Lec 7 MIT CMS.930 Media, Education and the Marketplace

PA and I'm the learning technology initiatives director at the Sloan School of Management I'm part of the Executive Education Department but I also report to the deputy Dean here at the Sloan School of Management what I'd like to do is really talk about three things in this brief time we have together first I'd like to explore two dimensions of education and and I'm thinking in terms of not only the classroom education we're familiar with but also the distance education which is so prominent uh in the developments today second I'd like to identify two key questions that I really feel are important for us to be thinking about and addressing in the area of new technologies and education and third I'd like to answer those questions from Stone's point of view and tell you a little bit about what we're doing and how we're doing it finally I want toose a challenge to you and ask you a question so let's get started when we think about these two Dimensions that I'd like to explore at first I'd like to think about for a while the purpose of Education now if we think about the purpose of Education I'd like to invoke Professor Russell aov's point of view he's a great thinker as a systems thinker and as a strategic planner and he asked companies and organizations to think about not only the explicit per purpose for which they exist but also the implicit purpose if we were to think about education from an explicit point of view and we think about the school age or the youngster population there's no doubt that content is very very important clearly important information needs to be conveyed to students from people who've studied in the fields uh for a long period of time second purpose for the explicit purpose of educational institutions is to allow students to practice and to apply what they've learned a third explicit purpose I think we'd probably all agree is that school environments create a situation where students can learn together where they can learn from each other so it creates a community of Learners if you compare the explicit purposes for adult education I think we'd agree that they're all the same again content has to be conveyed practice or application of what is being learned is very important and thirdly it's an opportunity to learn together and to learn from your peers now let's think about the implicit purpose of educational institutions from the point of view of the school age or youngster population there are really I think two implicit purposes first there's the issue of socialization I think we all understand the importance of children growing up together and having an opportunity to work together to become friends to learn how to resolve conflicts um and to basically interact in a social environment a second implicit purpose for the youngster aged group is a babysitting purpose and I think you can test that theory by asking the question if you could educate a child by the age of six as completely as was possible and as necessary would you choose to do it I think the answer is no as young children come along they need a period of gestation where they in a control environment grow up now let's compare that to the adult learner the adult learner gets tremendous value if an educational institution is able to provide an environment where networking takes place where friendships are made where connections are made that can be used outside and later beyond the confines of the educational environment babysitting however is not an issue for the adult Learner in fact it's really just the opposite the adult learner has enormous pressures on them to to uh not take time out to learn but instead to continue working in their work environment in the context that they are in on a day-to-day environment so I think the comparable or the the the parallel structure for the babysitting for the younger children is that adults need time out they don't need uh they need time out from their work environment so that they can take time to learn so I think it's very important to keep this in mind and I'm going to be coming back to this a number of times as we talk about the experiments that we're doing at the Salone School of Management i' like you to keep in mind the fact that these two uh categories of purpose both the explicit and the implicit are something that we need to be responsible for in whatever we do as designers of educational situations now I'd like to shift gears another dimension to keep in mind throughout this discussion is the dimension of Technology we have a dizzying array of choices that are U available to us as we think about new ways of providing education and they fall along axis so for instance we can think about do we want an educational experience to be facilitated or non-facilitated do we want it to be synchronous or asynchronous do we want it be electronically delivered or do we want it to have a face-to-face component should it be customized or and in other words uh made specific for the particular audience or can we create something that is an off-the-shelf product that people can use in many different environments should it be interactive or should it be one way now these are not just academic choices there's technology that's available now in this wonderful congruence of developments that let us do all of these things so the challenge then comes back to the instructional designer where do you fall on these different axes what are the choices that you're going to make technology is there you as an instructional designer have to think of it from the point of view of fulfilling both the explicit and the implicit purposes of the educational experience you're creating so if you think of the effect of technology on the two different populations the Young age and the adult uh age learners for the school Age Technology provides just extraordinary opportunities for enriching what goes on in the classroom and I think that the conversation that we had with Bonnie bracie was perfect for that she talks so beautifully about how can you engage students however um the teachers have the luxury of the students remaining in the classroom because of the babysitting function they will not empty the schools so the teacher can create this system which is multi-dimensional in its purposes and take full advantage of the technology without jeopardizing all of the different dimensions of learning for the adult learner the technology has the capability of freeing Us in terms of time and space if we do that we are in great risk of jeopardizing the implicit purposes of Education the socialization where they get to know each other and create bonds and relationships and also that time out that time to learn you put them into a work environment and say here go and learn and uh get back to us when you finished this is very difficult because there's no Hiatus and the pressures of the daytoday work get very much in the way of learning so I think these are aspects that we're going to be thinking about and talking about and they lead me to my two key questions I think the questions that we need to be asking ourselves in the area of management education for the adult learner is do we face a period of disruptive technology this is the notion that technology comes along which changes the game changes the whole way in which you're doing business if that's the case then we as a business School need to be thinking about in fact changing the entire way in which we proceed to do business so first question are we facing a period of disruptive technology the second question is from a pedagogical perspective not from a business perspective but from a pedagogical perspective do we know what the Learning System is all about do we really know how people learn and are we competent therefore to decompose and recompose these elements of learning so that we are still consistent with fulfilling all the purposes both explicit and implicit of an educational environment so those are the two questions that we're struggling with those are the two questions that Sloan asked itself and I'd like to go on then to my third area where we really talk about what is Sloan doing how do we answer those questions and what have we done as a result of those answers if you ran a business School how would you answer them it's challenging so let me give you Sloan's answers and then tell you a little bit about what we've done Sloan's answer to those two questions is to both of them we don't know we don't know and therefore we need to do some experiments and in those experiments we not only need to learn what there is to be learned but we also have to learn what it is that we don't know so that was really the design for the ACT ity that we've been pursuing since uh Dean donard convened the educational technology task force in 1999 so let me move then to the third area of what I'd like to talk to you about which is what has flown done and how have we done it if we think about content as the the first explicit purpose of Education there are a couple of things that we've done and I've mentioned these before we've done the work with unex where we took a pre-mba package preparation package from their uh list of available titles if you will and made it available to our incoming MBA students this was very successful in that it was an enrichment it gave the students an opportunity to do rust removal and self assessment on the topics that they were going to be studying when they came onto campus so it was an opportunity for them to challenge themselves in a a comfortable environment really preparing for the time they come on campus so this was an experiment of using uh an online distanced product to enrich what it was from a Content standpoint that our students would get now another content experiment that we're doing are the knowledge updates and we spent some time talking about this this is an opportunity for us to see if we can electronically package and deliver the results of current research in a way that's really engaging to the the person that's that's looking at it and the challenge we've G given to ourselves is can we do that packaging in such a way that it lays the groundwork for Community Learning coming out of people who've who've gotten involved in looking at these Frontier topic knowledge updates so those are two experiments we've done in the content area in the area of learning communities where we have technology facilitating people learning from each other we've done the development of a learning platform called slon space you're going to have an opportunity to try it so I'm looking forward to that but let me just give you uh the the sort of overall picture of it which is that it is a student Centric portal that allows the students to customize for themselves which portlets they want to have uh uh open when they come to their their area and slone space and some of the portlets that are available to them are announcements schedules class discussions class material distribution membership in the various communities and classes in which they participate so this is an experiment that we're doing in developing and refining our ability to provide a a learning community platform but as you can see and and the way I'm talking about this they really only are experiments in a couple of the dimensions of the educational purposes that we talked about in the very beginning so now I'd like to shift to talking about the miral Lynch Andrew Law Investments course and talk about it and describe it to you along each one of the five Dimensions that we laid out at the beginning when we talk about the development of Investments course through the maril Lynch partnership effort we on the education technology task force thought of it as our experiment in how do we create a window into the classroom so if you think of it that that's that was the the metaphor that we used as we were thinking about the work that we were going to be doing and we challenged ourselves to do the systems design so that we responsibly took into account all of the dimensions that we talked about at the beginning so thinking about this course let me take them in turn if we think about content the Investments course uh picked up on a semester long course taught by Professor Andrew low two secondy year MBA students very Advanced Theory taught by a star who was a lead thinker in this area we videotaped the classes as Professor low taught the MBA students live and then converted them to CDs and we used the technology that allowed us to synchronize his teaching materials beside the the window in which the video was playing it wasn't particularly High touch uh technology we didn't allow for indexing but we did by putting it on CD give students the ability to watch it any place any time in addition in terms of conveying content we prepared a notebook where they would have all of the teaching materials that Professor low used in his lecture on paper why did we do that because he teaches a very quantitative course he speaks in the language of math and it would be very important for students to be able to have hard copy so they could take notes on the on the paper rather than be working very hard to copy down the equations that he used in his lectures so we captured the content and stored it electron Ally there were 12 lectures six of which were uh added that were optional lectures now if we think about the application or the putting of the content into practice we put a great deal of emphasis on that we wanted to make sure that if the students were not going to be given the time out to learn we needed to provide a vehicle where they could take advantage of learning in their work context to actually put the theory into practice in order to do that we built a project groups were assigned and these students came from all over the world so we made a great effort in in the selection of the student groups that we put together and we set up the the project in three phases the first phase required them to identify a customer that was not well served by maril Lynch or perhaps a new customer and to profile those customers in turn terms of their risk and investment preferences part two was that they had to design a new product to service that maril Lynch had never offered before that was specifically appropriate to meet the needs of this this customer group and third they were required to put together an implementation plan where they did the cost benefit analysis to Mara Lynch for offering this new product or service these were very sophisticated projects that were developed they shared their projects with each other as they were preparing them in fact we had an interesting situation where the project of one group of students was in fact a great solution for the product of another uh group of students um and then in the end of the course they presented their projects not only to Professor low but also to senior managers at Merl Lynch this is how we address that that uh purpose of Education to give students an opportunity to apply and practice what they've learned so we've talked about content application practice third explicit uh purpose of an educational situation was to provide a learning community this we did um we set up a number of vehicles for peer-to-peer exchange and peer-to expert exchange with each lecture we put together pre-lecture questions and post-lecture questions that the students required to answer and they used that learning community space that I told you about before Sloan space on Sloan space were discussion groups for each one of the lectures and as students posted their pre- and post questions they went directly to the discussion space about that particular lecture they were accompanied in this dialogue by the TA who came from Sloan who was a subject matter expert and the learning director who came from Mara Lynch who was responsible for managing the lives of the students and and the pressures on them so both the TA and the learning director got involved in the discussions by uh overseeing the activity intervening when help was needed either because people were becoming overwhelmed or were dropping by the wayside or because they were confused and they needed some help from a Content standpoint in fact partway through would tell you the story we actually changed the assignment we were dissatisfied with the dialogue that was taking place and we asked students to answer one question and then comment on the response of another student so this this is one of the things that we changed Midway through so understand we didn't get it right first off we were experimenting throughout the the project another venue for Community Learning we set up to have office hours synchronous office hours with the students and the professor where uh using a text chat room uh text based chat room they were able to communicate with Professor low to ask questions and to exchange views and to have his feedback on their projects so we devised a number of different ways for them to learn from each other and from the experts so those are really the three explicit purposes that we identified at the beginning now let me switch to the implicit purposes of socialization and timeout for socialization we designed the course so that at the beginning of the course and at the end of the course the students were brought literally from all over the world to New York and they spent a day uh with Professor low and with each other during the lunch of the first day their project groups were assigned seatings so we asked them to sit together over lunch and begin to develop the Rapport get to know each other because after that first day all they would be doing is communicating through technological means um we um asked them to identify themselves and identify themselves not only in terms of the work that they were doing but the capabilities that they might bring to the group as a whole from a socialization standpoint again at the end of the course after the final day we had a very nice graduation party which was attended by Professor Low by the head of the global debt Market group and Senior membership uh senior sponsors from the top management team very not fancy but having a chance to have a beer together sitting down down around the table be presented with graduation certificates be congratulated individually it was a very very important part of cementing the Friendship bonds that it started at the beginning of this 12we course and that would take them going forward an interesting piece of data is that the students reported that one of the primary values they got out of the course was the opportunity to learn uh get to know people throughout the company that it would have taken them years to uh get to know on their own that was how we addressed the socialization issue now how did we address the timeout what we did with this course because we made it time and space dependent was we in fact violated the timeout rule we plunged them into this intense learning experience in the context of their own work um let me tell you the way we solve that problem we solved it by focusing a great deal on motivating the students why because these are students that don't know how to spell time out they're very aggressive type A people who just um simply made two extra hours out of their 24-hour day so it was very important that we keep their motivation high so that they would not in the compression of time and the requirements of their very high stress jobs uh collapse under the weight how did we do this we started we had the Good Fortune of starting with the very top person in the global debt Market group feeling this was a very important initiative within the within his organization why did he feel that way first of all he wanted to embed in his upand cominging um High potentials the the use and application of really Advanced investment Theory so he wanted to imw them with a new way of thinking about how they did business secondly he was very interested in treating them as a group to a a particularly um significant communication from him and from management that they were a valued part of the team the students that were were brought into this course were in that interesting Gap in the professions where they have been with the company for a couple of years but it will probably be four more years before they're considered for the big leap for the big uh advancement High potentials during this period of time are very likely to leave and what uh the head of the global debt Market group wanted to do was send a signal that these people were high potentials were recognized as such and that meil Lynch was willing to invest in them in order to increase the retention so we had the head of the group having it a very high priority he then asked his direct reports to work with their direct reports to nominate the correct people 70 people were identified 30 were selected for the course with five alternates so you can see right away that these students knew that they were being selected as a very honored pool throughout the course the people who had nominated the students were encouraged to be good sponsors and to to take an interest in their studies we had uh senior Executives from the group sponsoring the group projects might or might not have been somebody who uh had sponsored a student but it was somebody who was very interested in the business that project might be integrated into and finally we had when the project was presented not only the sponsors but also the business heads that would be the top two layers of the organization listen to the projects evaluate them and then feedback whether or not they would be taking them forward and putting them into practice this kept the students highly motivated as you can imagine this was a degree of exposure that was very very unusual for people at their age and stage and I think it was successful in terms of creating motivation as a way to simulate the time out that was not allowed to them in the design of the course so I've gone through all these uh Dimensions because I wanted to make sure that you could understand that when you're creating an entire course or an entire educational engagement it's very important to think about both the explicit and the implicit purposes and it's at your peril that you ignore any one of these Dimensions it is a system and the there are interdependencies among the system if you don't account for all of them in your design uh the system may not work that gives you a little bit of an of an exposure to what we've done so let me just tell you what we're doing next we're going to take what we've learned and run the course again at Mara Lynch and then we want to take it further and take what we've learned and see if we can be developing additional educational experiences with new components um and and see if this isn't a a way that we can have have learned how to do education taking advantage of tech technology and not having technology get in the way of the ultimate learning experience of the student so this really wraps up uh the material that I'd like to cover in this this brief conversation with you and I'd like to lead you with a challenge and a question the challenge is for the work that you're going to be doing and the class time we'll spend together that what we're talking about is not about creating fancy uh technologically composed content it's not about making the material relevant and easy to apply and giving opportunities to do that it's not about creating interaction and Community it's not about providing operate uh opportunities for people to get to know each other and to build friendships and it's not about giving either uh time out or motivation to keep people engaged the challeng is it's about all of them it's about all of them so as you think about uh Professor miwa's class when he talks about education and media and the marketplace I'd like to suggest that your jobs our jobs are to figure out as we produce anything and work on anything we need to put in the hands of Educators a a comprehensive product a product that helps teachers know not only how to convey content in a new way or create U interaction among your students in a new way but how does it fit into the other dimensions of the educational experience what I'd like to at least introduce to you is the exercise that we're going to be doing together homework will be posted I'll be giving you a write up about it what I'm going to be asking you to do is help me develop ways to improve the Andrew low course and the dimension that we're going to be focusing on is the dimension of building a learning community this is an area we've identified for ourselves we need need to do a better job with and I think that you're a good brain trust that uh will be good opportunity for us to tap so I'm going to be asking you to experience not only the lecture but also the Learning Community I'm going to be asking you to read the evaluation that that we did of our own work I'm going to be asking you to find resources that help inform your opinions about how we can do a better job at building a learning community and then I'm going to ask you to begin to design an approach give me some recommendations that we can take forward and put into the new courses that we're going to be developing look forward to working with you on this I appreciate the time that you spent uh watching this video if you have any feedback on this video as a way of communicating to you uh from me to you I'd very much appreciate hearing from you look forward to seeing you at the next class