in a place with beautiful winters in
terrible summers and I grew up with the
dream of one day attending a top college
program when the time came I was
fortunate enough to get the opportunity
and I loved it I mean I really loved it
so much so that I pursued a career in
academics and for the next 20 years I’ve
spent my time in university so you can
imagine that I did not react well when
my son as he was going through the
college application process told me that
what if I don’t go to college you can
imagine that this challenge some of my
longest held assumptions
however in time I started to reflect
about this and I started to challenge
those assumptions I started to challenge
things that I never thought I would
challenge the college system started
closing in on a thousand years ago in a
small city in Italy Bologna and if you
were to look at a classroom of the time
a picture if you would you would see
that not that much has happened has
changed right you still see some people
not paying attention right
it even looks if you look closely it
looks like someone’s texting but it was
a great transformation for the first
time there’s a place where you could go
and learn and if we move a thousand
years into the future we come to the
World Wide Web without a doubt the most
successful project in human history and
its impacts are profound if it changed
every aspect of our society in ways in
which worse tril is still trying to
understand and I’ll give you here a few
data points from a few industry in the
medical area more Americans 190 million
get advice from WebMD then actually go
to the doctor every year and the civil
and the legal profession more disputes
are resolved through eBay’s dispute
resolution system then civil cases go
before the courts in the United States
the Huffington Post
however you may feel about the
publication it’s representative of a new
generation of content producers where
content was democratized the ability to
publish all you needed was an
interconnect internet connection and you
could publish to the world and last in
the field of religion this fun little
app here for confessions has received
the blessing of the Catholic Church the
imprimatur from the Vatican and it has
fun little features like sin tracker in
and the field of Education the first
model to break through was the MOOC the
massive open online course the first
course that ran had over a hundred
thousand registrants more than any
university has students today ten years
later the platforms combined have close
to 60 million enrollments that’s more
than double all of the students in the
entire university system but we’re just
getting started
this model here the MIT micro master is
a pretty interesting one but before I
tell you about the innovation let me
take a moment here to consider what the
car of the current admission process is
if you’re going through it you know how
painful it is if you have kids that have
gone through it you just feel for them
your heart breaks for them it is
ultimately just too hard and if you look
at this criteria many of us in the
faculty say if we were to apply today we
wouldn’t get in but it is precisely
because of that how interesting this
micro masters is it inverts this model
everybody gets in there is no admission
decision you take classes online for
scale along with all the MIT students
and if you stand out you get invited to
come on campus you pay for only one
semester and you get the same degree as
everybody else a couple weeks ago I
spent some time with the first batch of
people admitted through this process
forty hungry intelligent students much
like the rest that we have on campus and
they had come from 57 different
countries none of them had to apply not
only that they’re coming on proven
records as opposed to potential but
we’re just getting started this is just
simply one of the many models another
one is the course marketplace very much
like in the writing platforms anyone who
thinks they have a course that they want
to present to the world can and we’re
starting to get a new generation of
content that is pretty valuable
my wife was current was recently
evaluating real estate programs to
learn how to do investments as she was
going through this process she came
across a course that had had 70,000
people take it it was from a Stanford
graduate that had been in the real
estate industry for ten years and had
put everything he wish he would have
been taught into this course it had over
100 lectures and it lasted six weeks my
wife took it and at the end of it felt
pretty good like she could start to make
decisions in this field this course only
cost $30 compared that to what we’re
paying for a master’s today and so this
is one of the clear patterns faster
education lower cost more availability
as well perhaps norther another model
represents this as much as the boot
camps where people are training from 12
to 16 weeks and going directly into the
job market the output of these last year
approached 50% of all the accredited
programs in the country on computer
science and so as I went back to my
traditional institution in my
traditional classroom I thought about
how I could use some of these
innovations and the very first thing
that struck me and I should mention
before I describe what I did is that I
teach computation to non computer
scientists these are the architects
urban planners business students and
engineering students that come from
non-computational fields and one of the
things that have frustrated me for years
was the feedback cycle that we had with
students typically the first week is an
introduction the week after that in the
semester we assign some content give out
a homework that homework comes back the
week after that the TAS pick it up
graded and it’s not returned into the
following week a month
traditionally goes by before we give
feedback and so I wanted to do something
about this and so what I did what I
started to do was I flipped the
classroom that means I asked the
students to watch the videos before they
came to class I also asked them to take
a quiz I wanted to get some feedback
even before they showed up in class as
to how they understood
the concepts I then within the class
move through 30 minute blocks three of
them my class is an hour and a half and
the first one I give him any lecture
where I highlight concepts and touch on
things that I noticed they were shaky on
after that I have them write an actual
computer program hands on keyboards
after that we have a platform that works
on automated assessment in which they
can submit and can get feedback during
this cycle and let me tell you the
classroom changed overnight if I stood
in the back of the classroom previously
I would see people surfing the wave I
would see people answering emails not
really paying attention and not really
engaged when I made this change the
classroom changed completely
it was like a class a quiz environment
everybody was quiet everybody was
engaged everybody walked out of the
classroom with a clear indication of
where they stood not only that from the
teaching staff side we could also pick
up the data in the analytics from each
of those machines and we could do
interventions if we thought there was
something that needed further
explanation I did the exact same thing
with examinations for the longest time
we’ve given exams where we give people a
piece of paper and a pencil to prove
that they can program a machine so
instead of doing that I had them
actually programmed the machine and in
the same way they had that automated
feedback and let me tell you that the
result and the work that these students
did after this period which is about ten
weeks very close to what we saw with the
boot camps and then applied this in the
last four weeks to a project was an
output higher than any other I have seen
by several degrees one of the projects
was pulling satellite images from one of
the big satellites to go around the
world to try to detect child slavery in
Africa try to detect the structures that
are being used especially around fishing
villages these are people that ten weeks
earlier had never seen computation or
used it in this manner another one was
processing information from
intersections to try to provide
higher safety and there were the
applications were across the board
because I let them choose their topics
another one was trying to verify with
crowdsourcing the veracity of birding
sightings in a birding community and you
know we’re a lot of fun and quite
exciting
now as I thought about the success of
this model in my classroom I thought
about how could I take this abroad how
could I make it accessible to
communities that are underserved how
could I port it to high school now my
son was still going through the
application process that I mentioned and
he offered to help and in fact he
started working importing this content
to high school in one of those lucky
coincidences the largest school system
in Mexico invited us down to teach a
course to 108 to 100 high school-age
girls they were getting pretty poor
souls of the university level in in the
larger school system right now it’s less
than ten percent and so they were
interested in exposing girls at a
younger age as we were flying bound to
deliver this course which was basically
my MIT course compressed into a week
going 8 to 5 Monday through Friday again
with the teenage girls through 13
through 17 I thought to myself this is
gonna go this could go really wrong here
is pretty this is this might you know be
pretty scary I’m happy to say it was one
of the most rewarding experiences of my
career I’ve never met a group that was
more engaged more passionate more hungry
learned and that the work that they did
we’d sit together
I took some MIT students down with me as
well we’d sit together at the end of the
day and just stare at each other and
laugh because we couldn’t believe what
we were seeing in the classroom it works
so well in fact that we’re going back
this summer to teach 1,000 and we’re
coordinating for a national program for
next year for 10,000
[Applause]
now one of the other advantages of all
this work that’s been done on platforms
around the world is that there’s a great
deal of data that’s coming off of these
platforms that is enabling a new
generation of researchers to identify
insights that will accelerate our
learning one of I’ll show you here a few
of them one of them is speaking speed if
I were to poll you and I would ask you
should I speak slower so you can
understand me better or should I speak
very very very fast you would be about
split some people think it’s better to
speak slow but in others then it’s
better to speak fast
standard is about 150 words per minute
it’s actually better and we know now
from the data to speak fast target is
about 180 words per minute how long
should I go right you’ve had some of
this today and Ted that’s a pretty good
pretty good timing it should be seven or
15 minutes and that doesn’t mean you
can’t go longer it just means that you
have to reset the audience’s attention
every seven to fifteen minutes lastly
and this is one that I find particularly
interesting is that students prefer
hand-drawn diagrams to PowerPoint and
the reason they give is that it’s slower
they have the opportunity to accompany
the instructor in the creation of the
diagram and they have an opportunity to
catch on and digest rather getting the
powerful beautiful PowerPoint and I know
I’m showing you Parker right and so
clearly we’re going through a
transformation we’re going through a
disruption the negative side of that is
something you see in the press quite
often like in the case of this beautiful
doctor from New Hampshire who lost their
license because their computer skills
were not up to par and in many ways this
has been coming for a long time
the legendary Grandmaster Kasparov lost
to a program by IBM in 1997 big blue but
what’s less talked about is that the
following year he came back and
supported by a basic program
he beat the IBM program the big machine
and what’s even more surprising is that
an amateur beat the field with the
support of some basic programs now
there’s a clearly winning combination
here a connected intelligence a
combination of the human technology and
education and to give you an example the
device that you see me wearing there is
something that adds a layer of virtual
information on to the real world
medicine schools at the moment are
piloting how to teach anatomy with these
devices for the very first time you
don’t have to read it off the book you
can interact with it in 3d you can run
simulations you can look at the skeletal
the circulatory all the human systems in
a way that was never possible before
think about the acceleration and
understanding that this simple device
can bring and so as I say in my slide
this is not your father’s education and
not pull out a few of the things that
we’ve talked about the very first one is
that there’s going to be more sources
the traditional cookie cutter will go
away it will continue for some time but
there will be the boot camps there will
be the course marketplaces there will be
the innovations that are taking place
like the micro masters the other is the
reach the platform is taking all of this
content to the furthest reaches of the
planet it doesn’t matter if you’re in
Cambridge or in a favela in Rio or
somewhere in Africa you will be able to
take the same content I mentioned the
students from the micro masters already
come from fifty fifty seven different
nations the other thing is that it will
be very low cost right I mentioned the
course of my wife was thirty dollars a
lot of these platforms the MOOCs the
micro masters these are free and last it
will be faster and it will be better
that experimentation that’s taking place
with the course marketplaces is going to
challenge us right what do you mean you
expecting these trend a hundred thousand
dollars in the masters we can take two
or three of these courses for a couple
hundred dollars right and we will be
better we will respond and so these will
provide more opportunity to close how
close the story arc with my son he came
back from Mexico
impacted by the experience that he
started a foundation to teach Hispanic
girls computational thinking and
throughout the last six months he has
been taking MOOCs he has been taking
boot camps he has been trying to bring
his skills up to where he thinks they
need to be at the same time he has been
fundraising he has been team-building
and in the end I can see that he can be
an academic but he could also be an
entrepreneur but in the end it doesn’t
matter he’s getting a better education
this father did and if that’s the
promise for our next generation we have
the opportunity at a better world [Applause]