 Can you imagine a world where everyone had access to higher education? It's a world of amazing possibility, but unprecedented challenge. The only way that we solve the problems is to unleash the human spirit. How is it that we can provide more people with access? Higher education is often marked by its exclusivity, by its selectivity. That model will not scale to the demands of the 21st century. Existing systems of education are insufficient for the demand. And so a combination of technology and the best of the educational principles we've learned over hundreds of years is what's required in the 21st century to now extend the gifts of civilization much more equal and to harness the innovative power of people all around the world. The extension of smartphones and cell phones around the globe is happening faster than any technology uptake has ever occurred in the history of nature. And that global net makes it possible for people to communicate with the highest possible fidelity and learn from one another in ways that they never have been able to learn before. At Arizona State University, what we seek to do is find as many ways as possible to extend that first year of higher education to as many people as possible in as many different ways as possible. Most students that start college do not graduate. That's a sad state of affairs. This program's intention is to change that. Education is the right. edX's mission is to dramatically increase access to education for students all over the world. Imagine if a learner can take MOOCs without any admissions, without an application process, without worrying about the socioeconomic status or the GPA, and if they can pass the course, then by paying a small fee, they can get credit. This will make college a lot more accessible and a lot more affordable than it is today. This program is intended to eliminate those barriers, to take a high school student or someone else and provide for them the freshman year experience in the most advanced, technologically enabled, educationally enriched deep learning experiences that humans have ever been able to develop through this partnership with ASU and edX. With a partnership with ASU, they can also now earn credit. This new pathway to college will revolutionize education going forward. Believe that you can achieve, change your own life and maybe change the lives of many others. Become part of this experience. Earn this credit. Begin that journey. Welcome to our next panel, Innovations in Online Higher Education. My name is Tyra Mariani. I am the co-founder and managing partner of Opportunity at Work based at New America. And I'd like to introduce my panelists for this afternoon, Michael Crow, who is the president of Arizona State University and Anant Agarwal. Did I get that close? Who is the CEO of edX? Welcome gentlemen. So Michael, I'd love to start with you. Tell us about this exciting announcement today between edX and ASU. Well, one way to look at this is that sadly in the U.S., let's say we've been putting a lot of money nationally into Pell Grants, half the students that have received Pell Grants since 1980 never graduated from college. On top of that, everyone knows the statistics that in the lower quarter of family incomes, regardless of a student's academic ability, only about 9% ever graduate from college in their entire lifetime. In the upper quarter of family incomes, nearly 80% graduate from college. And I could say almost humorously, regardless of their academic ability, including low academic ability. That tells us that there's something wrong out there in the general environment. And so in this particular case, edX is a pioneer with university partners at advancing this idea of massive open online courses. ASU is a pioneer in advancing high quality degree programs. We sort of didn't come together online in addition to full immersion. We didn't come together three or four years ago on sort of separate paths through the lessons that we've learned. We now see that we can do something that we couldn't do three or four years ago. We can now build and deploy an entire general education curriculum of 12 courses where if a student takes eight or nine of those courses, they can complete the general education requirements for any college or any university in the country and have it count. Or they can, from a college pathway perspective, practice those courses to know what it takes to go to college. Many students that we encounter have all of the ability to complete college, but they lack confidence, they lack family support, they lack community support, they lack support in their schools, they're frozen out of things because they don't have access to these kinds of learning environments. They now have access to this learning environment. And then there are also students who are bored in high school, tired of high school, drop out of high school who probably shouldn't drop out of high school, no one should. And this empowers them. EdX through Anant and ASU through our team in EdPlus at ASU. We figured out how to take all the lessons that EdX has learned with the millions of people that have engaged with their courses and all the lessons that we've learned in our online degree-based, what we call digital immersion technology-enhanced learning environment. It's much better than the old-term online, which is really reflective of like the equivalent of a dialed telephone to us. It's such an old term and an old concept. Having said that, their skill, their lessons, their tools, their immersive learning environments, their way of doing things, our approach, our faculty, our commitment to the college going rate, our commitment to making these things happen, allowed us to come together and do something that we couldn't have done just a few years ago, which is the general education requirements for a freshman university or college experience will now be available to anybody. I think that deserves a round of applause. So, Anant, this is pretty groundbreaking. How is it different from other online offerings? Sure. I wouldn't say it's pretty groundbreaking. I would say it's groundbreaking. Okay. Groundbreaking it is. Take away the little... This is the computer science professor speaking. If you miss a comma, the program will not work. No partial credit. This is really revolutionary. We've been doing at edX, founded by Harvard and MIT with a very generous, kind hearted, $60 million contribution to the founding of edX. We were launched about three and a half years ago to create these MOOCs, these massive open online courses from working with really world-class, high-quality universities to create these online courses on our platform where anybody in the world could come in and take the courses for free. You just imagine, you know, you can go up and sign up and take a great course on, you know, human origins, for example, from Professor Tim's from ASU. Or you could go and take a course on Chinese history from Peter Bohl at Harvard. I mean, it is unbelievable for students to come in and take these absolutely great courses online. Or did I say for free? So you can go to edX.org. And people just, they are shocked to see that. You can actually take these courses for free of very low cost. And these are very high-quality courses. The courses match campus rigor. This is not your grandfather's online courses where... Dial telephone. Dial telephone, exactly. You know, where you had talking heads and multiple choice. But these are immersive, game-like experiences. So you can go up. I encourage you to go and look at. You have a demo course on edX called... Just search for demoX. It shows you all the cool things you can do. There's online labs that bring in immersive game-like technologies through simulation where you're playing around with circuits and components and physics. There are discussion forums that bring in the best discussions and social interactivity that you might find on Facebook or other networks bringing that into education. So what you're doing is think of combining social from places like Facebook. Combining a gaming and interactivity. Combining video distribution, high-quality video distribution at scale from Google. Combine that with learning. That's what you have today. All led and guided by the best professors in their field that someone can find. Exactly. And so the professors, so these are not courses that are just running by themselves. So I'm right now, as we speak, I'm actually working on a final exam for a course that... I'm teaching on edX myself in my copious spare time. It's a course on circuits. And we are part of the discussion forum. We have teaching assistants from... This is a course of MIT. MIT teaching assistants that are part of the course and guiding the discussion forums and so on. So these are interactive, rich courses guided by the faculty and mentored by the faculty and TAs. I think what is missing until now, so you could take these courses for free and you pass the course and you would get a certificate. It would be a verified certificate if you passed the course, which is pretty cool. And you can post it on your LinkedIn profile. You can frame it nicely and it looks pretty cool. And you can also put it on your Facebook profile. And we've also heard that many employers like to see that, but it was pretty cool. But I think what is really cool is the partnership with ASU, where I think it takes what we're doing to the next level, whereby offering courses where if you pass a rigorous course led by campus, high-caliber campus faculty and a high-caliber course, if you can cut it, it's going to be a hard course. It's not going to be a cakewalk. If you can cut it, you're going to get a certificate and at that point you can pay for credit and get ASU credit. So I think that is really cool. Yeah, it's rare that you get to pay on the back end, right, after you have mastered a course. And we were talking out in the hallway about how that's different from the current post-secondary education system and you were mentioning how you sort of pay up front. I mean, our system is, you know, frankly, you know, our system is completely backwards. You know, we are professors, so we can correct professor jokes, but I mean, just imagine if you were to go to a store and to experience something, but they say, oh, you have to pay up front. We wouldn't quite tell you what it is, but you have to pay up front. Okay, you pay up front. And then they tell you, if halfway through you don't like it or it didn't quite work and so on, they won't give you your money back. And then you come back again, or you go to pay again. I mean, that's an education system today. It's nuts. It's so important. It's so fundamental and so foundational for our society, but that's how we, you know, we do it. Even products and stores don't work like that. I think what the Global Freshman Academy that ASU and edX are launching together will do is enable learners to dip their toe in the water short of speed, try it out, and if they can cut it, they can pass, and then they can go and pay for credit if they want to. So Senator Booker in the earlier session talked about a whole range of things. He talked about reform in prison policy. He talked about the fact that we're no longer first in the world in college graduates. He mentioned that a whole bunch of statistics, they boil down to the fact that just as our economy needs higher and higher levels of educational attainment, which is proxy for high-speed adaptive learner, it's actually about the degrees. It's not about the degrees per se. It's about what the degrees enable as a process of learning. Yet we have declining educational attainment. On a generational basis, we have a range of other problems from our perspective. What we're interested in is every tool and every technique that alters pathway success. How can the student transit from any family at any family income into a post-secondary learning experience? Governor Haslam in Tennessee has outlined, for instance, what he calls the drive to 55. He knows that the Tennessee economy, which presently has about 36% of its population with a post-secondary certificate of some type, a technical degree, a baccalaureate degree, or an associate's degree, is inadequate to the competitive position that the workforce will need for the future. Well, how do you scale at that level? How do you take all these students who have everything that it takes to do university-level work but still don't either make it through the university, still don't even make it to the college? So our driving obsession here is to enable student success, to focus on the individual, to break down the cultural barriers, or even the family barriers that have kept the student from being able to move forward, to allow gaming and practice, to allow actual completion of the course, to incentivize completion of the courses, to incentivize the basic fundamental completion of what's called the general education curriculum. We think that there's huge opportunity for technology to be very valuable. I'll give you an example, so it's kind of funny. People sometimes think we've sort of lost our minds, which is always possible but not likely. And so we teach at ASU about 20,000 courses. Individual courses, not sections, courses. We're taking 12 courses, working with edX, bringing in fantastic faculty, every tool, every technology asset, every learning enhancement mechanism, every way in which a person can learn in a digitally immersive environment. We're going to take those 12 courses, put every tool that human beings have ever developed into those 12 courses, offer those 12 courses out to a general population and say, does that help you be able to find a path to complete college or a path on your way to college or a path to excite your learning? And so for us, that's the motivation for us. And we're hopeful, as is Anant, that we'll kick this thing off. We hope other places work in this direction. Other people pick up this trajectory. Other, particularly public universities, pick this up as a method to move forward. It's not that we're trying, no single university and no single institution can solve all of these things except by showing how it's done. That's what we're attempting to do, is to show how this can be done. What's funny, sad even, we advance these 12 courses, and people automatically think that we're talking about talking heads on a screen. We've never actually ever had anyone comment on any of these things that has ever taken one. It's kind of funny. And so what we're finding in the thousands of students that we're educating in our digital immersive environment now, and the tens of thousands that we're educating in our full immersive environment, which means face-to-face learning, that's also technology enhanced. And this is where I'm leading with this, is that we're seeing learning accelerate. We're seeing success accelerate. We're seeing family income less and less a predictor of success. We're seeing family circumstance less and less important to predicting success. I'll give you one example. We have advanced technologically enhanced learning platforms. We have eliminated the gateway courses for STEM education as a pathway breaker. So what used to be 50% non-success rates in those kinds of courses now are often down to 10% non-success rates in those kinds of courses now, all through the introduction of technology, all through rethinking the learning environment. So in this full digital immersive environment with edX, we are advancing this unique set of unbelievably cultivated and curated learning experiences. These are not simple courses. These are learning experiences that when you complete these experiences, you will be able to hang with any other student that has learned these fundamental core subjects in any other methodology and be able to hang with them and create your ability in those courses. Now, at the end of the day, a student that does that can maybe then speed their way through college and take two majors or three majors instead of one. They can maybe make their path to college more easily than if they hadn't done these things. So this for us, working with edX, it's like MOOCs cubed. It's super MOOCs because it's a new way of learning that we think will then empower many other things. So speaking of MOOCs, the completion rate for MOOCs is significantly low. It's actually about 7%. Talk about the effect of credit as an incentive for completion. Sure. So MOOCs, for all the good things that they've done, have really faced two big challenges. Well, the early generation MOOCs. Absolutely. So MOOCs post April 22nd, 2015. The two big challenges were one was the completion rate, which is people would sign up in hundreds of thousands. In fact, the introduction to the Linux course on edX is the highest-endored MOOC of all time, 350,000 people enrolled in that course. And so we have a number of courses. And the median pass rate of the people that enroll is about 7%, which is not a great number. The second big challenge is that if you look at the people coming and taking MOOCs today, 66% on edX already have a degree. So 34% do not have a degree. So those are two big challenges. First of all, we're not reaching the audience, the target audience of learners that really need an education. And second, those that do come in, they're completing at 7%. So our hope is that the availability of credit will address both these challenges in one strong. So for example, if you're giving credit, credit is the currency of education of our time. Credit is the key currency. So now when you can take a course online or take a sequence of courses online and get a freshman year credit, learners will come in that don't already have a degree. We can't give you credit. Why would people that need credit come to us? So that's one. And the second thing is that the single biggest reason people are dropping out and don't complete courses is these are rigorous courses. When they're going to get stuff, you drop out. If there's nothing at the end for you. So if you're not getting something at the end that is important to you, that is valuable to you, you lack the motivation to complete it. So now our hope is that when they're going to get stuff, the availability of credit will keep them going through rigorous hard courses. What we don't want to do is water down the courses to boost up the rates. I think the challenge is to provide the right motivation and incentives and better tools and technologies and help from staff and instructors and TAs to boost up the rate. That's what we believe we can do with credit. Just to make a comment on this notion of rigor, it's actually the opposite objective. It's actually the enhancement or the intensification of rigor, which is possible through these technology-based learning platforms. And so we have two learning environments now at the large-scale public research university that I'm a part of. And one of the environments is what we call full immersion technology enhanced learning. We have 70,000 students in that environment. We've been working on this technology enhancement vigorously for almost 10 years and beyond intensively for the last five years. What we've learned from working with those 70,000 full immersion technology enhanced learners is that we can, with a faculty committed to student success who are research grade, highly creative individuals, many of them fantastic people, we have so altered our trajectory of success for the students by this new culture for the faculty and the introduction of technology that now we can see things that we were ignorant about or even worse than ignorant about. We were stupid. I mean stupid. And so we were stupid that we didn't know that we needed to individualize the learning across a broad spectrum of students. So this notion that somehow it's just put 10 students in the class who are all similar to each other intellectually and then find a great teacher for them to engage, well that works when you're teaching music composition or conducting or lyric opera, all of which we teach. Remember we have 20,000 courses. What we found though was that in the low hundreds of courses we could create through technological contributions ways in which you could individualize learning. We've doubled our four year graduation rate. We doubled the number of graduates in the last 10 years. We'll have 20,000 graduates this year with enhancements in learning outcomes by every measure, by any tool that anybody has to measure such things. Now that's our full immersion technology enhanced learning environment. Now imagine in our other environment, which we're working with edX and others, but in this project edX, that's called digital immersion technology enhanced learning. You're in a complete digital, highly individualized, customized environment. Now, one thing that I will tell you about both of these is that it's not just about the courses, both environments, full immersion and digital immersion. It's not just about the courses, whereas the advising, the support, the group face-to-face interaction. So in our digital immersion environment and in our full immersion environment, many dozens of our tools have to do with student assessment, student planning, student engagement, academic advising, academic support, tracking to a degree, all tools that we either built or bought or merged with someone else and advanced all these tools. So we've altered the platform in both learning environments and now what we've seen is tremendous enhancement and outcomes in both. So we have an 89% retention rate in our digital immersion learning environments. 89%. We're running a project now with a Seattle company called Starbucks that where we're... Think we've heard of them. They're in Arizona too. And so this is a project where we're moving people through all four years of college and when they complete through incentives and so forth, this project that we're doing with edX, we couldn't do this project without having done all the other things that we've been doing, both for the full immersion students and the digital students. This project is something that we set upon as we started talking about how we could work together, what we had learned together, lessons that we'd learned together, how do you scale, how do you advance its scale, how do you create a learning environment. So even to think about it just as a course, massive open online course, even that is a misnomer. This is a massive open online curriculum. It's a massive open online college. It's all these things together. It's academic advising, courses, tools, assessments, all these things. So people in the audience shouldn't think that this is, that would be a gross oversimplification because we know now that it's not about courses. It's about the creation of a learning environment in which the individual student from a very broad spectrum of backgrounds can be enabled as a master learner. That's really what it is that we're trying to do. I think the key is, I think in addition to curriculum, it's also about pathways. People are not looking for, it's a sort of one course and done, they're looking for a pathway, pathway to careers, pathway to the rest of their lives. Yeah, because it really is an alternative pathway into the system, right? It's not, yeah, it's not, I think there's a concern of like, oh, will it cannibalize and take students away and in fact it really opens it up for more students to get a high quality, pathway is the right, is the right way to look at this. So we will have in August 11,000 first time full time freshmen admitted to ASU under the admission requirements of the University of California at Berkeley from 1960. So we have the historic research university admission requirements. 11,000 freshmen will come to us with those admission requirements straight out of high school. We will have 11,000 students transfer to our full immersion environment from community colleges over the year. So think of that as 22,000 new undergraduates. Those undergraduates coming to us from the high schools are on certain pathways. The kids coming in from the community colleges, we've built multiple pathways. Now we're trying to open up other pathways not necessarily to make it to ASU. This program is not about going to ASU. This is a program about how to get on a pathway to advance yourself into the economy that Governor Haslam from Tennessee, look at this drive to 55, I'm not from Tennessee, I'm not shilling for him. Let me just tell you that this is an unbelievable set of objectives that we've got to achieve. President Obama, in fact, in February of 2009, outlined a series of objectives in a state-of-the-union speech where he said we've got to get 100% the high school graduation and 50% of the population to a post-secondary certificate. We haven't made any progress towards that goal except through special initiatives at the level that's going to be necessary for us to be successful as an economy. And you can see this now. This is a way for us to forget how to do this by enhancing pathways. In a few minutes we have left. What does success look like for Global Freshman Academy and what impact do you hope this will have? Just as there are multiple pathways for learners in college, I think a success can come in many ways. And part of doing any... When you do a grand experiment and a grand project, oftentimes you don't quite know... You know you're headed in the right direction, but you don't quite know where it's exactly going to lead. But that said, success can come in many ways. One of them is that looking at it from the lens of edX where we were founded to really increase access to learners and provide education pathways if we can attract a significantly larger fraction of learners that don't already have a college degree. So if we can move the needle on the 66% that I talked about, only 34% don't have a college degree. If we can get more learners that don't have a college degree coming to a platform, truly move the needle on that, to me that would be a big deal. The second thing is that through high quality courses and introductory freshman level courses, not graduate level or postgraduate level courses, through introductory courses that enable students to come in and we can help students with their completion rates, that would also be a significant achievement for us. So what I say is on three levels, so back at the ranch as they say in Arizona, and there are actual ranches there, in fact, I'll be at one tomorrow, up in Sedona. So back at the ranch in Arizona, Arizona is a very high growth state, unbelievably socially complex, evolving in every direction simultaneously. We have low college going rate, low college success and low college going rate and success particularly among what will be the majority population in Arizona at some point and that's people of Hispanic descent. Let's just look at that. Can we move the needle relative to college going rate in our local environment? Not just going to ASU, it's not about that. Getting on track to advance to a post-secondary perspective. Can we incentivize students to finish high school? We still have a quarter not finishing high school, a million kids a year in the United States not finishing high school. When you interview them, when you look at the interviews of the people that didn't go to high school and you look at the regret at age 23, they say I didn't know what it took to go to college. I didn't know what was involved in going to college. What you're going to know now because we're going to show you, we're going to help you, we're going to work with you, you're going to have this tool, this mechanism. We've got some other tools that we're working on also that's going to really earth shattering things in the pipeline. At the national level, beyond Arizona, were we able to stimulate any movement of the needle relative to college success and also other innovators? Other universities that want to work with edX, want to work with others, and then internationally or globally, we have a project now, we have a team of six people working for us in Ho Chi Minh City. We're working with 10 corporations, the Vietnamese government, the American government, the change of others, our job is to change engineering education outcomes in Vietnam, that is the People's Republic of Vietnam, and you wonder why we're doing that. Turns out that the supply chain in the United States for many high tech industries is tied very closely to Vietnam. We have a complete interdependency on each other. They've come to us and they've said, gee, can you help us upgrade our educational outcomes at the university level at the scale of a 90 million person country? I just turned to Anant, and I say, well, Anant, can you help us to work with the government of the People's Republic of Vietnam to change educational outcomes in real-time, quickly, at college level? So he's teaching computer science. We have an online electrical engineering degree, undergraduate degree, fully vetted, fully accredited by the ABET accreditation. That's hard to scale. It's hard for us to do a lot of different kinds of things, but working together, we think that we can innovate locally in Arizona, nationally to the benefit of the United States, and then internationally to help upgrade things. So that's what I'm looking for, is moving the needle in those three spaces. Great. Well, I'm afraid we're out of time, but congratulations, gentlemen, on this very, very exciting announcement. Thank you.