like this in front of a beautiful crowd
like yourselves takes me back to my
first week on campus I sat in an
auditorium not dissimilar to this one I
filed in there in the middle to the back
i sat beside a guy and a girl and I
listened to a professor and the
professor started talking he started
reading from a set of slides and over
the course of class we realized that he
was reading from a set of pre-prepared
slides that came with the textbook and
the slides summarized the textbook
chapter that we were supposed to have
read before we got there the girl to my
left fell asleep the guy to my right
filled around his laptop I did not go
back to that class again the word
lecture the origin of the world let that
word lecture is electus which in Latin
means that which is read here we have a
lecture hall in the Middle Ages as you
can see there’s a professor standing
with a book from what she’s reading and
students who are taking notes here we
have a lecture hall today notice
anything similar here we have a
professor standing in front of our cloud
of students those students are again
taking notes and that professors reading
this time maybe it’s from a set of
PowerPoint slides so we’ve got all of
this power in our pockets we’ve got more
information in our fingertips then
generations before us could ever have
imagined yet this is what’s happening in
the classroom makes no sense to me 11:00
now this is the number of times that a
student will check his or her phone
during class ninety-two so the
percentage of students the percentage of
students who send a text message during
class now think about that for a second
there about five of 500 of you here in
this room I’m basically giving you a
lecture what that means
that 460 of you are going to send a text
message at some point during my speech
eight seconds this is the average
attention span of a student in class
I kid you not it’s down from 12 seconds
in 2000 so what I’m telling you is that
we had four more seconds and you guys in
my day now clearly things have changed
right I’ll give you another stat and
that’s 79 who here is felt anxiety when
you’re without your cell phone okay a
good number right 79 percent is the
percentage of generations ears who feel
anxiety when separated from one cell
phone so clearly we have changed as a
society for better for worse technology
is impacting us in ways we never could
have imagined the ways we learn are
changing yet the way we teach has not
evolved in hundreds of years I want to
talk to you about some small changes
that are already happening some big
changes that could happen and five
things that I think will happen in a big
way over the next five years first off
this is something I think many of you
would like to see happen we will see the
end in the next few years of the
traditional textbook here we have a
chart that some of you might have seen
it Maps textbook prices as you can see
there’s CPI over the last 35 or so years
the cost of goods and services in our
society has risen by about two hundred
and fifty percent right so slowly but
surely there’s been a rise in prices
certain certain other areas of the
economy like housing have seen slightly
faster optics than that and then we have
textbook prices textbook prices over the
last 35 years have risen in over 900
percent so three times as fast as
everything else in the economy textbooks
rise in price so why is that textbook
publishers have taken advantage of
something that economists refer to as an
agency cost the person who makes the
buying decision the professor is not the
same person who actually pays for the
product a student and these two customer
groups have very different wants
NEADS now you would think that with this
agency cost and with these rising prices
these textbook publishers they just must
be making a killing right well here’s
Pearson stock price and you can see that
big dip it dipped 30% in a single day
ten days ago these guys are under threat
so we think they must be making money
but they’re not so why who here has
bought a used textbook before yeah nice
everybody put their hand out that’s good
so did I so with all of these people
buying used textbooks the textbook
publishers have been forced to iterate
on their model so they’re now releasing
new versions of textbooks every two to
three years every couple of years you’ve
got version 7 of algebra going to
version 8 now what does that do it
reduces a ton of new costs into the
system distribution well prior to that
editing prior to that graphics design
prior to that finding authors who are
going to rewrite these textbooks when
you add up all of the costs it’s pretty
clear why these guys have an
unsustainable business model and the
publishers are constantly trying to get
ahead of students but they’re failing
students aren’t just buying used their
photocopying books they’re scanning them
they’re downloading torrent ‘add ebooks
they’re sharing books some students
don’t even buy the books at all so
they’re under threat the physical
textbook is going the way of the dodo
right but that’s not the only reason why
these guys are our under threat
second is that user-generated content
will become the norm now it’s
unfathomable to me why this hasn’t come
sooner I got four years people have been
talking about how there must need to be
a Wikipedia of textbooks alright so you
guys all know the story of Wikipedia and
how it completely destructed the
encyclopedia industry right the
encyclopedias would produce these nice
beautiful versions that would go up on
people’s shelves much the way that
textbooks are sitting up on your shelves
for
– version 3 version 4 and then boom a
snap of a finger they were gone but it
hasn’t happened in universities yet
there are movements around open
educational resources but they haven’t
gripped us they haven’t taken over in
the way that we expected them to the why
so first off in higher ed there’s a very
high bar for quality textbooks need to
be peer reviewed and that comes at a
cost
secondly it’s about the priorities of
your professors the priority of a
professor is research research research
maybe teaching comes down fourth or
fifth on the list right unfortunately
and as a result of the professor’s
priority set any Content that’s
delivered needs to be accompanied by a
suite of resources to make it easy to
deliver that’s why what I believe we’ll
see over the next few years is the
emergence of teaching platforms
interactive teaching platforms that will
allow professors to create content edit
content collaborate on content creation
and ultimately distribute that content
out to students these platforms will
have all of the bells and whistles that
professors require and they’ll also come
with built in marketplaces a marketplace
which will allow professors to make a
little bit of money from peer of you or
even creating content but not so much to
gouge students and so what you’ll see is
that $300 general chemistry textbook it
goes down to one tenth the price but
with better quality and greater
interactivity what also we can see with
the emergence of everything online from
Google when in which you put your daily
thoughts and who can probably tell you
more about each of us than we can tell
it ourselves to Facebook we’re putting
in all of our personal information
Instagram you know uploading all of your
photographs we’ve shown that we’re
willing to trade our privacy for
products that deliver significant
benefit to us in one way or another we
haven’t seen that in higher ed yet but a
reason the Lucien’s study has showed
that 98% of students say they would give
more personal
information if it were to enhance their
educational experiences that’s what
we’re going to see the emergence of
platforms that will track whether
students are coming to class for better
for worse I wouldn’t have liked that
whether they’re participating class
whether questions are right or wrong or
outside of class how people are
progressing through their texts where
the stumbling blocks are and getting all
of this data will help identify which
students are struggling which ones are
not which ones are likely to pass which
ones are likely to fail ultimately it
will help us intervene to stop students
from failing out of school next you guys
have seen a VR exhibit outside of here
today we have glue Google glass oculus
rift these things are operating right
now at the periphery soon enough these
will come to the core and VR will need
to be integrated into the classroom
let’s think about a surgeon for example
he’s performing a surgery that he or she
hasn’t done before so it’s it’s
something complex in the past this
person would have had to read a textbook
maybe talk to a peer look at a couple
photographs and then jump in there
putting the life of that person under
the operating table at risk now surgery
students can put on their helmets and
practice the surgery as many times is
needed to get it right the first time
I believe that classes across the board
will be transformed in this very way
next is new methods to engage students
you know we talked about the changes in
our attention spans we talked about our
reliance and mobile devices yet the vast
majority of professors do not allow
mobile devices in the classroom this
also must change I like to think of
Harvard physicist Eric Mazur here he he
talks about the way that he really he
likes to run his class says look I will
ask my students a question I’ll see how
people did and then I’ll pair the
students who get the question right with
those who got the question wrong and I’m
gonna have the students who got the
question right teach those who go out
the question wrong how to do things
students start teaching themselves it’s
only through use of technology when
you’re standing in a large lecture hall
that you can start facilitating some of
those interactions that you can
facilitate collaboration that you you
can enable group work that you can get
students out of sitting and listening to
somebody and into participating with one
another and taking advantage of all the
brainpower that’s in the room at that
very time next we should it also comes
down to the skills now bringing all of
this together what you think about the
skills that are required for the next
generation so a large body of research
around education to employment and to
summarize it it’s that schools
oftentimes believe that they’re
equipping students with the right skills
to enter the workforce but when you
survey students after they enter the
workforce and you survey employers they
often say the opposite that students are
not prepared for the demands of today’s
workforce and that’s just today with
artificial intelligence the workforce
will change dramatically in the next few
years from Robo surgeons to algorithms
that enable the financial industry to a
great example is Ross the intelligent
attorney which scours all sorts of legal
documentation and is paired with IBM
Watson supercomputer to become this
high-powered paralegal that can do the
vast majority of paralegal functions
today when you think about examples like
this it’s no wonder that a recent Oxford
study said that but 50 percent of jobs
in the u.s. which should hold true here
in Canada as well
will be automated by artificial
intelligence and technology in the
upcoming years so what does that mean
for today’s student we need to stop
teaching students to regurgitate this is
not about a professor reading from a
book and students writing down this is
about teaching critical skills critical
thinking skills it’s about teaching
students to be adaptable it’s teaching
students to become creative problem
solvers it’s having students experiment
to learn how to do these things on their
own so when I imagine the new lecture
hall I imagine a student comes into the
lecture and rather than telling the
student to put his or her device away
the professor says all right let me quiz
you on it I’ll ask you a question maybe
a little poll works through a quiz I’ll
have you collaborate you pair the
students into groups of three or four
and they work through exercises together
as a professor I can engage back and
forth in discussions I can answer
questions I can provoke dialogue and
then start looking at the data of that
class and saying okay these are the
areas in which people are are getting
concepts today and these are the areas
in which we need to hold in a little bit
more and maybe at some point in the
class you throw out slap on your VR
headset and you say okay if I’m in a
chemistry class let’s take a look at
what a molecule looks like up close in
person or if I’m in history class maybe
I’ll go back a couple hundred years and
see the way that things were actually
like and experience them firsthand
well we need to imagine is ways to
integrate the technologies that we have
into the lecture which allow will allow
students to be taught the way they need
to be taught and the way that they
actually learn thank you
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