The Future of Universities in a Block Chain World | Diane Sieber | TEDxBoulder

tonight I wanted to tell you about my trip to the University of Bologna this summer I went back to the University of Bologna to give a research paper and was completely in my element because it was a college town and I grew up in college towns you kind of know what I'm talking about I think and you know it was full of students who are talking about politics and philosophy and particle physics and of course soccer at every possible moment and they were showing off the discoveries of new books they'd found in these in these used bookstores and it felt like exactly the kind of learning environment I grew up in as a child of university professors as a lifelong member of the university population and it was reassuring in fact I had gone back to the University of Bologna precisely for that reassurance because I've been become increasingly worried about the state of modern higher education for the last 15 years and the University of Bologna was the first University the first college town the place where everything started being mixed in with all of the students hearing all of their discussions and feeling the solidity and the millennial nature of this institution made me start thinking well okay maybe we're okay maybe universities will just last forever because it seems like they've lasted for a long time so far you know when the University of Bologna started in the 9th century it was really just a gathering of people who showed up from all over because there were a lot of people who wanted to learn something and a lot of people who wanted to teach something so the university didn't really become a university until several hundred years after a gathering a happening a plurality of learners who joined at the crossroads of the two major trade routes in Northern Europe so people exchanging information from from Europe to the East and from Italy to the populations north of the Alps this is the most incredible university seal ever an incident it's also it was invented in the 19th century this isn't what it originally looked like they needed a seal so it's off by a couple hundred years but the alma mater through the autumn the the alma mater of all alma mater institutions started as a collective of students referring to themselves as Universitas because they came from all different nations it was a collective bargaining Society which allowed them to hire instructors to teach exactly what they wanted to learn during exactly the time period they wanted to learn it they had very strict and high standards about faculty for example if you couldn't fill an auditorium you clearly were terrible and you were fired if everybody slept through your lecture then you were fired and if you didn't know your material you guessed it you were fired so it was a pretty rough time for academics and yet it was an incredible time for learners like Plato's Grove this was a university without diplomas credentials this was a university without a curriculum students designed it themselves this was a university without that incredibly complex course description which explains how you get from your first semester all the way to graduation in only four years also like I said it was a university without a seal until they came up with one that nobody else can top university classes were pretty much the way University classes are now which is also a puzzle why are we still teaching the way we did a millennium ago you may even notice that there are some students talking to each other and somebody's asleep right which I see you out there too okay anyway but you know fundamentally we haven't changed the way we teach since that time and this is proof now the only difference is that there are a lot more distractions for students in the classroom so let me tell you what keeps me up at night because I really truly am worried about the modern university about my home the first problem is universities are exclusive in fact we're ranked primarily on the basis of how many people we don't accept universities are largely research oriented therefore faculty rewarded for lots of research and yet have very little training when they come in on how learners learn and most heartbreakingly of all universities are really really expensive at an average of twenty thousand dollars a year for a public four-year institution forty thousand dollars a year for a private four-year institution the average university student loan debt is thirty thousand dollars and that doesn't even that that includes the fifty percent of students who don't even get the degree by the time they're done the other thing that is problematic to me and probably keeps me up even more nights is the fact that universities have become remarkably complacent yes we deliver wonderful face-to-face engagement yes we have people who do lots of great research and we share information with our students and we care about our students and yet waiting in the wings have been a number of really well-funded high-tech companies in Silicon Valley looking at us sitting on a four point six trillion dollar global education market now tell me that isn't a target worth disrupting the first big disruption started in 2011 with the announcement of a MOOC a massively open online course that was taught at Stanford University a hundred and twenty thousand students worldwide took it Wow and then universities pointed out yeah but only two percent completed it you know what I'll bet you if all of those hundred and twenty thousand had been given a Stanford credit for taking the course you would have seen a lot more completion rate so Coursera EDX Udacity have all started to develop courses well we've not paid as much attention as we should have using new methods of data gathering so every single learner that they have is generating big data all of those big data are informing much more accurate algorithms and those algorithms are outputting classes which are in fact online but adjustable reliable individualized personalized able to move with the needs of the student able to set the bar just high enough that it's a challenge and not crushing frankly they're able to turn education into all the best things about games speaking of which I actually my used to be a language professor and my very favorite language class of all time was on duolingo online for free because you know if you didn't practice that owl might die can we come up with an incentive like that for regular classes I'm not sure okay so here's the truth the university is facing a world in which the Internet has all knowledge available for free any student can go anywhere to find any information we're not in the business to anymore providing information we're supposed to be in the business of telling people how to interpret information working with them to understand their world and yet these new courses which are powered by really excellent machine learning are doing precisely that so as we've not been paying attention right now any single one of you could cobble together an entire college curriculum you know there are at least 5,000 classes that would count toward getting a not degree the uncommon has popularized this we're getting a not degree and then going out and trying to get a job what's the obstacle almost every job description says they need a bachelor's degree or greater so the obstacle is not the education and the learning the obstacle is the credential as I paced the streets of Bologna trying to find solace and reassurance that the university would last forever I turned around and started ahead back to my hotel and I ran almost directly into the Roman wall this wall was built a millennium ago and it protected Bologna both the University in the city from whatever horrors lay outside of it and looking at that wall everything sort of clicked into place and I said blockchain so blockchain is a mathematical technology it allows us to put online a public ledger that is accessible and and examinable by anyone who has cryptographic access it every ten minutes on average worldwide time stamps transactions it actually would be the exact kind of binding agent that we could use to put together a curriculum from all of the disparate elements that are already out there and available it's called the trust call and it's on its path to replacing any businesses that primarily profit by by verifying the connections between two strangers for example banks or stockbrokers or maybe university registrar's so what I envision them is the possibility of a personal blockchain a personal building block by block of all of the disparate components of one's education this might be github recommendations or separate classes you've taken from separate universities or maybe that course you took over the weekend and bookbinding or maybe the the crash course you took in how to program computers or you name it the idea being that you can assemble your own individual portable profile of your education carry it with you and have it be available on-demand to any potential employer also discoverability its searchable you could be found before you even know there's an employment opportunity that exactly matches what you want what I see happening as a result of this is potentially something really great now what happens to universities I think lots of universities are gonna have to scale back retrench not try to do everything focus on the very things that they do best and not try to cover all topics but I think also that universities are gonna have to figure out how to change or become completely irrelevant in this new ecosystem in a global university we're going to need to be providing courses just in time for lifelong learners on schedules that lifelong learners can handle and some of them may be in person and a lot of them may be at a distance and yet I think if we want to play in this global ecosystem that really is our only hope for survival finally I would say that there's huge hope in this as well because right now in the next three years 3.3 billion people globally are going to become part of the global middle class very little money but hungry for education by 2030 that's going to be 4.8 bill people universities can serve millions but a global university can serve the billions who want to go forward and educate themselves and we can also streamline their their own individual pathways toward the kind of education they want because every option will be available to them through both the internet and the blockchain the future is already here it's just not evenly distributed yet said William Gibson the future is here all of the educational components and all the technological components are in place it's just a matter of a few years thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 22,764

Rating: 4.8882236 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Bitcoin, Career, Classroom, Finance, Globalization, Marketing, Progress, Research, Schools, Social Interaction, Software, Students, Teaching

Id: s6bk1PKIuzo

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2017