Futurism and Education - A Conversation with Raya Bidshahri

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You can tackle a lot of hyperpolarization in society by teaching young minds to transcend moral tribes, to think critically, to overcome their cognitive biases, and to be more empathetic. So it's not just about learning about these issues in the world, but actually putting learners in a position where they're empowered to help solve these challenges.

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining us again for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. For this week's episode, it was fantastic to be able to record my conversation with Raya Bidschari at The London Project in Dubai. Raya is a serial education entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and award-winning educator. She's the founder and chief executive officer of The School of Humanity, a revolutionary online high school with a progressive model and skills-based curriculum. Raya is also the founder of Awqademy, an award-winning organization offering future-focused and wisdom-based education. She has served on the founding teams of multiple organizations, including SciFest Dubai and SheWorks. Raya serves as an advisory board member on multiple edtech companies and is a member of the Bett Future Education Council. She was named one of the BBC's 100 Women for 2019, and Raya has spoken at many conferences, including the G20 Youth20 Summit, Global Education Forum, the UNESCO Expo Sciences, GES Leaders, and many more. She's been sharing her expertise as a keynote speaker for over a decade since the age of 16 and brings a much-needed youth perspective to discussions about the future of education. You can connect with Raya on Twitter @raya_bidd or on LinkedIn. And thanks again to the team at The London Project for their great support and the recording.

Well, thank you so much for joining me.

It's a real pleasure to have you with me on the Future Learning Design Podcast as a futurist yourself.

Thank you.

But thank you, right? No, it's a real pleasure to speak to you. So I'd love to begin, you're just kind of at the beginning of a new adventure in a way with the School of Humanity, but before we get into that, you Well, a lot of your work has been around thinking about the future, exponential futures and futurism. And I've, you know, I've seen you've been referred to as a futurist. I don't know whether you would refer to yourself as a futurist, but I just wondered to start off with what you feel is the role of futurism in education in relation to how we think about education and then how we might support change in education.

Yeah, I love that question. And there's a new term actually around educational futurism and educational futurists. So there's a few people who now refer to themselves as educational Futurists.

Yeah, I saw that.

Yeah, and I think that's a really important and powerful role in education because if you think about the role of futurists, it's often to exercise radical imagination and radical openness and to be able to envision what the future of humanity could look like 50, 100, 200 years from now. And then how can we best prepare ourselves for that future? If you take that a step forward, we can ask ourselves what kind of a future do we want to create and then kind of map out the steps towards that future. So I think it's really important that we apply that framework and methodology to education and ask ourselves, what kind of a future do we want for our global education systems 50, 100, 200, 1,000 years from now? And what is the roadmap to getting there? So I would say that's the power of applying futurism to education. And I think it's a much-needed kind of radical overview of it. We can be very conservative and kind of, you know, history-focused when it comes to our education space. So a bit more future-focused Linguist perspectives can be really powerful.

Absolutely. Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, it informs a lot of my work, but I found this, which I'd love to read to you if that's okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So this is just a summary of a similar kind of idea, right? All of today's schools and universities are too past and present oriented, right? The education system lags behind the rest of society in responding to change. The way children and young people look at the future has a direct bearing on their motivation for academic performance and how they 'Live, cope, and grow in a high-change society.' I love that. It's nice, right? And then, 'The future is a subject of study for all learners, young and old, and it could be a point of departure for changes in education.' Yeah. Right? It's pretty good, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1974. Who is that from?

So this is a summary of— it's from a paper in 1974, but a summary of Alvin Toffler's words, right?

Yes, yes.

I mean, clearly an amazing person and way ahead of his time in a way, but I guess the interesting parallels between what you're saying and what we're reading there is clearly people have been thinking about this in relation to education for a long, long time.

Exactly. Yeah.

Where do you see perhaps firstly some of the challenges around that and the resistance to, to that kind of message? And then also, is now a different moment?

Yeah, it's a great, great question because I think, you know, in innovation they often use the terminology of an immune response. So every time you go into a company and try to radically disrupt things or reinvent things, there's usually an immune reaction from the legacy systems, right? And we like to say the education system notoriously has a very strong immune reaction. So if you go into any school or any Ministry of Education and try to completely overhaul things, there's almost like a reaction that you get in return. I think one of the things one of the things I always fall back to in the education space, you have to take a systems thinking approach when trying to change things, because there isn't one problem and one solution. You have a lot of systemic challenges. And if you look at the system at large, you have, you know, regulators, schools, parents, universities, like all of these different nodes in the system play a role in contributing to the problem. And all of them have an opportunity in terms of solving the problem. So I think each node of the system has its own challenges that they pose to systemic change. So if I were to narrow it down into 3 bottlenecks, I would say one is regulations. So education continues to be a heavily regulated space, especially high school education, higher education. So for example, in most countries, including in the GCC, there are mandates and laws around the kinds of transcripts that students graduate with. So making a shift from your traditional report card towards skill-based transcripts or portfolio-based transcripts is almost impossible. To do legally. And then you have standards around content. So there's emphasis on certain old-school content that they still require, laws around the hours of schooling that make it difficult to move towards blended or hybrid models. So regulations, in my opinion, is one of the most difficult areas to tackle and really hinders change. The second is, I want to say, university admissions system, the reliance on SATs, the reliance on those report cards. That again puts pressure on high school students and high schools to focus on certain things. And then the third thing I'd say is parents. Parents. Parent mindsets. Nostalgia is a huge factor for a lot of parents, right? They think about their own high school experience, or, you know, schooling experience in general, and they usually want the same for their kids.

Well, it worked for me, right?

Exactly. And what they don't realize is that their kids are growing up in a very different world and will go into a very different future than what they were used to. I do believe this is a different time. I think COVID-19, despite the difficulties it posed to many parents and learners really shook things up. A lot of the ideas that my team and I present don't sound as insane and don't sound as crazy after, you know, seeing 1 billion learners transition into online learning in a matter of weeks. And there's research to prove it. So there's research from EdSurge that shows that over 50% of parents now show favorable views over to homeschooling and online schooling and alternative schooling post-COVID. COVID-19. So there's some early research to show that we may be experiencing a different moment, a transitional moment in history.

Yeah, interesting.

Yeah.

Now, I spoke to Valerie Hannan recently for the podcast, and she— I mean, she used the phrase, 'The future just kicked the door in,' right? Which I like, because it's like it really just came up for us to really confront what radical change or exponential change might suddenly kind of present to us.

For sure, for sure. I think all around the world Prior to the pandemic, online schooling was not regulated. There were no laws, there was no systems in place. Many countries didn't even have business licenses if you wanted to start online school. And all of a sudden that's changed. And for the first time— and this is my favorite bit— international board exams all around the world were cancelled for 2 years in a row, and universities were forced— over 50% of them are now test optional. So all of those things make it easier now to launch something completely different because all of these legacy components of the system have suddenly fallen apart.

Yeah, very nice. And I also like, just going back to what you said earlier about futurism, that you've got this idea of the children themselves, even the educators themselves, actually shaping the future, right? Because I think some of the issues around futurism have been, you know, of course we can't predict, and even less so now can we predict what the future is going to look like because it's changing so fast. But it's that idea of actually not trying to predict the future, but actually allow children the space and some of the competencies to be able to effect change and shape the future. I think that's an interesting part of this idea of educational futurism.

Absolutely. There is a beautiful quote by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed where he says, "The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it. It's not something you await, but rather create." And I like to think all our curriculum and model falls back that quote is, "How can we give young minds the mindsets, the competencies, the skills to imagine, design, and execute an exciting future for our species?" Yeah, brilliant.

And I mean, you're doing it yourself, right? You have been doing it for a long time with Awkademie and now School of Humanity. But before we talk specifically about some of those adventures, Awwcademy clearly was a, you know, there's a lot in that about wisdom and awe, even the name itself. And perhaps just wanted to invite you just to have a bit of reflection about why, why those things? Why do you think that's an important part of learning and education?

Yeah, I think it's what we've lost in our education system. You know, it's something that we really lack. If you think about learning, it really should be an experience that is incentivized by awe and wonder and curiosity. And we've all felt that at one moment or another, either as kids or as you know, even adults when we come across, when we watch an awe-inspiring documentary or we come across a beautiful quote or something incredible that we can't wrap our heads around. And that's the part of the learning experience that we wanted to continue to kind of embed for young minds. So the awe and then the second piece, yeah, wisdom. So there's great work by an author called Thomas Lombardo, who's a futurist, and he talks about wisdom-based education. For future cyborgs. So he talked, you know, the whole thing is about the trend of us towards merging with technology and moving away from seeing us versus tech and becoming, you know, increasingly embedded with our technology. And then you think about those cyborgs of the future from that definition, he asked, you know, what kind of education do those future cyborgs need? And really primarily, it's not just about preparing them with these skills like AI and VR, but actually giving them wisdom competencies. So the ability to have an expanded sense of self, expanded sense of time, the ability to have compassion and empathy. And, um, that's really what's missing from education, because it's not just about test prep, it's not just about preparing for university, but actually giving young minds the existential and life skills and wisdom to be able to, you know, tap into something more meaningful.

Yeah, that's great. And I've had an interesting conversation with Eagle Grossman and Charles Cassidy on wisdom for, for the podcast as well. It's a topic I'm very interested in myself, and particularly I'm interested in the connection that that has with knowledge as well, because clearly I think one of the points of resistance to change is this fear that we lose the knowledge element, right? And you can just look it up on Google, which, you know, is a spurious argument at the best of times, but clearly there's some, you know, there's truth to that. So it's trying to think around where is the role still of knowledge and understanding and therefore than wisdom. Yeah, because you don't just jump to wisdom, right?

Oh, for sure, for sure. I think a lot of these things also are— you have to shift your education model to experiential learning because, you know, soft skills or even wisdom isn't developed by consuming information like we do in the classroom or memorizing facts and taking tests. It's instead experienced, right? And there are ways to cultivate that in a learning environment, but it's not your traditional learning model. So that's also part of the challenge, is in order to truly cultivate wisdom, you have to rethink what what we mean by teaching and what we mean by the classroom and what we mean by the entire education system.

Yeah. No, it's interesting. And actually, I don't know, I take it back. Maybe you do jump to wisdom sometimes, right? Through an experience, right? A deep experience of awe and wonder. You know, maybe that does give you some insights that actually it's not a linear path to it. So yeah, I retract my former statement. Sure, sure. But no, interesting.

Yeah.

And obviously that was integrated, those ideas were integrated heavily into the platform of AWCADemy. So perhaps you could then just, yeah, speak to that a little bit in terms of how you began to integrate those ideas into an online school, which was Aw Academy, and then as you've now evolved into School of Humanity.

Yeah. So a lot of the work that we did at Aw Academy was actually set up as an almost a supplement to the traditional education system. So we would do a lot of workshops, boot camps. We also had an online platform with modules, but it was always supplementary to what already existed. And I quickly realized that there were challenges with that. There were challenges with working within the constraints of the existing school system. You had limited time of the learners, right? You know, as soon as— as long as they had exams and homework and they had all these accountabilities and responsibilities within the system, it was really hard for any extracurricular or supplementary provider to have true impact. At the same time, we were seeing that a lot of the real impact and change in the education system were happening at the edges with the rise of these new alternative progressive schools all around the world. So I'll give a few examples of some of these schools that inspired us. So for example, you have the New View School in Boston, and they've been around for a few years now. And they're a school with no subjects, no classrooms, and no exams. Instead, learners develop future skills by embarking upon 2-week studios where they work on different challenges. The educators are like coaches, and they graduate with like a skill-based transcript and a portfolio-based transcript. And their kids have gotten into MIT and Harvard, and they have a really cool track record. So they've proven you can move away from the status quo and succeed. In parallel, there's the Agora School in Netherlands. Once again, very similar. It's a completely inquiry-based, you know, learners direct their own schedules. The facilitators are not instructors, they're facilitators and mentors and coaches. And once again, they're doing an awesome job. So for me, I felt like that's where the real impact is. It's this new, new rise of school models that we're seeing early, early glimpses of. They're not mainstream, but there's some really proven examples around the world. So the School of Humanity was set up to kind of help scale that movement. We saw that a lot of these schools were being set up in kind of small communities and they were being set up as brick and mortar first, whereas we felt like, especially in the MENA region, you know, there is an early adopter demand of parents who wanted access to such models but didn't necessarily have them. And so the School of Humanity was kind of designed to take that step on taking really progressive school models, reinventing education and doing it in a more global and scalable and accessible way.

Brilliant. Yeah, that's amazing. And there is, I mean, there are encouraging signs, aren't there? I mean, with Agora, I had good conversations with Jan and Guido there.

Amazing.

There are signs, I think, that they, you know, they're collaborating with the local authorities there in Belgium and the Netherlands. And, you know, there are beginning some kind of early adopter local governments even who are beginning to pick up some of these ideas as well, which is great. And there's, it's definitely a culture of of that kind of innovation here in Dubai.

For sure.

And Dr. Abdullah and KHDA clearly are in great support of that kind of thing. So hopefully there's some, back to your earlier point about restrictions and accountability, there's some hope there that there's some dovetailing of those alignments.

Absolutely. Netherlands actually has a whole class of schools called special schools. And these are schools with unique educational ethos and models. And they actually have a unique regulatory framework for those kinds of schools so that they don't inhibit innovation and they allow those schools to exist. A great case study of how governments can continue to have some standards and quality assurance metrics in place, but still allow these really unique models to emerge in their economies.

Yeah, that's brilliant. And maybe could I ask, in terms of School of Humanity, just for a bit of detail in terms of what types of programs are you running? Because I've obviously, I've looked at them myself, but giving a, a taste of, of that kind of awe and wisdom that's integrated into these interdisciplinary inquiries and through the, those kinds of programs that you're running.

Absolutely. So, you know, School of Humanity, we like to call it an online school like no other. And essentially we've reimagined and reinvented what we learn, how we learn, and why we learn, including where we learn. So in terms of what we learn, the curriculum is a completely interdisciplinary curriculum. It's a skill-based curriculum. So we cover, you know, critical skills, over 600 skills from 8 domains, including some of the traditional stuff like mathematical literacy, scientific thinking, but also covering things like conceptual skills, morality and ethics, existential intelligence, emotional intelligence, and giving equal equal weight to those skills. So it's a completely interdisciplinary and skill-based curriculum. Learners embark upon interdisciplinary learning paths like future of medicine, future of money, and they learn by solving global challenges as well. So for people who do understand the jargon, it's a mix of challenge-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and personalized learning as well. And in terms of how we learn, we do have industry mentors guiding the learners throughout those challenges. In addition to the learning paths, learners can actually, you know, develop their own personalized learning plan. So one of the things we say, for example, let's say we have learning outcomes in our core curriculum around coding and sure, in our, we have skill paths where you can kind of hone in those skills. But if a certain learner has taken their own independent courses and says, hey, I have these skills, I have learned them in another way, or maybe I've developed some of these competencies when I did this internship, there's no reason why we can't recognize that learning. And also included in the transcripts. That's also part of what makes the model unique. And we also wanted to reimagine the incentives of learning. Why do we learn? In traditional schools, learning is heavily incentivized by arbitrary tests and exams that really don't have any inherent value other than the fact that society deems them valuable. So we've moved away towards more skill-based transcripts and skill-based assessments and more formative assessments. —so regular smaller assessments rather than having one summative test. We've also looked at industry standards. How do you evaluate communication skills or technology skills in the workforce, and how can we bring those same standards into education at a high school level so it's meaningful evaluations? And the final point I'll add there is even though we're being set up as an online school, we do believe the future is hybrid, so we are starting some hybrid programs in the fall, and we're collaborating with venues, co-learning spaces all around the world to launch kind of a more blended and hybrid programs. Yeah, that's great.

I mean, that's something I wanted to ask you about in relation to where, where do you see the value added of the interpersonal, the physical space to do the learning, and then obviously the online stuff? How— what's your vision around those things?

Yeah, I think both are really important. I don't think kids necessarily need to be in school as much as they are now, from 7 AM to 4 PM, 5 days a week, you know, in some cases at least every day for 200+ days a year. I think we can be a bit more flexible, right? So giving learners more flexibility in how many days they spend in school can be really powerful. But no denying that, you know, so much of the social learning and emotional learning happens because of everything else that happens outside of the classroom in a school setting. So, you know, if you really think about the purpose of a school today, it's not learning. The learning stuff can happen online. It's the social community. It's the emotional, you know, connections that are formed. It's all that stuff. So when we imagine our hybrid programs, we really imagine giving learners flexibility in that about half the learning and instruction and workshops can happen online. The other half can happen in person. They can even have the flexibility of going into learning hubs whenever they wish. Rather than being mandated like they're prisoners. So ideally, you have a balance. For us, strategically, it made sense to start as an online school because it's easier to bootstrap. It's easier to get accredited. And it's easier to scale globally when you have an early adopter market. But we do believe that the future is hybrid.

Interesting. And then just on your credentialing, how are you tackling that one?

Yeah, so we're actually licensed as a secondary education provider in the United States. So we're licensed as a school. And we are on the path to international accreditation. We're also adopting something called a mastery transcript. It's a really cool kind of transcript where instead of having grades, you show transferable skills linked to a portfolio of project.

From the consortium. From the consortium, yeah.

In fact, I think you should have them on your podcast. They're awesome. And the cool thing about the Mastery Transcript Consortium is it's increasingly gaining acceptance amongst American universities and slowly universities around the world. So it's already a recognized form of transcript. Which is awesome.

Fantastic.

Now, it's very interesting, the hybridity that's coming in in terms of the way that we use different spaces. And so that idea of— and I've seen, you know, as you use the phrase learning hub there, it's not a school, it's a learning hub. But then perhaps a learning hub is also a co-working space. You know, you see— I've seen this happening as well in terms of hybrid professionals and learners. And as well, as you were talking, you talk about high school education, but then we talk about learning and development in— once you go into your career, and actually they're kind of the same thing, right? They really— it's just a continuum, to use the clichéd phrase, lifelong learning. Yeah. I mean, it— but it really is, especially when some of that's online, some of that's in person, you know, you then just end up seeing a continuum of learning and development, learning and growth, education, whatever terminology you want to use. Yeah, but I think that's an interesting, again, inflection point that we're seeing a lot of similarity between those two spaces. Absolutely.

And then what we're also seeing— so at School of Humanity, we call them co-learning spaces, just as you have co-working spaces. And the approach we're taking, we're not building these ourselves, we're partnering with existing venues that are really inspiring and we think the learners would love to learn from. And this is something the educational futurist Mark Prensky is a huge advocate for, is changing this terminology. And I think it's something that has to happen gradually, right? I think, for example, if you— let's say you took the word education away and replaced it with something like empowerment, and you took the word school away and replaced it with learning hub. I find that if you replace too many words at once, it becomes very difficult to communicate to parents and learners what it is that you offer. So I think it's important to transition out of those terminologies gradually. So for example, we don't use the words like subjects or courses. We say learning paths. And, you know, we don't even call them educators. We call them learning facilitators. But we still have the word school in our name just because it's easier to signal to the world what we provide. So I think it's important to do that as a gradual change in society.

Now, that's a really interesting point. And it's like the tension between too much jargon, which actually alienates rather than invites people in. Exactly. And actually, we need to bring people with us on this. And when you actually get to the nub of it, you know, really passionate educators who work in the most traditional of schools, they want learning and growth for their young people, but they might be alienated by the kind of the jargonistic terminology of some of these things. But actually, we need to find some more points of, of kind of unity in order to bring, you know, bring that to bear. But obviously, going back to the beginning, we've got to be thinking about what the the long-term future is, and then sometimes that's going to cause some radical disruptions of what we're doing. Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, and then in relation to some of your other work, because I liked the phrase intelligent optimism, the way that you have been trying to encourage public discourse in Dubai and other places, I'm sure, around science and science literacy. And I know you studied neuroscience yourself at Boston and Perhaps you could just speak a little bit about that in terms of what's the role of that kind of public discourse element around some of these things.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So when we refer to intelligent optimism, and some thought leaders refer to it as rational optimism, there's different variants of that phrase, we're talking about being optimistic about the future based on rationality, evidence, and reason. So most people, when you ask them how they feel about the future of humanity, especially young minds, they're pessimistic. They really think we're headed towards dystopia. And most science fiction movies often tend to depict that as well. And there's There's a reason for this. Our brains are actually wired, you know, to pay more attention to negative news rather than positive news. The news and media agencies know this, so they— for every 19 negative news stories we see, I think we see 1 positive. So our perception of reality is warped in this really negative way. And if you actually look at the data and evidence, we are living longer, healthier, wealthier lives at this point than any other point in human history. In fact, we're living in an era known as the Long Peace. Which is the longest we've gone throughout human history without the world's major powers going into war. You know, murder rates globally are at their lowest points, literacy rates are at their highest points, so there's lots of positive things to celebrate. Now, one thing I will add is whenever we talk about intelligent or rational optimism, it's not saying the world is perfect. It's saying instead that, look, the world has gotten better because we've constantly solved challenges. And yes, there are many, many pressing challenges today. We can continue to solve them and continue to progress. As a species. There's a beautiful quote by, by Steven Pinker, who's, who's written excellent books on this topic, where he says that human progress is not everything gets better for everyone all at the same time. That would be a miracle. And progress is not a miracle, but instead it's about problem solving. And every time we solve a new problem, we create new problems, and then those in return need to be solved. And that's human progress. Yeah. So when we say, you know, we're progressing as a species, we're headed towards positive human progress, that's really what we mean.

Yeah, interesting. But clearly, if I was to bring the intelligent pessimism into that, clearly, I mean, increased inequality, the climate emergency, you know, social justice, all of these issues that we know are very real. And so therefore, just maybe as a final thought, where do you see your role as an educator and as a, you know, thought leader or futurist in relation to a responsibility, I suppose, to help to bring some more problem finding and solving in that context?

I think education— and this has been said in different shapes and forms— education is the most powerful tool with which we can change the world. And in fact, a lot of our curriculum at the School of Humanity was informed by, you know, this vision for human progress. So as my team and I asked ourselves, what kind of a world do we want to live in? And then how can we work backwards from there and embed the skills, the right values and mindsets into our curriculum in order to optimize for creating such a world. Because I think no matter what the challenge is, whether it is climate change, whether it is even how we tackle a pandemic, right, you can kind of work backwards and embed a really systemic, sustainable solution into our education system. So you can tackle a lot of hyperpolarization in society by teaching young minds to, you know, transcend moral tribes, to think critically, to overcome their cognitive biases. To be more empathetic. You can embed a lot of solutions for climate change by teaching systems thinking, by teaching actually, you know, a greater sense of— an expanded sense of time and self towards our planet, teaching cosmic perspectives, appreciation for nature, right? So it's same thing, you can do that again and again for every challenge. And that's ultimately our mission at the School of Humanity. We say it's to reinvent education to better serve our species, and that's ultimately what it all boils down to.

Yeah, very good. Yeah, I've been interested in the idea of social innovation for precisely that reason. I think education absolutely has that duty, almost responsibility, but part of that is that young people need to experience what it is to do those things, and we can't necessarily just teach that. Yeah, exactly.

That's why challenge-based learning is so powerful, and we've worked with this pedagogy, you know, in many different shapes and forms. It's ultimately creating learning paths and designing learning in a way where It's all incentivized by solving global challenges. So one of the learning paths we have coming up over the summer is actually around the future of medicine and healthcare. And the students go through an experience where they actually first understand systemically what is our healthcare system like, what are the different nodes of it, what are the medical technologies that are disrupting things right now, what are the opportunities. And then they actually, you know, identify sub-challenges, do root cause analysis to see what the what the, the sources of those sub-challenges are, and then they themselves develop either entrepreneurial, creative, legislative solutions towards those challenges. So it's not just about learning about these issues in the world, but it's actually putting learners in a position where they're empowered to help solve these challenges and learn, develop different skills, whether it's learning math or communication skills, through the means of solving these challenges. No, I completely agree.

And the counterargument to that is often that young people don't have enough knowledge yet to really be able to tackle those. But for me, that's a spurious argument as well because you can, by experiencing those things, you are also developing the knowledge if the curriculum is designed in, you know, in a really effective way or co-created with the learners, however you're doing it. But if you've got guides and coaches on the side to really target those things, things, you have a, an opportunity to do both. Exactly, exactly.

And I say the same thing actually, entrepreneurship is another example of this. So often you have aspiring entrepreneurs who say, no, I want to build more experience in industry first and then start a company. Whereas any entrepreneur or CEO entrepreneur would tell you it's actually something you can never be prepared for. You learn by doing, right? The moment you start is the moment you actually start learning how to do it. And it's very similar. Of course there is a knowledge piece to it. And part of the program, we actually work with learners to develop their own learning playlists, which, you know, might be podcasts, books, videos, articles that they kind of go through on their own relating to the project. So they have to upskill and they have to increase their knowledge before they can truly solve a problem. So there's that piece to it. But what I think is important, the shift I advocate for is not to not have any focus on knowledge, but rather not have mandates around knowledge, have the mandates be around skills. So you say there are certain skills that everyone must have, right? It could be mathematical reasoning, it could be scientific thinking, but there's so much knowledge in the world that how do you decide what to focus on? And who decides? Who decides, exactly. What's more powerful is, yes, let the learners decide where the knowledge— what knowledge they want to focus on, but of course ensuring that they develop holistic sets of skills across different domains so that they can succeed in life.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I guess the only point where I perhaps slightly disagree with that is the guidance that subject experts can bring to the certain threshold concepts that you just need, right? Super concepts that you just absolutely have to spend some time with if you want to open doors into other domains, right?

Absolutely. That's why we still have our industry mentors. So, when we think about the types of educators we have, there's 2 types. You have your learning facilitators that might be more interdisciplinary educators that guide learners through the learning path. But every week they also meet with their industry mentors who give them guidance around more of the very subject matter expertise to allow that to happen as well.

And the industry mentors are directly relevant to the, like, Future of Medicine? Exactly. For their medics or— Exactly.

Yeah, so for our Future of Medicine, our mentor is an experienced serial entrepreneur in the medical technology space, author and investor in the space as well. And what's really powerful for the learner is they end up with these really cool role models, right? And they get to learn directly from someone who's experienced the space. And there's nothing replacing that, really.

Interesting. And there's a networking element to that as well. Yeah, exactly. Just as another skill that's vital for, you know, for success in the future. For sure. Wow. Thank you. Right. Amazing. Really, really interesting conversation. Yeah. So thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

Amazing. Well, thank you for having me on. This is great. Friedemund.

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