Who here went to college? Raise your hands.
I did too.
I got to spend four years on this beautiful campus.
I learnt a lot about computer science from my classes
and even more about life from my friends.
I also developed a lifelong love of orange and black.
(Laughter)
This is Teppo's son.
He recently learnt to walk
and even though Teppo doesn't believe me when I tell him this,
he's going to be walking off to college pretty soon.
So, Teppo. How do you think your son's college experience
is going to be, compared to ours?
Teppo Jouttenus: I must admit that I don't quite know.
I have more questions than answers
when I think about how will education be 20 years from now,
both here in the US and around the world.
But I do know that some things must change,
and here are four:
education must get better.
Too many people enter college unprepared to learn
and leave unprepared to get a good job or be good citizens.
One scary statistic from a recent study
is that 36% of students across a range of universities
made no significant improvement
in their critical thinking, reasoning,
and writing skills in four years of college.
We can do better than that.
VS: Education must get cheaper.
If it doesn't, then billions of people around the world
who needs to be educated
are not going to get access
to the high quality education they need.
Just here in the US,
there is over a trillion dollars of student debt.
Anyone here still have student loans?
TJ: Education must be able to adapt faster.
Anyone's college or university
were they specifically good at making quick decisions,
adapting to change? No.
There are benefits to keeping a steady course
but sometimes changing education
feels like taking a herd of elephants
and trying to get them to change directions.
VS: And finally, education has to last longer.
It may actually turn out to be
that four years of college is too much
but four years of education is definitely not enough
in today's quickly changing world.
So let's review where we are starting,
with traditional education first.
TJ: The traditional education bundle
has elements that are both non academic
like housing and football teams,
and academic, like professors and classes,
and it comes with a hefty price tag.
There is a lot of experimentation going on right now
in ways of unbundling education.
Taking these elements in different combinations
to meet various different needs.
One interesting example is taking online classes
without the football teams
and having them for free.
This obviously will not solve
all the challenges we have in education
but it raises some interesting questions
that are dear to our heart, because we work at edX
and there we publish courses from top universities
freely available to anyone with an Internet connection.
So, Victor, how does this differ from the standard education bundle?
VS: Sure. Before I worked at edX, I spent several years
helping create and teach classes at Harvard.
There we had a pretty standard model.
We had a professor that gives lectures.
I spent hundreds of hours creating problems
and then grading then when they were submitted.
Of course, students came to my section and did problems.
Teppo has worked a lot with creating edX classes
so tell us about one of those and we will see how it differs.
TJ: Sure. As a program manager,
my job is to work with professors and their teams,
and find the various different components that come together
to do the best possible online class that we can.
For one MIT course, we started with the legendary Physics professor,
Walter Lewin,
added in two other professors, three lecturers, one postdoc,
sprinkled into the mix some students, a program manager, video team,
software engineers, and blended it all together
to create the online version
of Walter Lewin's Electricity and Magnetism.
And Victor was one of the software engineers
that built the platform that makes all of this possible.
Do you want to talk about some of the elements of the class?
VS: Sure. So, here are some of the screens in the class.
We have Walter Lewin, or a video of Walter Lewin,
describing the science behind Van der Graaf generators.
It's immediately followed by problems like this one asking you,
did you actually understand what you just saw?
Where students get incentive back.
We have interactive simulations like this one,
written specifically for this class,
that shows how electric fields change as charged particles move in them.
And finally we have a discussion forum
where students from all over the world
can connect and discuss the material and help each other learn.
So, for example, in this particular screen
one of the students posted a relevant video from Youtube
that illustrates some of the concepts discussed in the class,
sparking a discussion where people were asking
why this is working, what is going on.
So together, compared to the experience I had at Harvard,
this is somewhat different. We get this bundle,
we lose that in-person connection that I had with my students in section
but we get this global forum and global connections,
and we get instant feedback,
which is something that was much harder
to do in a traditional model.
So let's look at the edX class
with the four aspects we said before.
TJ: One way that the edX class is pedagogically better
than traditional lecturing is because
the lecture is split into smalls snippets
and you get instant feedback,
so there is more engagement with the student.
It is freely available for the whole world
and the team can adapt faster
because they don't have to spend any energy
recreating the parts that they loved.
Instead, they can focus on improving the parts
that they weren't happy with.
And it opens up new possibilities for lifelong learning.
Our colleague Ruth's father is 89
and he is still actively taking edX classes.
VS: Of course, not everything about the online class is better.
In particular, it costs a lot to create such a class,
and, as I mentioned earlier,
we really lose that in-person connection between teacher and student
that can be so important in some cases
to keep students motivated and to help them get through the material.
But one of the great things is, once we have created this class,
we can call up yet another bundle.
We are already trying things like this,
where we take Walter Lewin's course,
and we bring it to a campus, or a thousand campuses,
and you can have the professor there
instead of having to spend those hundred of hours
creating materials that we already have,
guide their students through it,
and really focus on addressing the individual needs that they have
and not just incorporating the basics.
This is just one combination
and the future of education is going to involve
lots of different experiments and combinations.
Only some of which will involve online learning.
That should bring us to...
TJ: Blenders.
Or how do we most effectively
blend online and face-to-face elements in education,
and how do we create the most effective education bundles
to meet the needs of different learners
in different kind of circumstances.
And this is where we need your help.
As we and others continue to experiment
we want you to try out the different bundles
and share what works well.
So when you come across a delicious educational smoothie...
(Laughter)
... tell your teachers, tell your friends, tell your school,
because the more demand there is for awesome learning experiences
the quicker the best educational bundles become the new standard.
VS: Of course, it's important to remember some of these educational smoothies
are going to have actual snow and ice, not computers.
For example, this was my classroom on a course I took several years ago
with the National Outdoor Leadership School.
We spent several weeks trekking through the mountains,
learning about leadership and teaching,
and trying to find our way through the woods, and not get too lost.
I learnt a lot from this course.
I find myself using things I learnt here pretty much every single day,
which is not something I can say from most of my college classes.
This was one of the high points of the trip.
We were on top of a mountain
and could really see the landscape in front of us,
and sort of gather a glimpse of where we were headed.
I find that working in the everchanging landscape of education today
is sometimes like this,
where it feels like we really see what is going on
and we know where we are going, but more often it feels like this,
which is an afternoon on the trip,
trying to find camp in a half frozen swamp
in the middle of a snowstorm.
But we did it,
and one of the things I learnt from this trip,
and from this course was
how important it is to really embrace the uncertainty
when you are exploring a new territory that you don't know already.
And I think that if we do that in education
we will be able to discover better combinations
that more succesfully help people teach and help people learn.
We hope that we've managed to convince you
that the future of education is exciting
and that perhaps you are a little nervous about it.
And we hope we help.
Join in discussion around this, try new things, and share what works.
TJ: I don't know if my son's college bundle
will include a football team or not.
But what I do know is that when we continue, all of us,
to experiment and share the best educational bundles
we can make education better, cheaper, faster, and longer.
Thank you.
(Applause)