Dr Barbara Oakley - Learning how to learn - LT16 Conference

thank you I'm so glad to be here thank you so much for coming I think this is a fantastic conference and I have to begin by telling you a little secret about me I love to watch people I probably a lot like a lot of you and the thing is I've worked a lot in different places around the world so I have to tell you about the most interesting person I've ever watched now this was when I was working down in Antarctica McMurdo Station and this guy he was just amazing he could mimic almost anybody he was just a thin wispy little guy with a big head so he looked like this sort of upside-down exclamation point and what he used to do is you know he had a wispy little voice but his name was Neil the station manager on the other hand was the six foot eight just a hunk of a man baritone voice now what do you used to like to do is he used to like to mimic or Brown the station manager so when the phone would ring and bringing it and kneeled and pick it up and say hello resort Brown speaking so one day the phone rings Neil picks it up hello this is art Brown speaking and it was hard round on the so art says who the hell is this and Neil says why art this is you I'm so glad you've finally gotten in touch with yourself and so this is actually what we're going to do here today I'm going to help you get a little bit more in touch with yourself and one of the deepest attributes you have as a human being and that is your ability to learn now the the funny thing is so you know not too long ago about a year and a half ago my husband and I were down in the basement and we were making this thing called a MOOC right which is a massive open online course so I was I had just finished off a book my publishers Random House and they're like barb you've got to be writing op-eds for the New York Times and Washington Post and all these you know you got to be doing that I'm like no no no I'm in my basement I'm working on a MOOC and they're like what's a MOOC so so we get this MOOC together and it's called learning how to learn and it's it's an online course and anybody can take it it's free and here and here's the real shocker so you know we make it and and here's a recent New York Times article on it's now the world's largest course and and so it's the number one most popular course in the world and it's we've got over 1.3 million registered users and we did it all for less than five thousand dollars in our basement so I'm just like wow so I go to Harvard Harvard invites me to speak and you know hear little Midwestern engineer you know I make good I'm going to Harvard I'm all nervous and I go there and I walked in the room and it was I mean there's all these people from Harvard MIT and so forth and I'm like what the heck why are there all these people here and I come to find out that our one little MOOC made for less than five thousand dollars has on the order of this same number of students as all sixty of Harvard's MOOCs put together made for millions of dollars with hundreds of people so so I go and this is totally true I'm like it's not rocket science anybody can do this and boy you do not say that around but anyway so the themes of this talk are going to be first I'm going to give you a little bit of insight into how we learn some practical insights for neuroscience and and from cognitive psychology and then I'm going to give you a little information about how to use this knowledge to help in the creation of riveting online materials now I have to start by giving you just a little bit of information about my own background so I grew up moving all over the place at least in the US so by the time I hit 10th grade I lived in ten different places now the thing is that math in particular is very sequential and so when I was about seven years old I was moving from Lubbock Texas Tech hums fir'd Massachusetts and suddenly they were way ahead of me and doing the multiplication tables and I realized at that time there was just no way I could do math and science I mean doc that was it so I flunked my way through elementary middle and high school science and math and the funny thing is I really am I'm standing here in front of you as a professor of engineering so and this is a real published in top journals I'm here you know all that kind of thing but one day one day one of my students found out about my sordid past as a math flunky and he said how'd you do it how did you change your brain and I thought about it I thought you know here here I was this is like this is the last cute picture of me so but I was just I was this little kid and I just I loved animals and knitting and I and I I always thought wow wouldn't it be really awesome if I could learn another language I grew up in a resolutely monolingual household and you can guess which language that was I spoke and I just thought wow you know I really want to learn another language because I can't do math on science so you know what's left for me maybe I'll try this so I didn't have the money to go to college and so I I thought how can I learn another language and maybe even get paid for it that was one way to do that and that was to join the army so you see me here out of looking very nervous about to throw a grenade and if you knew how clumsy I was you'd see why I was looking so nervous and I did learn another language I learned Russian and so I ended up working out on Soviet trawlers up on the Bering Sea because here's a bunch of fish and I'm looking pretty happy cuz they're we're gonna have some of them for dinner but anyway so I learned Russian and I I just loved new perspectives and in having new adventures and so I also ended up down at the South Pole station in Antarctica and that's where I met my husband so I always say I had to go to the end of the earth to meet that man which is true and but and we just had our 32nd wedding anniversary on the 1st of February so so I began to realize something though and that was with all my love of adventures and new perspectives I was still being very limited in what I wanted to learn right I will I only wanted to learn language and things that I was comfortable and familiar with I remembered looking the textbooks of the West Point Engineers I had worked with in the army and I'd look at it I go man that just looks I can't I can't even fathom how Kenny buddy could understand that and then I thought but wait a minute aren't I supposed to be open to new perspectives and new adventures I mean why should I start looking at some of these kind of things and in fact as I came up to the time where I was about to get out of the service I discovered a very interesting fact and that is there's not much interest for people whose sole professional expertise is the ability to speak Russian so I decided when I when I got out of the service that I would try and retrain my brain see if I could learn something to do with math and science because I could see that language and culture are very very important but math and science and technology are important also especially in today's world and so I I said about age 26 I went to remedial high school algebra and began to try to work my way upwards and it was very slow and it was very difficult but if I had known then what I know now I could have made it so much more easy on myself so as I began years later trying to answer that students question how did I change my brain I begin you know I thought you know oh I wrote in a little email as an answer about this so I started working in a book and I wrote a manuscript because I like to write books and and then there's this thing I don't know do you know this it's called rape my professors calm and you can go in and you can see how professors are rated for how good a teacher they are so I going to rape my professors and it turns out there's a way if you really fiddle with it you can download the best teachers of large classes in in pretty much any subject you might name so it might be math science physics chemistry so I went and I downloaded like the top two three hundred professors who were often the best researchers as well and I got their emails and I hear there were thousands and thousands of of these professors and I emailed them all and I asked them would you like to take a look at my manuscript and shocking percentages said yes so here I got you know just probably close to a thousand responses from people who had read the manuscript and here's one thing that I found very surprising they often there was like this sort of a secret shared handshake that they had they would they they would use metaphor and analogy and story to help convey some of the really difficult ideas that they had that they were trying to teach in math and science and so knowing then or knowing now what I wish I had known before it turns out that when you teach something using a metaphor you're actually activating this is called neural reuse Theory you're activating some of the same neural circuits to understand this very difficult or the very easy concept of the metaphor asked to understand the very difficult concept itself but a lot of these really top professors were embarrassed to reveal that they use metaphor and analogy why because maguet attacked by other more mundane professors around them right you're dumbing down the material and so forth but it's not true now knowing what we know from neuroscience it's simply not true so so as I begin in putting this all together I reached out not only to these top professors but I reached out to top neuroscientists to top cognitive psychologists and of course I myself have been a professor and and researched in the field of engineering education for several decades so what I'm going to share with you today are some of the key ideas and key points from what I found now the the brain as we know is incredibly complicated but fortunately we can simplify its operation to two fundamentally different modes the first I'll call I'll called the focus mode and you turn your attention to something boom it's on right so you look at a book you look at me and you're focused attention is on but the second is called I call it the diffuse mode and diffuse mode is more a relaxed neural set there's actually set of some 24 that we know of now neural resting states the most famous of which is the default mode network so so the default mode or diffuse mode networks you you activate those like you're standing in the shower not thinking about anything in particular I never know just how many times you'll have an idea in the shower and or you're going out for a walk or riding a bicycle or getting on a bus or maybe falling asleep these are all times when you can't really turn on diffuse mode resting stays but they'll come of their own volition and that's when you often have insights about difficult challenges problems that you've been trying to figure out so to better understand some of these these two different modes we're going to use a metaphor and so the metaphor we're going to use is that of a pinball machine and you probably remember how a pinball machine works you just pull back on the plunger and a ball goes blinking around bouncing around on the rubber bumpers and that's how you get points so what you do is I'm gonna I'm gonna take this pinball machine and I'm gonna plop it right down on a human brain so there's the human brain and you can see here there's the little nose on the top and the ears on the side and I'm gonna plop this pinball machine right there in the brain so there you go okay it's plopped in there now you can see this is the analogy for the focused mode of the brain and those little rubber bumpers are quite close to one another so when you're thinking in focus mode as it turns out you're kind of following along the pathways that have already been laid for example if you already know how to do multiplication which of course I didn't when I was 7 years old your mind has some patterns that have already been laid about multiplication so when you think a thought like you're trying to solve 24 times 72 it moves along smoothly in those patterns that have already been laid and that's how you solve the problem but what if you're trying to figure something out that you've never encountered before so it'd be like you've done multiplication you're very comfortable with multiplication but you have never encountered division before how do you even get to the new pattern you don't even have the new pattern there you don't know what it shaped like what it's supposed to do I mean how do you even get there it turns out that that second brain mode is what you often do when you're learning something new you often involve the use of this second way of thinking the diffuse mode so when you think of thought it takes off moves along and and it moves you can see how see how it ranges a lot more widely before it hits bumper those bumpers are more widely spaced and so you you can't think along a specific rigid pattern like you can in the focus mode but you can at least get to a new location in your brain that allows you to think about a problem or a new concept in a different way so the trick about focused and diffuse mode is you can be in either the focus mode or the diffuse mode but you can't be in both modes at the same time unless you're a Buddhist monk with lots of training and all these kinds of things so what that means is you're focusing really hard to solve a problem you focus focus focus and then and you can't figure it out so you focus your tendency is and this is if you look at my old books from when I was trying to learn like the rudimentary trigonometry you'll see all these dimples in the book pages and it's because I would get so frustrated that I take a fork again I just stand my book with a fork right because but we all shared those kinds of experiences don't our students and our co-workers and those who are trying to train those we've all had these kinds of experiences and it relates to the fact that you're for example in this kind of a focus mode you're here you want to be here you keep focusing harder and harder but you're just stuck right there and you don't realize you're stuck there the only way you can actually finally get here is to stop it close the book put away the video whatever it is you're that you're stuck on walk away and that will allow you to access some of this very different type of thinking so you can approach that problem when you come back in a new and fresh way so so you might be thinking ok well we got us here another professor and she's just giving us some good academic stuff and how can we really apply this in real life so I have to let you know some of my favorite characters in history who figured out ways to apply this in real life and they used it to create some very very interesting things so the first one is this guy Salvador Dali one of the greatest of the surrealist painters and you can see him he's he's he was like the original wild and crazy guy he was Madonna and Lady gaga before there was Madonna Lee gaga that is his pet Ocelot Babu and what dolly used to do was when he had some kind of difficult problem with his with his painting he'd sit in a chair with a key in his hand relax relax relax away and he'd be loosely thinking about some problem he was trying to resolve relax and just as he relaxed so much that he'd fall asleep the key would fall from his hand the clatter would wake him up and off he'd go he'd take those ideas from the diffuse mode back into the focus mode or he can he could refine and analyze them so you might think that's that's interesting but it's you know it's an artist and I actually have to deal with technology so what's here for me turns out anybody know who this guy is Thomas Edison yes so Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history and what Edison used to do he used to when he had some kind of really difficult technological problem to resolve sit in a chair with ball bearings in his hand relax relax away just as he'd relax so much that he'd fall asleep ball bearings would fall from his hands the clatter would wake him up at least according to legend and take those ideas from the diffuse mode back into the focus mode or he could refine and analyze them so the lesson for us in all of this is is people throughout history great and not so great known and not known have used these kinds of different modes whether whether consciously or unconsciously to help them resolving problems so so when someone you know like if you have your daughter is sitting and solving a division problem to her she's using these same kinds of creative approaches as people throughout history of use and she's being as creative with her problem-solving even if millions of other people have solved these problems before as as people throughout history have been creative so so I what I'd like to do now is I'd like you to you've already met someone so turn to that person and I'd like you to team up and explain the difference between focus and diffuse modes so take about two minutes here on your mark set go okay so ah so let's let's keep going here okay so I know what you're saying again is another one of these academics you know with these great ideas that are actually not practical in real life because she's saying it takes time to do this you have to go back and forth between the modes to learn something but who has time for that when you're in business and you've got people who are working hard and you just don't have time to dilly-dally around and more than that more than that you may like to procrastinate so if it turns out procrastination is really the biggest problem for a lot of people because you can be working on something focus on it and then take your mind off work on something else while you're waiting for that background processing to take place and you but you've got to get to working on it the first place in order for any processing to take place so this is a funny thing in this massive open online course I hear back lots of people like hundreds of emails a day and one of them the things that they absolutely love most about the MOOC is what I'm going to tell you next so I think you might be very interested to hear about some of these ideas turns out that when you procrastinate when you even think about something you'd really rather not do it divides a part of the brain known as the insular cortex that allows you to experience pain so you actually feel pain when you think about something you don't want to do so what do you do about that you you want to do something to turn off the negative stimulation right so a procrastination is really just a habit and let's look a little more carefully at how this habit happens you get me first you think about something you'd really rather not do and you get this on the happy feeling right you get a pain in your brain and so you turn your attention to something that's more pleasant and the result is that you feel happier almost instantly but you do this once you do it twice no big deal you do it very often and it is just like an addiction it actually can have long-term negative consequences in your life so since I'm an engineer we will cut right to the chase how do you handle procrastination the easiest way is using the Pomodoro Technique this was invented by an Italian Francesco Cirillo in the early 1980s and it's very simple Pomodoro is Italian for tomato of course all you have to do turn off all distractions so no little alarms on your on your computer nothing from your cell phone turn off all sounds all buzzers and set your timer for 25 minutes that's what Francesco Cirillo did was he had a little tomato shaped timer as as what he was using to kind of convey these ideas and then just focus for 25 minutes anybody can focus for 25 minutes know if you like me you might do things like this you begin focusing after about 3 minutes it go your brain goes like this oh my word I've only done 3 minutes I've got 22 minutes to go I can't do it and then you just let that thought drift right on by and you return your attention because you're not supposed to be perfect you just do as well as you can during this time and then at the end you reward yourself so maybe play a song that you like maybe have a little bit of chatting with friends cup of coffee web surf a little bit what you're really doing is we have always had this tendency to think that learning only occurs when you work concentrating and focusing but now you're beginning to understand it occurs as well when you're boxing so by focusing intently for a period of time and then relaxing for a period as well you can go back and forth between these modes and it can help you learn more effectively so the only last little tool or a trick for you is don't focus on finishing a task just remember your whole goal is to focus intently as you can for 25 minutes you don't even want to think about the task you're working on because that activates the pain you just do it right and then get you into what chick's armor Holly calls the state of flow now so good learning is a lot like baking a cake you you can't I mean a cake has lots of different ingredients to it and good learning has lots of different ingredients so I'm going to touch on just a few of those other new ingredients and the way I'm gonna do it usually I explain these ideas but what I'm gonna do here since we're involved in online learning I'm gonna give you a little snippet from the MOOC so you'll see how I teach about this important new idea using the strategies of online learning so this new idea relates to the importance of sleep in learning so this little vignette gives you a sense of how we do things on the MOOC you might be surprised to learn just plain being awake creates toxic products in your brain how does the brain get rid of these poisons turns out that when you sleep your brain cells shrink this causes an increase in the space between your brain cells it's like unlocking stream fluid can flow past these cells and wash the toxins out and now so you can do things online that you actually can't do in the classroom which is kind of fun and but there's lots of things going on in that do you notice how my hands are gesticulating gesticulation in moving my hands you're the viewer watches the hands and they're mirror neurons fire as a result of that and in in some sense they're repeating the motions and learning more effectively with what you're what what you're teaching so when I hear people say hey do a talking head I'm like no don't do a talking head because that cuts you off and it cuts off the just dist gesticulations and gesticulations are an important part of online learning so other things you'll see a lot of motion going on in in the video so I'll appear on one side and in some of the videos you'll see I suddenly appear on the other side or I might lose from full standing - you know a half body or something like that motion attracts attention and we're beginning to understand the neural physiological pathways that allow that attention to to be attracted so and in particular looming motion attracts attention a lot because in real life if something is looming towards you it could kill you so it can be very effective to help help keep viewers attention on the on the video if you use good careful attention to motion a talking head does not count as motion it's too predictable it has to be slightly unpredictable so there's another aspect of sleep I just want to quickly point out that is is very important for learning here is a light microscopy image of a neuron a living neuron before learning and before sleep and here is the same exact living neuron afternoon and after sleep and if you look these little yellow triangles here those indicate places where new synaptic connections are being formed so sleep isn't just you know something you do it's actually something that not only washes away toxins but helps create the neural architecture that allows for effective learning so this is why it's so important to space out learning to do a little bit every day that rather than to cram it all at once if you cram it all at once it makes it so you're sort of little metabolic vampires so to speak can more easily suck those patterns away if you're looking for a metaphor a good one is a brick wall you lay the brick lay the mortar let it dry and that's how you build a solid wall if you don't let that mortar dry you get a sort of a wreck looking thing it's we tend to think when you're learning something that it's just kind of all mush up there and there's not really solid connections being made when you're learning but that's not true at all and this is why spacing out your learning is so so important so a quick other little bit of information relates to working memory we used to think that we had seven call it slots in working memory and that is like you could hold seven numbers in working memory now we think it's probably more like you can hold four items in your working memory so in some sense Minoo if you want to keep something in working memory the best way to do it to earth excuse me if you want to take something from a working memory and put it into a long-term memory the best way to do that is through practice and repeating right that's what will allow for this to take place so I like to say practice makes permanent and what you're really doing is you're building these nice solid neural pathways and in some sense it's like this first time you practice something you're creating a pattern but then the more you practice and repeat the deeper and richer that pattern can become so the the last sort of important item idea related to learning that I want to convey here today is what what is known as the theory of chunking and chunking isn't just sort of dividing things up into bite-sized pieces to communicate it a chunk in another very very rich research sense a chunk is a neural pattern that you create whenever you get some bit of knowledge so for example if you have raw information you're introduced to your working memory goes a little crazy and we can actually see that in a neural imaging how your working memory and your prefrontal cortex is going nuts the first time you're trying to figure something out but once you figure that thing out you're you can kind of think of it like this you figure out what it is that's my husband right there you figure out what it is and it's like you've created instead of this glob here a mass you've created this ribbon that you can pull easily to mind it's one chunked ribbon and the other slots of working memory are now left free so you can put other ideas in there and think about things this is why sometimes people on tests who haven't studied well they'll they'll put these ideas you know though they'll try to pull something in mind and the teacher often has two different ideas they want you to connect together but if you don't have those ideas chunked into a nice pattern what happens is you you your working memory is all busy so you can't pull something else in together to make that connection so that's why chunking and getting ideas getting patterns into mind is so important so I'll give you a little example of chunking happens in everything it happens in math and science happens when you're learning a language happens when you're doing sports it happens with our younger daughter so so we're doing the MOOC and so the thing is how do you do it for $5,000 unless you get cheap support staff from your family so I asked I said hey look you know our two daughters can somebody model backing up a car badly so my younger daughter is like I can do that right so what he's backing up a car backing up a car if you know how to do it it's a chunk when you first learn to backup a car it's crazy your minds overloaded with too much stuff right so when you watch her as she backs up the car and you'll see she'll be like going crazy she's it was very easy for her to model this uh and and it's really difficult when you're first learning how to backup a car so here's a look at she's crazy she's going crazy it's hard right so she backs up the wrong way and then she backs up the other wrong way and so but again even something as simple as backing up a car involves the creation of a chunk you first try it it's really hard after a while it's so easy you can pull it to mind and be talking to somebody else even as you're backing up the car it becomes that automatic so ah so um so I want to give you just a little bit of a background on how we made the MOOC right so this is my basement except it's a little cleaner than my basement normally is right so we created it using a green screen so you can use any kind of cloth you want for the green screen you know it's nothing special it's just we ordered like 450 bucks we've got this green cloth from Amazon and I had no video editing experience so I went and looked how do you do a green screen studio you know you know on video and so I learned how to put together a green screen studio there's some lights there the three normal lights I didn't know then that you probably have four but but it still worked obviously and what happens is I stood in front of the the green screen and I would be standing there and my and then I would read from the teleprompter and then I would flub it and so I say start again and then I'd flub it and then I'd walk off you know and my husband would be like he was the guy behind the camera say he'd be like oh okay stop with the diva moments get your body in here you know and so so what you do is you create this image it has green behind you you can replace that green stuff with whatever you want right you know so you can have a PowerPoint or something animated and that's what you saw was a set of images with the sleep video so I used these Steve Jobs approach to video creation Steve Jobs had this idea that when you it used to be when you opened your computer there were there was a minute or two of startup time and what jobs did was he he would he said why is that I mean that's really stupid people around the world are having their time wasted by waiting for boot-up time and you know I mean it's similar for me people around the world of watching our videos so I made took great care to make every single second count when creating the videos so I may be up there casually cracking a joke but I'm not going while I'm thinking about things so you might think oh but the arm is important it allows the viewer to think about things no it doesn't because if I'm saying um before the difficult thing if you were once the pause after the difficult thing so so anyway I tried to make every single second count that was all tightly scripted and put together so then even though it seems very casual and very fun everything is carefully planned so uh here you see my my husband I had first-rate family support in the form of my camera audio and director and that's the teleprompter we used and a thing to realize in any kind of online materials that you create is online is incredibly competitive so a great educational video is a mixture of academia with Silicon Valley but a little bit of Hollywood and of course when you get to places like Harvard they say Hollywood oh you're dumping it down but actually some of the best art in the world is coming online through through television nowadays I do remember one of the worst professors I ever had in my entire life told me once I never watched television and I thought gosh you know I don't either I better start watching so I did and I'm really glad I did because I think it informed doing the MOOC so online learning actually can be better than face-to-face you can do it either fully online or partly online as you probably all know as flipped you know it maleeh in the broad-ranging sort of lifestyles that we have today worldwide it can it can make learning available that has never been available before and high-quality learning so I recently did an article for Nautilus magazine called virtual classes can be better than real ones and and it just amazes me because a lot of the academic critics of online learning have never taught an online class so they don't really know what they're talking about there's you will be very happy to know that nature publishing group is putting out a new journal nature of course is the best group of research journals in the world they're based here out of England and this new journal is going to be called MPG science of learning and it will have at it'll actually bring some solid science into how we learn effectively you you should know that 0.13% of typical gold standard educational literature is replicated what that means is you can publish virtually anything you want nobody's ever going to check you so this is part of why the field of education is in such disarray by bringing nature's perspective in on these articles or in on this research I think we're going to start seeing dramatic shifts and my my co-instructor teri Sinofsky for the MOOC and I have been invited to contribute a inaugural article about learning and about MOOCs so I'm very excited about that so just a few little snippets here I want to point out that green screen can kind of help reduce cognitive load because it brings everything right in to one area and again notice the gesticulation here so I'm explaining what I explained you for yours right here pimples right down inside so what you see is just a little snippet of what I had explained before but notice I can stand full body and I can be walking around inside those metaphors these are the same techniques used by some of the world's most brilliant scientists through history Barbara McClintock for example the who the she won the Nobel Prize for her discoveries related to jumping genes she would imagine herself down in the level of the genetics and that was how she was able to kind of figure some of these things out Einstein of course famously imagined himself writing a light-weight imagining these kinds of metaphors is an incredibly powerful technique and you can do it in your basement I mean it's just that this is all simply PowerPoint right and I use Sony Vegas Pro in case you're I mean that's like video editing software for dummies but Sony are actually a Adobe Premiere is is really a very good software package that people normally use so here's just a little motion with metaphor just to give you a little sense of that and this is to try and explain how to remember equations because we're often told don't memorize the equation you can go look it up no you want to memorize equations at least the key equations because it helps build a neural structure for you right poets poets will often say memorize the poem and you will understand it more deeply but why should we let the poets have all the fun right if you memorize it Kait equations or key ideas it will stick in your mind and you'll think about them more effectively so I'm trying to teach people silly tools to memorize more easily f stands for flying M stands for mule and a stands for whatever you'd like it to stand for so here's the the little video vignette the idea there's a gigantic flying mule bring a cuisine MA on my couch yes and that is my living room cleaner than usual in the background there and an another very important idea related to online learning we're used to going to classes and we have students in cages in classes they can't get away very easily so we don't have to kind of keep them entertained a little bit or humor does more than entertain it actually relaxes certain areas of the brain and that allows you when you have something really difficult you want to do something humorous beforehand because it's like makes your brain literally be more open to the new idea it relaxes it so humor is incredibly important in in online videos and that is something that's forgotten at your peril so here is this is my co-instructor terry Chrzanowski he's a legendary neuroscientist she's one of what one of only ten living human beings who simultaneously a member of the National Academy of Sciences National Academy of Engineering and National Institutes of medicine for the US and he's the Francis Crick professor at the Salk Institute and he's actually a really nice guy but he's so sort of prestigious that people don't really realize that so I edited his videos for him so I'm like Terry can I pull humor in there he's like you back so here's a little bit of Terry with humor he's just gone through a very lengthy and deeply scientific discussion of how we learn and now we move on this brings us to zombies zombies can't learn it is also clear from their behavior that they have brain damage especially in the front of their cortex which is the part that makes plans so he comes right down off his pedestal and he's just fun to be around and that's a lot of what we try to do it win the creation of the monk of course you probably all know that good online materials are short there about six minutes in length that's what research shows the attention drops off before and after that a I think good online learning actually is changing how we teach because the best materials are now in competition with people teaching online classes so in that sense it's important to remember that teachers professors often get to where they are teachers get to where they are because they've always been very successful at showing off how much they know but your job as teaching especially teaching online is not to show off how much you know which involves showing how difficult something is before you simplify it your your job is simply to make those ideas simple clear and memorable for viewers so with online materials I'll just give you a little a few perspectives here sometimes people say well MOOCs you know they're not that big a deal because people drop out right you may have a million viewers but maybe only a hundred thousand of them actually finish you know the MOOC but actually that's that is if you look at the statistics if you took a textbook and looked at that textbook and said how many people touch the textbook in the store versus how many people actually finish every single chapter in that textbook you'd say man those textbooks have low completion rates nobody should be buying textbooks right I mean just because we have the data of people looking glancing at a MOOC doesn't mean that that people aren't getting a lot out of it from even a simple glance but a lot you can see from this person here she says I don't need the certificate I won't take the quizzes given that I don't want to leave the impression everyone who signs up and follows that path is simply not finishing or getting thing anything out of it I am in fact getting a great deal out of the course so a lot of people who are just kind of watching a few videos they're still getting things that are very worthwhile for them as people often say well online you can't really impact people they're not really paying attention that's not true either good materials can catch people from all over the world but this is this is like one of the funniest ones so this is our older daughter she is just wrapping up medical school and so I had I asked her to and she was a good sport about it I just asked her to model just wearing headphones to block out sounds so she has these kind of small little headphones turns out she's got these big honking headphones on her lap so she models how you block out sound if you're really learning something difficult she was in class sitting pretty much like this her professor was speaking to them he suddenly stopped the class he's a preeminent cardiologist in southeast Michigan stops a class points directly at her and says you you're the girl of them food you're in the MOOC so so even preeminent cardiologists I actually take these materials and then that contrast that with here's an email we got from a 5th grader so that would be like somebody about 13 12 13 years old I'm in grade five my mom was browsing through Coursera and I passed her and make me join in she chose this course for me I'm very thankful for that I never knew that professors were very witty I'm like course I'm witty I scripted it in damn it you know but the course is also used in refugee camps and Somalia and the southern Sudan it's it's used in Penitentiary's in state of California it's also I just met with some people in Colorado they're using it for to help educate people with IQs of 70 in below who had always been sort of put on the sidelines before they'd never been able to go into any kind of professional work there some of these are now attending college so learning how to learn can make an immense difference in all sorts of people's lives and the personal nature of good online learning can make a big impact so here's a letter from someone who says she took the MOOC and for me it was life-changing she's currently studying a MOOC on mathematical modeling the old me would have given up after the first or second week the new me is on course for honors so it can make a big difference here's one that says just basically and it's not me and it's not my co-instructor it's it's these new kinds of materials and way of reaching ways of reaching out and this is something truly that is available for all of us to do again it's not rocket science you want to know what I did when I got stuck in creating the MOOC I'm at NASA local high school kid right they knew how to create these materials it's really it's not hard and it's all inexpensively available so the biggest thing that we can be doing now is I think just sharing our own excitement uh an enthusiasm for learning that's that's why we're here and I think in closing what I just like to say involves the idea of passion we're often taught follow your passion and the thing about passion though is it is truly a double-edged sword passions develop about what you're good at and some some things take much longer to get good at so I always say don't just follow your passions broaden your passions and your lives will be greatly enriched thank you so much okay thank you very much Barbara that was a very insightful talk very interesting I love your honesty through through the presentation absolutely wonderful to hear so before I open it up for questions and comments and anything around that I just want you to do a quick thing with people who's sitting around it's just what was it what was important for you what did you think it was useful just that talk for a moment amongst each other just what did you think was useful what did you think was important about what you heard from Barbara so please just do that and then I'll get your attention back so just but I just want people to talk and then I'll get you comment well done Bob and you have some water that was a lot of talk good hopefully did I run our kids first yeah it's fine we've got about eight minutes left quite a lot of different pieces there I remember the pieces where you were talking about working memory and chunking I remember from my psychology days of learning and what is interesting to hear from the updated thinking around that one of the most important educators and the reason is because it would completely run counter to the way they teach they think but that means yeah all right can I get your attention please thank you very much so we have we have two roving mics on either side of the room so if you do have a comment or a question for Barbara then just I'm afraid you have to do the hands up thing so please do and then we'll try and get around so we've got somebody over there I've got somebody over here whoever gets it first goes go and program manager at a business school and I was wondering how can i implement the is it possible to create a give you state within a classroom or outside a classroom how can you develop a program that takes that into minds okay so the question is how do you develop a or implements and defuse activities in the classroom my sense is that the best way to do that is through active learning so for example when we took a break and you switch your attention it's you're switching your attention to someone else but it's a much more relaxed state so you know it's not like you're really focusing on me trying to try to follow it's more like okay now what do we think and if you use the same trick usually when when they do that to me and I'm in the audience I'm like you go first and you speak for so I can just like relax and kind of think about things but I think this is part of why active learning is such a powerful technique the classroom and that's my my best recommendation thank you I'm frequently asked to make elearning modules in a corporate environment some of these are quite complex on something like tax or audit or completely new learning very technical and some people say well that's going to take at least an hour perhaps three hours and and I'm thinking no way Jose that's far far too long is there in your opinion an optimum time for learning in of that nature six minutes is really so so you know I mean I'm an IT engineer so I know that you can't communicate everything in six minutes right but what you can do is you can create little scripts six minute chunk of an idea six minute now maybe some of them will be three maybe some of them will go up to seven eight or nine but you can keep them pretty restricted because you're giving one idea if you're trying if your instructors are trying to communicate this big broad thing all at once they're gonna lose everybody but if they give a chunk a chunk a chunk you know in a sense of breaking things up but also each one is a neural chunk then then towards the end they can bring those chunks together and it will make much more sense I know exactly what you mean professors I think the biggest challenge is professors think they know it all and and your or as people who are experts and they often don't realize there is a way to to break things down and communicate it more briefly it's as Pascal once said something along the lines of you know if I had more time I would explain more briefly because it's difficult but that's where good scripting can really if you take a script and say you know get the person to write script and then say hey look this is you know 50 minutes there's a little part right there hey you can kind of tweak that around so it's got a beginning and end and then do it like that sometimes you'll need an expert to go in and say hey buddy you've got a you can do it you can do it shorter because they won't believe you but then find that person who can frame the idea that it is because absolutely you can do it with anything create small chunks and then tie it all together at the end thank you well ago yeah so you mentioned earlier on that's online learning could be better than in the classroom then if that's the case then why are we all here okay if you look at all teaching it is a statistical truism to say that 50% of all teachers are below average right so why do we have those 50% of really bad teachers out there I mean I'm being a little facetious here there are there a good teacher the best of all education is if you have world-class teachers getting world-class students together you know so I mean like the world-class students here like what's happening now and you were all able to kind of talk that is the best but a lot of times that's simply not available if you I was in Guatemala last weekend so they can't get professors to come to Guatemala they all do get them they'll sign up and then they'll look and they'll say hey it's too dangerous it's not really too dangerous but you know they'll be put off so they just won't come so what I'm really trying to say is simply a lot of times you can't get the very best so you kind of go for the second best but but it actually can have really good trade-offs that can make it really pretty much the same in many ways as good face-to-face kinds of experiences you know I love there's learning comes in a lot of different ways and so you know I wouldn't trade the interaction of a conference like this but at the same time I certainly I think that online materials like what we can create is really a boon for people - thank you great question thank you for extremely interesting talk I've done a lot of work in safety critical industries one of the important things is to do the analysis properly so that like on your slide with the brick wall you've got all the bricks one of the ways that I feel up sexually say is that too often you get given a manual and told to do some elearning on that even if it is having to be chunked into six minute bits you need to know you get the right chunks how do you make sure that that happens now when the analysis analysis phase out of the old style addy approach that's a difficult question to answer because I think it varies so much by what is being taught certainly for me I mean somewhat analogous is the whole idea of learning how to learn in the first place there there's just so many different aspects of it how can you tie together that for example some of the top review papers on how you learn effectively talk about deliberate practice interleaving and talking amongst other people as the keys to learning effectively but I've just present all sorts of other ideas chunking the importance of sleep how you know just all these different ideas in there there aren't even included so the I think going back to the crux of your question it's all in how the material is created in the first place and you and you want to have a really good person drawing that together and creating a learning experience whether online or in person that is that brings together some of the you know amorphous things that you're trying so it really goes back to who that content creator is I don't know if that really cuz your questions such a good one and a difficult one to answer but that would be my best way of addressing that thank you I'm afraid we don't have time for any further questions we're at the end of time come on

Channel: LearningTechnologies

Views: 8,864

Keywords: neuroscience, Moocs, MOOC, learning models, Pomodoro technique, Coursera, elearning, e-learning, learning technology

Id: J0_Pjdy_1lI

Length: 67min 17sec (4037 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2016