Open Learning - A Conversation with Prof. Sanjay Sarma

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

You get in the mode of transforming rather than winnowing. Winnowing is the opposite of transforming. I mean, no parent would do that to their child. They wouldn't say, well, you've got a C+, honey, but you, you know, you got an A. You never do that because you're committed to transforming your children into the best they can be.

Hi, thanks for joining me for this week's episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. My guest this week is Sanjay Sarma, who is the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. From 2012 to 2021, Sanjay led MIT's Open Learning, first as director, then as dean, and finally as vice president. MIT Open Learning includes the Office of Digital Learning, the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative, the Center for Advanced Virtuality, and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab. In 2020, Sanjay published Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn, which he co-authored with Luke Yokinto. Sanjay has authored over 100 academic papers in computational geometry, sensing, RFID, automation, and computer-aided design. And is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching and research.

Hi Sanjay.

Hey Tim, how are you?

Very good. How is everything this morning?

Things are great, thank you.

Cool.

Well, thank you, Sanjay. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to talk to you, and thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Such a pleasure, Tim, and great to talk about perhaps the most important topic of our times, maybe the second most after health.

Absolutely. It's great. And the book that you've written with Luke, Yokento, Grasp the Science: Transforming How We Learn. I just thought it was a fantastic book and so was inspired to reach out and chat to you. So yeah, I'd be really interested to dig into this with you. So just to start with, I think in my world, teachers, educators, school leaders, everyone's heard of Dewey, right? Everyone knows John Dewey. His reputation precedes him, but not many people have heard of Thorndike, this hidden character in the history of education, particularly in the US. And I thought that was a really interesting frame for a lot of what has then transpired. Obviously this is 20th century we're primarily talking about, but I thought if we could start there, perhaps unpacking that idea that you quote in the book, that understanding the history of education in the US during the 20th century, unless you realize that Thorndike won and Dewey lost, you can't. So I think that's, that's a pretty interesting and provocative statement to start with.

You know, we have a long history in society that's about celebrating great ideals, but doing the exact opposite, right?

Yeah.

And this is another example of that. I mean, you could argue that Gandhi lost and Kissinger won. And Ellen Condif Langeman, who was the dean at the Harvard School of Education, Graduate School of Education, said Thorndike won and Dewey lost. And the reason that is, is because We find false security in fake math.

All right.

And what I mean by that is Dewey's words were actually deeper, but in many respects also harder to quantify.

Yeah.

Harder to practice. They seem sort of soft. They seem fuzzy. And we have a tendency to give credence to things that are numbers. And frankly, I think there's a gender thing as well, a little bit more male, you know. And so Thorndike measured everything, including, as we say in the book, perhaps the shape of his mustache, right? Precisely shaped. And it was fake in many respects. The math was, you know, he was measuring the wrong things. He was measuring behavior. He was one of the great behaviorists, which is since long discredited. And he was measuring performance, you know, of animals, right? And there was some racism built in, scientific racism, because it also permitted him you conflate sort of childhood learning and things like that and exposure and make racist statements. And because of course they're all very numbers-based, dammit, I can say that, right? It's a podcast.

Of course you can. Yeah, absolutely.

That won. That perspective won. And for all the big talk about Dewey, who said what were more profound things about students really learning and learning trumping teaching, right? The management schools went down the Thorndike route and we talk a big game when it comes to education, but we don't practice it.

Definitely. And one of the things I really liked was this outside-in and inside-out frame that you also put on both of those. Cause I think, I mean, obviously the measurement leads often and that, you know, it's the tail that wags the dog, but it was also a kind of a very reductionist idea, right? This kind of Thorndikean inside-out perspective, whereas Dewey was coming from the outside in. Maybe you could just explain that a little bit.

You know, the human brain has 80-something billion neurons and something magical happens, emergent, beautiful stuff. And you know it, you know, you know it when you listen to poetry or music, or when you hear a standup comic say something that tickles you and, you know, puts something in a different perspective. When you go down to 500 million neurons, which is a dog, and 250 million neurons, which is a cat. And I'm sorry, cat lovers, dogs do have more neurons. That makes a profound difference to the way in which humans behave. One of the mistakes that Thorndike made was assuming that he understood the inside and he could predict the outside. All right? So in other words, he made the mistake that somehow by understanding cats and dogs and animals, this is the mistake of the behaviorists, right? That they've understood the cognitive stack and they can understand how a human being with 86 billion neurons can behave. So they had, they went deep, they thought into neuroscience, but they weren't really, right? Dewey looked at it from the outside in and respected the emergent properties of the human brain, which is incredible. So the fact that you have a Malala Yousafzai who, you know, where she grew up, where she could question the orthodoxy, or you have a Martin Luther King who questioned the orthodoxy, or Rosa Parks. Those are emergent behaviors that you have to look at the whole to realize. So there's this fake, almost pseudoscience that Thorndike engages in where he thinks he understands these behaviorist phenomena from animals and he scales it inside out to all of the human brain. But the human brain has to be looked outside in. And Dewey, to his credit, had the courage and the, I think the word is humility. Just state that. But I'm telling you, science loves things where we, you, we think we understand it and you can reduce it to numbers.

Yeah, exactly. And, and, and that's what's so interesting about your book is because it's, it's, it's very nuanced, right? And this hap happens often in, in our world of education that it's, it's very black and white, this or that. But actually the science of transforming the learning that you, you describe in the book is, is actually both, you know, you, you talk about the fact that we need the inside out as well as the outside in approach almost simultaneously in different ways. And I think that's a really important point as well. 'cause it's not, it's almost not that Thorndike won and Dewey lost, but we would prefer Dewey to have won and Thorndike to have lost. Actually, it's about how do those two things integrate? 'Cause I mean, especially for you as well as a mechanical engineer from a very auspicious institution such as MIT, that's, you know, that's heavily based on inside-out thinking, right? That's right.

So I mean, that's the point. I mean, we think we can engineer. So let's take a step back, right? When you build a bridge and obviously you don't want the bridge to collapse, you can't look at it outside in because you can build 1,000 bridges and find the one that doesn't collapse. You have to go inside out. You wanna understand the physics and you wanna understand what is called the structural mechanics and design it. So we always yearn to go inside out and we wanna get there and we just beginning to bridge it now in 2022. 2019 was when we were writing the book, right? Yeah. But the mistake that Thondike made was in, you know, 100 years ago to assume he had it. He didn't. And then he scaled those things. So what we need is to continue that pursuit of trying to understand how things work inside out, but don't declare victory hubristically when you don't have it.

Yeah, absolutely. And so where you kind of go next is then obviously the implications of Thorndike and the way that, I mean, obviously there's the precursor was the Industrial Revolution. And then, and prior to that, you make some connections with with monasteries as well, but all of that put together kind of almost weaponized this incredibly powerful standardized industrial education system, which I'd love to talk in a moment that you talk about the educational winnower, which I think is just a brilliant analogy, but just make some of those connections perhaps for us. You know, obviously there's a lot of talk about the industrial model of schooling, but I thought that the connection with the monasteries was also an interesting point. Yeah.

So let's start with the industrial model of schooling. We talk about it's a little bit more nuanced than people make it out to be, but nonetheless, the analogy is a good one. So if you look at the Industrial Revolution, what did we do? We made parts, things, and to make them interchangeable, we tested them. And when we tested them and they passed some proxy test, we said, oh, they're interchangeable. You know, this train will fit on the tracks or whatever, right? Now, if you look at education, the problem is it's similar to the Tom Dyck-Duy argument. In fact, it's related. How do you test whether someone really understands something? Can you really? Yeah. Can you test that this person has the critical thinking for life? This person can be creative, they can invent something. Could you have tested Michelangelo? And declare victory and say, oh my God, this person is gonna be a great painter? I doubt it. Could you have tested Messi at age 13? An expert might have seen Messi's talent, right?

Yeah.

But perhaps for all that, maybe he would've turned out not to have had the grit to survive, right? And become what he became. So what we tend to do is reductionist, which is we tend to declare certain tests, and that's the testing system we've fallen into. And over time, the tests diverge from real-world tests, right? And become proxies and more and more frankly impoverished proxies of what we really want. And that's the trap we've fallen into. And just because someone passed a course in computer science doesn't mean they'll be a great coder. Doesn't mean they're gonna be Steve Jobs, right? Doesn't mean they're gonna be Bill Gates. They might have grossed 100%. In fact, I recently took a sailing class because during my sabbatical, I want to sail. I scored 100% in the exam and crashed the boat half an hour later after impressing the bejesus out of my instructor, right? But this is what we've done, you see. Now, the tradition goes back to, you know, where does education come from? Education comes from religious education, and basically, basically in every tradition, right?

Yeah.

Monasteries, you know, you sent a novice, a docent, they went to a monastery and they sat there for a certain period of time and they read and they recited. In fact, we use the word recitations in our education today, which is almost an archaeological term, a hint from the past.

Yeah.

And it's si time. You say you sat there for so long, right? And you recited so many times, and when you graduate, you can recite the book. You can interpret the book, right? That's where it comes from. And our education, especially the modern education system, comes from Western European, the tradition, which owes a debt, frankly, to the Islamic tradition as well. And that whole monastic tradition became the university, right? And then the Industrial Revolution hits and you go, I need to test this person. So the problem with this is much as the Industrial Revolution led to interchangeable parts. Our education system leads to interchangeable people, which works out well if you're a corporation, you know, A left, I can replace A with B because they have their accounting degree. It's a skill. As we go forward in, you know, as humanity, especially post-COVID with the gig economy and creativity and innovation, interchangeable people won't cut it. It's people's individuality that's going to make them successful.

And so that's why I think education, particularly now, needs to rethink its role and rethink these proxy tests we have that have this industrial And that, that image of the educational winnower, it's obviously related to what you're talking about there, but I think it's such a good analogy that it's worth just going over for a moment.

You know, when I teach a course, I think I'm a good teacher. I might have 80 students. I teach dynamics. At the end of the year, this being MIT, we have midterms, homeworks, final exam. I add up all the grades and say this student deserves an A+, this student deserves an A, and that student a B, and that student a C, and occasionally that student didn't pass. And let's just look at the B-C boundary, right? Why did the student receive a C? Was it because something he didn't understand? Did the student who got a B understand something significantly more? Was it the day of the exam, one was feeling better than the other? Maybe I, as a professor, I didn't do a good job. You know, our education system, we have sort of a little bit, I think, abandoned our duty to make, transform all these amazing minds into Michelangelos and other, you know, icons. Instead, we just say, oh, you know, let's winnow them. Let's say that this is an A+, this student's a C. And we've sort of, in my view, abandoned that really sort of holy contract that we have. To transform them all into A's, which is called mastery learning. And so our education system has become a race. It's like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, right? We sort them out. We winnow and say, you didn't make it, you didn't make it, you didn't make it, you made it, right? And that's, I think, underlies a lot of our issues.

Yeah. But I think what's interesting, even more kind of emotive and powerful about the winnower concept more than the sorting hat, is that of course it's sorting. The education system is sorting people, but at the same time, simultaneously, it is stripping possibilities and potentialities away from young people. You know, I think I see that, you know, it really is not manifesting and making the best possible use of their creative energies and their potentialities. It's just saying, well, you know, we're going to strip this away because it doesn't really fit here. This doesn't fit here. And what you end up with is this very potentially fragile, narrow, academic, you know, conformist in a way, you know, someone who can just understand the rules, can play by the rules, performs when they need to perform, like, you know, as you've described with your sailing, right? You know, you perform in the moment of the exam, but when it actually comes to real life, real sailing, that's when the, you know, the rubber hits the road, to mix metaphors.

There was a rubber bumper on the boat, so actually metaphor doesn't work.

There you go, it works.

Well, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you're absolutely right. And how many examples does it take, you know?

Exactly.

I mean, Steve Jobs was dropout, for God's sake. I mean, I don't— I mean, look, many of the students who do really well are really good. Don't get me wrong. But occasionally, we tend to sort of lean towards the risk avoider rather than the risk taker. We avoid— and equally, I think we strip away the— frankly, we call them failures, right? Or you didn't get— you're a C student. It is, it's moving. I mean, I love what you said, because it's true. And by the way, I wasn't a great student. I mean, I got into a great college because India's very competitive and, you know, I had a lot of fun and I could have been written off and I'm happy that I had opportunities, but a lot of people get written off and they don't deserve it.

Absolutely. And I think, I mean, one of the responses to that is rather than to look at the system is just say, right, well, let's just, you know, let's make the teaching, the quality of teaching better because I've, I heard you describe the teachers being the kind of the unsung heroes of the industrial education. System, because they're, you know, despite the system they're trying to do, and there is something fundamentally flawed about the way the system is structured, and there is only so much that the teachers can do. But what do you see as the role there for the teacher's role, but also the way that it might be enhanced or developed?

Look, I mean, I think teachers are in some ways the most idealistic people, you know, in our society. They are hardworking. I mean, you can't generalize anything, but a lot of them are very Dewey, right? And not Thorndike. The Thorndike is a system, right? So you have Dewey strapped in a matrix of Thorndike. Exactly. All right. And the system still asks for metrics. And what were the test scores? It doesn't take care, take cognizance of the fact that the student may have issues at home or something else, or maybe the curriculum is too heavy and the teacher's forced to go through it rather than make sure that students truly understand it. And it sort of imposes this winnowing architecture on a community of teachers and students that are trying to do the right thing. Because again, it comes back to this machismo of trying to measure everything, you know. In the '60s and '70s, Robert McNamara, he was in charge of essentially the Vietnam War, et cetera, et cetera. And he would measure numbers, right? And Taylor, Frederick Taylor of Taylorism, these are examples of people who use numbers to run things. And the problem is that whole Taylorism, you know, which is used in manufacturing as an analogy, is what Thorndike did to education, right? So teachers try and do their best and they are trapped in it. And I have, I would say, appreciation and respect for teachers. They do their best, but the system does not help.

No, absolutely. But I think one of the, obviously the things that's happened over the course of the pandemic and now the kind of return after the pandemic is, is the, the huge kind of burnout and resignation that we're seeing of teachers or lack of teachers being taken up into the system in terms of training new teachers. So I think there's obviously a lot of learning that we need to do. And obviously some of that is system reform or transform, but also some of that is the way that the teachers are empowered and skilled to go into those, for example, more hybrid environments. And that's one of the things I felt was really powerful about your book was the fact that there was an acknowledgement, of course, there's this system reform piece, we've got to do that, right? And I'd love to talk about some of those things that you've been doing at MIT in relation to that. But then there's also there are some more and less effective ways to teach in a hybrid environment. And that's what you tend— what you seem to do with the book as well, to say, you know, there are things we know, there are strategies that work in different ways and based on the science of learning. So perhaps could you just talk through a few of those different kind of strategies or ideas that you go through in the book that you think will kind of skill up a teacher in that kind of hybrid environment?

Yeah, no, absolutely. Look, I mean, I'll just maybe take a slight digress just a little bit to frame it and just say that our evolutionary ability to learn and teach is fundamental to our existence. Human beings are the most adaptive animals on the planet. You know, baby goat can stand in a day, right? Human beings are actually quite helpless at birth, but learning is what makes us adaptive. So that's a trade-off human beings make. And we are all natural teachers because we are also parents. And the thing about parenting and learning as a child, which is the same instinct that continues through adulthood, is it's not scalable. It's very tactile. It is very apprentice. It is, there's implicit learning, not just explicit. We have, I think, a false interpretation that somehow learning is explicit. Everything is explicit. I can tell you everything you need to know explicitly. But we know that Messi learned because of a coach who trained him, or a bunch of coaches, and so did Michelangelo, right? And there was a lot of implicit, tacit feedback. So this misunderstanding that learning can be made explicit is what has pervaded our education system, and that reduces teachers merely to speakers. You know, there's this quote from Plato, right, that the mind is not a vessel to be filled, it is a fire to be kindled. Teachers want to actually light the fire, but the system forces them to simply fill the vessel. Now, the fact of the matter is, with online, you can have your cake and eat it too. Teachers can now use online to have students absorb the material. It's a new social contract, so students have to buy into it. And then the teachers can become the coaches, the parents, the fire kindlers, the inspirers, the, you know, the person who told Michelangelo to hold his chisel differently or the brush differently. And to me, that is both humane and it's engaging and it's necessary. Now, after COVID, what's happened is in various cultures around the world, we're beginning to see that students have been deflated by the experience. In China, it's called lying flat. You see it in students in the US. At work, it's called quiet quitting. There's a whole movement or, you know, a meme. So I think that we have to up our engagement significantly. And so not only is it the right thing to do, I think teachers would do it naturally. It is necessary. And this is called hybrid or flipped classroom. And of course, we wrote the book before COVID but it was timely because in COVID, what we should really have done was maybe teachers should shot videos. They didn't have the facilities, they couldn't have done it. And Zoom could have been a discussion, right? And things like that. Some did it, but I think this is our new reality and we will all have to do it.

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of the inspiration, the way that, I mean, the rich stories that you draw on from Course 2.007, right? It was, that's what draws you into the book. 'Cause you know, you're describing this incredibly dynamic human environment of creativity in that course. Ultimately, is that what gave you the inspiration to trying to capture what was special about that particular course?

Yeah, 2007, I taught it when I was a young professor and I've been involved in various ways for the last 26 years. It is an extraordinary pedagogical breakthrough because what it does is it unleashes the creative juices of students. They get a kit and they get, they had to build robots to compete basically. Competition at the end of the year. And that process is creative, it's collaborative, it's competitive, it's all of the above. But what it does is it turns education on its head. You don't tell a student, do this, do this, do this. You ask a student, here's a challenge, go address it. And it creates receptacles for the knowledge that students seek, as opposed to, you know, you shoving knowledge in students' faces and telling them to figure out what way to put it.. And it was, it's an inspiring course because it again, turns it on its head. And it's also in many respects how Michelangelo probably learned or, you know, all the great artists and scientists of history or creative people of history where they were doing something and in the process of doing something, they pulled in knowledge, right? And yes, so it was inspiring. I will say that I was very lucky. My first school when I was a young child was a Montessori It was sort of an amalgamation of a Montessori and Waldorf school. And that really transformed me. That was in New Delhi.

And that's transformed me. Yeah. So you've experienced it as a learner as well. Yeah. Interesting. Just what I mean, a question on 2007. How did you reconcile the testing piece of that? Because again, obviously at MIT, you've got highly, highly able students and their academic outcomes are very significant and important. As part of their whole experience, their degree program at MIT. What was the end of that 2.007 course? So they're essentially working in teams to develop a robot, right? And then compete against each other for, you know, different aspects of effectiveness of the robot. But how did you square that circle of the kind of knowledge outcomes, skill outcomes?

Yeah, just to be clear, they worked as individuals to make robots. And because it's, you have small sections and you have a coach. Now there are tests to make sure, for example, at one point you had to learn mechanics to make sure the thing doesn't teeter over or, you know, something doesn't break like that bridge example I used earlier, right? So there are, you do check off and you still have tests to make sure you got it, but it's in the context of this. And then there's a design process and you get graded for that. You're not actually graded for whether you won the contest, but because it's much more activity-based and much more coaching-based, it's much closer to testing the real thing rather than what I said earlier, which is a proxy of something just because it's convenient, right? You're much closer to the real thing. It's much more like Michelangelo, you know, using his chisel wrong and the instructor telling him, well, you know, you may want to hold it differently or tap it more gently or whatever. But it's, yes, it is there. We do square that circle, but it's much easier when it's in the context of an activity as opposed to completely abstracted away from reality.

Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, that's the, that's the key thing, isn't it? Is the application and the transfer of the learning into a particular context. And that has nuances and that has emergent properties. And there is, at a certain point, you need to honor and celebrate and record and, and kind of acknowledge the gains and the developments of the young person in front of you. So that needs, that assessment piece has to be there, right? It's an, it's a crucial piece of what's going on, but it's trying to do that in a way that is as nuanced as what we know the messy process actually is.

That's right. And the other thing is, you know, my refrain about us being very excited by numbers, right? A lot of learning is subjective, a lot of the judgment is subjective too. So giving ourselves the space to do that is important. I mean, you know, you don't— I'm sure Messi never got a score, you know, B+ of how much you did, how well you did in your coaching session today. Right? I mean, in things that really matter, we look at how well they did, period. Right?

Of course. Yeah.

Sports is one example where the outcomes are clear. In things where the outcomes are not clear, somehow we reduce it to fake numbers or sometimes not necessarily fake, but not necessarily precise numbers.

Yeah.

But, but I think that is the elephant in the room of the education system, right? Because the system is set up justified by that exact myth. I mean, you know, we all educators know that there is a subjectivity to this apparently objective score that, I mean, you know, I'm based in France, right? My children go to French school. You know, the level of specificity of, you know, 0.1 or 0.2 of a grade. I mean, you know, it's nonsense, quite honestly, in terms of nobody's actually identifying that level of specificity of performance, you know, plus or minus 1 or 2 decimal points. I mean, it doesn't make sense, but as you say, it gives this air of objectivity and therefore, well, it's of course, of course that must be acceptable. You know, that's great. But the elephant in the room is that it's not. And for me, it's like, let's let the elephant out and celebrate the fact that it is messy and subjective, but that's okay because there's an important performance. Can you actually put it into practice in a context and then reflect or, you know, whatever. I mean, it has implications obviously for the way we do it, but—

100%. I mean, if you, let's say that, that quarter point, how much was that because actually it was an opportunity to get the student to really understand something differently and you expressed it in a way that they didn't get, right? And how much of it is a student? Can you be really be that precise? I, you can't. And yes, that's the elephant in the room, which is where does that precision come from?

Yeah, and maybe we should stop trying to reach it. I mean, you know, so it's alternatives in terms of assessment. I know you've done a lot of work around digital credentials, which I'd love to ask you about because I mean, as the Vice President of Open Learning, and then I think you were the Dean of Digital Learning prior to that. So I mean, a huge amount of opportunities for innovation and a huge amount that you've done at MIT in relation to this space of digital learning and digital credentialing and open courseware as well as another one and the MOOCs and edX. There's all sorts of interesting aspects to that. I mean, as we are kind of somehow post-COVID now, what, where do you see that whole space of, well, let's take one by one, but the digital credentialing first.

Well, I mean, there are two aspects to digital credentialing. One is credentialing, which is the recognition that we will have to continue to accrue knowledge throughout our lives. You know, that contract that you've learned something and it's good for the rest of your life, that's no longer valid. And the digital credential is a way to prove that you've learned, and it's for many reasons. One is, you know, so when someone puts it on their LinkedIn page, it can't be faked, right? But also because if you're a refugee from Syria and you have a dentist degree and the, you know, the current Syrian government wants to take it away because you're also a dissident, As when you're a refugee, they can't, right? So the basic idea is to create a fabric where your credential is stored and you can accrue credentials over time. So it's a recognition of both. I happen to believe that even the undergraduate degree should be broken down into credentials, stackable credentials. It shouldn't be just your degree. It should also be, well, I learned this, this, this, and this, right? As opposed to, you know, 47 vague courses that, you know, that the recruiter can't really understand. And then you continue to accrue credentials over your life and that's your, and they're as a digitally provable. So that's what the credentials are. And they're also seeing a lot of students drop out. So for example, they don't finish the undergraduate degree in America. Debt is a huge issue. And if they drop out, it's better to have a credential rather than an unfinished degree, which is what they walk away with. Because then you can say, well, I learned this, you know, so give me a job and I, you can earn. So that's the thinking behind credentials movement.

And you've been doing that with masters as well, the MicroMasters, is it, that you were developing?

So what we did with the MicroMasters is we said that, so I mean, let's take the master's program at MIT. I mean, it's a, you know, we have lots of master's programs and thousands of applications, highly coveted, but then we have to tell apart who deserves to be at MIT and who doesn't make the cut, right? And we base it on scores from universities that we may not know. We read recommendations from faculty we will never meet. We use some standardized tests like GRE, GMAT, things like that, which, you know, they have their place, but it's very hard to make a judgment. So rather than admit people based on these measures, we turn it upside down. We call it inverted admissions. So what we do is we say anyone in the world can start taking these courses, and if they finish a certain number of courses, we give them a new certificate. It's called a MicroMasters.

Interesting.

The thing we made up. Okay. So it's open admissions. Yeah. But the— there are exams, they're proctored and it's very difficult.

Yeah.

And if you make it past the finish line, we'll give you a MicroMasters. So we don't do the winnowing. You see, we get through the winnowing.

Yeah.

Now the people who do finish, we give them this new credential called MicroMasters. It's not a degree, it's a credential. And once you have it, Then we say, look, we look at the scores, but now we know, you know, it's not a snapshot exam. It's the discussions, what you did. It's okay. These 50 people will admit and you can finish your actual master's at MIT if you want to come in half the time. So it's win-win-win. I mean, you spend less money, much cheaper, spend less time. The employers love it because their employees can take these MicroMasters credential. We love it because we have a much better distillation. In fact, we find that on average our MicroMasters students are at least as good and often outperform the students we admit by the regular route.

Interesting. Yeah, interesting. And just to connect those two kind of mini-conversations there, in terms of the way that the assessments are done in these, because it strikes me that there's this incredible opportunity, right? I mean, are we simply just digitizing the outdated assessment model that used to exist and we're just, you know, we're creating a digital credential out of it, but, you know, essentially everything stays the same because the assessment is being performed in the way that it used to be, or is there a shift simultaneously in the mode of the assessment, the way the assessment is done to, to acknowledge all of the things we've been talking about?

That's a profound question, Tim Logan. What we do is, let's say it takes 8 courses in one, one year, two semesters to get a master's. Four of those courses tend to be more easily tested with an exam, proxy exam, the more math stuff, things like that.

Yeah.

And for the much more, you need to do a project with a team. We have to assess how you did. We need to give you coaching. So what we do when we take a regular master's and turn it into this new format is we take the ones that are more easily tested and we put them in the first half. And when students come to MIT, we give them the second half, which is more the place where the in-person is so essential. And a lot of courses are like that. And it's quite a balancing act to design it. You can't just take the first half and say, do it online. It doesn't work. You have to really think it through. Yeah.

Yeah. So again, it's that, I mean, it's that same principle of using the hybrid environment for the things which are most appropriate for online and the things that are just absolutely essential and kind of full of humanity to be done in person.

And even the online piece, it's interesting, the online modality done right. You can do a lot of team projects. You can have reading assignments. Students do some amazing things online, by the way. It's so weird, you know, I mean, we thought that online was simply a sort of a narrow version of in-person, but online is its own thing. You can do things you cannot do in person. Yeah, strangely. So you have to celebrate and take full advantage of the online in its full glory. And that's what we do.

Yeah.

No, that's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, there's so many collaborative tools as well, and as well as the way that time can be used differently, synchronously, asynchronously. I mean, I think absolutely there's so much potential of the digital environment that still is a bit untapped, but yeah, interesting. One other thing I'd love to ask you about was just the, personally, just kind of philosophically, I'm a real fan of open source and I was interested to read about what you did with the OpenCourseWare. So as I understand it, taking the MIT curriculum and basically just making it freely available online. If I've understood it correctly, that's the first thing. But what was the idea behind that, the intention behind that?

So in the 1990, 1999 or so, MIT started thinking about online for the first time. And we did analysis and we found that we could make X million dollars. And we said, you know, ain't worth it. The value of the knowledge is much greater. And, you know, frankly, that's not what makes MIT special. It's not the facts. It's the things you learn in person, you know, exactly what we've been talking about. Yeah, it's the workshops, it's the coaching, it's the interactions, the dispute, discussion, you know, it's a coffee shop, it's the labs. So we said, we'll just give our curriculum away for free to the world. And immediately people thought we were nuts. And some thought it was brilliant. And today, looking back 22 years later, It's been quite an extraordinary achievement really, because we've had almost 200 million people come and download content, everything from, you know, advanced linguistics to neuroscience, to physics, to math, to biology, right? I mean, engineering. And that's what OpenCourseWare was. Now MIT actually has a long history in doing this, um, counterintuitive sort of giving stuff away for free business, which actually works, works out quite well. Because of, we also were the vanguard of open source software. Which is software for free. And the whole open software world, Linux is an example of that, right? Comes from our neck of the woods. So it was in the same tradition and it's been a great thing. In fact, we just published an article about Hal Abelson, who led that effort. And my quote in that article is that it was outrageously elegant and counterintuitive. And now it seems obvious, but I'm proud of my colleagues who took those steps.

Yeah, no, that's interesting. And, but I think what strikes me as particularly significant for me in my world is I see so many schools and teachers, obviously I know we were talking about a university curriculum, but I think the principle is, is the same because I think there are so many schools asking teachers to be building, writing, developing curriculum constantly. Every, you know, many different schools I visit and, you know, work with and They're all doing it. And that actually takes a significant amount of teacher energy and time and creative resource. And actually, as you say, that's not really where the good stuff happens. The good stuff happens in the interactions. But I think a lot of teachers' time often is spent developing and writing curriculum. And so actually perhaps, I don't know, more of that kind of elegant approach of just let's share the best units we have, the best learning designs for units of learning that we have, and then frees up some of the kind of psychological space, you know, opportunity for teachers to do the good stuff.

That's exactly right. I mean, the whole point of here is to release time back to teachers and students to do the creative things that they frankly weren't even able to do in COVID, right? I mean, when nature releases its grasp on our physical location and lets us be in person. I hope we don't go back to lectures, right? And, but it's, that's exactly right. That's where, so OpenCourseWare is a face that launched a thousand ships, if you will, right? Yeah. It, it began to open people's eyes to this because now you could just reuse content without violating intellectual property and so on. And yeah, focus on what we—

it's not the, it's not the content that's particularly the valuable thing and actually it's actually releasing, as you say, releasing human potentiality in those interactional spaces. That's where the sparks happen. And that's where, you know, that's where people's energies hopefully should be. And then we get, maybe we get a bit less winnowing happening.

It reduces the window for winnowing. And I think that that's exactly right. Because then you get into the role of transforming.

Yeah.

But you get in the mode of transforming rather than winnowing. Winnowing is the opposite of transforming. I mean, no parent would do that to their child. They wouldn't say, well, you've got a C+, honey, but you you know, you got an A. You never do that because you're committed to transforming your children into the best they can be, right? But somehow we sort of give up on that in school. And again, it gives— if you're trying, teachers are heroic, they'll do it.

100%. Absolutely. This is brilliant. Thank you, Sanjay, a really, really interesting conversation. And there's, I mean, there's so much that you've done, as you say, kind of even 20 years ago at MIT with this stuff. But now I'd really recommend the book to everybody. I think it's a really interesting take on the story of why some of these things are the way they are. But we still need— there's still a lot of work to be done to shift them, right?

Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you, Tim. Such a pleasure. Thank you for the kind words. And really great to see you. And look, I hope in this post-COVID era, we take the bull by the horns.

Yeah, exactly. Amazing. Thank you, Sanjay.

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