 Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator. I'm your host. I'm your catherter for the next hour. And I'm delighted to welcome all of you today. We have a great guest and I'm really looking forward to talking with him. Now we've been talking about entrepreneurship. We've been working with a whole series of startup funders and founders since the beginning of the forum. What really excites me about John is a few things. One is that he's brilliant, as you'll see in just a minute. The second is that he's a serial entrepreneur. He started the Princeton Review. He started to you. And now he's the founder of noodle education, about which we can learn a bit more. So without any further ado, let me bring this week's fantastic guest up on stage. Hello, John. I can't hear you right now. I think you muted yourself. Yeah, yeah, I still can't hear you. It's okay. Take a minute to do that. Try it again. It might be the earbuds. Okay, while you're doing that, let me just say hi to people who have just come on in. Like John Hollenbeck from, I believe that's University of Wisconsin. And it's good to see you all. John, when you logged in, did your browser ask you to give permissions to camera and mic? You might want to just hit reload and give it a chance to do that again. Anything? But can you say something one more? Yeah, I can hear you. There you go. It just took a second. John, welcome. And thank you so much for coming. No, it's thank you for having me. Where have we found you today? Well, I'm here. Very good. Very good. When I last talked to you, you were biking across New York, I think. So it's nice to see you in a different situation. There's so many questions to ask you. But the first one I'd like to begin with is to ask you what you're going to be working on for the next year. What are the big projects and the big ideas that are top of mind for you right now, especially running Noodle? Noodle works with 25 Great University to help them run degree programs. We're getting towards 100 programs under management working in a new model that I think is pretty exciting. We are launching in January a platform for courses and non-degree programs and it competing directly with Coursera and edX. And that is consuming my day. Wow. That's a huge move. That's really what's it going to be called? Noodle. Oh, so it's going to be part of it. It's not going to be called something separate. It's just going to be called Noodle. Right. Oh, very good. Wow. That's absolutely enormous. Good luck. If you think about the professional lifelong learning space, it's probably four times as large as the graduate school space. And it should be dominated by higher ed, right? This is a perfect place to take a student through the rest of her journey. And instead, I think schools have ceded that ground to a bunch of companies that have very, very different interests. And I think we can unwind that. So you're doing this working with all these universities. So you're a kind of platform partner for them? We are. We take a small percentage, 15%, and then for the credit card and the tech and the support of students and so forth. But everything else is really trying to put the school's front and center in what I think are pretty creative ways, almost a co-op. And then in which case you're kind of the co-op infrastructure. I think of us as a network hub. Like our job, if you think about the internet, there are companies that just work on the backbone. And that's an important role. And in this case, we're not the educators, but we can connect educators in ways that I think are pretty powerful. And you're launching this in what month? January. I can't wait to see that. I can't wait to see that. Friends, first of all, you just learned about an amazing project and you just learned about some of the thinking behind that. Now is the time for your questions and your thoughts about this. For example, if you'd like to learn more about this platform, if you'd like to learn more about the thinking about how it would work as a network hub or how we can best support lifelong learning, especially for adults. Now, I'm going to ask a couple of questions to get things rolling even further. Before you do, can I just suggest John Hollenbeck's comment? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's totally right. What he said is the school with its limited curriculum is the least able to pivot to lifelong learning. Any one school, even pretty large institutions, is not going to be the solution for a student as they wind their way through the workforce. Collectively, higher ed is the solution. And if you supplement it with a couple of providers, you know, the Google's and Facebook's of the world who are certainly capable of very specific content around use of Google, you know, SEO and so forth and use of social networking tools. But if you think about the academic part, no one school can be the solution, but collectively higher ed can be. There's so much more capacity, so much more content. Yeah, I agree. John, that's a great question. And by the way, John, if you'd like to follow that up with more thoughts, please, please feel free. I think I saw that you were already eating, so if you want to be on video, that's understandable. But if you'd like to type in another Q or A, I'd be happy to do that. And John, by the way, I'm just delighted to see you working with the chat. That's always good. The chat here tends to go pretty quickly and there's a lot of good stuff going in it. And, you know, before I could say this, before I could say anything more, there are actually some more questions that have just come up. So I'm going to put these on the screen for us to work with. So this is one from Michael Meeks. Please paint a picture of your vision of higher education in the future and your best guest timeline. Michael, that's my kind of question. I mean, it's a big question and I can give a couple of kind of vectors. Number one, there will be consolidation in the space, not down to five schools, nothing crazy, but in any one discipline, in nursing, in teaching, in business, whatever, there will be fewer schools that are larger because they have more capacity and because they have kind of clear catchments. This is, this is what I do. This is where I am. I'm really good at it, at different kind of price points, at different geographies. That doesn't mean necessarily that the number of universities and colleges is going to shrink dramatically. It just means that each school will probably do less and, and, and sort of circle around the core competencies so that it can, so that it can be more efficient in those spaces, be more clear about who it is and who it isn't. Number two, graduate school education will be almost completely online and almost completely part-time. So that's people who are getting their PhDs to stay in academe, but, but for professional masters. The trend lines were so clear even before COVID. And I think, I think it's, it's never going to be under 50% again. It's, it's going pretty quickly towards the great majority. And the reason fundamentally is it's just better economics. The cost of going to a school, the opportunity cost, you know, even if you're making $50,000 a year, that's probably more expensive over, over a year and a half or two years getting your masters than the tuition itself. And making it a part-time program, flanking your job is, is, is just utterly compelling for, for students. Flanking your job, that's a good phrase. And finally, I'd say undergraduate is going to look a lot like it does now. I think we collectively have to get our costs back together. And there are two parts of it. One, the cost of delivering great education to students, we have to reduce. And two, the perception of that cost. We have to reduce. The way we talk about the expensive higher ad is moronic. And I think that'll happen for a lot of reasons we can talk about. So that's grad schools. That's more fewer and bigger institutions. That's an undergrad experience that's changing in some ways. But remaining the same in some others. Michael, thank you for the question. And John, thanks for that incredibly precise answer. Friends, if you, if you're new to the forum or if you're new to the shooting technology, that's an example of a question. Here's another one comes from Karen Newman. They put this up on stage. What characteristics will differentiate noodle from Coursera or others? Three things. First, from the school's point of view, we're not taking a half or two thirds of tuition. We're taking 15%. And then there's a marketing fee shared with the schools that, that hopefully will amount to nothing, but could be as high as 20%. So still a third versus much more, even if we did all the marketing. Number two, the experience for users is both better supported with counselors and TAs available to students either to find the right course or program or to take it. And more social that we organize students, we organize classes into sections of five to 15 students of like goals and, and give them the tools to really collaborate. And, you know, I think it's going to be a work in progress to figure out just how to craft the right sections that, that maximize for, you know, users really enjoying it. You want them geographically together, if possible, so that they can go out and get a beer, you want them to be at the same point in their careers so that they can have the right level of conversation. Past that, you know, it's a, we'll, we'll see. That's interesting. That's very, very interesting. And that's a question I'm sure you're going to be asked many, many more times. Karen, thank you. Thank you for that question. So those are, again, friends, if you're new to the forum, those are two examples of, of the question function. Now, what I'm going to do is show you the video question function. Do so by picking on my good friend, Tom Hames, in KD, Texas. Hello, Tom. Good afternoon or good morning, wherever you happen to be. Hope everyone is doing well. So my question is this, when you have a distributed network of colleges and universities trying to work together in this, in this open model of suggestion, how do you go about the technicalities of sharing, credentialing, legitimacy, knowledge artifacts, the kind of things that we have a very stupid way of transferring right now called the transcript, which is at best, cryptic and at worst. Well, I don't know what it is at worst, but it's meaningless in many ways. So that's my question. A different answer for degree and non-degree programs. When I think about schools collaborating, collaborating at scale, I don't think in terms of a shared course or shared courseware. I think instead, really the cost of high-red, and I noticed Don is on, I think he would agree with this, that the teaching is only like 20, 25% of the cost of high-red. It's all the other things that can actually be shared in intelligent ways. You know, there are a million examples, but if you take the marketing side, the recruiting side, if you take support for students, if you take learning design, you know, you create some great widget that costs $20,000 for a five-minute experience, but it's really good and, you know, it might be VR, it might be an animation or a simulation. If only one other school uses it with you, now you've cut the price in half. You've cut the cost of doing that in half in three other schools anywhere on earth who aren't competitors. Now you've cut the cost by 75%. When you've got a prospect who is signaling, because, you know, you can do the analytics on this, signaling that they're never going to come to your school, that either they're not qualified or for some reason it's just not happening. And you can see, you know, in their work that that's happening, that's the great majority of people who come to the website and look at your site, look at your program. Don't take it for whatever reason. Right. If you can capture one of those people out of 90, you utterly change the economics for schools of the cost of marketing and recruiting as opposed to every school throwing them back to Google and having the next guy work hard to find that student. So, you know, you think about technology, there are 4,500 schools who have built their own tech platform, cobbled together from LMSs and LCMSs and everything else, and all of them are terrible. And and they're all subtly different from one another, but they're all still terrible. And, you know, why do that? Why not have some schools say, look, let's just have a really good learning platform. We don't differentiate from our learning platform. Let's just have something really good that's less expensive, that's better supported. There's a million places to to to affect change. So you're talking about scaling overhead, not necessarily content or the talents of particular groups of professors who are teachers who are trying to teach in a special way. No, if anything, I I try to steer my schools into better defining who they are and differentiating from other people. You don't have a geographic moat the way you did a decade or two ago, being really clear as to who you are, who you serve, how you teach. And it is really important. So I I think the worst way to collaborate is to try to squeeze out some savings in the 20 percent. Whereas we've got a lot of low hang for it on the 80. OK. We had one quick question. Thank you. Oh, Tom, good question. And, John, thank you for that very, very precise answer. We had a follow up question from Lisa Durf, who asks in this process of coordination and collaboration, how do you convince faculty to give up control? I don't. And Brian, when you say precise, do you mean rambling? No, I mean the opposite. OK, you're not. I mean, if I if I am, you told me to stop you. If you ramble, you haven't begun to ramble yet. All right. I don't look for faculty to give up control. This is your course. Every piece of it should reflect the narrative arc that you want there. I don't believe in courseware. What I do believe is that there are a lot of programs out there that it's been a while since the faculty got together and said, what do we want someone to walk out of this program with? Which course teaches what part of it? To get rid of kind of redundancies and overlaps and to make sure that we're that we're all a team. And it's nice sometimes when you go online. It's this moment where before you spend a lot of money on learning design. You can really think through that issue. Who's who else is out there? How are we different? What do we want to get across? And those are some of the best conversations we have. And and you could say that takes away a little bit from any one professor's control, but not really. It's it's it's how do I work within my school? To build a course that that that sort of makes sense as part of that arc. This sounds more at the school level than at the individual faculty level. It is the school has utter control over over what it teaches and how the only thing we're doing on the non degree side that's vaguely like this is we don't think of what we're building as a marketplace. We think of it as a course catalog. So any one course has to be unique, either in who it teaches, what it teaches or how it teaches. So if we have a good program, a good course that, you know, does this. And someone else comes in with another one. Our answer is, well, we can't take it unless you differentiate maybe, you know, that course is for mid level managers. And it's some business course on how to give a performance review. OK, well, I'm more interested then in something for entry level or something for experienced managers. Like how is your course different from what's out there? Because there's no reason to have 12 with the same thing. So that comes back to consolidation and redundancy again. Yes, it really does. Friends, if you're again, if you're new to the forum when Tom appeared on stage, that's an example of a video question. And if you would like to join us, in fact, I'll make it even easier. This little teal-colored podium, if you just click that, you'll appear on stage. And if you click it by accident and you're in the middle of eating a big sausage or something, I can turn you off if you like. But otherwise, just click that to join us. We're very friendly, as you can see. And while people are doing that, we have a question from Mark Tafasco. And I want to bring this up on stage so people can see that. Mark asks, what did you think of that Wall Street Journal article about 2U came out a couple of days ago? It seems that colleges that we think of as sophisticated as an all-in-matter are not very good consumers of partners. I'll put that on the screen again so people can see it. I thought the article was right on the money. Ouch. The that program started as something pretty good. And it went off the rails after I'd left and I watched it happening. And it's actually why I created Noodle is this interaction. What I realized is that the original plot of a revenue share model online program manager was that our interests would be aligned. The way I thought of it, I will market my programs to the point of economic indifference, as long as I'm not losing money, bringing in high quality students and students who are well qualified. I'm going to go get them. What the company did with the ascent of that dean is they said, look, this, you know, let's say some really good teaching program we built at USC, it's highly selective, inexpensive. Relatively, and and and quite good. They started pulling money out of that program's marketing efforts and putting it into marketing the social work program because it was nonselective and very, very expensive. And it was and you watch it across the OPM space. They have completely different incentives than the schools. And their incentive is to find their way to bring students to the most expensive programs, not the least expensive programs. So it just went the opposite. I mean, just went for the cash cow immediately and and isn't scaling up at all. It's it's anti collaborative in that sense. It is completely anti collaborative. And the OPMs operate in a black box. You really can't see what they're spending on your program. You can't see the data itself. And until I had left for a couple of years, I'm looking back at it and saying, this is just not good. That's that seemed OK to me. You want it sort of incubated and set off to the side because it was so small and fragile of the Internet and online learning. Nowadays, the concept that you have an online program and a campus based program is ridiculous. Right. I mean, that's a vestige. You you will move towards like every other sector. You have a program and some students are taking this course online and some students are taking it on campus. And there's one student body. There's one administrative mechanism to support those students. Do you think they'll be blended at the level of individual classes on the high flex? There's a difference between what I think of as agile hybrid. Any one course. Yes, you might bring in some online learning things instead of lectures. That makes a great deal of sense. But fundamentally, if it's a course on campus, the locus of that course is on campus and you're doing things of one sort or another, but basically you're there. And if it's an online course, you're fundamentally. Doing things off campus, which means you're in a different city. You don't want to come to that city every so often or every every week. And so and so or you're in the city, but it's just the schedules work out better to take it online. So I think of any one courses predominantly on campus, predominantly online. But I think of the program as indifferent. Who cares if you're going to take this course one way or the other. So that's very that seems like a very post pandemic approach. Once we settle into that, once face to face opens up a bit more. Friends, that was my question. Forgive me, that was my moderator's privilege. The forum is here for your questions and your comments. So as you can see, John is happy to pounce on all of your questions. And we're happy to support them. Those of you in the chat, if you'd like to surface any of your questions as formal questions or for them to join us on stage, just press the podium button and you'll be up here right away. You can tell we're pretty friendly, I think. We had a whole stack of questions coming in and some ideas from the chat. I want to pull out a couple of these, if I could. One of them was Lisa Durf asks about what kind of student support mechanisms are used by several universities? And Lisa, you can you can flesh that out a little further. I think you're referring to how to multiple campuses together to support a student who's taking classes between them. And John, if that question makes sense, you can know it does. The majority of people supporting students in one program work for that program. But, for instance, let's take the issue of crisis counseling. And your counselors on campus aren't actually allowed from a regulation point of view to work with students who aren't in your state. Very often the you need a mechanism that when there's someone in crisis, you can refer them to someone who actually is qualified or not qualified, but is registered to the students in that state. Any one school having counselors who could work with students in 50 states would be onerous. But those crisis counselors can be there as a pool and all of our programs can access them. So it's it's what happens in the middle of the night. You don't need a huge support staff. Maybe somebody can cover a couple of different programs or a couple of different schools. You don't need, you know, very specific things that like tech support doesn't need to be school specific. No, no, there's nothing Georgia Tech about Microsoft Office, right? That's right. There's nothing Pennsylvania about Google Chrome or something like that. I should address Christina's question, by the way. Students can select courses from a smorgasbord of multiple offerings. What diploma will they receive? And again, I want to separate degree programs from non-degree programs. A degree program is that school, period. So all of the courses are from that school. And again, my hope is that they form a compelling narrative arc. The learning platform of just random courses that somebody might use to continue their journey as in business and tech and in health. There's some courses we'll launch with, which are just the care and feeding of your child's brain for parents of newborns, you know, coming from a school of ed. Those courses don't have a degree, they're not attached to a degree. They're just a standalone object. And so there it can be a smorgasbord. You are you are taking the course that addresses your need right now, which could be from a different school than some other course that filled some other need. No, it's a good question. Thank you, Christina. Again, John, thank you for grabbing that out of the chat. Friends, keep them coming. We seem to be on the verge of solving some big problems in a higher education. And this is a great time for questions about this. We have another from Professor Meeks, and we just bring this up on the screen. Have there been studies showing that online education, like your platform, saves the planet, eco footprint, carbon savings, et cetera, wondering about benefits and motivation of online education? Not that I know of. I know it's not we are a B Corp. But I'm not focused on that as a problem. Our focus is how can I lower the cost of really good higher ed by 25 percent? And yeah, and that's about stretching the use of facilities and more efficient back end support for for for courses and for for faculty and students. I just turned in my book manuscript to my publisher about higher education and the climate crisis and the research on this is just all over the map. I mean, a lot depends on how you define carbon footprint. And so it's possible that we may see more people pushing for a form of green computing and what green computing is people argue about. Does it mean fewer hardware refreshes? For example, does it mean using some using less of some more intensive processor demanding software like, say, Bitcoin mining? It's it's a it's a great question. But speaking of great questions, we have Renee Petrina, who wants to join us and we bring her up on stage so we can see her. Hello, Renee, and thank you for coming up. Brian, thank you so much. Thanks. Thanks for taking my question. So, John, I'm thinking about shared resources. And so I work in higher ed. I work at an institution that's part of edX. And when we when we joined as an edX partner, suddenly we're taking existing resources and adding them to more jobs, more people, more staff rather than sharing. And the next thing you know, there's there's more existing structure. So how do you push back on the universities that noodle partners with to get them to move towards shared resources, particularly if they already have set resources in the online space in some way? Because in order to go into a pooled resource, they're going to have to give up some of their own existing, maybe in-house staffing. Because sometimes the people getting in with OPMs already have built some of their own things themselves. They're not necessarily buying. So we have been pretty focused on being flexible. And and if a school has strong learning design strength, then we then we take a back seat. You know, if somebody's out on leave, if there's a, you know, something, some animation or simulation they need help with, we step in. And otherwise we have no interest in just being redundant. But the larger question of which things should be done on campus by personnel working full time for that school and which things should be done elsewhere and which things should be shared among schools. I think it's going to be a different answer for different schools that changes every year as the world kind of waxes and wanes on this stuff. Like I strongly feel that things like like an LMS and the learning platform around the LMS, there's just no reason. You know, I think UNIS has done some good work on some pieces and there's just no reason to have every school reinventing that particular wheel. But there are other things like learning design that I'll give you an example of something we're doing. And and now I'm going to push you on that rambling thing. We're building a master's in learning design with the university. Where the great majority of the instruction is a practicum. Like an apprenticeship where the students are part of teams building out courses for other universities. Universities are saving money because their courses are being built by faculty leading groups of of of designers, aspiring designers. The students are getting a master's from a great school, basically for free. And they're walking out with a CV that they can point to these courses that they don't. In a sense, it's what I'm talking about, like where, how do we work together and it's not always going to be symmetrical and it's not always going to be linear. Yeah. So, first of all, that wasn't rambling. That was a great example. And Renee, what do you think? Does that help? It helps them also just it's asking a lot, right? It's asking a lot of higher ed. Unison has done a lot of really fantastic things so far. And I think back to, you know, pre-unison when a lot of those institutions were in the Sakai consortium, right? And we're working on an LMS that individual schools could not support their own parts of it as quickly as as quickly as the market could, right? So then Unison takes Canvas as it's as it's chosen LMS. And so I look at all of that and I think but noodles still going to be entering into contractual agreements with these partner schools, right? I know you said I've heard you say four year no longer I want to be flexible. But how, you know, these are these are big ships and and it's going to take a lot of culture change to turn them. Yes. And and a lot of time. I mean, the fact is that, you know, Google tests stuff all the time and 80 percent of the tests and they're smart people, 80 percent of the tests fail. Right. So so the notion of using technology in different ways is not just hard culturally, but there are dead ends. I think Sakai might have been a dead end, you know, and the ability to sort of mitigate that risk and and to and to provide coaching alternatives to the way you're doing it now. Some of them a school will say, yes, many of them those they know you try it. Maybe next year they'll have a different answer if it's if it's working on. But if you think about it in the end. And how else there are only three ways to lower the cost of good higher ad? One is scale, right? You're taking that infrastructure and putting it out over more students. Two is streamlining administration and three is collaboration at scale is somehow finding ways to put more ores in the water. Well, Renee is thinking hard about that. And I like this. And please go ahead. I'm getting caught in the chat. There's a lot going on in the chat over there, too. I'm trying to follow all of it once and for all of you chatterers. Again, hit the Q&A button or join us on stage. It's you can tell we're friendly and you guys have really good thoughts. Renee, thank you. Thank you for asking that. Thanks so much for putting me out. Oh, a pleasure, a pleasure. Again, you can see that we're we're pretty welcoming lot. And we're always glad to see you on stage with with video. So I'll make sure that people can see the podium there. We had a question that came from Peter Gray, and this is a very technical one, but a very important one. I'm just going to read this one out loud. If the idea is to scale some overhead costs across institutions, are there cross state or international regulatory barriers to that, e.g. the student in India or living a fully online degree from the US institution? The larger problem there probably are, but they're not important. Because, again, at the core of what a school does is the students, it is selected taught by the faculty. It has selected using intellectual property that it's built. And the regulates the regulations around things like, you know, your LMS or, you know, just has to be secure. The larger issue is cultural is so, for instance, marketing programs abroad, marketing US programs. Lots of people around the world will come to the US for a degree and pay far higher tuition than they would have paid in their in their region. Selling an online program from a US university almost impossible, right? Because you still have the high tuition, but now you're not here and immersed in US culture. So how do you blend starting a program online during that first semester working through the visa process and then coming here on campus? Like it's it's not a it's not a regulatory problem. It's a marketplace and culture problem. It is. And I'm curious if you just come out and spell this out for us and then how does noodle serve to make that cultural change happen? If you're a hub rather than, you know, a dictator or an organizer, people can just say no to you and and not change it all. And do all the time. It's it's you pick your battles. And in the end, you know, we're working with schools as a as a vendor, right? We know who's you know, game this is and we will do what the school wants us to do. But our job is to surface good ideas, to surface best practices and to try to be convincing to try to take risk away where we can. But yeah, I have a million good ideas that nobody nobody in the world seems interested in. We here in the former interest that I've got a response. But before I do that, I want to defer to John Hollenbeck from the University of Wisconsin. And John has a question or a whole series of questions. Welcome, John. Thank you. Yeah, I'm going all Donald Duck on the chat. So I've got a I guess my basic question really is, why do we continue in a time of innovation and rethinking, make the classroom, the given, the course, the degree, the artifact. I came into education from a career as a musician. Rowland cared where I went to school to learn to play trombone. And of course, I didn't go to school to learn to play trombone. I took a different kind of education. It was what came out the exhaust pipe of the horn that mattered. It was my performance. And I think as I think about learning and artifacts, a degree doesn't mean you know anything. It just means that you got a degree at a place. Whereas performance is what matters. Can you do the job? And I think that by not reframing the question, we keep getting trapped in this notion of how it abadges and degrees and selling courses and all that kind of stuff. When really what we should be doing is creating self-directed learners able to act in a democratic society, collaboratively and individually, to create knowledge. And that's a different thing than what we're talking about. So first of all, the thing that's so hard about education, and it's not just high-red, it's K-12 as well, is that everything we can measure doesn't matter. So you look and it's like somebody got a grade on this course, or they showed up in class, or any number of things that you can easily measure. But to your point, John, it doesn't matter. We think those things predict that you will be able to do things and that you'll have a good life. So the longitudinal data are the people who went to the school thriving professionally, personally, and societally. We don't do a lot of measurement to that. So when you say, okay, let's just do everything performance-based, it's a lot harder to measure if you're a good teacher than it is if you're a good trombonist. And so to some degree, I think of the class as a building block because it's a reasonable length of time. There's stuff you put into it. If you already know all of it, you don't have to take the class. There's some number of people who know some of it, but when you start breaking it down into the Silicon Valley narrative of everything is badges and everything is certificates, I think it becomes in co-aid almost immediately. So the value of a degree, whether it's undergraduate or graduate, continues to go up even as everybody says that they're worthless or everybody in that sector. On the other hand, once you have that degree, once you have a starting point, the notion that whatever you've learned by the time you're 21 or 25 is going to get you through to retirement is equally unlikely. And that's where kind of smaller bits of learning might make sense for a lot of people. So I'm just not sure I see an alternative. Are you proposing what and does it replace the degree? Yes, I am proposing what. I am proposing that we go back and think about what Dewey was saying about what a school should be, that we look at Vygotsky's notion of social learning, that we take Ilich's profound distrust of the institution of school, and Papert's wonderful treatise in Mindstorms about programming the machine, not letting the machine program us. Wrap all that up at a community of scholars and invent a new fricking place to do all those. I'm tired of classroom 2.0. So yes, I am proposing what? I am proposing a big old hairy, unknowable thing and maybe I should start my own company. I think you should, John. I think the Hall and Beck School sounds terrific. And I just love the lineage you just eat up. But I'm sorry to interrupt. Please, John, if you want to... There's two Johns here. I just realized, John Casper. They're always more than two Johns anywhere. Yeah, that's a delicious idea. Thank you. Thank you, John. And thank you for giving us the phrase exhaust from a trombone as well. So, friends, we're down to about eight and a half minutes and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to throw their thoughts out. And while people are still thinking about this and while people are bringing up questions, in fact, we just had a question just popped up, even as I say this. And again, this is from Michael Meeks, who is all over you, John. He is just on this. Do you see degree program demand remaining high or are we moving toward non-degree alternatives? Do you see badges or other resume filling options stepping forward? I see that lifelong learning is growing at 10% to 15% a year and probably we'll keep doing that. That people need in an economy changing as quickly as this one is, they will need ongoing instruction period. But I don't see any reason to believe that we can't, that the degree space is impaired as long as we solve for tuition. And let me just give a clarification on something. So there's a cluster of higher ed, which is a problem and which we're trying to attack and then there's how we pay for it. So we've done two things over the past couple of decades. One, defunded a lot of state systems, so the state is paying a smaller and smaller percentage of tuition, which is jacking up tuition that the students pay. But also we've been increasingly price segmenting right, so everyone in that school is paying a different tuition. Yes. The same way that everyone on a plane is paying a different price for their seat. Yes. American Airlines advertises the least expensive seat. So does everybody else in every other industry? The idea that higher ed uniquely talks a lot about the most expensive seat is a real problem because every year we've jacked up tuition by 4% and then given all of the overage to the less advantage students, net tuition has basically been flat to inflation for 20 years. Nobody writes about that. They all write about how tuition is going through the roof. We have a perception problem every bit as large as an actual cost problem. And those two really do diverge. I love the comparison to airlines. So we're trumpeting our first class with all the amenities even though most flyers don't pay that. That's right. So who does that? Yeah, that's not the smartest idea out there, I think. We did Steve Ehrman, who was the author of a fantastic new book and we hosted him on the forum to talk about it. I just can't get enough of Steve. He asked the question, about three ways to improve affordability. How about number four, improve the learning process to enhance what's learned while increasing success rates? I'm sorry, let me bring that back up so you guys can see that because it's a long sentence. That improves, that reduces costs and costs per graduate even more. I don't disagree. And one of the points of a more agile solution is that if you look at people who drop out, let's take three categories. One, when you switch majors, you lose generally a semester of credits. When you switch schools, you lose a whole year. And obviously, if you drop out, that's a large problem that 35 million people have. Better counseling, more clarity on those issues. And yeah, of the people who drop out, over half, well over half, it's for financial reasons. So a more activist approach to figuring out which students are in trouble and making sure we get them the support they need, which in many cases is financial, is a big deal and you're right. It certainly changes the cost benefit. It's not the actual cost. Well, Steve, thank you. We're really solving a lot of problems today, which is terrific. I'm really glad to see all of this. Let me ask a different question. When I'm learning about Noodle, Jenna, I'm thinking about two other precursors. I'm thinking about ArtStore. I think a lot of you know ArtStore. You may have used it before. But the idea was that a lot of campuses had the same Art101 slides. So the idea was that they would get the best slides and secure all the copyright permissions and then they would make that available as a service. And that seems to have succeeded very well. And at the same time, people can add their own content to ArtStore and use it as a... So that's one antecedent that Noodle reminds me of. The other is the Council for Independent Colleges had this great project where they had upper-level humanity seminars and they would be taught across a dozen schools at a time. So there's the ones that were usually didn't enroll many students. So it wasn't introduction to the Bible. It was the book of Joshua. It wasn't art history. It was Byzantine art in the late empire. And once they plugged that one class into the dozen colleges, then they made a much larger group of students and each other campus was able to grow their curriculum by that one class. I'm wondering what you think about those and what light that might shed on what you're doing. There are a whole bunch of different kind of approaches that some are easier to implement and some are probably a bigger project. Number one, when you're doing learning design, the great majority of stuff is like read this or a short video of a professor. Possibility in that stuff is nothing. The hard part is when you do a complicated simulation. We're doing these interactive graphic novels that I like a lot. But those objects, those sort of high-quality interactive learning objects, that's where the money is. And those are the things to share. In smart ways that don't lose the differentiation of your school. Like, and as a professor, which ones might be helpful to me given what I'm trying to teach and given who I'm trying to teach it to. So I am always a little bit concerned about sharing classes and turning a university into a mixed school. Whereas sharing just some virtual reality heart, sure, like case studies in business school. So that's one thing. And then the second thing is, and this gets a little obstruse, but think about two curves. One of them is if I build out a really good program, but only one student a year takes it, it's a very expensive program. Two students, I've had the cost. Four students, I've had that again. And it's kind of sloping down and then flattening at the cost of each additional section. But the second cost is marketing and recruiting. And each school has a catchment. This is where everybody knows who I am. This is where I have an alumni network. This is where we have relationships with employers. And the cost of acquisition for students starts out very low. If you've got a reputation at all, somebody's going to take your program. But as you scale, that curve kind of flattens for a little bit and then goes way up. And the two of them together go down and then back up. There is an optimal size for a program that it's not so big that you're like reaching, reaching, getting students who like that, Wall Street Journal article shouldn't be there. Or you're just spending a crazy amount of money marketing, but large enough to cover your costs collectively and to allow yourself to build good things. Small schools have to collaborate with other schools, not geographically based in order to get to a size where that curve makes sense, competing with an ASU or competing with a sub-New Hampshire. Yeah, but a large school doesn't have to do that. A large school doesn't have to do that. We're back to scale again. But there are other ways of getting to scale. And again, that object being used by multiple schools gets you to scale in the ways that actually impact costs. John, when I was advertising and promoting this session, I was trying to get together the right nouns that would describe what you'd be talking about. And I threw in education and technology and costs, so I'm glad I got those. But I hadn't realized how much collaboration and networking would play a crucial role to what you're doing with Nudle and what you talked about today. I have to say, I'm really sorry that we're out of time. We've just gone through an hour, and it feels like we're sitting at the feet of the guru. You have given us so much, so much information. Just what quick question? So much information. What's the best way to keep up with you and keep up with Nudle? Email at jcatsman at Nudle.com or forums like this. I really appreciate not only your questions, but everybody's questions. It's really an incredible group that you've pulled together. It really is. These are wonderful people. And John, thank you for your really, really generous time. And we'll circle back with you next year as we see Nudle hopefully expand and move from strings to strings. Good luck in January with a launch. We're really looking forward to that. Thank you so much. And take care. But don't go away, everybody else. Don't go away because we have to point out to where we're headed next. And just want to make sure you all heard John's praise. Thank you all for these fantastic questions. The chat box alone has been an incredible stream of thoughts and ideas. Looking ahead, we're covering a whole stream of topics. Again, the future of higher education is complex. So we're hitting a bunch of them, everything from what's going on in the research universities, the libraries, the digitization, the disability and enrollment all the next few weeks. If you'd like to keep talking about this, how we can build a network hub, what are the best ways for collaboration to work, what should we do, what is the what campus that John proposed? Just use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter. We'll be glad to talk with you there. Or visit my blog at BrianAlexander.org. If you want to go into the past and look at some of our sessions, including our two sessions with a head of Unison, just go to tinyurl.com slash FTF archive and you can find more. And above all, everybody, we're coming close to the end of this extraordinary year of 2021. I'm delighted that so many of you are thinking and talking with us. This has been a wonderful conversation. Keep doing all this great work. Above all, stay safe. Take care. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.