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I'd like to reimagine education.
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The last year
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has seen the invention of a new four-letter word.
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It starts with an M.
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MOOC: Massive Open Online Courses.
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Many organizations
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are offering these online courses
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to students all over the world in the millions for free.
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Anyone who has an internet connection
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and the will to learn can access these great courses
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from excellent universities
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and get a credential at the end of it.
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Now in this discussion today,
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I'm going to focus
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on a different aspect of MOOCs.
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We are taking what we are learning
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and the technologies we are developing in the large
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and applying them in the small
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to create a blended model of education
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to really reinvent and reimagine
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what we do in the classroom.
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Now our classrooms could use change.
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So here's a classroom
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at this little three-letter institute
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in the northeast of America, MIT.
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And this was a classroom 50 or 60 years ago,
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and this is a classroom today.
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What's changed?
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The seats are in color.
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Whoop-de-do.
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Education really hasn't changed
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in the past 500 years.
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The last big innovation in education
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was the printing press and the textbooks.
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Everything else has changed around us.
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You know, from health care to transportation,
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everything is different,
but education hasn't changed.
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It's also been an issue in terms of access.
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So what you see here
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is not a rock concert.
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And the person you see at the end of the stage
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is not Madonna.
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This is a classroom
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at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.
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Now we've all heard of distance education,
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but the students way in the back,
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200 feet away from the instructor,
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I think they are undergoing long-distance education.
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Now I really believe
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that we can transform education,
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both in quality and scale and access,
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through technology.
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For example, and edX,
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we are trying to transform education
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through online technologies.
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Given education has been calcified for 500 years,
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we really cannot think about reengineering it,
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micromanaging it.
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We really have to complete reimagine it.
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It's like going from ox carts to the airplane.
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Even the infrastructure has to change.
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Everything has to change.
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We need to go from lectures on the blackboard
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to online exercises, online videos.
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We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories
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and gameification.
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We have to go to completely online grading
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and peer interaction and discussion boards.
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Everything really has to change.
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So at edX and a number of other organizations,
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we are applying these technologies to education
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through MOOCs to really
increase access to education.
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And you heard of this example,
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where, when we launched our very first course,
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and this was an MIT-hard
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circuits and electronics course,
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about a year ago, year and a half ago,
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155,000 students from 162 countries
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enrolled in this course.
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And we had no marketing budget.
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Now, 155,00 is a big number.
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This number is bigger
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than the total number of alumni of MIT
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in its 150-year history.
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7,200 students passed the course,
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and this was a hard course.
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7,200 is also a big number.
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If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year,
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I would have to teach for 40 years
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before I could teach this many students.
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Now these large numbers
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are just one part of the story.
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So today, I want to discuss a different aspect,
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the other side of MOOCs,
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take a different perspective.
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We are taking what we develop
and learn in the large
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and applying it in the small
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to the classroom to create
a blended model of learning.
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But before I go into that, let me tell you a story.
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When my daughter turned 13, became a teenager,
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she stopped speaking English,
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and she began speaking this new language.
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I call it teenlish.
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It's a digital language.
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It's got two sounds: a grunt, and a silence.
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"Honey, come over for dinner."
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"Hmm."
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"Did you hear me?"
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Silence.
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"Can you listen to me?"
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"Hmm."
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So we had a real issue with communicating,
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and we were just not communicating,
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until one day I had this epiphany.
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I texted her. (Laughter)
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I got an instant response.
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I said, no, that must have been by accident.
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She must have thought, you know,
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some friend of her was calling her.
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So I texted her again. Boom, another response.
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I said, this is great.
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And so since then, our life has changed.
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I text her, she responds.
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It's just been absolutely great.
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(Applause)
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So our millennial generation
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is built differently.
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Now, I'm older, and my
youthful looks might bely that,
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but I'm not in the millennial generation.
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But our kids our really different.
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The millennial generation is completely comfortable
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with online technology.
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So why are we fighting it in the classroom?
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Let's not fight it. Let's embrace it.
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In fact, I believe, and I have two fat thumbs,
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I can't text very well,
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but I'm willing to bet that with evolution,
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you know, our kids and their grandchildren
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will develop really, really little, itty-bitty thumbs
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to text much better,
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that evolution will fix all of that stuff.
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But what if we embraced technology,
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embraced the millennial generation's
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natural predilections,
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and really think about creating
these online technologies,
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blend them into their lives.
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So here's what we can do.
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So rather than driving our kids into a classroom,
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herding them out there at 8 o'clock in the morning.
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I hated going to class at 8 o'clock in the morning.
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So why are we forcing our kids to do that?
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So instead what you do
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is you have them watch videos
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and do interactive exercises
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in the comfort of their dorm rooms, in their bedroom,
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in the dining room, in the bathroom,
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wherever they're most creative.
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Then they come into the classroom
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for some in-person interaction.
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They can have discussions amongst themselves.
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They can solve problems together.
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They can work with the professor
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and have the professor answer their questions.
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In fact, with edX, when we
were teaching our first course
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on circuits and electronics around the world,
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this was happening unbeknownst to us.
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Two high school teachers
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at the Sant High School in Mongolia
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had flipped their classroom,
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and they were using our video lectures
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and interactive exercises,
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where the learners in the high school,
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15-year olds, mind you,
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would go and do these things in their own homes
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and they would come into class,
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and as you see from this image here,
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they would interact with each other
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and do some physical laboratory work.
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And the only way we discovered this
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was they wrote a blog
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and we happened to stumble upon that blog.
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We were also doing other pilots.
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So we did a pilot experimental blended courses,
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working with San Jose State University in California,
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again, with the circuits and electronics course.
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You'll hear that a lot. That course has become
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sort of like our petri dish of learning.
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So there, the students would, again,
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the instructors flipped the classroom,
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blended online and in person,
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and the results were staggering.
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Now don't take these results to the bank just yet.
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Just wait a little bit longer as we
experiment with this some more,
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but the early results are incredible.
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So traditionally, semester upon semester,
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for the past several years, this course,
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again, a hard course,
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had a failure rate of about 40 to 41 percent
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every semester.
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With this blended class late last year,
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the failure rate fell to nine percent.
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So the results can be extremely, extremely good.
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Now before we go too far into this,
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I'd like to spend some time discussing
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some key ideas.
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What are some key ideas
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that makes all of this work?
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One idea is active learning.
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The idea here is, rather than have students
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walk into class and watch lectures,
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we replace this with what we call lessons.
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Lessons are interleaved sequences
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of videos and interactive exercises.
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So a student might watch a five, seven-minute video
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and follow that with an interactive exercise.
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Think of this as the ultimate
Socratization of education.
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You teach by asking questions.
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And this is a form of learning
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called active learning,
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and really promoted by a very early paper, in 1972,
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by Craik and Lockhart,
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where they said and discovered
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that learning and retention really relates strongly
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to the depth of mental processing.
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Students learn much better
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when they are interacting with the material.
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The second idea is self-pacing.
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Now, when I went to a lecture hall,
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and if you were like me,
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by the fifth minute I would lose the professor.
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I wasn't all that smart, and I would
be scrambling, taking notes,
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and then I would lose the lecture
for the rest of the hour.
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Instead, wouldn't it be nice with online technologies,
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we offer videos and interactive
engagements to students?
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They can hit the pause button.
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They can rewind the professor.
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Heck, they can even mute the professor.
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So this form of self-pacing
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can be very helpful to learning.
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The third idea that we have is instant feedback.
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With instant feedback,
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the computer grades exercises.
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I mean, how else do you teach 150,000 students?
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Your computer is grading all the exercises.
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And we've all submitted homeworks,
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and your grades come back two weeks later,
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you've forgotten all about it.
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I don't think I've still received
some of my homeworks
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from my undergraduate days.
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Some are never graded.
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So with instant feedback,
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students can try to apply answers.
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If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback.
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They can try it again and try it again,
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and this really becomes much more engaging.
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They get the instant feedback,
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and this little green checkmark that you see here
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is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX.
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Learners are telling us that they go to bed at night
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dreaming of the green checkmark.
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In fact, one of our learners
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who took the circuits course early last year,
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he then went on to take a software course
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from Berkeley at the end of the year,
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and this is what the learner had to say
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on our discussion board
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when he just started that course
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about the green checkmark.
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"Oh god; have I missed you..."
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When's the last time you've seen students
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posting comments like this about homework?
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My colleague Ed Bertschinger,
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who heads up the Physics Department at MIT,
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has this to say about instant feedback.
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He indicated that instant feedback
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turns teaching moments into learning outcomes.
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The next big idea is gameification.
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You know, all learners engage really well
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with interactive videos and so on.
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You know, they would sit down and shoot
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alien spaceships all day long until they get it.
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So we applied these gameification
techniques to learning,
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and we can build these online laboratories.
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You know, how do you teach creativity?
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How do you teach design?
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We can do this through online labs
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and use computing power
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to build these online labs.
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So as this little video shows here,
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you can engage students
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much like they design with Legos.
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So here, the learners are building a circuit
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with Lego-like ease.
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And this can also be graded by the computer.
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Fifth is peer learning.
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So here, we use discussion forums and discussions
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and Facebook-like interaction
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not as a distraction,
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but to really help students learn.
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Let me tell you a story.
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When we did our circuits course
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for the 155,000 students,
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you know, I didn't sleep for three nights
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leading up to the launch of the course.
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I told my TAs, okay, 7 by 24,
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we're going to be up
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monitoring the forum, answering questions.
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They had answered questions
for a hundred students.
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How do you do that for 150,000?
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So one night I'm sitting up there at 2 a.m. at night,
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and I think there's this question
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from a student from Pakistan,
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and he asked a question, and I said,
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okay, let me go and type up an answer,
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I don't type all that fast,
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and I begin typing up the answer,
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and before I can finish,
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another student from Egypt
popped in with an answer,
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not quite right, so I'm fixing the answer,
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and before I can finish, a student from the U.S.
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had popped in with a different answer.
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And then I sat back, fascinated.
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Boom, boom, boom, boom, the students were
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discussing and interacting with each other,
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and by 4 a.m. that night, I'm totally fascinated,
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having this epiphany,
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and by 4 a.m. in the morning,
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they had discovered the right answer.
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And all I had to do was go and bless it,
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"Good answer."
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So this is absolutely amazing,
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where students are learning from each other,
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and they're telling us that they are learning
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by teaching.
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Now this is all just not in the future.
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This is happening today.
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So we are applying these blended learning pilots
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in a number of universities and high schools
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around the world,
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from Tsinghua in China
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to the National University of Mongolia in Mongolia
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to Berkeley in California,
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all over the world.
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And these kinds of technologies really help,
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the blended model can really help
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revolutionize education.
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It can also solve a practical problem of MOOCs,
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the business aspect.
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We can also license these MOOC courses
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to other universities,
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and therein lies a revenue model for MOOCs,
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where the university that
licenses it with the professor
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can use these online courses
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like the next generation textbook.
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They can use as much or as little as they like,
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and it becomes a tool in the teacher's arsenal.
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Finally, I would like to have you
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dream with me for a little bit.
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I would like us to really reimagine education.
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We will have to move from lecture halls to e-spaces.
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We have to move from books to tablets
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like the Akash in India
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or the Raspberry Pi, the 20 dollars.
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The Akash is 40 dollars.
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We have to move from
bricks-and-mortar school buildings
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to digital dormitories.
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But I think at the end of the day,
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I think we will still need one lecture hall
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in our universities.
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Otherwise, how else do we tell our grandchildren
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that, you know, your grandparents sat in that room
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in neat little room like cornstalks
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and watched this professor at the end
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talk about content, and, you know,
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you didn't even have a rewind button.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)