4.08 | 02.03.21
The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.
I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge body of instructional videos available at low or zero cost on YouTube and sites like Khan Academy.
Coursera, the world's largest MOOC provider, added 31 million new users in 2020, compared to just 8 million new users in 2019. The second-place MOOC provider, edX, added 10 million users in 2020, twice the number of new students who joined the year before. Evidently, millions of students of all ages want to use their stuck-at-home time to learn something useful.
But how effective, really, are online course materials? How do MOOCs fit in with what cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are discovering about how students learn best? And what do K-12 schools and institutions of higher education plan to do to incorporate elements of online learning into their curricula and meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences after the pandemic passes?
This week we talk through those questions with Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is one of the founding members of edX and a supplier of hundreds of its most popular MOOCs. Together with co-author Luke Yoquinto, Sarma published a book last August called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn.
Though it was written before the pandemic hit, the book offers a timely look at how educators at the K-12 and university level could make smart use of technology to build a new, broader educational pipeline that's more user-friendly and open to millions more people. Sarma says that will mean implementing more of the learning tricks researchers already know about, such as spaced repetition and interleaving, and finding better ways to scale up the coaching and contextual learning that are so effective in in-person settings like MIT's famous 2.007 robot competition.
Mentioned In This Episode
Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, by Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto
Link Trainer [Wikipdia]
MIT 2.007 - Design and Manufacturing
Fear Is The Thing with Fins from The Briny
Videos from MIT’s 2.007 Robot Competition
Chapter Guide
00:08 Soonish theme
00:23 The Allure of Tech-ification
02:57 Sanjay Sarma on 1930s Edtech: the Link Trainer
06:35 Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn
07:30 The Winnower
09:35 Making Learning More User-Friendly
11:10 The Science of the Brain and the Art of Teaching
14:30 Context Makes Learning Click Into Place
16:03 MIT 2.007: The Robot Competition
19:34 Designing MOOCs at MIT and edX
22:44 The Limits of MOOCs
25:12 How to Scale Up Contextual Learning
30:08 Opening up Elite Schools and Inverted Admissions
34:14 Learning in the Pandemic: The Worst of Both Worlds
36:54 End Credits and Acknowledgements
37:55 Promo: The Briny
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.
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Full Transcript
Audio Montage: We can have the future we want. But we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: There’s an alluring idea that we keep falling for over and over here in America. It’s that we could solve a lot of our social and economic problems if only we could figure out how to take the disruptive thinking that supposedly accounts for the spectacular rise of Silicon Valley-style computing and software startups and put it to work in other fields.
Take a field like energy. Obviously our century-long dependence on fossil fuels has come back to bite us in the form of massive climate disruptions. So back in the 2000s we saw the rise of this whole field called cleantech, where the goal was to take ideas from software and networking and rework the energy infrastructure to achieve new levels of efficiency.
Then there’s healthcare, which is also pretty broken, thanks to a system of employer-provided private insurance that dates back to World War II. That system creates a stack of warped incentives where doctors and hospitals only get paid when people get sick, and then once people do get sick, they feel like they should get the best available care, no matter what the price tag. So costs keep rising out of control. As an antidote to that we now have the field of healthtech or digital health, where the promise is that data-driven decision making will supposedly keep patients healthier and bring costs under control.
In finance, there’s fintech. In restaurants and delivery, there’s foodtech. And in education we have edtech, which is the one we’re going to focus on today. The thing is, none of these tech movements have truly transformed their native industries. At least, not yet.
Don’t get me wrong! It’s not a dumb idea to ask whether you can take ideas from software and the Internet and the mobile revolution and bust out of some of the inefficient patterns that old industries run on.
But frankly, it is a dumb idea to think that the very specific conditions that enabled and powered the tech boom in Silicon Valley over the last 30 years can be recreated in any other industry. And it’s even dumber to think that you could revolutionize whole fields of human endeavor like education simply by throwing software at them.
At the risk of giving away the message of this episode at the very beginning, here’s what I’d say about fields like cleantech, healthtech, fintech, and especially edtech. Changing an industry to make it work better for everyone is a lot harder than just adding the suffix “tech.” For one thing, these fields aren’t blank slates, the way the personal computing industry was prior to the 1980 and ’90s. They’ve each got infrastructure and practices and ruling theories that go back decades or centuries.
Sanjay Sarma: First of all, I just want to give you an example of ed tech that is about a hundred years old, almost 80 years old, which you may not realize, but which helped the United States in World War II. And I'm going to tell you the technology, it's augmented reality.
Wade Roush: This is Sanjay Sarma. He works at MIT, where his title is vice president of open learning and he oversees the part of the Institute that develops massive online open courses, or MOOCs.
Sanjay Sarma: And you might say what? Augmented reality has been used for 80 to 100 years? Where is that? Well, let me tell you where. During World War II, before World War II, America was able to train pilots much more effectively than Japan. Both countries could produce planes. That comes down to flight simulators. Which is a technology that America had and it is, in fact, truly augmented reality. In the initial flight simulators, the Link Company, were very mechanical, and over time they became computerized. But there is a technology that transformed, you know, an industry.
Wade Roush: Sarma is absolutely right that flight simulators changed the way we produce pilots. The founder of the Link Company, Ed Link, came from a family in Binghamton, New York, that built player pianos and pipe organs. Ed loved planes, but he couldn’t afford flying lessons, so in the late 1920s and early 1930s he adapted the electric pumps and bellows mechanisms from the organs to build a kind of toy plane. It was mounted on a universal joint and it had controls that let the user steer through the three axes of pitch, roll, and yaw, just like a real plane. This trainer cockpit was connected to an external desk where an instructor could speak to the pilot over headphones, like a ground controller. The Army Air Corps started using the trainers in the mid-30s, and by the time World War II came along, tens of thousands of US and Allied pilots were using the Link trainer to learn how to fly
[Archival audio from training films]
Wade Roush: After the war, British Air Marshall Robert Leckie said, quote, "The Luftwaffe met its Waterloo on all the training fields of the free world where there was a battery of Link Trainers.” Unquote.
But how is the Link Trainer an example of edtech? Well, in Sanjay Sarma’s eyes, the most important thing about the Link machine wasn’t the mechanism but the way it looped in the instructor. Instead of teaching flying from a book or in front of a blackboard, instructors could coach pilots through the literal link to the simulator.
Sanjay Sarma: It would be too expensive to train pilots in the air. Right. Instead, we give them a lot of training on the ground and then the coaching, the mentoring, is where your pilot professor, if you will. The expert teaches you to become like Sully and, you know, so that when, you know, you can land the plane in an emergency and be an excellent pilot.
Wade Roush: Sarma thinks that one of the lessons of the edtech hype cycle that we’re living through now is that technology like MOOCs can never completely take the place of one-to-one coaching and feedback from a human coach or professor. In fact that’s one of the themes of a book Sarma and his co-author Luke Yoquinto published last year called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn.
It might seem strange to hear that the person who coordinates online learning programs at MIT thinks that MOOCs have their limits. But the real point of Sarma and Yoquinto’s book is that we need to rethink the entire education process, from kindergarten through grad school, to open it up to more people, to reflect the latest science about how people learn, and to make sure we’re automating the right parts of the process.
That’s why I wanted to talk with Sarma about the book. Because by the time the pandemic is over and students and teachers can start meeting together in actual classrooms, we’re going to have a lot of new evidence about which parts the learning process require in-person interaction and which parts can and perhaps should be delivered digitally and remotely. And that might get us to place where we can better articulate what K-12 schools and especially colleges and universities are really good for, and what they should look like in the future.
Wade Roush: Sanjay Sarma, welcome to Soonish.
Sanjay Sarma: Such a pleasure to be here, Wade.
Wade Roush: So we're here to talk about the book you published last year with science writer Luke Yoquinto. It's called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn. And the book makes the case that our systems of K-12 education and higher education pretty much all over the world have one component that is fundamentally flawed. And here's where I wanted to start. You call that component the winnower. So can you first explain what you mean by the winnower and where the winnower came from?
Sanjay Sarma: Yeah, it's very interesting, right? I mean, if you are a parent and you have three kids, do you pick winners and losers and say, OK, this kid is meant for great things? Or do you want to make them all successes? The education system as we have it today, it conflates education with selection. So you say, well, of these 30 kids, this kid gets an A and that kid, you know, isn't going to make it. And we came to that, I think, through a collection of circumstances, because we conflate, as I said, education with selection. And the result is that we have lost sight to some extent of the transformative duty of education and a commitment we should make to take every learner and make them successful, rather than simply saying, OK, these these four made it because they got good grades. So it's a pretty fundamental thing. And I think it's a tail that's wagging the dog of education right now. [00:01:53] Obviously, in the end, someone's going to make a hard choice, you know, does this person get the job or not? Right. Does this person write better software or not? Is this person a better singer or not? That happens. And but I think that that has seeped too deep into our establishment, where rather than taking accountability and saying, I will transform you, young lady, young man, young person, to become the most successful person you can be, it has become a bit of an excuse to sort of almost say, you know, move on. So that's a challenge.
Wade Roush: One of your main arguments in the book is that the way we've designed education over the past maybe 200 years makes learning far too difficult. Which may, in fact, be a deliberate part of the design, since, if learning is too difficult, that kind of ensures that a lot of people will fail and get winnowed out. So maybe that's the point. But you argue for a quote unquote, cognitive reckoning, a phrase I really love, that will make the act of learning much more user friendly. And so I'd like to ask you a little about what you have in mind.
Sanjay Sarma: Yeah. So Luke, who's been a tremendous partner in this and very talented and collaborative friend in creating this. You know, we were sort of tossing around how to capture this, really, hairball of ideas. And that concept of learning becoming an obstacle course to see who finishes, rather than an escalator which lifts everyone, right, to their capability. That tradeoff became very clear to us and what we need to do. And the problem with the obstacle course is that in some ways it absolves the learning community of the responsibility of transforming all. As I said, I keep saying compare this to parenting. Imagine if parents acted this way. We don't. We cannot. So that tradeoff became very, very clear and also tragic. And this is something we need to rethink because in the new world, this winnowing won't work anymore, you know, and people are going to demand more because the economics of education are changing. The job market is changing. The challenges are becoming bigger. We have to empower and enable and transform in all learners at all ages.
Wade Roush: Ok, so the way I read the book, there's one driving question throughout, and that's how the science of the brain meets up with the art of teaching and how we can take what neuroscience and cognitive science are discovering about the way people actually learn and the way memory works and use that to reinvent education, and hopefully do it in a way that doesn't winnow out so many people based on arbitrary things like, I don't know, their place of origin or their family income or their test scores. Is that a fair way to summarize the book?
Sanjay Sarma: I'd say so, yeah. I mean, what I would add is that we don't think it's merely cognitive science. We think that there's an inside-out element, which is how do the neurons work. How does, you know, the brain work? And there's an outside-in element which is recognizing that the brain is extremely complex….And the emergent properties of the brain, the emerging behavior of the brain is hard to predict. And so we need to sort of, on the one hand, understand the mechanisms but also cater to the whole brain and to the whole person and their needs and their interests and their motivations and their emotions. But in doing so, to your point, make sure that we create a successful individual.
Wade Roush: At a high level, what are we learning about how the brain works, either from the inside out or from the outside in, that should change the way we think about learning and teaching.
Sanjay Sarma: It's very interesting, we're learning inside-out how memories form, the importance of forgetting and memories, and all sorts of tricks like spaced retrieval, which is, you shouldn't learn in one chunk, you should be doing things over, you know, weeks and months and then you learn it better. Interleaving, mixing things up. But outside-in, we're learning the importance of curiosity. We're learning the importance of context. And we're learning the importance of coaching, which is where people can contribute.
Wade Roush: I want to break in here and explain a little more about what Sarma is saying about how memories form. For example, we know from decades of cognitive science research that we learn new material better when we space out study sessions by days or weeks, rather than, for example, trying to cram for an exam the night before. That’s called spaced retrieval or spaced repetition. Interleaving is directly related. If you use the gaps between your study sessions for Topic A to study Topic B instead, it turns out you learn both topics better. And the idea behind context is that it’s really hard to absorb the essence or the practical meaning of what you’re learning until you have a chance to apply it in a real-world situation. The paradox is that the format for most classroom education today works against all those insights.
Sanjay Sarma: And if you actually look at the full picture, I feel that we are doing our education, our education system is backwards. And what I mean by that is, in-person time should be dedicated to context, curiosity, coaching, you know, things like that. Teamwork, peer activity, you know, filling, connecting the dots, looking at the big picture. But we squander it in one-way lectures. And the one-way lectures are better done online. Not using Zoom, which is actually the worst way to do it, actually is using asynchronous videos and things like that, right. Where the student can watch them in their own time. And it's called the flipped classroom. And the classroom is where you do all the stuff that we should be doing in person. So that's what we're learning.
Wade Roush: Sarma says a lot of his thinking about how learning should work is informed by his own experiences as a university student in India, and then in his first job as an engineer at Schlumberger, a big company that provides services to oil drillers.
Sanjay Sarma: I grew up in India in a relatively really terrific school, great professors, but in a traditional system. I r t was very hard to get into the school. There's A competitive exam. And, you know, tens of thousands of people took the exam and only a few hundred literally got into it. And I got in. And then I got lost. And I was talking to one of my classmates the other day and he remembered that I was the Fun-Loving student, not the the student who aced everything. And looking, and then I went from there to work directly. I didn't go to grad school. And suddenly I rediscovered myself. Because I suddenly discovered the importance of context. I discovered the importance of actually doing stuff with what you learned as opposed to putting it in escrow and hoping that it might become useful someday.
Wade Roush: You do talk in the book about how you learn mechanical engineering in a theoretical way in college, but it wasn't really until you started a job at an, on an actual oil rig in the North Sea, having to actually, you know, monitor and repair these giant drilling machines that you had a hands on practical, everyday, very urgent reason to understand these concepts in practice, and that that's when things started clicking for you.
Sanjay Sarma: Without a doubt. Look, context creates the shelves and the drawers to put your information in. Right?
Wade Roush: In the 1990s Sarma joined MIT as a professor Department of Mechanical Engineering, and pretty soon he got a chance to put his insights about context to work, as the co-instructor of a course in design and manufacturing called 2.007 r . Also known as MIT’s famous robot competition.
Sanjay Sarma: it's a very MIT course, where students get a kit and they're asked to build robots and then there's a competition. It's so outside-in, you know, you're not teaching, you know how to design a gear, which is what we learn in India, or how to, you know, calculate the stress. We do that in other courses. But in this course, it was about systems thinking. It was thinking outside-in. Designing, you know, strategy. And I realized, oh, my God, that provides all the context in a class that I got when I went to work. And that to me was sort of transformative. That's outside-in.
Wade Roush: In 2.007 students have a different challenge each year. Like one year, there was a a Star Wars theme, and the main object was to spin a pair of wheels attached to the engines of a model X-Wing. All the competitors start with the same box of parts, and the point is to come up with the their own unique and hopefully effective solution to the challenge.
[tape from MIT 2.007 robot competition in 2017]
Sanjay Sarma: But context, you go, oh, my God, yeah. That's where this control theory is useful. That's why mechanics is useful. That's why heat transfer useful. That's where something else is useful. Oh, that's you know, those are the ways in which a gear can can wear, or these are the ways in which a pressure vessel can leak and explode potentially. Right. That context is so fundamental. If we flipped the way we taught and focused on context and curiosity, our outcomes would be significantly better and students would have a much better time with it. And we'd have more citizens who are willing to take on the problems of the world that we are leaving them with.
Wade Roush: We’ll work our way back around to the 2.007 robot competition in a minute. But first…I wanted to ask Sarma about MIT’s in a different kind of education that’s sort of the opposite of hands-on engineering training, namely massive online open courses. In 2011 MIT created a whole program to produce new MOOCs called MITx, and together with Harvard it formed a nonprofit company called edX that’s now the world’s second largest provider of MOOCs.
Wade Roush: Since 2012, you've held, as far as I can tell, at least three different titles at MIT. You were Director of Digital Learning, then you were Dean of Digital Learning, and you're currently Vice President of Open Learning. And I suspect that there's a bigger story behind the way your title has evolved and that it may reflect the way MIT itself thinks about these opportunities and its obligations in this area of education reform. So can you tell that story?
Sanjay Sarma: Yeah, you know, when. So I wasn't involved in inventing the massive open online courses. That was the president of MIT and someone who I think deserves a lot of credit here at MIT, Anant Agarwal, who became the CEO of edX. The two of them developed the MIT version of the MOOC and then working with Harvard established edX. And then Anant left to lead edX. And so the then chancellor, Eric Grimson, requested me to take on that role. Initially, we were trying to figure out how to make MOOCs, and then as we got into it, we realized, my God, if you're going to make MOOCs, massive open online courses, first of all, they've got to take advantage of this other incredible legacy MIT has, which is Open Courseware, which was founded 20 years ago. So we combine those two and then we realized we needed the rules for doing this. What is the science of learning? We can't do this on instinct. And so we established the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative to look at the science of learning, which contributed in part to this book. We have eminent cognitive neuroscientists here, people like John Gabrieli, who've been thinking about this for decades, and they made tremendous contributions to learning and, you know, learning-related conditions like dyslexia. And then once we did that, we realized that we needed to also launch a worldwide lab for people to access or get, you know, access to this content. So we launched the Jameel World Education Lab. So it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You know, we started doing more and more and more. And it became more and more central to MIT. For example, we launched a stackable credential called the MicroMaster's, which has now taken off. There are more than 50 on four continents. And we launched it here. And so as it became more both sort of fundamental, but also as the scale grew, we have almost a million people enrolled in MicroMasters at various levels in the MicroMaster, more than four million people taking our MOOCs, edX has crossed 100 million enrollments. So the role grew and that that is what led to both the change of my title, but also the fact that the president wanted this role to report to him because he felt it was very critical to the future. And thank god. It worked out during covid. I mean, obviously terrible time for humanity. But the skill of being able to do stuff online has served at MIT and other schools in good stead.
Wade Roush: But Sarma says that just because MOOCs turned out to be useful during the pandemic doesn’t mean educators have worked out all the kinks.
Wade Roush: Are there examples of ed tech that are working in your mind? And then conversely, are there other examples of edtech that maybe not working? Maybe edtech turns out to be actively counterproductive in some situations.
Sanjay Sarma: Yeah, ed tech is the tool and can be good or it can be bad….So to me, the massive open online courses, stackable credentials, and a lot of the cognitive tricks that are used in, for example, online language programs, whether it's Duolingo or Babbel, by the way, all of them, many of them use the tricks that I write about my book. Right. That's the strange thing. Most professors don't know them, but these software programs do, right? It's I think that's where I point to success. Having said that, this is also going to be a fad. There's going to be a lot of talk about how suddenly, oh, I have an A.I. program to teach your kid to ace, you know, math. Be a little bit skeptical because there's going to be a lot of there's going to be a lot of confusing and mediocre stuff out there. But there is no doubt that if you take the Khan Academies the world, you take 3Blue1Brown, which is a channel on YouTube, or ViHart, or Minute Physics, or Crash Course. They are wonderful and the content is out there and it is transformative.
Wade Roush: You do also give examples in the book of school districts that are perhaps so understaffed and overstretched that they wind up calling on some of this online courseware as their whole curriculum, basically, and they stick students in front of their laptops and tell them to basically progress through these courses, but without any in-person sort of expert handholding and instruction, as if the content itself were enough. That seems to be a recipe for failure. And yet it's kind of a temptation if the content's out there, to deploy it without marrying it up with adequate in-person instruction, right?
Sanjay Sarma: Absolutely. Look, this is a tool in the tool can be abused. In fact, that's what I was referring to. You can stick kids in front of it and assume they're going to learn and, or adults for that matter. Actually, adults are better. There's more volition. There's more discipline. But to stick a kid in front of it and declare victory, it is a terribly sad, hollow use of the technology. And that's what I caution against. The fact of the matter is, it's a tool, but it's a tool for the human. The learner is a human and the coach is a human. You can make the coach much more effective. It's a force multiplier, but it multiplies. And if you multiply zero, you get zero. And that's the problem.
Wade Roush: So speaking of coaching, the example of innovation in education that you come back to the most frequently in the book, it kind of animates the book in a way, is again, Course 2.007, the robotics competition at MIT, which does in fact seem to embody all of the stuff you're talking about in terms of hands-on learning. To quote Woodie Flowers. I think he talked about not just learning calculus, but how to think using calculus. And the robotics competition is all about how not just to build a robot, but how to think through engineering. Right.
Sanjay Sarma: Look, first of all, 2.007 was created by someone many of us at MIT, particularly me, consider a hero in education, Woodie Flowers, whom you mentioned, who passed away as we were writing the book and it was really heartbreaking. And this book was we dedicated in major part to his memory. The thing about 2.007 is this recognition that we can take a kit and give it to students and give them a competition, you know, and the competition as they build one robot, one robot each, or maybe a robot and a helper robot, and we don't particularly encourage it, but they can interfere with each other, and they get scores. And every year it's a different competition. And the final day is stunning. It's a stunning competition. So it what it embodies is this ability to take an open ended problem, break it down, think through the issues strategically. Now, most schools would shy away from it. You know why? Because it's hard to grade. It's hard to find coaches. And remember, most schools say, "We will only teach something we can grade it." And that is a reflection of this winnowing mentality that warps our view of learning and education.
Wade Roush: So they solve that at MIT by making sure that the winners of the competition don't get a huge advantage. I mean your success in the competition is not a big part of your final grade in 2.007. Right.
Sanjay Sarma: Yeah. So we decouple winning the competition. That's a different recognition from the grades you get in the competition. The grade is based on how you, to your point, thought about design. You know, are you thinking in the right way? Are you thinking about mechanics in the right way. Are you thinking about friction in the right way. Are you thinking about the actual design, the components, the way you you laid them out, the winnowing of design ideas, not of the students. Right. That is what we judge. And that's what a great is based on. And that decoupling is wonderful.
Wade Roush: But the conundrum that you yourself acknowledge many times in the book is that 2.007 Is a super expensive course. It may be, in fact, the single most expensive course per student at all of MIT. And so therefore the most difficult to scale up. Although I guess there is a living example in the in the form of the FIRST robotics competition for high school students. And it's a huge success. So many kids compete every year….But are there other ways to think about scaling up some of those lessons, about the value of winnowing out design ideas and the importance of having a human coach there to work with you through this whole process of building an effective robot? How can you scale that up to to millions of people?
Sanjay Sarma: I absolutely believe we could scale it up. Without a doubt. It does take a lot of effort to think it through. It’ll take some money to actually put that effort in. But it doesn't have to be ten times more expensive or even twice as expensive as school is today. I just feel that we need to change our systems. For one thing, if you had a lot of online content, you would create time for the teachers to be coaches, rather than simply repeating in the classroom what they could have done online. Right. So right there you created resources. And that content is almost there already. I mean, you know, the government doesn't have to spend a lot of money. Just go to YouTube and search these channels. You see amazing content. Khan Academy by itself has transformed, has produced a lot content. And the coaching can be very broad. I mean, for example, you know, look, think about a few hundred years ago, did Michelangelo ever attend a lecture? Right. And he turned out pretty good, don't you think? I mean, Leonardo turned out pretty well. Because they were coached. You can read Vasari's book about the Renaissance sculptors and painters. And you can see that they worked in apprenticeship. Right. So I think that there is actually a range of things we can do. And in fact, I have another book coming out shortly which looks at everything from apprenticeship models to internship models to certificate programs where you actually work with industry all the way to vocational schools. So I don't want to go on and on. But look to me, what happens with FIRST robotics is a classic example of taking this expensive MIT course and scaling it, getting the parents involved, getting clubs involved, and you can flip it. But this is a, this deserves the attention of the national government. This is a Manhattan project for the good. You know, we need to do this. Maybe the better analogy is this is the moonshot, you know, for our for our future generations.
Wade Roush: Hopefully someone's listening in Washington.
Wade Roush: I'd like to read a passage from the book where you're talking about what is it that creates the perceived value of a degree from an elite school like MIT? So here's the quote. "There's a truism whispered among administrators at top colleges and universities concerning why students keep signing up for elite schools. The value, the thinking goes, comes in three parts: the stuff you learn, the people you meet and the fact that you got in." Unquote. So, you know, full disclosure, I should say, as somebody who went to Harvard for college at MIT for grad school, I'm guilty as charged. But the question is, how can you change the whole winnowing process without first changing what it is that people seem to value about elite educations? Right. … It feels like elite gatekeeping institutions like MIT are seen as elite, they're small and selective. And so I'm wondering, you know, with with MITs, with edX, with Open Learning, do you see yourself as trying to work against that framework or work within it somehow?
Sanjay Sarma: Yeah, I mean, I will say that…the school you went, Wade, MIT, we value not just the selection, but the people you meet doesn't include just each other, but also includes the professors and the grad students. And because it's a research institution…it means that our students can apprentice with these research programs. So I would I would say that the second, I wouldn't write it off. I think it's important. You create a community of excellence and people grow on that excellence. …T way we address the third issue, which is the selection. Right. Which is the, "You got in so you must be good," is through programs like the MicroMasters that we invented at MIT that now edX has deployed, and there are more than 24, more than 24, 25 universities on four continents implementing it. Here's what we do. The MicroMasters, it's say half of a Masters, but it's fully online. You don't get a Masters. You get this new credential we invented. We call it the MicroMasters. But get this Wade. There is no admissions. Anyone can take it. So right there, there's no selection, right? We call it inverted admissions. That's why we have almost a million people enrolled. And then they take the courses and there's exams and there's a final exam. It's all sort of proctored. And if you finish, then you can apply for the actual masters, which you can finish in half the time, and we have more than 120, 130 universities around the world that'll admit students. Now, what did we just do here? This is not selection based on a piece of paper. This is achievement. So we believe that you can actually invert the funnel, right, or make, or take away sort of a paper based admissions and make it one of, you know, you proving you can do it to yourself as much as anyone else.
Wade Roush: There's still a winnowing process. It's just that the students are are winnowing themselves, in a sense.
Sanjay Sarma: That’s right.
Wade Roush: And it's based purely on how hard they're willing to work.
Sanjay Sarma: Yes, exactly. It's entirely based on that. And so it's a tradeoff between those two worlds. Right, of. And we put a lot of effort into making the content sort of well produced and we use all the cognitive tricks. It's not as if [we're] making cognitively unfriendly and seeing if you lose interest, "Oh, see, we got you. You lost interest. And so you're not good enough." As opposed to that, we make the videos short and we produce the content right. We apply, you know, all the stuff I talk about in the book. So we take that away. The other thing that's happened is once we did the MicroMasters, a bunch of other universities came to us and said, look, you'll probably admit, you know, the top of the top students, but we'd like to admit, you know, students in our continent because it'll be more convenient for them. So we thought about it and we have more than 100, actually almost 140 partner universities now, literally on five continents, that students can apply to with their MicroMasters and go there, which is less expensive. They can top it off. But they're doing it based on their achievement and their sort of intent. They're displaying that.
Wade Roush: Do you see signs that the MicroMaster's credential will begin to take on some brand recognition and some meaning in the in the ladder of achievement?
Sanjay Sarma: But I do think and I know that the MicroMasters and other credentials like this are gathering value. I get calls all the time from people I know, "Hey my son got a MicroMasters and now they're getting a job there and it's serving them well. The boss loves it," you know. So, yeah, without a doubt.
Wade Roush: I wrapped up my interview with Sarma by coming back around to the question of what the pandemic is teaching us about edtech. Is remote learning at best a poor substitute for in-person teaching? Or is there still room for new technologies that could bring hands-on education and coaching to many more people, the way the Link Trainer helped thousands of Army Air Corps pilots learn how to fly?
Wade Roush: Has the pandemic revealed unexpected strengths or unexpected weaknesses in our practices around education and technology and distance learning?
Sanjay Sarma: Absolutely. In fact, I wrote an article about it a few months ago. In some ways, the pandemic is the worst of both worlds. Let me explain. In a lot of classrooms around the world, education was distance education to begin with. What do I mean by that? You know, the professor would talk. The student sitting, you know, 10 rows back, tuned out, OK. At least there was some human touch. At least the student could talk to their neighbor or, you know, or, you know, maybe approach a teaching assistant or ask the professor something, should they have the stomach and the and the interest to do that. Right. In the pandemic we just took that and put it online. We're in Zoom World. It is neither good online education, which would be asynchronous, very carefully crafted videos like we do in a massive open online courses or we do in our MicroMasters or what Sal Khan does on a Khan Academy. It's not that. Nor is it in-person, sort of done right, or even in-person done not right, but with some human touch. It is the worst of both worlds. And a lot of people are calling it online education. I please beg you to understand: that is not online education. That is a heroic attempt by well-meaning teachers, well-intentioned students, and suffering parents to make good in tough times. It is not good online education. So it became very clear to us that we needed to sort of flesh out our vocabulary. But I think the science bears this stuff out. If you want to make Zoom lectures more interesting, shoot a video on your iPhone, send it to the students and make the Zoom a discussion. That's called a flipped classroom, right. So a lot of these things. Yeah. I mean, my God, if I could, we could write a whole new book now.
Wade Roush: Ok, well, the book once again is called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn. It came out in 2020, but you're still kind of doing the virtual book tour. So I want to thank you for joining me and thanks for all the work you do, Sanjay, this has been a real delight.
Sanjay Sarma: Such a pleasure, Wade.
[Transition music]
Wade Roush: Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush. Our intro music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. The outro music and all the other music you heard in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
You can follow Soonish on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find a transcript for this episode as well as the full show notes. I’ll put a link in the show notes to Sanjay and Luke’s book, and to some great videos from MIT’s 2.007 robot competition.
Soonish is an independent podcast supported in part by you, our listeners. Your donations on Patreon help me stay independent and keep making more episodes for everyone to enjoy. A reminder: all Patreon supporters get access to one of our coolest rewards, Tomorrow's Episode Today. That means access to every new episode of Soonish, one day before everyone else hears it. It's like living in the future! If you'd like to support the show, please go to Patreon.com/soonish. And thanks!
Soonish is one of 10 indie podcasts that have banded together to form the Hub & Spoke audio collective. And this week I want to tell you about a sharktastic episode of The Briny from producer Matt Frassica. It’s about how long-distance ocean swimmers deal with their fear of…things from below.
[clip from The Briny]
The episode is called “Fear Is the Thing with Fins,” and one thing I love about it is that Matt not only produced the episode but wrote all of his own music. You can find that episode and more at TheBriny.net. And you can always check out the rest of the Hub & Spoke lineup at hubspokeaudio.org.
That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. And I’ll speak to you again… soonish
