ANANT AGARWAL: I'd like to reimagine education.

The last year has seen the invention of a new four letter word.

It starts with an "M."

MOOC.

Massive Open Online Courses.

Many organizations are offering these online courses to students

all over the world in the millions for free.

Anybody who has an internet connection and the will to learn

can access these great courses from excellent universities

and get a credential at the end of it.

Now, in this discussion today, I want to focus on a different aspect of MOOCs.

We are taking what we're learning and the technologies

we are developing in the large and applying them in the small

to create a blended model of education, to really reinvent and reimagine

what we do in the classroom.

Now, our classrooms could use change.

So here's a classroom at this little three letter

institute in the Northeast of America, MIT.

And this was a classroom 50, 60 years ago, and this is the classroom today.

What's changed?

The seats are in color.

Whoop dee do.

Education really hasn't changed in the past 500 years.

So the last big innovation in education was

the printing press and the textbooks.

Everything else has changed around us.

From health care to transportation, everything is different.

But education hasn't changed.

It's also been a real issue in terms of access.

So what you see here is not a rock concert.

And the person you see at the end of the stage is not Madonna.

This is a classroom at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria.

Now, we have all heard of distance education,

but the students way in the back, 200 feet away from the instructor,

I think they are undergoing long distance education.

Now, I really believe that we can transform education

both in quality and scale and access through technology.

For example, at edX, we're trying to transform education

through online technologies.

Given education has been calcified for 500 years,

we really cannot think about re-engineering it.

Micromanaging it.

We really have to completely reimagine it.

It's like going from ox carts to the airplane.

Even the infrastructure has to change.

Everything has to change.

We need to go from lectures on the blackboard

to online exercises, online videos.

We have to go to interactive virtual laboratories and gamification.

We have to go to completely online grading

and peer interaction and discussion boards.

Everything really has to change.

So at edX and a number of other organizations,

we are applying these technologies to education

through MOOCs to really increase access to education.

And you have heard of this example where,

when we launched our very first course-- and this

was an MIT-hard circuits and electronics course about a year and a half ago--

155,000 students from 162 countries enrolled in this course.

And we had no marketing budget.

Now, 155,000 is a big number.

This number is bigger than the total number

of alumni of MIT in it's 150 year history.

7,200 students passed the course, and this was a hard course.

7,200 is also a big number.

If I were to teach at MIT two semesters every year,

I would have to teach for 40 years before I

could teach this many students.

Now, these large numbers are just one part of the story.

So, today, I want to discuss a different aspect, the other side of MOOCs,

take a different perspective.

We are taking what we develop and learn in the large and apply in the small

to the classroom to create a blended model of learning.

But before I go into that, let me tell you a story.

When my daughter turned 13, became a teenager, she stopped speaking English.

She began speaking this new language.

I call it Teenglish it's a digital language.

It's got two sounds, a grunt and a silence.

Honey, come over for dinner?

Hmm.

Did you hear me?

Silence.

Can you listen to me?

Hmm.

So we had a real issue with communicating,

and we were just not communicating until one day I had this epiphany.

I texted her, I got an instant response.

I said, no, that must have been by accident.

She must have thought some friend of hers calling her.

So I texted her again.

Boom.

Another response.

I said, this is great.

And since then, my life has changed.

I text her.

She responds.

It's just been absolutely great.

[APPLAUSE]

So our millennial generation is built differently.

Now, I'm older.

I mean, my youthful looks might belie that,

but I'm not in the millennial generation.

But our kids are really different.

The millennial generation is completely comfortable with online technology.

So why are we fighting it in the classroom?

Let's not fight it.

Let's embrace it.

In fact, I believe-- and I have two fat thumbs.

I can't text very well.

But I'm willing to bet that, with evolution,

our kids and then the grandchildren will develop really,

really little, itty bitty thumbs to text much better.

Evolution will fix all of that stuff.

But so why don't we embrace technology?

Embrace the millennial generation's natural predilections

and really think about creating these online technologies,

blend them into their lives?

So here's what we can do.

So rather than drive our kids into a classroom,

herding them out there at 8 o'clock in the morning.

I hated going to class at 8 o'clock in the morning.

So why are we forcing our kids to do that?

So instead what you do is you have them watch videos

and do interactive exercises in the comfort of their dorm rooms,

in their bedroom, in the dining room, in the bathroom,

wherever they're most creative.

Then they come into the classroom for some in person interaction.

They can have discussions among themselves.

They can solve problems together.

They can work with the professor and have

the professor answer their questions.

In fact, with edX, when we were teaching our first course

on circuits and electronics around the world,

this was happening unbeknownst to us.

Two high school teachers at the Sant High School,

in Mongolia, had flipped the classroom, and they were using our video lectures

and interactive exercises, where the learners in the high school--

15-year-olds, mind you-- would go and do these things in their own homes

and they would come into class and, as you see from this image here,

they would interact with each other and do some physical laboratory work.

And the only way we discovered this was they wrote a blog

and we happened to stumble upon that blog.

We are also doing other pilots.

So we did a pilot, experimental blended course

working with San Jose State University in California.

Again, with the circuit and electronics course, you'll hear that a lot.

That course has become sort of like our Petri dish of learning.

So there the students would-- again, the instructors

flipped the classroom, blended online and in person,

and the results were staggering.

Now, don't take these results to the bank just yet.

Just wait a little bit longer as we experiment with this some more,

but the early results are incredible.

So, traditionally, semester upon semester for the past several years,

this course, again, a hard course, had a failure rate of about 40% to 41%

every semester.

With this blended class late last year, the failure rate fell to 9%.

So the results can be extremely, extremely good.

Now, before we go up too far into this, I'd

like to spend some time discussing some key ideas.

Some key ideas that make all of this work?

One idea is active learning.

The idea here is, rather than have students

walk into class and watch lectures, replace this with what we call lessons.

Lessons are interleaved sequences of videos and interactive exercises.

So students might watch a five, seven minute video,

and follow that with an interactive exercise.

Think of this as the ultimate Socratization of education.

You teach by asking questions.

And this a form of learning called active learning.

And really promoted by a very early paper in 1972 by Craik and Lockhart,

where they said and discovered that learning

and retention really relate strongly to the depth of mental processing.

Students learn much better when they are interacting with the material.

The second idea is self pacing.

Now when I went to a lecture hall and if you were like me, by the fifth minute,

I would lose the professor.

I wasn't all that smart.

And I would be scrambling taking notes.

And then I would lose the lecture for the rest of the hour.

Instead, wouldn't it be nice with online technologies,

we offer videos and interactive engagements

with students-- they can hit the pause button.

They can rewind the professor.

Heck, they can even mute the professor.

So this form of self pacing can be very helpful to learning.

The third idea that we have is instant feedback.

With instant feedback, the computer grades exercises.

How else do you teach 150,000 students?

Your computer is reading all the exercises.

And people all submitted homeworks, and your grades come back two weeks later,

you've forgotten all about it.

I don't think I've still received some of my homeworks

from my undergraduate days.

Someone never graded them.

So with instant feedback, students can try to apply answers.

If they get it wrong, they can get instant feedback.

They can try it again and try it again.

And this really becomes much more engaging

when they get the instant feedback.

And this little green check mark that you see here

is becoming somewhat of a cult symbol at edX.

Learners are telling us that they go to bed

at night dreaming of the green check mark.

In fact, one of our learners who took the circuits course early last year,

he then went on to take a software course from Berkeley

at the end of the year.

And this is what the learner had to say on our discussion board

when he just started that course about the green check mark.

Oh god; have I missing you.

When's the last time you have seen students

posting comments like this about homework?

My colleague Ed Bertschinger, who heads up the physics department at MIT,

has this to say about instant feedback.

And he indicated that instant feedback turns teaching moments

into learning outcomes.

The next big idea is gamification.

All learners engage really well with interactive videos and so on.

They would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day

long until they get it.

So we applied these gamification techniques to learning.

And we can build these online laboratories.

How do you teach creativity?

How do you teach design?

We can do this through online labs and use computing power

to build these online labs.

So as this little video shows here, you can engage students much like they

designed with LEGOs.

So here, the learners are building a circuit with LEGO-like ease.

And this can also be graded by the computer.

Fifth is peer learning.

So here we use discussion forums and discussions and Facebook

like interaction not as a distraction but to really help students learn.

Let me tell you a story.

When we did the circuits course with the 155,000 students,

I didn't sleep for three nights leading up to the launch of the course.

In fact, one of my TAs, OK.

7 by 24.

We're going to be up monitoring the forum answering questions.

Now, I had answered questions for 100 students.

How do you do that for 150,000?

So one night, I'm sitting up there 2:00 AM at night.

And I think there was this question from a student from Pakistan.

And he asked a question.

And I said, OK, let me go up type up an answer.

I don't type all that fast.