"This is the first generation of people that work, play, think and learn differently than their parents.
They are the first generation to not be afraid of technology. It’s like the air to them." - Don Tapscott
Everything looks bigger than life when you are five.
So everything was big, everything was strange, and I remember feeling a bit scared.
Like many children, I remember my school years fondly but the bits I remember fondly aren't
the bits I should have remembered.
I remember the play and the sport and the naughtiness and the playfulness and the mischief.
In fact, I remember the bits that were non-standard.
It's an incredible privilege for me to have had education be such
an important and present part of my life.
I remember being bored a lot. It didn't bring out the best in me, I got through it anyhow.
I wasn't a great fit or the system wasn't a great fit for me.
It's kind of crazy when you think about it.
That we take all these children and we force them to try to adapt to this really complex
bureaucracy system, the system should adapt to them.
The origins of traditional education lie inside the military, to a large extent.
They needed identical people; soldiers, administrators, and so on, so they produced this system.
When the industrial revolution happened they do wanted
identical people in their assembly lines.
Even with consumers, they wanted consumers to be identical
so that everybody would buy the same things.
So if you look at school that way, if you look at the fact that we process twenty or
thirty kids at a time, in a batch, just like in the factory.
If you look at the fact that if you fail third grade, what do you do?
We hold you back and we reprocess you.
All matching with the factory works, we built it on purpose.
And it was really useful for its function.
But we don't have a shortage of factory workers any more.
We are probably at the death of education right now.
I think the structures and strictures of school, of learning from nine till three,
working on your own, not working with others.
I think that's dead or dying. And I think learning is just beginning.
THE FUTURE OF LEARNING
I had ADD when I was growing up, like so many people now do.
And there's this feeling that there is something broken about the kid,
because the kid doesn't conform to the system.
So what we do is we medicate children to fit into the system, as opposed to saying;
wait, the system is here for the kids.
And there are lots of people who can quite easily sit still for eight hours
and take notes, and then two weeks later say back
what they wrote down.
But there is also this huge population of extraordinarily talented
and engaged people who can't learn that way.
There's a very big difference between accessed information and school,
they used to be the same thing.
Information is there online to anyone of the billion people who have access to the Internet.
So what that means is if we give access to a four year old or an eight year old or a
twelve year old, they will get the information if they want it.
Knowing something is probably an obsolete idea.
You don't actually need to know anything, you can find out at the point
when you need to know it.
It's the teacher's job to point young minds towards the right kind of question.
A teacher doesn't need to give any answers, because answers are everywhere.
And we know now from years of measurements that learners who find the answers for themselves
retain it better than if they're told the answer.
Education is being very slow to look at data, to look at numbers,
to look at analysis and what's actually happening.
We measure a test here, and an exam there,
but the details of what's happening we don't really have.
That will be, for sure, the next important thing in our pockets,
our ability to analyze wherever you are.
Some of the people watching this will already be analyzing their health
and their wellbeing and their sport.
They will be analyzing their learning too soon.
And then we'll be really good at it.
Knewton is a data-mining and adaptive learning platform
that allows anybody, anywhere to upload content.
They could be a publisher, an individual teacher, or anything in-between.
And produce a course that will be uniquely personalized to each student based on
what she knows and how she learns best.
The textbook of the future is going to be delivered on connected devices.
What that means is the incredible amount of data that students have always produced,
when they studied, are now capturable and useable.
So Knewton and any product built on Knewton can figure out things like; you learn math
best in the morning between 08:32 and 09:14 am.
You learn science best in 40 minute bite sizes.
At the 42 minute mark your click rate always begins to decline, we should pull that from
you then and move you to something else to keep you engaged.
That 35 minute burst you do at lunch everyday you're not retaining any of that just
hang out with your friends and do that stuff in the afternoon instead when you learn better.
You learn this stuff best with short questions;
this stuff best with complicated, difficult questions.
We should return this type of material to you four days later for optimal retention.
And here's exactly the things you're going to struggle with your homework tonight because
you haven't learned some of the concepts that are embedded in that material.
And we can go in real-time and grab you the perfect little bit of content, from last month,
or last year, and put that seamlessly in front of you so that you don't struggle.
We can predict failure in advance and prevent it from happening.
We're going to move from this kind of alienating and in some cases boring and in some cases
frustrating model of everybody gets exactly the same stuff.
They're getting it at the exact same time, the exact same order,
and the exact same difficulty level.
For half of the class it's too hard, for half of the class it's too boring.
It's going to get the most advanced kids, the most stimulating material.
It's going to get them to unlock their potential in a way that they're not today.
But for every kid, no matter how much you are struggling, you've got a path to success.
It might take you a little longer, but you'll have a path to success no matter what.
And also the system gets smarter and smarter as more people use it.
Strategies compete against each other to be replicated in the next generation,
so the strategy that is the most effective for you, once we find that;
any kid in the future will have that strategy teed up.
It's a whole new thing.
When the automobile was invented people weren't asking for the automobile
they were asking for faster horses.
And people aren't really asking for Knewton because they don't know what it is yet,
but once they see it and experience it then they'll get it right away.
THE SHIFT IN KNOWLEDGE
People say that education moves very slowly.
Suddenly you just need to be connected.
That changes everything; it changes the basis on which you can make a contribution,
your brain can make a contribution at a distance.
It's one thing to sit here in the media lab and talk about the future.
I often go into places that are about as different from a media lab as it can get.
And I think to myself; what's the value of all my ideas over here.
But, there is one great hope.
Wherever I go, the very first thing that I ask, or I take out my phone to check for,
is; do I have that little bit of bandwidth to give me GPRS,
or something equivalent to that?
And in the middle of jungles I find that sometimes it says connected
And I know then that everything that I'm saying can go anywhere,
and work exactly the same way.
It's a question of time.
CONNECT TO LEARN
Connectivity is actually opening up the world. If you open up a village, for example Bonsaaso,
and the students can actually now communicate with other students, say in London.
It means they start seeing the world in a different way.
Educate a youth, and you educate a nation.
Connect to Learn is a partnership between Ericsson, together with AF Institute
in Columbia University, and the Millennium Promise.
It's twofold, it provides scholarships to girls, and Connect to Learn gives students
computers and connectivity and shows them how to use it, and how to get information.
Education was limited to what the teacher could tell the students, and the teacher was
relying on a small textbook, or those few books,
so the teacher was not getting very exposed.
Now you are able to access a lot of information and the children start chatting
and exchanging information, you can see that there is much more things for them
to talk about because they feel like they are more exposed.
And the children are more confident.
They have the energy, they have quite a lifespan ahead of them
and they are about to start thinking bigger.
If you bring connectivity to them, they are actually able to do transactions and they
can start small businesses, which will uplift them.
So I'd say it's actually opening up our villages, our country, and the whole continent.
We're rolling it out in as many countries as possible in Africa, and also in South America.
It has the potential to be upscaled to any country.
A FLAWED SYSTEM?
The way we solve interesting problems is we fail and we fail
and we fail and we fail, until we succeed.
And if you've talked to people who have succeeded, what they almost all have in common is
that they've failed a hundred times before they succeeded.
And what separates them, from people who aren't successful, isn't that they succeeded,
it's that they failed more that the other people did.
I'm not sure it's okay for the schools to say; we have to optimize,
to process as many people as we can to match this testing regime.
You can't imagine, in a world where you sit down to do an exam and you ask yourself
the question; I hope there are no surprises on the exam paper.
And your teachers think; I hope I prepared him for everything.
How would that prepare you then to go out into a world
that everyday is going to surprise you.
It's full of the surprises of the economy, of society,
of politics, of invention, of technology.
Everyday is a surprise.
Learning prepares you to cope with the surprises, education prepares you to cope with certainty,
there is no certainty.
The teacher stands between the child and the formal education.
Trying to make the child face that system.
And until that system breaks down, or disappears, she has an incredibly difficult job of keeping
the child's curiosity alive, while at the same time saying; listen, by the time you
are sixteen, you'll have to start memorizing certain things, so that you can go and sit
for the examination, clear it, and get out of school properly.
No one I know takes standardized tests for a living.
So why are we using standardized test to see if you are going to be good when we don't
have standardized tests after you take it.
It's infected the entire marketing eco-system of education, because famous colleges are
famous because they are picky about your SAT scores.
Parents want their kids to go to a famous college.
Parents push their school to create kids who will get into
a famous college by doing well on the SAT.
All which is corrupting the entire reason we have education in the first place.
If we can get parents, and teachers, and kids, and administrators, to have this conversation,
to just talk about it, then if at school board meetings, or if, at ten year reviews the questions
we are asking are not; how did your students do on the SAT.
But instead we say; the SAT makes no sense, famous colleges are a scam,
we need to create a different thing and we can have this conversation.
Then change will start to happen.
Coursera is a social entrepreneurship company that enables the best universities to take
their best courses and put them out there, so that everyone around the world with an
Internet connection can benefit from having access to a great education.
As of today, which is the end of September we have 1.5 million students from 196 countries,
it's a little debatable how you count countries.
We have 195 courses from 33 universities.
Our larger courses have an enrollment of 130,000, our smaller courses have an enrollment of
only about 10,000, of course they're still growing, most of them haven't launched yet.
A medium class, when it launches, has about 50- 60,000 students registered.
Scale is interesting because it allows us to offer a high quality product at a very
low marginal cost per student, which is what allows us to take people who really can't
pay for an education and to provide them a free education.
Education for free at the highest quality because the costs are so low per student.
The student experience in Coursera is that the course starts on a given day and each
week a student has access to numerous pieces.
One piece is video lecture, and it's interactive videos, you don't sit there for an hour just
watching video, you get to interact with the video.
There is rigorous meaningful assessments of different kinds,
not just multiple choice but real exercises with real depth.
And there is a community of students that you get to interact with to ask questions
and have those questions answered by your fellow students.
So that you get both a better learning experience via peer teaching as well as a social experience,
where you feel like there is a community of learners surrounding this intellectual activity.
People often ask us whether universities are a thing of the past, whether universities
are going to die out, and I definitely do not think so.
There is something tremendous about getting people together in a place
where serendipitous interactions can happen.
Where you can have face-to-face mentoring between an instructor and students
where students can talk to each other, and create together, and learn to debate ideas.
So this on-campus physical experience at the moment
has no virtual substitute that is equally effective.
Our goal here, and I think one needs to be pragmatic about this, is not to equalize necessarily
the opportunity of students who currently don't have any access, and make it equal
to what a fortunate Princeton student might have.
Because that might be a really worthy goal, but it's not something
that we can necessarily can achieve in the short time frame.
What we'd like to do, is we'd like to bring both of these up to considerably better than
where they are now, even if they don't end up being equal.
If we've improved a lot, of both the on-campus students, and the ones,
who currently don't have access, I think we've done an amazing thing.
So let me explain how revolutions work.
Revolutions destroy the perfect and then they enable the impossible.
They never go from everything is good to everything is good.
There is a lot of noise in the middle.
If we look at the music business; first it destroyed the record label business, the Internet.
And only now is it enabling independent musicians to get heard.
Education tends to move in stairstep functions, in terms of change,
so when it does change, it explosively changes.
The move from pre-printing press to post-printing press is a one-time transition
in history of the world, in terms of education.
Online education is going to be like that as well. And we want to make sure that,
as a species, the human species gets it right.
One of the revolutions that we're going to see is where less and less of education is
about a conveyer of content, because that is going to be a commodity, and hopefully
one that's going to be available to everyone around the world.
And a lot more of what we think of as education is going to go back
to its original roots of teaching.
Where the instructor actually engages in a dialogue with the students and helps them
develop thinking skills, problem solving skills, passion for the discipline.
The kinds of things that are much easier to do in a face-to-face setting and a lot harder
to do in an online format, but for which, really the college experience, as we know
it; that it the right place where you'd like to put that kind of development of skills.
Now what I want to see from schools is; get kids to want it.
Create an environment where kids are restless until their need for information is satisfied.
Every time I get a question right, I get immediate engagement. I think the teacher has to step
back and say; today's topic is this. Open your notebook and figure it out for yourself.
What we need are teachers who will look people in the eye, and believe in them,
and push them forward, and it's hard to do that on the Internet.
It really needs to be done in person.
Schools decide to be better because they see children being better.
And teachers... what does it say on teacher's t-shirts?
It says: 'We're in it for the outcome, not the income!'.
Teachers are there because they can see the change in their children.
If you add up every child in history, more children will leave school
in the next 30 years, than they've ever left school in history.
If I was going to make one change, I'd make their schooling just a little bit better.
And that would change history faster than anything else.