More Clicks, Fewer Bricks: The Lecture Hall is Obsolete

we're gonna begin in just a couple of minutes but we usually have a little bit of a preliminary conversation chat or two to discuss how we got here why we here why we're doing this topic but I want to point out too in that Avenue that tonight's debate is taking place in partnership with the Richard Paul Richmond Center for business law and public policy and that is a joint venture of the Columbia Law School and the Columbia Business School and we want to thank them for bringing us here partnering with us for this and tonight to chat a little bit about how that partnership came in to bring I'd like to bring to the stage dr. Christopher a mayor he is the Paul Milstein professor of real estate and co-director of the Richmond center and he's going to come on stage and say a few words so let's welcome professor Mayer thanks a lot John good evening welcome everybody on behalf of the Richard Paul Richmond Center for business law and public policy it is my honor to welcome all of you to this evenings debate the debate marks the fourth time that the Richmond center has partnered with intelligence squared us in furtherance of our mission to promote evidence-based Public Policy and dialogue on timely and relevant policy issues inaugurated in May of 2011 the Richmond center provides a platform for scholars of law and business schools to collaborate and formulate ideas and debate important public policy issues and to inspire students to pursue careers in areas in the intersection of business law and public policy this evenings debate addresses whether online education such as massive open online courses so-called MOOCs will fundamentally alter the traditional classroom ecosystem in higher education or serve the college serve to enhance the college based educational experience I am proud that the Richmond center and intelligence squared us have picked up the gauntlet and this issue and worked so diligently to bring us four of the most notable figures engaged in leading the dialogue on online education and what better place to hold such a debate than on the campus of Columbia University at least so long as campuses exist as we may as we find out I wanted to thank intelligence squared us and Robert Rosenkranz in particular for their ongoing partnership and collaboration thank you to Richard Paul Richmond who is with us tonight for his ongoing support and generosity thanks to each of our debaters in the moderator John for engaging in this important topic and most importantly I'd like to thank all of you who are attending the debate and actually participating in the conversation this evening and now I'd like to bring back John Donvan who in addition to his many wonderful qualifications is actually a graduate of Columbia's journalism school so we want to do wanted to welcome you thank you thanks very much good yeah it's a home team crowd for me and so the next conversation I want to have and this is part of the ritual of intelligence squared our founder Robert Rosencrantz likes to come on stage and share what he spent some time thinking in advance about what debate should we be putting on in a season and he comes on and shares with us how we got to this debate why this topic why now and in general he's made intelligent squared you as possible so please give him a round of applause as we bring him to the stage hey Bob thank you John so normally you talk us through a little bit of the of the the pros and cons that were likely to hear but before we get to that I need to bring up the fact that I find it curious that at another university campus that we shall not name in a city called New Haven Connecticut there stands building called Rosencrantz Hall same last name as yours which suggests to me that you may actually as in fact the benefactor of that building you you make you have some kind of a commitment to the bricks thing do you not well I do but but I try to be fair and balanced so my most recent Yale philanthropy was a fun to create online courses for Yale professors it's the Center for educational innovation at Yale so I'm on both sides of this issue so have you ever actually tried an online course here you know actually I did I I was I felt like online courses might be a truly revolutionary kind of development in education and at a personal curiosity I took a course in statistics and I thought it was fascinating it had a number of elements that really seemed very interesting to me first of all you could go at your own pace which you can't normally secondly you got instant feedback or continual feedback as the material was presented I gave wrong answers deliberately in some cases just to see where that led and it gave you hints as to where you went wrong and how to correct yourself so it seemed like a very very interesting way of learning with frequent rewards and frequent feedback did you get a grade I did how'd you do I did fine so it sounds like you've just sort of made the case for why why there's an appeal to the online course what's the opposite argument well I think the opposite argument is that you really there's something very much missing a purely online approach to education you miss the give-and-take of a vital classroom you've missed the requirement to think on your feet to try to persuade other people so I could well imagine that somebody could learn to be a very good statistician taking statistics courses online but I can't imagine that somebody would learn to be a great debater doing that you need the personal touch I think you did well let's see how we can test our people on the personal touch as debaters tonight I think they'll do fine but that's over to you now and over to that let's welcome to the stage our debaters ladies and gentlemen thank you Bob Rosencrantz and I would just like to to ask for one more round of applause - Bob Rosencrantz and Richard Paul Richman for bringing this debate to us here tonight so an idea for the times we live in who needs the college campus anyway college by Internet you get to learn at home you make your own schedule you save money but did we hear some of this going on already back in 1948 college by radio when NBC collaborated with the University of Kentucky to put courses on the airwaves college by television when Britain ran its great experiment called the Open University it's been going since 1971 the thing is the demise of the traditional college campus has been talked about for a long time now but it has held off against all of these technological assaults so far and the question is will it be different this time with online education is that a game-changer that will make the traditional lecture hall obsolete well that sounds like the makings of a debate so let's have it yes or no to this statement more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete a debate from intelligence squared us I'm John Donvan we are here at Columbia University's Miller theater we have four superbly qualified debaters two against two who will argue for and against this motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete our debate as always goes in three rounds and then the audience votes to choose a winner and only one side wins our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete let's meet our debaters first ladies and gentlemen please welcome Anant Agarwal and a not you are a professor at MIT you are the CEO of EDX that is an online learning platform founded by Harvard and by MIT recently it was announced that Columbia would also become one of its charter members not you are not only the CEO and president of EDX but you also taught its first course which was circuits and electronics you had an enrollment of a hundred 55,000 students from 162 countries is that a-- is it a hard course it's not a hard course it is an MIT hard course it had differential equations as its prerequisites and we were petrified we would have a hundred people sign up for the course looking at the differential equation prerequisites we were shocked when we had 10,000 people registered in the first hour of announcing it and before we knew at 155 thousand people signed up for this hard course how many passed so more people pass this course then I would be able to teach at MIT if I were to teach at MIT for 40 years how many passed 7,200 Wow but less than 5% correct it's about the same percentage passed the course as a mighty admitted into its current batch I'm I didn't meet at seven percent of the people who applied to MIT this year so about the same number past this MIT hard course okay I can see you're good with numbers thanks ladies you know let's welcome Agarwal and the nuts tell us who your partner is the inacol Ben Nelson ladies and gentlemen welcome Ben Nelson please then you are also arguing for the motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete in 2010 you left your job as CEO of Snapfish you had a plan to reinvent the university experience the result is the Minerva project it's an elite meant to be elite online undergraduate program and your plan is to rival the kind of education you can get at the Ivy's at a fraction of the cost and you've said you want to make it more difficult to get into Minerva than to get into Yale so how many people were in your inaugural class so we admitted 45 students this year that represents a two and a half percent acceptance rate and we admitted the students not based on a artificial capacity constraint but we actually admitted every single person that passed our bar and one of these extraordinary students is right there in the audience where are you I'll chat with you later you can ask a question so so it's obviously there's obviously you're finding a market for this absolutely our the demand that we have received for Minerva has been extraordinary because we not only are tapping a global market but we also are approaching admissions purely on the basis of the human potential of this candidate and not about their lineage or who their parents are what country they were born in but you want it to be elite we are designing the curriculum such that it is made for the very the very most capable people in the war okay so by one definition its elite ladies in one thanks to Ben Carver and welcome to the debate our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and we have two debaters who are arguing against this motion first please welcome Jonathan Cole Jonathan this is a home crowd for you you are the John Mitchell Mason professor at Columbia University you've served 14 years as Provost Dean of and Dean of faculties he wrote the book the great American University you wrote the book about this whole story which traces the origins and the evolution of American higher education you've been in academia your entire career and this particular University Columbia you have seen through decades and decades of change and growth just to give the audience an idea of how much change in growth what year did you actually start at Columbia I began at 1960 the fall of 1960 I've never left and I say I'm not gainfully employ a bull by any other institution quite frankly but I've been here I've gone through many roles and I've seen many changes from wearing a beanie as a freshman and having tug-of-wars with ropes to well I won't go into the rest back in 1960 you had to ride a horse to get to class if if you had a horse ladies gentleman Jonathan Cole and Jonathan your partner is Rebecca Schulman and she's fantastic irrepressible and logically incredibly sound ladies gentleman Rebecca Shulman Rebecca Schumann you are arguing against the motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete you're a columnist for Slate you are also a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education and with its vitae project you are also an adjunct professor a professor at the University of Missouri st. Louis you teach German so you are really in the trenches this is the real world for you and you're living it we're curious have you ever had a conversation with your students in your German class about their preferences or dislike however for online education and for what are called MOOCs yeah actually I was just talking to them about it yesterday I don't teach German right now I teach something similar to the core curriculum here at Columbia actually I teach the freshman literature sequence and I asked him yesterday how do you guys feel about MOOCs and how do you feel about online classes they didn't know what MOOCs are and most of them do not like their online classes well that sounds like an advantage for your side already alright ladies and gentlemen Rebecca Suman thank you very much and we're gonna be hearing that term MOOCs so stay tuned to hear it defined because it's important now this is a debate and that means it's actually a contest clash of ideas and one side will win in one side will lose and that will be determined by the vote of our live audience here at Columbia University we want to go now to set you up to vote twice once before the debate and once again afterwards and the way that we determine the winner is the team whose numbers have changed the most so we want to set you up with the first vote go to the keypad at your seat and register for us where you stand at this point on this motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete if you agree with this motion at this point push number one and if you disagree with this motion push number two and if you are undecided push number three and the system will lock out in about 20 seconds if you push the wrong button just correct yourself it'll lock in your most recent vote and you could ignore the other keys they're not live and again at the end of the debate we'll have you vote a second time and we look at the difference between the votes and the team whose numbers have changed the most in percentage point terms will be declared our winner so we're gonna go in three rounds and we're gonna start now with round 1 round 1 our motion is this more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and here in round one to open and arguing for the motion Anant Agarwal he is a professor of Electrical Engineering and computer science at MIT and the CEO of EDX and online learning destination founded by Harvard and MIT he'll be making his way to the lectern to make his opening statement it will be seven minutes long uninterrupted ladies and gentlemen Anant Agarwal six minute statement thank you you know I'm going back to do when I was an undergraduate oh my god 30 years ago 32 31 years ago I'm sitting in class and this is like most of the classes have been in this was an IIT in Madras lots of bright kids around me extraordinarily bright and the fifth minute mark was my third the transition point I would follow everything the lecturer did they instructed it unto the fifth minute mark and then at the fifth minute mark I would lose the professor and I would look around and and everybody seemed to be following the professor but I would have lost the professor and then I spent the remaining hour simply scrambling taking notes completely I just lost the professor scrambling taking down every word no idea what is going on I wonder how many of you in the audience have felt like that in a classroom I won't ask for a show of hands I just want you to think about it I certainly felt oh my god everybody and everybody around me knows what's going on what's what's up with me our education system this this whole system of the lecture and getting together larger students in the classroom really is based on the factory model of Education put a whole bunch of people sitting in the classroom and and then you have a person lecturing at them it's a very very efficient system it's several thousand years ago and this university bolonia is still standing it's a thousand years old and you know what nothing has changed you could wake up a thousand years behind you a thousand years ahead and absolutely nothing has changed everything has changed around us but the university education system hasn't our communication is different we don't have to yell across you know continent that we have smartphones a medical system has changed we don't have to hit somebody on the head to knock them unconscious and operate very quickly we have laparoscopy today but education system hasn't changed we can fly for one continent to another communicate in all kinds of ways but an education system hasn't changed don't we believe it is important we can do the online education of today is very different from my grandfather's online education it's completely different today in this new system we can use self-paced learning just imagine I can watch a video of an instructor I can pause the video I can rewind the video not once but six times heck I can even mute the professor this this self pacing allows me to learn at my own pace I wish I had that when I was you know I was an undergraduate student another thing I would submit my homework and I would get the graded homework back two weeks later if I was lucky I still haven't gotten some homeworks back 32 years later no if no feedback the feedback came too late I wasn't interested in the feedback when it came late but with online learning today if we go on to edx.org or one of the MOOC platforms feedback is instantaneous we can create all kinds of questions equations we can even grade essays bleed or not so that feedback comes instantly I can get a something's wrong I can think about it try to fix it I can learn in fact I learned the most when something is wrong what did I do here I can try to fix it instant feedback is critical and then many many many studies education researchers have known this for 40 years study by Chen in 2003 showed that you provide instant feedback students learn better if you don't provide instant feedback they don't learn as well we also do another thing we use active learning again these ideas are old ideas we just not applied them so a very famous paper by crack and Lockhart talked about active learning just go back to Socrates it's a Socratic method you know you teach by asking questions so here what we do is we can interleave videos but in interactive exercises see watch your video at your own pace then you go answer a question to see if you've learned the material or not this is mastery learning if you haven't quite gotten it you go back and review the video are the material to come back and you try it again so this way you don't pace forward until you have picked up and really learned the material and studies like the Kraken law card study from as old as as as early as 72 has shown that this again improves learning outcomes so online learning today incorporates all of these principles and it's completely different from what it was before we can even bring gamification into our system we can do online labs now check out the demo course on EDX on EDX it's called demo 101 we have online labs and biology chemistry physics mathematics the people can play around and bring gamification into the picture our millennial generation is completely different in just a two week cycle room I remember walking past my daughter's room she's 14 and she's lying in bed and she's got three screens in front of her okay on one screen she's doing physics WebAssign on the second screen she swiped my iPad and she's watching Netflix on the third screen she's what zapping now whatever that is with her friends it's not tweeting anymore it's what's happening with her friends and they learn differently the millennial generation is able to do these things and then in the classroom you still need that you know they interact with each other learn the soft skills and so on and so forth but they can get all the content and so on completely online and that's how they want to learn they want gamification their one engagement not not the same old boring lecture where I lost the professor after the first minute their first minute everywhere everybody should really have a high-quality education and with online learning I can really bring this to the classroom as well and bring in bring in online learning to create the blended model of learning in an experiment we did with San Jose State University they used our online material in class to create the blended model students read what videos interactive exercises in this active learning model before they came to class and in class they would ask questions of the professor interact with other students and learned through the soft skills in collaboration but the big part was online and here they demonstrated that traditionally by students would 60% would pass the course 40% would fail in this blended model at San Jose State using our material online they found that the failure rate fell to 9% I know your time is up thank you very much Anant Agarwal ladies and gentlemen our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete in here to make his position clear against this motion Jonathan Cole he is the John Mitchell Mason professor at Columbia University where he served as provost and Dean of faculties ladies and gentlemen Jonathan Cole thank you and then there were MOOCs the latest technological messianic movement that will disrupt and then save higher education I want to make 12 points in six minutes as to why you should vote against the motion that more clicks will end the need for bricks and all two fundamentally the nature of higher education online education will not replace the great colleges and universities in the United States it's the selective colleges MOOCs will be one of many forms of new technology that will be useful mostly for courses as was pointed out by my worthy opponent for those where you can get the right answer that's at the back of the book for all of the courses where there are subtleties and interpretation where there's a need to argument for a close-knit community of participants whereas a need for critical thinking for close reading where analysis plays back and moderates initial formulations MOOCs will be less useful in fact as a biological scientist Stewart Feinstein says questions are more relevant than answers indeed Richard Levin recently signed on as the CEO of Coursera and he said that it couldn't replace the traditional four-year residential college let's take the democratizing effect Levin says that's what one of the purposes is but who in fact takes those courses from all over the world a noble purpose the people who take that course at least from the evidence that we have to the moment are people who are already educated not the people who were trying to target for education the next point is that there is no impaired good empirical evidence that supports the idea that MOOCs represent a disruptive technology that will overturn the current business model of the best colleges and universities let me just tick off a few of the things for which there is absolutely no good empirical evidence there's no economical cost model that has been shown to work the cost of creating content is very high friends of mine have told me that they spend a hundred two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand dollars a course in short there's no evidence that MOOCs will in fact lower the cost of tuition there's no method that has been shown as to how intellectual property will be divided up how much will go to the professor's how much to the University there's no good evidence that MOOCs have a democratizing effect as much as they might be desirable to have a democratizing effect there's no good evidence on how people with different learning styles respond to the flipped classroom and the MOOC culture on campus there's no good evidence on how you can examine thousands of people taking online courses without massive cheating there's no good evidence about who drops out of MOOC courses those 7,000 who graduated may well have been people who already took the course at MIT now how do we know who they really are and what their characteristics are 72% of the professor's who answered a questionnaire about teaching online courses who are committed to them said that they were not give credit for those who did well in the course Sebastian Thrun is one of the founders of core of one of the leading MOOCs Udacity has said we were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines and at the same time I was realizing we don't educate people as others wished or as I wished we have a lousy product it was a painful moment people learn from each other when they eat together we together converse together sleep together if nothing else sex will reinforce bricks over clicks on the campus this is not to say I want you to know that the Khan Academy where small short highly focused courses are offered won't be appealing to some it is and it will be but it is not going to end the need for the kind of close interaction that we need to find in the classroom in physical structures MOOCs will not solve the coughs disease I will answer what the coughs disease is and why I won't actually lower tuition and the increases in tuition that you have read about in the papers during our next part of this debate let many platforms grow I don't know how many of you have seen Brian green the physicist at Columbia's new platform on that he created for the world science fair it takes place in New York he built it himself it is for people who know nothing about science two Nobel Prize winners it is far more sophisticated than the platforms like EDX one author allow many of these platforms to grow and see how they work MOOCs are one tool that will help to make higher learning better not cheaper for both undergraduates and professional school students it's not likely to infiltrate the world of the laboratory however remember what makes American universities the greatest system of higher learning in the world is the research discoveries that have changed our lives and the lives of people around the world you never hear the MOOC discusses the MOOC proponents talk about the influence of MOOCs on laboratory life it will have a tremendous effect on accessing information JSTOR artstor digital libraries all of these things are wonderful inventions and part of technology that helped us learn but that is no substitute for being able to analyze moby-dick Jonathan Cole your time is up thank you very much you and here's where we are we are halfway through the opening round of this intelligence squared us debate where our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete you have heard from the first two debaters and now on to the third I'd like to welcome to the lectern Ben Nelson he is the founder chairman and CEO of the Minerva project that is a new online undergraduate program that aims to reinvent the university experience and Ben I we had four teachers up here and I was hoping that one of them would in the opening statements explained to those who do not know what a MOOC is so I want to give you an extra 15 seconds before you launch to tell everyone in our audience and our listeners what this odd word means and why it is exceedingly relevant to this discussion so a MOOC is a massive open online course and as Jonathan point out it is one of several formats and technologies used for online education that's perfect ladies and gentleman in his opening statement please welcome Ben Nelson thank you thank you so much for having us and thank you Jonathan for pointing out two very important things first that I should have absolutely gone to Columbia as an undergrad because they have sex in class and I I certainly made a huge mistake going to Penn we did not have that and secondly thank you for making such a compelling argument to vote for this motion the what what Jonathan put together as the framework was a critique of the state of online education not even online education but a segment of online education today as it stands it was not a critique of the potential of online education and it was based on an analysis of a very small portion of American higher education these small courses in the most elite institutions in the United States but we're not talking about the future of the most elite institutions we're talking about the future of higher education in general and so let's look at the facts the fact of the matter is or the fact of the matter are that when you look at but even the elite universities do they are largely about disseminating knowledge lecture based courses the lecture hall where a university professor stands up in front of a large audience gets paid three four hundred thousand dollars fully loaded and teaches one maybe two courses a year to two hundred students is not an economically viable model and it is in fact a worse form of delivery then what not described the very first version the version 1.0 of these massive open online courses the fact that matter is is that all of the problems listed about MOOCs whether we're talking about who is taking them cheating whether we're talking about the completion rates whether we're talking about whether or not it's economical to create the upfront costs all of those problems got solved over time and even before they do with identity verification online with the fact that once you create one of these MOOCs it can be taken to hundreds of thousands of dollars once you realize that the fact that these courses are not completed or they're taken by the the people already have in at university education not because they're the only ones that can benefit from them but because today they're not issued for credit compare completion rates at massive open online courses that are there purely for fun versus the completion rate at Chicago Community College they're both in the single digit percentages but when you go to Chicago Community College you're going there and paying to get your associates degree here you have an opportunity to learn for free and you have an opportunity to learn at your own pace with those around you but let's go beyond the lecture let's address even the most esoteric elements of higher education the close conversation between students and professor in small groups that explore subject matter well turns out you can do that online as well and you can do it in a better way than you can offline classroom when we first created our platform at Minerva which is limited to 19 students per course every student is on live video we went to the University of Washington Medical School and we tested a very rudimentary version of our platform with a live class offline and a live class online taught by the same professor the same subject matter the results were universally accepted that the online class was far superior to the offline class simply for the fact of the matter that even though there were the same number of students in the class when you look straight into that camera and the professor sees your face and all of the other students sees you see your face you are at paying attention the professor can call on students and ask them a question and find out what they're going to answer rather than having them ask or answer at random so the professor can choose to pick not the right answer but the spectacularly wrong answer which is interesting one that curates the course of the conversation in ways that simply are not possible offline well we all have to remember is we are at the dawn of interactive high quality personalized education whether it's a broadcast too many whether it's in a small seminar format or whether it is done in a individualized adaptive learning platform that caters the process of Education to the individual student but the fact that we are at the dawn means that none of us in this room including Anant and myself who are working on this everyday can conceive where this will bring us in the future here's what we do know we do know that when students are given the option of going to their illustrious lectures even at the world's best universities there are far more students on the first day of class than there are in the last day we know that oftentimes when you ask students did the courses that you took on in your college career change your life did they make an impactful change in the way you perceive the world majority of students say no we know that technologies will continue to improve and we'll bring the intellectual development of students not just among the elite but among students around the world to a newer and higher level thank you thank you Ben Nelson our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and now to here to put support her argument against this motion let's welcome Rebecca Schumann she is a columnist for Slate and the for The Chronicle of Higher Education Vita hub and the author of the forthcoming book Kafka and Vic and Vidkun Stein ladies and gentlemen Rebecca Schumann thank you thank you so much everybody for being here and to my co-panelists for just presenting not I try really hard to get my assignments back to my students really fast I really try my best and I always make it under two weeks but now I'm gonna try even harder I really appreciate Jonathan that you brought up the fact that in person we like to teach classes where you can't get get the answers in the back of the book in my class there is no back of the book or the back of the book is just the last chapter of the book it wouldn't really help and then I did not know I made four hundred thousand dollars a year to di I teach two classes a year and I make I make fourteen thousand dollars a year so I don't know I'm doing it wrong all right so what I want to talk to you guys about is the MOOC I'm taking right now I'm taking a MOOC I'm taking a MOOC with EDX and when you sign up with EDX they ask you why you're signing up and I wrote definitely not for opposition research for the debate I'm going to do I didn't say that it's called think101 X the science of everyday thinking with two great professors from Australia I say I love it it's great it's really fun I've learned all sorts of different nefarious ways my own brain goes behind my back to thwart me I love it it's fantastic it's pretty easy it doesn't take too much time I've learned a lot when in mind should I go but I'm a 37 year old American with a doctorate I already know how to learn I learned for fun I do it as a hobby and it's a great hobby for me as a dabbler but I don't think that it is an adequate replacement for college yet there are a lot of reasons for this but the number one reason for this is really just one word and that word is contacts ladies and gentlemen I hope that you'll vote no on the motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete because more clicks means less contact less contact with professors like me I'm not a superstar I'm not a celebrity I'm not a millionaire I don't even have tenure and I never will but that doesn't matter to my students I want to talk a little bit about some of my students today I have one student who lives with dyslexia and she is so smart in class she's just brilliant in class but her written work really suffers and if she were taking an online course she might be mistaken quite unfairly for somebody who was not as bright as she is or drunk maybe I don't know but the fact that we can actually talk to each other in class has changed her life because she knows that I know how smart she is I have another student who's so shy that he shook last semester in class whenever I called on him I have ways of getting students to pay attention by the way he shook when I called on him he gave a presentation and he actually stopped halfway through because he went so clammy two weeks ago he came in second semester same class Dostoyevsky killed it did such a great job Lewis all the way and I was talking to him about his story because I wanted to use it today and he said I want you to know that our class has helped me learn how to talk to people the importance of that cannot be overstated it has helped him learn how to talk to people so people my students actual real people I know them they know me I don't just enter their lives with the dissemination of content they enter mine and we connect we make contact and that's important when things are going well in class it's even more important when things are going poorly the community college Research Center right here at Biya did a multi-year study where they determined that when students at community colleges and and other sort of non prestige institutions are struggling and they're taking classes online they're much more likely to fail they're much more likely to drop out they're much more likely to give up so I urge you to vote no on this motion more clicks fewer bricks because with every click the student loses contact with every click the student loses opportunities for growth with every click the student might even lose their future so right now students aren't just failing online classes in enormous numbers although they are online classes are also failing them I have a lot more to say on this but I'd like to transition to the discussion but while I am I'm going to be thinking about my students who all waived their right to privacy for me to be able to shout out to them today so I hope that like me you'll be thinking of Miranda and Emma and Alex and Alex and Sarah Sarah and Sarah Caitlyn Amanda Katrina Megan Braxton Annie DJ Casey Nick Sammy another Rebecca not me Josh Jake and James Taylor Ryan Elvin and Ethan Josey and Dmitry I think that they deserve contact I think they deserve devoted personal attention MOOCs are great for dabbling and they're great for supplementary education but I don't think they're substitute for human interaction the Minerva project sounds fascinating and I heard that you were hiring you probably pay more than I make but no matter how advanced software is I still don't think that it can replace face to face and being in the same room interactions the most important part of college it can be the difference between success and failure and because of that I urge you to vote no today on the motion more clicks fewer breakfasts the lecture hall is obsolete thank you Thank You Rebecca Sherman and that concludes round one of this intelligence squared us debate where our motion is more clicks fewer bricks to lecture hall is obsolete remember now how you voted in just before the debate began we're gonna have you vote again after you hear all of the arguments and again to remind you the team whose numbers have changed the most will be declared our winner now we move on to round two and round two is where the debaters address one another directly and take questions from me and you in the live audience the motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete arguing for the motion we have heard from Anant Agarwal and Ben Nelson they have argued that critics of online education are looking at the flaws in how it is now and failing to see the potential that it has at the era that this is now only the dawn of they say that it can improve dramatically and and catch up in a field academia where nothing has changed for eons that there's an advantage in fact to being able to stop a professor and wind and rewind and even silence if you want to that there's a generation now the millennial generation who are essentially wired to learn this way that it will connect to them that there are different learning styles and that the technology can adapt to all of them the technology allows that the team arguing against the motion Rebecca Schumann and Jonathan Cole they have argued they put it this way people learn from each other said Jonathan Cole contact his critical said Rebecca Schumann they argue that too much of an education too much of Education is not just about the answers in the book but it's about what develops over time in an intimate close contact that that that is critical and that software can't be the answer for everybody now I want to point out that there is this there is a level of nuance to this debate neither team is deep into their corner where they don't see merit in the other side's argument the team arguing more clicks fewer bricks is not saying no bricks ever again and the team on the other side is not saying no cliques ever they concede that around the margins the team arguing against or concedes that around the margins sure of some online education can be supplemental and useful and the team on the other side is saying sure there needs to be a way to have human contact and the Minerva project that Ben Nelson is sponsoring builds that in so let's make it clear that this is not this kind of fight to the death over this issue but there's an it's a discussion over emphasis and I think on the emphasis there is a wide gulf and I think some of that emphasis has to do with faith in technology itself to solve some of the problems particularly since the Sci arguing for the motion is saying well we're at the dawn of a new era and you have to see how much it can improve so I want to I want to put the question to the side that's arguing for the motion and making that point that we're at the dawn of a new era as I pointed out in the opening we have heard this before correspondence courses were going to democratize education and they didn't the Open University in the United Kingdom now there were people who have degrees for that but the great universities of England haven't flinched whatsoever and and the radio courses it said are we've heard that technology was gonna change the game dramatically so many times in the past why is it different this time Ben Nelson well I would argue it has helped and I think you have to understand the context think of general population educational levels in the 1930s around the world what the radio has done and television has done to to teach people and disseminate information has been dramatic for example in India it's something like a hundred million people have learned to read from a program that adds subtitles to Indian soap operas and that I naturally learns to read those those subtypes but but let me stop you there I've been just in the interest of time because my point is that that has not had much impact on the university model which your part which your partner says hasn't changed forever correct why not it's not interactive it's broadcast this is an interactive medium can we put that to the other side that the game-changer Rebekah's you and your opponents are saying is that it's interactive this time it truly is two-way it's not a letter through the mail to your professor with your answers what's your response to that well the current technology I would say just isn't interactive enough I think that students lose motivation when they don't have their peers around them to pressure them to go to class I don't teach online at I'm sold where I teach right now but I have colleagues who do and they have interactive components but it still doesn't really engage the students and when the students start having trouble they tend to really just give up I don't I think the big difference this time around is twofold one is the interactivity like the second big one is exactly the point that my opponents are making which can bring online and it's called peer-to-peer learning if you look at Facebook and Twitter and all of these peer groups web web where teens and and grownups in the billions are interacting with each other online why can't we bring that why why are you scared of technology let's bring that into our learning an education system and fold that in how people learn online so that the peer learning is part of the platform and as on EDX the whole discussion forum is part of the learning process Jonathan call well I'd like to just quote from sherry Turkle who wrote a wonderful little book called alone together and she's an MIT colleague of yours and she said technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities and as it turns out we are very vulnerable indeed we are lonely but fearful of intimacy digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusions of companionship without the demands of friendship our our networked life allows us to hide from each other even as we are tethered to each other which I think it often is reflected in the social media and the kinds of contacts that people make through technology it is not the kind of interaction that students have debating each other in class involving the individual and structure to force people to confront their biases and presuppositions to read texts extraordinarily closely that can be useful in other ways I don't believe it's possible yet Ben Nelson responses well I encourage all of you after the debate to go and find our student the audience because she's been on the platform that not only enables that but enables you to have the kinds of debates the kind of interactions the kind of interrogations of students that actually is even more difficult in an offline environment when you build a platform to teach a hundred thousand students that's not your goal your goal is not to build a platform that optimized for one-on-one debate when you build a platform that's about bringing the seminar and adding data to pay which two students will be the ones on both sides of the debate which kinds of analyses should you go back to in class and listen from another section so you can build upon that makes online seminars even richer so even though we don't have as many students on those platforms this resolution is about where the future of universities will go the technologies are here now they will get propagated one of the things that came up in the discussions about MOOCs and certainly in the heyday of excitement about their early inception was that they could reach hundreds of thousands of people if they reach people in the seminar type of arrangement with fifteen or twenty people it may be possible to generate some of the kind of discourse that you're talking about but so that's not where the imagery of the MOOCs really come from so you'll remember I just have to respond to that another that MOOCs are an online learning in this form are two years old we're comparing it to a thousand year old system which has failed the economic Moya has failed the milk or the thousand year old system the thousand university system oh well it had a long long run at a thousand years I wouldn't call that failure they still don't have an economic model but the point is that in terms of small seminar the simple mechanism we introduced on the EDX platform is called a cohort you can create Google Instant hangouts and small groups of five and ten people interact with each other and it's much more connecting than a professor picking one student out of a class while 300 other students are sitting there twiddling their thumbs I don't necessarily want my students to be in charge of each other I love them I loved him to death but were you my naming them again they're their peer review you know they're freshmen they're I I got rid of peer review in my class because it was like the inmates running the prison it made the papers worse it made think they don't know they're bright they're inquisitive they're great but they don't quite know enough yet to help each other learn in the way that I can help someone that's a really interesting point and I think maybe goes to the to to the whole notion of authority versus the the inmates running the asylum as they say been and what about that is that part of what this conflict is about uh well I think that's a wonderful intelligence squared debate for another time but we shouldn't conflate the enabling technology with the educational philosophy the question is what can the educational technology know I know I think we should conflate those things well I I think I think I think it's relevant because she's actually giving a reason why she needs to be there in the classroom kind of running things she can if she can be there on the 15 person breakout so there's nothing preventing the edx platform from having the professor jump from breakout to breakout that's just a philosophical point of view so so your argument really the side that's arguing for fewer clicks more clicks fewer bricks you're talking about you're basically you have a faith that ultimately the technology can address all all or nearly all of the criticisms that are coming from the other so you have a lot of faith that it's flexible adaptable and that it's only learning all right I wanted to take that to the other side so that's philosophically what your opponents are saying is that you ain't seen nothing yet and you're and and it's gonna be amazing and I want to sort of get a response from your side anything yet at the dot-com bubble either and that kind of exploded but the technology was worse at the time I guess I'd I would also say is that learning does not only take place in the lecture room and the the nature of the bricks that bring people together in a part of the learning experience go far beyond necessarily the lecture room and part of the subtitle of this debate is really whether or not the format and the structures and even the architecture of the old university setting will be obsolete and I believe that students will learn perhaps almost as much or as much outside of the classroom interacting in these physical spaces as they do in but Jonathan there I think your opponents concede that point but they say that the analogies of those physical spaces can be created online that those social interactions can happen online yeah well I did I think the even the sex can happen on would you turn me to that program what's the website no I well there I just simply you know disagree I mean I think that when we are dealing with let's say a course that allows you to get answers that are known answers I have no doubt that this new technology can have an extraordinary influence but a great teacher talking about the subtleties of text about being a perfect reader of how reading will influence your life not only in terms of enjoyment that I think I've yet to be demonstrated this is an assertion by our opponents are worthy your opponents it is not demonstrated and as I said earlier there are a lot of empirical questions that I haven't heard any answers to thus far from my word you're gonna come back to some of those but I want to let an entre spawn to what you just said sure so you mentioned that I think I think we're making a mistake here you're comparing the best teacher I would love to be in your class Rebecca I think you mean it'd be delightful with a class of 10 or 15 working with Rebecca that is fantastic but how many people around the world how many children in the US or the rest of the world can afford that kind of luxury to have a great teacher in a small classroom setting talking about grading non-fixed answers at the end of textbooks we have technology today where we can grade essays using machine learning technology and if you talk to the teachers in the California School District they're saying they're giving their children fewer essays because they just don't have the time to grade I know teachers in high school and I know my waifu' teachers they spend hours and hours grading essays and that is a good thing and as long as I can get Rebecca to grade my essays and give me instant feedback that is fantastic but what about all the students where teachers are not able to give essays and writing assignments because they don't have time to grade we have technology today in experimental form that we'll be able to create essays using machine learning technology uncle si Rebecca respond to some of that Rebecca she me I mean I don't like grading essays I wrote a very popular console 8 about how I'd like to stop assigning them because I don't like grading them but when I grade them I do grade them pretty fast essay grading technology is not very good right now it might get better but I mean when I think about the idea that a robot can replace the nine years of post college higher education that I had doing my PhD reading 13 hours a day learning breadth and depth really just piercing into the inner depths of my brain and scraping around inside it I have to confront that technological possibility with sheer terror I don't know if I want to be in a world where a robot can do what I have worked so hard and sacrificed so much and trained so much to do I'm not comparing you I know that was exactly but but but I'm with an ant on on his point being what let's take put aside the impact on you and how discouraging that would be to you what about the impact on your students of having a robot grade their papers yes they'd learn how to game the robot immediately but the point is not simply writing papers even the most conservative organization in the world the College Board in the SAT are giving up the essay part of the of the SAT examinations because they are doing the grading by rote in effect they're not nuanced they're not teaching students how to think for themselves independently which is a very difficult thing to do now maybe it is doable through technology but I haven't seen it demonstrated and again I do think that we're we're rattling on a on a piece of content I happen to agree with you both I mean I do think that at the very high levels of education you do want people who are expert in the subject to great essays that has nothing to do about where the class occurs the student the professor doesn't sit in front of a lecture hall or even a 10 person class and says hold on a second while I read this paper and grade it that's not a very interactive format it's not very engaging and so the question is what is the cost structure that is going to be built around actually disseminating that education and even in small format even in a scenario where we believe in where you actually do want a very tight student-faculty interaction 15 to 19 person classes we still opt to use technology to facilitate the goings-on in the classroom because we think that it could enhance the experience for the student and dramatically lower the cost where you don't need to build buildings and maintain campuses where you can gather the students and have them experience what the world has to offer as opposed to necessarily in a very expensive very exclusive campus environment Jonathan well I mean first of all I think that you know educators have done a terrible job especially at the selective colleges at dealing with the issue of costs and the students at Harvard graduate with no debt they have a tremendous endowment Columbia College students graduate with about $6,000 worth of debt but the sticker price is the only thing that is talked about so it's not as if those who can't afford it who come from from you know poor socioeconomic backgrounds can't go to these these great colleges I think this is a conflation however I can switch a bit between what the purposes are of these MOOCs are they to democratize the world as it were which in some ways may well be hegemonic who owns knowledge to reach hundreds of thousands of people or is it to hold seminars in a different way with 16 or 17 people those are very different types of issues and questions it seems to be been is trying to do one thing and it seems to me that Edie X is trying to do something slightly different is that a fair depiction of the two of you oh absolutely I think the different ways of using technology in the classroom every click is not the same and Beth is doing using clicks in one way by using clicks in another way I think the point here the debate is about more clicks and fewer bricks can we improve the classroom experience can we improve the way we teach students can we teach more students then can have access to a great Rebecca but in a 15 room class can we create using technology the approach where people can learn from each other through peer learning online can be accessed can be increased educational access to a millions of more students around the world they just don't have access to to the Rebekah's of the world and Jonathan let's take less than we just heard a non talk about people not having access in fact it is an argument for the MOOC what's your response to that well I mean you know if you say don't have access to the MOOC I'm not sure who you're referring to frankly let's find out who are you referring to so I'm referring to all the children and students that cannot afford college or that leaf call if you choose amounts of debt or that simply don't have access to college shop okay okay that's an F and that is a wonderful aim and a wonderful objective that I actually fully endorse but the evidence that I've seen and it's bad you know it's not particularly good evidence empirical evidence suggests that the people in remote places that can't get to MIT can't get to you know Amherst or Williams or wherever it might be are people who are already educated they are the ones who were signing on for these courses and may well be enjoying them but it's not reaching the population yet that I think would have you know it would have very benefit is that a correct analysis I think that our Anant is that correctly again I think it's it's how you play with numbers so we have 2.2 million learners on EDX and of that 30% that a 600,000 are high school and college students and so just because 70% of learners already have a degree doesn't mean that we are still not reaching they're reaching more students at the college age and high school level today than the largest university in the United States and so we cannot so we really cannot say that we're not reaching students in the right demographic we are and and I would have had to announce point that if these universities would actually issue a degree alongside with that you wouldn't have 600,000 students you'd have 60 million that one of the reasons that people don't complete is the same reason that people sometimes read a textbook from cover cover decide hmm I got the chapter 5 that was good enough thank you right there is no point except for interest right now well Rebecca Sherman do you do you see the democratization argument that is to some degree being made by the other side well um you know yes I think that it does the numbers or it does reach more people than not having it would reach but I again I agree with Jonathan that it doesn't necessarily reach the kind of people that it originally intended to reach and that shows in the corporate directions of EDX as two main competitors Coursera and Udacity both of whom have decided to concentrate on corporate training instead of the sort of loftier democratization of Education and it also comes at the expense of people like me there you know you I love that you think that I'm irreplaceable and that everybody should just be in my class but I am not that special there are literally over a million low level professors just like me in the United States right now desperate to reach students desperate to work and what happens to you million if their world comes true well I guess we go from working for poverty level wages to working for no wages were extinct I think I would completely disagree in fact I think online nature is a rising tide that will lift all boats give me an example of profession professor Jamie Larew she teaches at Bunker Hill Community College in Massachusetts and what she did was her students did not have access to a great computer science class so she took them online material from one of her introductory computer science classes and she used that in a blended model in the community class and she said if not for the online material from the EDX course she said she never would have been able to teach that course on her campus and she also said she is irreplaceable if not for her and are helping with the online material her students would not have passed the course so I think the teachers are necessary and I think bringing online learning into the classroom can really up level the whole educational experience I think you're expecting too much of administration's I think if they have the opportunity to get rid of pretty much all professors pipe in MOOCs from super professor and then use low-paid adjuncts and TAS to basically Proctor people they would jump at that they would do that in a second maybe not a super elite institutions like this one but at the regional and directional universities where the vast majority of Americans earned their degrees I just can't see that not happening because it would help the bottom line so much it would it would not happen when the supply and demand comes back in balance right now too much supply of professors not enough supply of completing students a lot of students desire to complete drop out because we don't track their progress we don't know when we lose them until the final grade all right in the future we'll be able to do that and therefore they'll be much more demand for adjuncts and therefore salaries will rise I want to go to the audience now for questions from you and I want to ask the way this will work especially if you came in late if you raise your hand we need a microphone to be brought to you we need you to stand up tell us your name and ask something that it really is a question not to debate with the debaters but to ask them a question that gets them debating with one another and to make it very short and terse and if it's not on the topic that gets them continuing on this topic I'll have to pass so right down front here if you can stand again Thanks hi my name is Adam and a grad student at NYU my question is don't you think that vocational education is more suitable to be online and while liberal arts courses or materials and to some degree Jonathan Cole made that point in his opening but your start hasn't responded to the sense of different kinds of different kinds of material may lend themselves to different kinds of settings so I wanted to and and one of those settings cannot be online liberal arts Ben Nelson so I that there are different kinds of subject matter lends itself to different format of student/faculty ratios but the question about whether or not technology can assist whether it is a large lecture a small seminar even a one-on-one tutorial in many cases is it's clear now you can see if you can see a creative poetry writing class online there are creative poetry classes online and and both in lecture format and as well as not let me tell you but are I I don't happen to know the texture this but how good an experience is doing poetry online it's amazing I think it's phenomenal I mean it I've but I'm by I'm biased in that answer I'll tell you where I where I don't think that online instruction can compare with offline even though it's already is happening in conservatory instruction if you are training someone to be a pianist during somebody be a violinist very hard to deliver and at a very professional level not Suzuki method very hard to get that level of nuance and impersonal guidance via to alright so I just want to go to the side on the other side so your opponents have argue that there is a small sector of material that doesn't lend itself you have conceded I think that there is there are areas that would lend themselves to to online learning I certainly do and that's why the University of Phoenix exists to raise human capital to the point where some people can get better jobs than they have and there's no reason why those kinds of enterprises shouldn't exist I would simply like to raise again for my worthy opponents that answer the empirical questions that I raised at the very beginning what's the cost bottle that will work that didn't work in the in the 1990s and the various other issues that have to do with intellectual property and the rest if you don't answer those questions you're living off the future let me let me address the economic model question that you raised in fact I think you made an argument against yourself so you said that MOOCs cost between 100 and 300 thousand dollars to create you're absolutely right they cost between $10,000 and half-a-million dollars to create but the second time you offered the MOOC or you bring that into your classroom the third time the fourth time is like a textbook attack for someone who's written a textbook took me 5 years to write the textbook but then to stamp out a new textbook is you know is 50 bucks 100 bucks so repeating is much easier and with MOOCs and online education that's how it is the repetition is very cost effective and very high quality however in a classroom I'm not sure what they pay you know professors at Columbia other universities but I know it's not $14,000 it's certainly on the order of one hundred to three hundred thousand dollars so in other words we are teaching a we are paying a hundred to three hundred thousand dollars each time a course is repeated so therefore the existing model is broken with MOOCs we can fix that where the cost of creation is high but the repetition that's how you get the scaling okay Jonathan Johnson called that was an answer to your question Rebecca do you want to take that well I mean it's I I enjoy ribbing on tenured people who make too much money as much as the next guy but the fact is that almost 80% of faculty today work off the tenure track definitely do not make in the six figures and over half of faculty working today are adjuncts like me who make in the low five figures most of our salaries begin with a one or a two Jonathan I must say that you have given me the perfect reason for retiring faculty they make their MOOC and they leave the door and you don't have to pay them again next year now if they make two MOOCs who owns the property so do you the first point about regarding faculty after they create a MOOC of course not they have to be involved in that then no one would ever want to make a MOOC so that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy and I want you to make a MOOC now so you make them weekend and then you have to support the MOOC you teach chef's that teach the students but you're not spending one hundred and three hundred thousand dollars each time you teach it you're still teaching it you're still involved but to a lesser extent and the intellectual property question the intellectual properties is very straightforward actually I don't see what the what the issue is the the courses and content it's like if we've addressed the problem with textbooks and other course content so I frankly don't see an issue there so I would have to take discuss to the offline as to what issue you are seeing with IP because there's a well-established model and that's the same model that will work for online content versus only intellectual property no do they get whatever income might be available from the MOOCs that our commercial enterprises so with textbooks the IP zone completely by the professor and the publisher universities that completely cut out from it and with online education I think here's a chance to save that you University the university's having discussion where three stakeholders can share the IP not just the publisher and the professor but the professor the University and in this case the publisher is the MOOC platform like EDX there can be a three-way sharing of IP which i think is the right way of doing it as okay to the next bookmark I want to go to another question sir right there my name is Noelle cape and I'm a professor at Columbia a simple model of the university is that it's in the business of both creating and disseminating information on the house I've heard nothing about creation does that mean essentially that the online operation loaders can you because you were waving the mic radio audience with just to ask a question tight ler tighter when one more time a simple model of university is that it both creates and disseminates information I've heard the online people say nothing about creation does that mean that you're in effect freeloaders on the university system I'm delighted to address that this debate is not about research it is about the dissemination of knowledge only about the second part yes no it is not I do think that what you enable when you remove the construe the constriction of the campus environment from not just the student but from the professor is that you can enable much more flexible research I'll give you a couple of very quick examples if you do field research having university job we have to show up physically to class nine months out of the year does not do wonders for your career especially before your tenured or like my father who's a molecular biologist and is now doing structural biology he needs to fly to the particle accelerators in Europe every three weeks just so he can shoot photons at his crystals well if he were still teaching he's emeritus so he doesn't he doesn't he wouldn't be able to do that so at least in an offline environment so so research can also be dramatically helped by the removal of physical requirements physical requirements for the faculty what do you think of that Rebecca which I mean it doesn't apply specifically to the kind of teaching that you're doing but you would have a you would have the ability for example to travel and study and do sabbaticals etc and still teach you like that I mean I would you believe in it for me it sounds great because I'll never have a sabbatical anyway but I think the few people in my discipline who are left on the tenure-track would probably have a heart attack because it'd be like yeah I mean I have to say with that that is so esoteric but I guess in an esoteric way I I don't disagree with the opposite side on this particular side I do disagree I don't think I I'm I'm not at all sure that you have a university if you were at admit that the sole function of that university in terms of bricks rather than cliques although cliques will exist in it is the research mission and all the students are basically no longer there now the essence of our great universities and our great colleges and whether they are very large state universities or much smaller ones is that they create knowledge they create discoveries and inventions I don't see how taking students out of the laboratory is going to enhance that process since they are the people the students the postdocs and others the postdoctoral fellows they are often doing the bench research and learning from each other through close interaction if you take all the undergraduates away and there are no bricks I'm not sure what kind of University is left let me just let me just say this and I'll bring the question back to you I want to remind you that we're in the question and answer section of this intelligence squared us debate I'm John Donvan your moderator we have four debaters two teams of two debating this motion or clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and the point was just made by Jonathan Cole that a world where universities devolve into institutions that basically do research and all the undergraduates are off campus online is a it's not a university that he would call the university and on to and respond to them that's be very careful here I think we're taking some of the best institutions in the world some really high callin institutions and and and touting the whole world with this utopian brush the world is not like that most universities in the world are not research institutions most colleges in the world community colleges in the world and high schools and and places where teaching happens are not research institutions we happen to be in a research institution which is great so I think we really need to look at the average the median and universities around the world where education may be the predominant thing that happens so I dream of a world where we have universities where professors and others are creating content and also disseminating content just that they do it differently it's the same people but they do it differently they do it bringing a lot of online and so that they can spend a lot of time creating great content which they don't have the time to do because they have to do it every single semester so now I can really create great content with a huge amount of effort and then focus on interacting with students in ways that I cannot do today let's go to another question professor Mayer you're a little bit of a ringer but I think yes no this is I I asked this not on the Richmond center behalf but actually because I study real estate and in the 1990s we heard people say the non-line address was actually much more important than a physical address but we see technology companies like Google and Facebook locating in the most expensive real estate in the country in the world presumably about the interactions of their employees who are working together and creating together what's different about the business of Education than the business of Technology and creativity and Nelson I actually don't think it's it's very different at all and in fact you can learn from what these companies are doing if you look at where these companies set up 10 15 years ago they created campuses Google has a campus and they said oh we're going to provide everything you want here on the campus free food and laundry and you know slides and things like that and guess what their employees said we don't want to live on the campus we want to live in the city open up an office in San Francisco open up offices in New York City write provide free food that's great but but don't think you can recreate the world at huge cost and make it better than reality and so I think that's highly illustrative I think that the more University opens the more the university embraces the resources of the world and is open to students whether they are their students or not the more vibrant the physical elements of the university will become like the research infrastructure and the less the university will start to compete or will continue to compete in areas like who has the better climbing gym ok I want to take some of the other questions I'm favoring the front because I can see it more easily so I just want to bring some of it ma'am all the way in the back there and again if you could stand up my name is Jessica I'm wondering how Jessica I've just been asked in my headphone to ask you to step down into the brighter light so that the television camera can see you for the live stream and by the way I didn't mention this in the beginning but we've been live streaming and we always do on with for TV and on our website iq2 u.s. org so that's why you need to walk towards the light can you see me now yeah yep I'm wondering how students are better prepared after receiving their degree can you give a tiny I asked for really short questions but you've got me oh they're just little more contact assuming that students complete their degree how are they better prepared for the world if they're how do they how do the online versus the old model students okay so to rephrase if I'm correct you want to know whether students who graduate with a largely offline diploma earned largely offline are as good you know their education is its high quality as those who graduates in the old model is that correct or are you asking how are they doing getting jobs exactly not not comparing the quality of the education but how are they prepared for the real world okay let's put that question first to the side of has more experience with that I would think Anant and Ben Nelson this year so you're again I think online learning as we know it called an online learning 2.0 because the oiled-up you know the old-style online learning really gave online learning a bad name and I think things are very different today online learning today is completely different and you should go check it out it's we have online labs you have discussion forums the kind of things we can grade are simply very simply but let's stipulate that it's better now but but to her question how are they if you assume so if you assume this kind of quality of online learning I think at the end of the day it really depends on the content if a great teacher created the online content or if a great teacher taught the in-person campus course and if the learner took one of the other and had a great experience and a degree I would say that it shouldn't matter which one they did and do you think that's realistic that if two guys walk into two job interview is walk in and one of them got a degree online and one got a degree at a campus and we don't need to stipulate which one it was let's say that they're roughly equal in terms of those kinds of courses offered that the employer is gonna look at them equally I don't think so I think if someone paid had enough money to pay for a completely campus experience and the same quality education they would have better soft skills but I think the debate is about fewer black bricks more clicks where's the emphasis and so I think that on campuses where they're bringing a lot more online learning the blend of the online with some of the in-person soft skills and so on can be substantially better than anything we have on campus today with the other side like to respond because the last two questions have gone to this side if you don't want to I can move on let's move on then we have a question that would be more focused towards this side ma'am if you felt like maybe if future faculty or future professors took more training or became somehow more involved in the online world or you know that that kind of iteration they could still be a more competitive valuable part that's a great question that's a great question it's almost a challenge to you Rebecca Sherman to to get with the program but what about that funding yeah I mean maybe I tried to flip my class last semester as an experiment and it didn't go that well but I used pretty good content it was just that the students didn't like it and what I find from talking to my students is that they do prefer the face-to-face experience that's just what they prefer I'd you know I don't know if I get really good at making podcasts or if I had some higher production values with my youtubes or something maybe but right now I just just I don't think it has to do the MOOC that I'm taking on EDX is gorgeously produced and the guys are experts and it's still just kind of dabbling like it's not a replacement for a class yet Jonathan called you and answer the question as well well I mean obviously it's a hypothetical and an interesting one if more people had experienced that and producing these things that they might teach better courses but we don't know I mean one of the problems that I have with this is that all of this is that it seems to me that there are many possibilities for technology and many ways in which technology can improve universities but we don't know for example the answer to the question before which is how do graduates of one form or another respond in terms of employment opportunities we don't know very much about different learning styles we have so little evidence that it seems to me what we're doing is we are essentially casting our fate to the wind and saying look this is a possibility not necessarily a fact because we don't have very much empirical evidence to demonstrate the case of our opponents and that concludes round two of this intelligence squared us debate where our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and remember how you voted just before the arguments begin right after these closing statements which will be two minutes each you will be asked to vote a second time and then our winner will be declared so on to round 3 round 3 closing statements from each debater in turn uninterrupted the motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and here to summarize his position in support of the motion Anant Agarwal CEO of EDX and a professor at MIT you know I have to say you know we heard some great statements from our colleagues I would love to take a class from Rebecca but this is not about comparing the absolute best that you can get in a particular kind of course against tough the online learning of yesteryear I think we need to look at where is where does the average gonna be where is the majority of the of the university the classroom the students going to be and I think in Rebecca's case she was able to recite the names of 15 of her students in my case it would take me forever to recite the names of 155 thousand students that got something out of my course but I will I will tell you about very quickly about three students Claude mu candy he came up from a family of 14 in from the Democratic Republic of Congo he goes to University of Capetown to learn computer science in his first year his father passed away he can't pay his tuition anymore and so it goes off into the world and he's been working for 10 years now that online learning is available he is going back to study and he's taking these MOOCs and he's learning and he's saying I'm gonna get a better job because of the kind of learning that I'm doing I can give a name of the name I'm all Bob a 15 year old student from Jabalpur in India took my course did really well he applied to MIT and he got into MIT now he's a sophomore at MIT and at MIT two or three students today compared to virtually zero two years ago they're now doing blended online learning mit is moved into this in a big way the blending the classroom with a lot of online technology so twenty eight hundred or a forty five hundred students at MIT are now using the EDX platform on campus in a blended model and this is just two years old so I think to look at where the average is going to be I think things are going to be very different going ahead so I would like you to think about the average student around the world in terms of where University should be and given that I really urge you to think about more clicks for your bricks in terms of increasing access and also improving the quality of education on our campuses thank you Anant Agarwal thank you our motion is that more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and here to summarize his position against this motion Jonathan Cole he is the John Mitchell Mason professor at Columbia University those of you among the jury sitting out there consider closely whether my worthy opponents here and I think they've made very interesting cases or espousing what is in fact fact what is fiction or what is wishful thinking let me conclude with three anecdotes a while ago I offered a course in law science and society was designed to challenge the presuppositions and biases of the students frankly it was designed to be both challenging and unsettling at the end of the semester one of my very smart students said to me I love this this course of the debates we had and the people I met but every time I left this class I had a headache not knowing quite what I believed in any any longer and I said Sam those headaches are a great thing it shows that you were really thinking hard and those debates and those doubts you had are an essential part of learning no set of clicks will replace the students experience then there are the extremely popular courses at Stanford's d.school and Institute for design innovation where one of the assignments was to rethink how people eat ramen noodles or an assignment that led to a news reading app that was bought by LinkedIn LinkedIn for 90 million dollars the students came from every field sciences engineering social sciences etc the students were taught by david kelly and one of the school's founders and they were invited to really think of developing empathy myth muscles they were also taught to forgo computer screens and spreadsheets and focus on people if the d.school says Kelly we learned by doing sounds a lot like John do his philosophy brought back to being it's had a huge success with students churning out dozens of innovative products and startups Jonathan Cole I'm sorry your time is up thank you they do our motion is more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and here to summarize his position supporting this motion Ben Nelson founder chairman and CEO of the Minerva project I wouldn't want to end this debate without getting into the facts of Jonathan so desperately wanted us to get to so I'll give you two facts one fact is what we actually know not about online education but about offline education not at the Community College not at a State University but our most illustrious universities professor at Harvard University Eric moszer who teaches physics wanted to know how much his students retained from his physics classes so he surveyed them two years after the end of the course you know what their retention rate was 10% the question isn't as much whether or not online education is effective is that it can't possibly be any worse than the existing model in fact even when you give students a choice as was done with the very first MOOC one offered by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University's Sebastian Thrun is a celebrity he is the reason why you go to courses he invented the self-driving car big guy and he had a course of 200 students on artificial intelligence and he gave them an option schmooze with me in the lecture hall or go on version 0.1 of this terrible product and take the course online of the 200 students 85% never came back to the lecture hall 85% decided to take online course in the very first most rudimentary version of online education you don't need much more data than that to realize that the future of universities won't be without bricks won't be all cliques but we'll certainly be far more clicks than bricks thank you thank you Ben Nelson and that is our motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete and here to summarize her position against this motion Rebecca Schumann thank you I just want to go on the record that and not thinks I am the best at teaching I'm gonna put that in all of my review portfolios so I want to talk a little bit about my class again not naming them but I'm talking about what we did this week so I don't lecture my room is a seminar room it's not a lecture hall and this week we're reading things fall apart by Chinua Achebe one of my favorite books one of the greatest books of all time and our activity this week was about proverbs from the Igbo culture on how they figure into the narration of the book and so I one of those proverbs is looking at a king's mouth one would think that he never sucked at his mother's breasts and I said to my class this is a very evocative proverb very provocative what do you think it means in relation to the protagonist okonkwo struggled with his masculinity and I just called on a student at random because I like doing that it's fun and he said oh no you should never forget where you came from and I said okay let's start let's do it so we went back and forth in the class me back to him other students to him other students to me if you want to know how it turned out you're gonna have to come to my class but the point is that most of the students in the class had never thought about that proverb like that before they'd never thought about it at all this was a moment that we created together this was a moment we created together in real time face to face in the same room with energy you could feel with energy between people that you could feel and that changed us all just a little bit the second part of this motion is that the lecture hall is obsolete and it's certainly true that in a thousand person lecture that kind of moment that you can feel is few and far between but I don't think the answer is to put that lecture online in five minute chunks and I don't necessarily think it's to get rid of the classroom all together for some fascinating sounding space technology of the future that I haven't seen yet which sounds great so that's why I hope that you will join our team in voting no on the motion more clicks fewer tricks the lecture hall is obsolete thank you Thank You Rebecca Schumann and that concludes our closing remarks and now it's time to learn which side you feel has argued the best we're gonna ask you again to go to the keypads at your seat and now vote a second time and we're gonna get the readout almost instantaneously same as before you push number one if you're for the motion number two if you are against and number three if you became or remain undecided and we all let the voting go on for about another 15 seconds and then we will lock it out and while that is happening I just want to say a few things one is our it's our first experience in coming up to Columbia and it's been fantastic for us and what really sealed that was the quality of this debate and the the level of argument and and enthusiasm and intelligence and decency and honesty and respect for one another that these debaters brought to the stage I just want to thank them for hitting all of those marks which are the goals of intelligence squared we also want to give thanks again to Columbia University's Richard Paul Richmond Center for partnering with us for this debate it is the fourth time and it's a great partnership and we hope that it continues to go forward we would yeah we've learned a round of applause for that of course we'd love to have you tweet about the debate did a handle our handles at IQ to us and at Columbia underscore biz that's bi Z the hashtag for this debate is online and our next debate is next week in Midtown April 9th at the Kauffman Music Center its Broadway and 67th the motion that night is Millennials don't stand a chance we're looking at the fact that the media often paints Millennials as uniquely you know narcissistic and coddled and helicoptered but we're asking also are we blinded to the qualities that they embody that we should be a miring like openness and optimism and innovation for the motion we have been taniyama B Brown she's a lawyer she's a start-up advisor she's a human rights advocate who was named one of Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40 business leaders her partner is W Keith he's a psychology professor at the University of Georgia and he co-author of the book the narcissism epidemic against them David Burstein at 25 years old he has already directed two documentaries founded a voter engagement organization and published a book how annoying really fast future his book I'm joking the book is fast future how the millennial generation is shaping our world and his partners Jessica Gross she is a self-defined ancient millennial she's a journalist and author of the novel sad desk salad and then on May 7th our final debate of the season where we debate the question is death final tickets for all of that will be at our remaining spring debates on sale through our website www.un.org/webcast and I would like if you are okay with it to post your full text on our website so that it's so that it's up theirs I'm sure everyone's gonna go to it yes it wasn't just to make you feel better I think everyone will go okay all right so I have the final results it is all in you have voted twice our motion is this more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete remember the way this worked the team whose numbers have changed the most between the two votes will be declared our winner on the first vote on the motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete before the debate 18% agreed with this motion 59% were against 23% were undecided those are the first results here is the second round of voting in the second round the team arguing for the motion went from 18% to 44% they picked up 26 percentage points that's the number to beat the team against the motion their first vote was 59% second vote 47% they lost 12 percentage points this vote this debate goes to the team arguing for the motion more clicks fewer bricks the lecture hall is obsolete our congratulations to thank you for me John Donvan and intelligence squared us we'll see you next time

Channel: IntelligenceSquared Debates

Views: 21,186

Keywords: education, debate, online education, digital learning, university, college, columbia, technology, Anant Agarwal, Jonathan Cole, Ben Nelson, Rebecca Schuman, Intelligence Squared, IQ2, Higher Education

Id: ICWe68IPEmg

Length: 97min 24sec (5844 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 02 2014