves is because cost saving is a key constraint that is put into the system when you try to innovate and Stuff does not get better unless it also gets cheaper at the same time So that's why a lot of people feel like the future of Education and the way to escape this unsustainable dynamic is through open Education open technology open resources So what does that mean? Well for my convenience, I like to think about education and this is completely from the point of view of the student We're not talking about research We're not talking about maybe the role of you know faculty and their their kind of lives or their labor conditions We're talking about what does the student want out of education? Generally speaking three things of three kinds of things they want content. They want skills and knowledge specific knowledge they want Socialization which is a very complex process of you know relationships with other people with mentors with peers and a sort of self development That we all kind of hope to get out of a classical education experience and then finally they want something to prove something to show that they Did this and that they can get a job and that they are you know They have an imprimatur from an institution that has shown them to be excellent in one way or another So how does the idea of openness affect these things? How can it potentially improve these things and also lower the cost of these things? is the question so This this kind of question and this kind of innovation first hit the world in the realm of content Content being sort of the most easily exportable and understandable resources that Education produces so you know we have any MIT's open course where it started in 2001 Students, you know the university putting its lectures online. It's people putting textbooks online creative common license Actually what interesting footnote the first open content license was actually created for the use of educational materials by David Wiley And he was one of the first people who had initial input in to creative commons and education becomes a very important Part of what creative commons does from now, you know from then on And so, you know Khan Academy is something that is not technically open people have heard about Khan Academy So it's not technically open in in in the sense of open source But it is free and it is also freely reusable anybody can kind of take it and there's a lot of cool Things that happen when you start to have open and free resources that are no longer Subject to scarcity like the scarcity of having to be in a classroom with someone or even the scarcity of having to purchase a copy of a book Obviously, they're infinitely reproducible and shareable They can be taken and modified for people's you know specific needs They are constantly when they're not so much because they're open but because they're digital. They're constantly updateable In way that a paper textbook is not And so there's lots of great things about open content The not to think great things about open content because we're trying to be even handed here is that it's just content, right? So it's just a resource for consumption and it can be very passive You know, it's not necessarily an improvement to replace a lousy teacher with a video Even if it's a great video because it's just something you watch and then if you have a question You don't necessarily have a way to get it answered And it also can be very isolating, you know, right? So you turn on the faucet of The content and just like anything else that you consume You're just sitting there kind of shoveling it in and that's very counter to You know a classical paradigm of of Socratic education where you're kind of having an interchange with someone So these are the problems that people have with open content, but it's also wonderful It's great because you know people spend a thousand dollars a year on textbooks if your community college student You spend as much on textbooks as you do on your tuition So this is very important to have this stuff and to get it more adopted, but it just is not the whole answer Can we have open socialization this is really controversial, right? What kind of relationships do people have online can you really have a mentorship or a close study group relationship online? This is something we haven't worked out yet because you know We're we're just catching up to how we relate to each other online and how we interact in social networks And what our persona is like in social networks, but people are trying right and I think one of the interesting things about you know How the online world and social media makes us a very aware of our horizontal connections to each other? Which is a very interesting counterpoint to the Traditional set of relationships that is foregrounded in an educational setting Which is a relationship between like the person at the front of the room talking and everyone else sitting and listening It's always been true that in learning It's very important to learn from people around you and the horizontally connected you your peers to learn through Conversation and to learn through collaboration and even competition That's always been true and it's always been cultivated in the best settings But online learning really makes that visible right away because first of all when you have volunteer networks networks of people trying to absorb information together They tend to cooperate and people have lots of ways of collaborating and cooperating You know social networks make that easy they're called networks, so we know that it's a network It's not a social You know it's not a social amphitheater. It's a social network So you're talking to people next to you and the people who have other questions So this is a very interesting paradigm of learning Peer to peer university is one place where people can sort of find each other form study groups and Foregrounding the peer aspect of learning to go back to the cost thing for a second is really important because it's what allows it to scale So if you have people peers that can help you answer questions or help you study or help you get over a hump That is very very important and I think some of the platforms that we're going to be talking about in a second are actually using peer Evaluations and relying on that as a way to kind of try to scale the network. So that's very interesting as well So and then you have this very large very strange question of what would it open credit accreditation look like right? And I wrote this this e-book the edgy punks guide to talk about sort of DIY accreditation open accreditation You know, it's worth noting that If you look at our system of accreditation that we have right now, it seems very monolithic Because there's this thing called the bachelor's degree and everybody understands what it means more or less And it seems to be like the gold standard for post-secondary education, but If you look at it from another point of view, that's not how it works at all because in fact By some standards 73% of the post-secondary learning that occurs Outside of high school past high school happens outside of accredited colleges and universities. What does that mean? It means continuing education credits. It means licenses state licenses and exams non-profit associations professional associations that accredit credit people it means Microsoft and Cisco certification So there's a lot of learning and there's a lot of post-secondary learning that prepares people for careers And even enriches their lives that has nothing to do with the bachelor's degree So if we start to accept and understand that the accreditation system is a lot more Multifarious than we think it is the people that have you know the gold standard degree the bachelor's degree then we can kind of understand what an open accreditation system might look like where there's more recognition of things like badges things like portfolios modular learning learning that is tied to specific skills and Importantly, I think for you know go back to the relevance question Learning that is constantly updated because your bachelor's degree gets less and less relevant as the years go by that's why people have to go back and get a law degree or get a you know a master's degree and Still it's not enough your skills have to be constantly updated And so in a world where the the burden is upon educated people to continue to educate themselves It seems more and more important to have different kinds of certifying different kinds of learning So now we've got some solutions to this there are people who are trying to put together In the last few months. This is a marriage has gotten a lot of press right people trying to put together Open content open socialization and open accreditation And so there's audacity they came out of the AI course that was taught at Stanford Sebastian Thrun And he wants to teach you know free online university classes for everyone right and You've got Coursera very similar education for everyone right and they've got very similar set of tools Actually all of these and then there's this one here right at X so very similar set of tools Videos short videos five minutes, and then they stop and ask a question You have to answer the question you get feedback right away then there are There's exercises to do more elaborate kind of problem sets to work through a lot of these are very technical courses And then you get feedback right away. You get again you get scores, you know, you know what you did In the MIT original the MIT X course in in robotics It was really cool because you could export an image of your homework scores Which is like a little bar graph and people were taking those and putting them on their Facebook profiles and saying yo Look what I got in robotics Which is kind of an amazing I think thing in terms of you know, what certification might mean then there were social tools as well All of these have social tools. They have wikis. They have forums In Coursera in the first round of the open courses. That was the machine learning course from Andrew Ning In the first round of that course a student would post on the forum He'd get a response in an average of 22 minutes from another student There's a very active Conversation live going on because they also have a really large scale all of these these projects Got over a hundred thousand people registered Registered it's important to remember. There's a really big power law distribution people register a hundred four thousand people in the first machine learning course 46,000 people did one assignment 23,000 people 25,000 people did most of the assignments, but that's cool. You know, it's free, right? It's pretty impressive still, but it's important to think about that when you think about what is learning for everyone mean, right? So this is my question people are getting really excited about this stuff, which is good It's it's content created by the best professors at the best universities And it is able to be used by anyone anywhere able to be used by right open to be used by anyone anywhere because it's free They think that they might be able to they're certifying people's learning They're certifying the completion of the course and I've talked to people people are using that certification They're taking it. They're putting in their resumes. They're using it to help them decide what they should study when they do go to college They're using it to start businesses. They're using it to hire other people to figure out, you know What type of people should I be hiring because you know, what do they need to know? So this stuff is already happening. It's proving itself And so this to me is the point where people are getting really excited They're hearing about this for the first time or they're hearing more about it and they're starting to take it seriously Universities, you know great universities across the land are having conversations in their provost office saying what is our Open education strategy. What do we need to be doing? This is a very important moment To ask what does it mean to have education be for everyone, right? Who's already good at this stuff? The people that I talked to who have taken these courses and done really well in them have some things in common They're really super super smart It doesn't matter if they are a 16 year old Greek high school student who taught himself programming when he was 13 Or a 13 year old 8th grader in northern Virginia who wants to you know Just study in her spare time because her public school is spending all their time doing Testing drilling testing and she wants to like learn something herself Or if you are an entrepreneur in Bangalore or you know, these are all people that I've talked to Super wicked smart all of them Obviously, they are very self-motivated. They are the creme de la creme and it's very interesting This is how open education works you can let everybody in in the beginning and then people start self selecting, right? And it's very it's the opposite to how education has always worked because that you know is a place like Harvard What is your acceptance rate like 5.9 percent? undergraduate You like you did all the work in the in the front end of the admissions office let you know figuring out who was smart And then it doesn't matter what happens essentially to them for the rest of the four years This is a much more Critocratic way it's I mean, you know if you talk with the signaling effect the signaling effect is you got in Everybody knows that you it's you might as well. Just you might as well just leave after the first semester, but I like some billionaires did right so so I Think that it's not necessarily a bad thing that people leave But it's also important to think about to succeed in this way. You need to be very self-motivated And then there's obviously social things even if you're from a very far away place and it's accessible to you You still are a person with leisure time. You're still a person with with access to technology, right? Is this a problem? Why is this a problem? Well This is a new Kumar from Bangalore who is one of these people, right? He in his pal like they they left their jobs at Oracle. They took the machine learning classes Stanford Then they started a company that does like big data machine learning stuff And his wife by the way as a doctor also took like the the medical school courses from Coursera So this is they're doing really well. This is the the the platforms that we're building right now are tools to make excellent people even better Which is great because we need more excellent people in the world and that is a very important Task of education, right? We want to offer excellent people the chance in the platform to excel and there's not enough classrooms No matter how many you build here There's not going to be enough for all the excellent people to come and learn so you definitely want to have that But you know, there's a whole other aspect and facet to education and for me as someone who looks at the economics of education and looks at The social force of education You know, there's a meritocratic aspect to education and there's a democratizing aspect to education We want it to be available to everyone everyone not just the excellent everyone's but the everyone's everyone's and who Right now is not so well served by the system that we have right now Well people who have different kinds of learning abilities, right people who didn't do well in school They don't love learning. They don't salivate at the prospect of taking a free Stanford or MIT course in robotics People who have jobs or families or people who are older independent students are not doing so well A lot of times if they are you know There's sort of six different classifications of people that are non-traditional students the non-traditional student is the new traditional student, right? someone who's over 24 someone who has a dependent someone who has a job and I think someone who's the first in their family to go to college perhaps someone who's the child of immigrants if you have three out of Those six you have like a eight nine ten percent chance of graduating once you start a Community college so there's a lot of people who aren't succeeding and they have very obvious Very obvious qualities Obviously people who have a little money are not a lot of experience with with computers And people who have other things going on in their lives that might affect their ability to be so intensely self-motivated This is really a huge opportunity that we might be missing right because These are the people that maybe we want to help and these are the people who maybe can't help themselves And these are the people that already go to the institutions that have the least resources All right a community colleges right now are educating half of all undergraduates with ten thousand dollars To spend per head, which is a third of the resources of an average public university and You know the question I think a really important question is how can open content open Socialization open accreditation be leveraged to help those people and to achieve this really important other task That we have for education, which is to create, you know a more just and you know civil fair democratic society Here's some ideas and I hope in Q&A that we talk about more ideas Um Can we reappropriate existing infrastructure? What does that mean? So let's say that we have a full compliment and it's like 18 months from now This is not far away 18 months from now Coursera and edX and Udacity and a couple other ones that haven't gotten started yet have created a full curriculum of College courses that are free that are excellent that are By the way, I didn't even get into the fact that they have adaptive learning platforms So they're constantly they're taking in data on how all the learners are learning and they're constantly improving The way that they they teach the material To different kinds of people which is great So let's say that this resource exists How could you then structure a university or how could you then structure a learning experience for people who? Don't fit the annouge model That it would be helpful for them as well I think that one thing that you could do There's this very obscure program out of Portland State University called learner web Where they basically created a really simple set of learning tools And the and they're online you can pick a learning plan like my learning plan as I want to be you know Get a GED my learning plan is I want to pass an English You know ESL test my learning plan as I want to become a citizen and Then you are on the computer and you're choosing these things and it offers you like curated portals to different resources But the key part about it is you're doing it in a place like you're doing it in the literacy center You're doing it in the library and there are people there that can help you They're not necessarily content or subject matter experts in learning English But they are people who are trained in social services and in motivating people and helping and listening to them and helping them figure out You know Ways to solve their own problems when they hit a snag So you can kind of imagine an idea where the the learning stuff and the accreditation is all served People are not okay, right? It's really simple. It's served on the computer and the people roaming the room Have the other kind of personal face-to-face skills to help make it happen and this maybe could be a lot cheaper than Trying to do everything or trying to have you know someone who is I mean This is not very effective right now Like if you guys imagine that you guys all have you know your veterans or you have a kid at home Or you have all like problems that you're you're dealing with on your minds You your computer is not working and you couldn't get gas to come to the class today, and I'm up here in the front of the room I'm not helping you with any of those problems, right? This is the one to many I'm not here to like help you with that But if I were talking on your screen, and then there's people coming around Maybe helping you with more of that. Maybe you can help you can stay the course a little bit better Maybe those people aren't necessarily working for colleges. Maybe they're working in community centers or different kinds of community Organizations, maybe they're working in an employer's like maybe these these learning hubs or learning centers take place within Oh God like a pro social employer like somebody wants to help his his employer employers become employees become better That could happen right like a Starbucks or somebody wants to get a lot of points for being like a good corporate citizen like Creates this learning project or this learning system for their people to do in their off hours And helps motivate them because the other important thing about that is What I mean by a microfinance model so in microfinance the gramming bank they kind of discovered that the way to Succeed and allow people to pay back their loans is to create circles where everybody together Borrowes and they're all kind of responsible to each other So there's a peer commitment. There's a peer obligation. There's a reciprocal feeling that goes on And I think you know talking again about the the social or the the socialization aspect or the network aspect of education of learning You can do a lot of great stuff online But you can also import that peer feeling of that peer aspect into a face-to-face community And it can go back and forth between the online and the offline world So what I discovered from talking to the Coursera and the MITx participants is that a lot of them did it with friends They did it with family members. They did it. They were working on the course together They also used the social tools so there wasn't any difference. There were some people that only did the social tools So they were just by themselves in a cafe pounding it out Asking questions in the forums when they had questions But there were other people that were there together with other friends and that seemed to really be helpful Their friend didn't have to know anything about machine learning in order to help them learn machine learning The friend just had to help keep them accountable and make it fun and interesting So can we create those kinds of communities or leverage existing communities? Where the learning is kind of piped in from outside, but the relationships are real and face-to-face So yeah, so that's you know, that's kind of the the that's something I'm playing around with like how could we use these resources for For this purpose and you know the fourth kind of this probably should be the first Principle is designed for basic needs machine learning is not going to help You know the kind of the kind of student that we're talking about they need something like CS 101 There is a great CS 101 class on the Coursera platform that was created and developed specifically for introducing people to computer science I've never had any computer science. I took it. It was great. I never took computer science before I learned a lot about computers how they work So it's a different you know optimizing it for accessibility This is not something that's naturally going to happen because the professors who are on these platforms right now It's all totally voluntary and they're just teaching the courses that they're most excited to teach But if you let's say the federal government or someone else who cares a lot about accessibility got involved in this you could You could say well, what are our most important strategic? Basic needs courses that we need to build and develop and you know and throw some inspiring stuff in there Don't just make it be like you know broccoli bread and butter Courses but like make it interesting but also make it designed specifically for the person that they may not have in mind when they're building these courses And then you know and then institutions can maybe repurpose these and and something institutions right now are already doing which I think is really interesting for accreditation Empire State College has been a Pioneer in this for many many years since the 1970s where there was another wave of sort of concern about accessibility Empire State College concentrates on credit for prior learning. They're part of the SUNY system public university in New York State But when everybody comes in they sort of have an intake session with a counselor Who has a two-hour conversation with them when they talk about what are your interests? What are your goals and what have you already learned and their goal is to try to get people to present portfolios and Exams and testing and get credit for prior learning credit for prior learning is this incredible tool that has been around for 40 years where You do a little bit self-reflection on your something that was a workplace training or a military training or Volunteer experience or a hobby or just an interest of yours and you create a narrative around it You submit documentation and what they find with people who get credit for prior learning is they are better They're doing metacognition. They're thinking about their own thinking process and they learn about how they own how they learn They are much more likely to succeed in college and they get there they get there faster They get there with you know They have the credits that they take with them from their past and they're more motivated and they also are better And a lot of qualitative measures, so it's a really really cool tool I think that organizations if you know if you think about a world where people can Go and play in the sea of open learning and then what they've learned a little bit about what they want to learn What they need to learn they can plunge in and get starting credit for that and then fill in the The gaps I think that's a really interesting use of our existing infrastructure This is another kind of organization outfit the kale Council on adult and experiential learning has this portal called learning counts Which is supposed to be for everybody to get college credit from their their existing experiences So, you know, I think that there's a lot of opportunities here to sum up right in the evolution of Education and all of these needs being served in different ways crucially cheaper But what's important to realize is that we get kind of complacent about technology the people that Don't like technology or sort of complacent that it's never going to replace the face-to-face and they're right about that The people who like technology are kind of complacent about the idea. Well, it just keeps getting better and better. It's amazing And they're right about that But the truth kind of lies somewhere in the middle Which is that there's stuff that happens on its own and seems to have this incredible internal momentum And then there's other stuff that people who care about this Really need to pay attention to and try to shape as it you know Starts to be designed and starts to make an impact in wider ways if we're going to have you know a Future of education that is better in every way For all the ways and all the ways that we all care about it so much And yeah, that's I'm wrapping up a little close to the Q&A. So thank you mentioned access to computers as one of the limiting factors and Do you think with a plethora of These learning resources available. Do you think that might provide more momentum for like a one laptop per child kind of initiative again? Like I know that kind of didn't really work out that well, but what do you think about that? I'm doing a story right now. I'm not one laptop per child. So it's really interesting You know, it wasn't as much of a face plan as people seem to think it was there's like two million computers out there in classrooms and There's another two million Intel classmate PCs, which is kind of it a copycat project But I think you know what people feel like is happening now is that the smartphone and the tablet is overtaking the laptop as being and There's like six billion cell phone Connections around the world. So, you know, it really is very close to universal now The idea of teaching through SMS is not very not the same as teaching through five-minute videos It's very very difficult and University of the people is an example of a of an online non-profit startup Non-accredited that's trying to do stuff in a way that people in Congo can access it which means like pvfs. It's very difficult to be innovative in the pedagogy when you have like a very crappy internet connection So, you know, I think you kind of need to develop both and you need to try to think about making it as successful as possible But yeah, you know Yes, the answer is yes There is more momentum if you think about so what one University of the people did in Haiti was they actually build a computer Lab in Haiti so that people could go and build, you know be online and I think that that's not a bad use of resources Hi Okay, so you talked about some of the courses that are completely online based, but you didn't really talk about Minerva, which is I don't know if people know what it is, but it's trying to be a complete higher ed experience based entirely on online learning and Just quick thing. I'm gonna be a senior undergrad and I Wanted to take the rest of my time at school off because I think school is slow And I think you can learn a lot faster just based on using online courses and direct things But I felt uncomfortable Quitting so far in and so I was just wondering if you think it's going to be a complete learning experience Or if it's just going to be something that kind of adds to the current whatever is going on in your life Well, I think there's there are people who are going to use these tools to go from some from nothing to something And there are people that are going to use these tools to go from good to great and You know, there is no complete learning experience, right? We're constantly always learning and it's always incomplete and it's in it's continuous So, I mean, that's that's kind of like my capsule answer to that. Yeah Yeah, oh wait, there's someone up here. Did you yeah? Yeah You talked a lot about Sort of higher ed online learning and I think a lot of it is pitched at sort of adults and people who haven't had college education or want to add to that but Can you talk a little bit about what's being done online for children and sort of Primary levels of learning. Sure. So the the world of innovation in K-12 is ruled by the 56,000 American school districts and the federal standards and state standards So within the world of school, it's very difficult to kind of get this stuff in use Although it does not, you know, it's not completely out of the question But the where the place where the ferment is happening and the excitement is out of school learning after school learning and Richmond learning camps and and libraries and museums and sort of the idea Of, you know, everything that the kids do and the the really awesome opportunity there is right according to the Pew research that K-12 age kids are consuming 11 and a half hours of media a day During eight and a half hours of screen time. So they count it twice because they got two screens up at the same time So they're already spending more time with digital media than they are spending in school And so the question is is there any way to kind of what do we do? Do we add vitamins to that digital media and make it nutritious? Learning-wise and try to improve its learning or do we try to maybe honor with the learning that they are doing and the work that They're already doing in gaming and what is gaming teaching them can be design better games AT&T just made a huge investment in a company called game desk, which is a nonprofit startup out of USC that's doing I think some of the coolest learning game design The crazy part about how to do learning game design is that you need to get in a room a Brilliant content expert and a great designer a visual artists and they all need to be in the same page And they all need to understand exactly what it is they're designing. So wait This is an aerodynamics game. Well, what does the aerodynamics look like and what does the bird look like when it's in the air? And how do we show the forces and is this correct? And is it fun to play? It's very difficult But you know so but I think there's a lot of cool stuff happening And I think the other world where this is kind of strange and weird is With online test prep because tests are becoming more and more important in K-12 online assessment And then just plain all, you know online public charter schools, right? So there are you know, there's online There's an open high school in Florida. There's one in Utah There's more kids every day taking high school courses either because their GED completers or or their homeschooled And they want to get a few courses here and there So that's kind of growing under the radar or it's a very poor school School district and they want to get an AP course and they don't have the money for it. So they're doing it remotely So all of that stuff is happening You got notes, this is a little I'm nervous Don't worry. I didn't write down my question So I'm coming out of a PhD program in the humanities and my first teaching assignment in the fall Is a permanent job where I am being expected to teach online only This is at a limit of 45 students for a to for a sort of upper-level undergrad course I wonder if you could speak to the disconnect between the kind of education that's practiced in rooms and campuses like this and The places where there is demand for those faculty to teach both in terms of preparation and in terms of the kinds of students people are being taught to teach Students who sit in rooms like this generally already have had the filters applied And it's a very different thing teaching them than it is So it's my understanding that academics were never taught how to teach. That's also true They've never been rewarded for teaching well either, right? Not directly, right? And they hardly ever get to teach students that are as good as the students that were in class with them Because they were the ones who stuck with it all the way through the end and the students that you are gonna have are the ones Haven't stuck with it all the way through the end yet, and they you know They made it to the school that they're at so this has been a problem for or not a problem But this has been a situation that people like you have been in for a really long time and it seems really different now I guess because of the online dimension to it and I the only the good thing about it. I think is that Everybody is learning how to do this stuff and everyone is new to it And I'll tell you the most robust online learning communities are the communities about online learning If you are interested in you know ed tech and learning how to teach using technology They are hella wikis and blog lists and Twitter Feeds and ed tech chat and everything you need you can get up to speed very quickly if you plunge in I'm not concerned about that I'm concerned about the political economy that's making this a necessity this kind of learning a necessity for Large state institutions where there aren't seats in in classrooms and have to hold the students say more about that What's the concern? The political economy is of online learning is well We'll expect a student to buy a computer and we will expect that they can carve out some some place in their single parent home Some space and time to do this course work. Yeah I thought them the model you're describing about using campuses as existing as centers to keep students motivation up is great but my students are Taking online courses in between their two jobs and their child rearing Absolutely. Yeah, I mean that's why That's why the current model is unsustainable, right? I mean, I don't think it says I don't think that is sustainable And I don't think that is you know socially beneficial I think we need to have but in order to stop doing that We need to have a really big redeployment of existing resources as well as new investment And that's going to take a lot of different kind of movement I wanted to ask you to say more about deploying the human resources It seems to me that Building it and assuming they will come is Really not a solution because those who come as you already said are the ones who are motivated who have time who have access to Computers and reliable sources of electricity that doesn't go on and off in brownouts all the time and who know that this is Going to serve them that putting in a lot of effort in the short term all by themselves Perhaps or only with some peers it's going to serve them really well in the long term and the people I'm worried about are the people who don't know that and Who have no way of knowing it unless they sort of wander into some kind of institution? nominally of higher learning where somebody might get hold of them and Help them find out what there is to gain This is universities can sometimes do this High school sometimes can do this but in a highly atomized system where everybody is supposed to log on and take care of themselves The opportunity to find out what you don't know and need to know It's not clear to me where that's going to come from The way that the university has conceived of its role is as they speak in of knowledge right for a long time before the university People achieved their learning goals in a different way And I really am interested in I talk a lot about use a metaphor of the community of practice Which is an anthropological Study in the early 90s where people they kind of looked in this question of how did people learn before they had formal schooling? Was everybody just totally ignorant or did they learn things? Did they know how to do stuff and they looked at people they looked at groups of midwives in the Yucatan tailors in West Africa and actually addicts in recovery and They they said, you know what you have what you need is you have a group of people Taking part in a task with a common understanding of the goal or the outcome Then you have people who come in and watch from the outside And this is called legitimate peripheral participation They're giving little tasks to do like if you are if your aunt is a midwife and you're five years old And you're following her through the forest and you have to sort the twigs and the leaves and then she starts telling you a little bit About what's what and then you once you've learned a little bit of something You're constantly do you're taking part in the work of the group you learn a little bit of something And then you teach someone else right away You know which is not to say like so so people learned how to do stuff communally in those groups if they managed to find a group like that There isn't always necessarily needed to be a centralized beacon of knowledge in order for people to realize that they didn't know Stuff and that they needed to know stuff But you know in a very complex knowledge-based society You know, we're gonna be waiting a long time if we and people are gonna get very far apart very quickly We kind of wait for everybody to sit in the grass and like figure this out for themselves So yeah, there is I mean to me that is just an argument for any institution that wants to be a beacon of knowledge to start to figure out how to get open as Open as possible and as visible as possible and as public as possible about what they're doing and why it's important And also to accept the fact that you maybe not be you know You maybe not have the power that you used to have to dictate What you think people need to know the people might have more choice and more ability to choose What they think they need to know and then you might have to come to them and serve them But I come from a part of the country which worries me a lot because I see so many kids there who have only local connections only local knowledge and With the best role in the world and complete any ability Have no clue that they might need to learn more than their immediate communities give them I'm not I think a lot of them are not until they get and they're going to get a really nasty economic crunch when they find themselves unprepared for any work that's available for them or a world of Question to in your beginning Introduction there about the the economics of the Colleges and that it's because of the cost of the human thing I think that's kind of a little bit off because there's way too much The colleges have invested so much right now into infrastructure of their buildings And they also take and play their grants and I was told once that I was wondering why if you were a business school Why couldn't you take the prep? I know this is alarming, but why couldn't you take the practices of good business? Practice and take and show how you can run a bus business efficiently You know, etc. And I was told you can't because in education if you're Harvard or the other school or whatever You all have to be at the certain price level to compete So there's a panache in and having that so therefore the only way that they lower their bottom line Is that they give you more in scholarships or they discount their prices, but the mr. You know the manufacturers Just sort of price is $50,000 and then so there's efficiencies and things like that you're just not going to see and I don't I wouldn't put it All on to the fact that you have the human factor Okay, so this is a chapter in my book, right? I looked very detailed into this the Cost the Delta cost project Jane Wellman does the most detailed research on this Finds that you're right in the sense that first of all across the board universities about 70% of their budget is payroll and compensation in general health care obviously is Important here pensions because a lot of these are public employees, right? Not faculty the amount of money spent on teaching is going down because of the casualization of academic labor and adjuncts Where it's puffing up is in the administrative offices and in services and staff Right for these buildings. So the public so the so that's a very that's an underlying kind of thing And I think you know so the cost disease is correct in the sense that it is mostly paying people Not necessarily teachers in the public realm the cost thing happens because State funding gets cut and the cost gets shifted on to students in the form of tuition Ultimately on to loans in the private realm There is something called, you know like a perks war where they're marketing and competing not on The quality of what they do because remember all the work is done in the admissions office but they're marketing competing on the quality of How they look and we know the offerings that they have and how it compares to other people's offerings and Sometimes on the price itself, which is kind of totally perverse and bizarre So an interesting factor that's you know entering in here is when you have these I mean two out of these three that I'm talking about a for-profit startups their venture funded startups and The word you know that the name of for-profit has had you know not a great round run in education But these are a little bit different because they're in partnership with existing universities They have a lot of prestige going for them and they they say that they're going to offer their stuff for free Not for-profit and for-profit all it is is a tax classification has nothing to do with Functionally how well it's run and what their mission is and so that's totally a misnomer you can get paid $400,000 or 800,000 if you're a united-way president doesn't mean that But you're accountable in a very different way than you are if you're a publicly traded company Shareholders that want to see right but increase from quarter to quarter I mean the for-profit universities right now the University of Phoenix is They it's not an accident that they keep having problems with fraud and and misjudgment because they are run to recruit students And to get their their first payment of federal student loans, and they don't really care what happens to them afterwards But that's a whole other Actually had two questions, which we may not have time for so you can pick one if you like I was curious if there had been any What you would deem successful experiments in the realm of music education because I'm coming from Berkeley College of Music today and the other is that I'm actually slightly excited that I'm hearing what I am for me today having just a month ago at Association of College and Research Libraries heard kind of higher ed bubble stuff and This idea that librarians had no place and when you started talking about communities and the need for that I went. Oh, that's that's libraries So I was just wondering on a on a more global scale Maybe slightly detached from the higher ed institutions if you think that would be a sustainable way forward too because I feel like here for the for the Digital gap the the public library system has been huge in helping kind of step that up So and I know there's been a few experimental steps in that direction in Rwanda and a few other places, but anyway pick a question I mean, I don't know much about music education and I love talking about libraries because librarians always get really excited when I talk about this stuff because Though the role of the teacher is changing and a lot of what When teachers are no longer the repositories of knowledge But they're the people that guide you to knowledge and help you make sense of the knowledge is out there Are the classification and help you define what your question is? This is all stuff that librarians are very good at they're good at information science They're good at you know how to find things and also how to you know again like how to help to help you define your question So this is a great paradigm for teaching I think in the in the sort of information commodified world and libraries are a great physical resource that exists That fills in the gap from birth all the way through retirement, right? All this all the learning that people need to do when they're not physically enrolled in a school or during the hours They're not in school a library is a great place for that if you have the funding to do it And I think you know, it's really interesting because we're living in this age of austerity Right and so many public resources are being cut back to the bone But it's precisely when you have a little bit of excess and a little bit of sort of Unpurposed stuff flying around that you get to innovate because you get to have the space and the time to kind of do that So the fact that we're having to innovate and do it with less at the same time I think is really you know scary and people kind of get into a defensive crouch when they talk about you know We're gonna but it's so short-sighted right to say this is a bubble and therefore we need to do everything But you really cut everything but the essentials and the essentials is something that we defined, you know 30 years ago when we did our assessment of what was what were our basic needs We need to take some of our resources now and do another assessment of what's essential and then work from that And so how many more questions do I have time for Yes I'll just yeah, I Really appreciate that your presentation comes from the point of view of what students want and what students need I was wondering if you could say a little bit about learner satisfaction and When students are happiest with their learning experience in the open-ed world Do they feel like their learning style was accommodated and in what way? Oh great question When students are jazzed first of all they really like having choices And being able to follow exactly what it is that they are interested in But also at the same time being guided and feeling like there is a person there I was really surprised to hear people say stuff like Andrew ying is the best teacher I've ever had even though I never met him And it's very intimate feeling like watching at someone, you know a video of that person in their office talking to you And then the answering your questions So that's exciting to people people really like having feedback, you know, everybody likes a little bit of a thing Feeling How did you do did you get that right or not? Just very simple immediately right away? And then you know, how are you doing? Maybe how's your progress compared to other people in the class? Although not even that I mean the feedback tools are not that complicated right now Just it's basically just like how did you in homework? Did you get a writer and immediately right away? How'd you do in the homework? Then the feedback of if I post a question in the forum somebody answers me right away or they say Hey, I had that question to look over here So there's a little bit of social Give and take and there is a There's a cohort feeling because people are going through the class at the same time And then there's like some socializing that goes on around that like oh, you're from Qatar. I'm from Qatar, too Let's have a you know, let's have a talk in our time zone type of thing. So easy social tools for connecting But you know, there's different the open University in UK had someone I interviewed who did some PhD research on this And they said there's different categories of people There's like very serious Learner people who are just geeks about learning and there's people who are very social and just want to like kind of post and talk to people And then there's people who are sort of just very Lightly just browsing through engaging with things and they don't necessarily have a particular goal in mind Is that answer your question? Yeah Yes Yeah Question of well, what if they don't want what we want them to want or what if they don't want anything? And we want to keep giving them stuff And how to you know, we're been the education pipeline has been so used to sort of having captive audience for so long It's really hard to think about how to serve people And it's not to say that you I mean you need to solve that problem right because people kind of You we do kind of think that everybody needs some version of this stuff They need to learn but I I mean I also go back to the thing of like people always learn You know given basic other, you know lower on the hierarchy of needs are satisfied people will learn so There's maybe one more. Yes. Oh Sorry Okay, and then you guys can ask or yeah go ahead I just had a question about accreditation and particularly with not necessarily the schools themselves online But the students and what they get afterwards. I think there's been some Mentioned in the press about plenty of schools You know people are paying lots of money for and then they get their diploma they get their degree and they're not only I mean, it's great that they're potentially more educated but not only do they not have a job and now they're out thousands of dollars and I think that's a Really important component that I'm curious about as we move toward and more Open democratic educational process, which I think is great But what is the benefit to the students at the end of the day, especially the disenfranchised the ones who are busy strapped No money, you know don't have the support system in place So there's a number of different ways to kind of get at this problem Obviously the you know you have to go from the baseline saying the current system doesn't work very well People buy answers to tests people buy term papers People you know get sucked into non-accredited or barely accredited programs that they you know and they're they're preyed upon the less They know about education less educated consumers They are the more likely they are to be on the other end of the phone with a telemarketer Who's kind of trying to sell them a bill of good so the system we have now is not working so well? What could work better in the online realm you obviously have this problem that you don't necessarily know who's showing up And you have to you know think about different ways Western Governors University, which is a very kind of forward-looking online Non-profit private Has just instituted a thing they used to have physical proctored exams So wherever you were you go to a place and take a test in front of a person and now They have a webcam Version of that where the proctor is sitting somewhere else and you have to take your webcam and like or take your laptop and like show The room that there's no one else in the room While you're taking tests and there's different kinds of assessment that can work so tutor is a very expensive Online program that's used by Georgetown used by USC to train teachers, which is interesting and also social workers And nurses and so all of these the classes are face-to-face video Synchronous and then there's practicums and in the practicums you have to film yourself in the classroom talking to students and so instead of The observer comes in for five minutes in the back of the room while I'm teaching and I like I prepared really well for that day They your video'd every week and you have to show you know to your fellow students and to the teacher how to do it So different kinds of assessment this peer grading stuff is really fascinating Coursera is trying to have a poetry class and a history class And they're trying to have peers read the papers and grade the papers according to a rubric and according to and they match that grade to You know the sampling that is done by the instructor And so they sort of and then five people look at your paper and then you know or your poem and decide like is it good enough? so That's really interesting. I think that the Making people responsible to each other is a very interesting way of sort of working on academic integrity and honor and Re-invigorating the idea of an academic community, you know if you really And I think anybody who's worked on a group presentation or a project has encountered this situation where you know Someone's not pulling their way. Do you tell them? Do you not tell on them? And something that you open front of the room is a bigger deal than something you just turn into the professor So in the world of openness you have an opportunity to do stuff that actually makes people work harder and has more Juice to it more, you know content to it. It's not just a multiple-choice Kind of throwaway thing But you have to use I think lots of these different tools together to try to optimize