Podcast #61: The Future of Educational Technology

Doug McKee: All right, let's do this. Okay, let's do the intro. Welcome to the Teach Better Podcast. I'm Doug McKee. And I'm Edward O'Neil. And we are talking about teaching and learning. On this double-sized episode, we talk to three guests about the future of educational technology. So, Doug? Yes, Edward. We are closing out Ed Tech Summer with a very special episode. I tell you Edward, I'm super excited about this one. I've listened to the interviews that you've done. And I'm excited to talk about them. And I think our listeners are really gonna like it.

Edward O'Neil: Yeah, I was motivated to do this because we had spent a bunch of time looking at various individual tools and polling systems and things like this. So, we looked in these categories, but what's coming next or where Ed Tech is going? I thought was a question worth asking a kind of step back kind of episode. I think it's a great idea. And I really love that you've got three different people with three really different perspectives on this. So, who will we be talking to? Our first guest is Michael Feldstein. He works for a blog and a consulting company.

He works for eLiterate and MindWire. She's a partner in MindWire, I believe. And then we have Matthew Rascoff, who has a very high level administrative role at Duke University before that he was at University of North Carolina. And then we have Bryan Alexander, who's a consulting futurist. Really his job is to think about and help other people think about the future of educational technology in higher ed. All three of these folks have really interesting things to say. We're starting off with Michael Feldstein. Tell us a little bit about kind of his perspective on things.

Sure, well, he actually goes into colleges and universities. They're doing interesting things and he and his partner make videos, which we can link to kind of describing what they do and they also kind of do white papers and research and things like this. So Michael has what I would call a social cultural analysis of higher ed that a lot of what you need to know about how ed tech works or doesn't work in higher ed has to do with the culture of higher education. So what's everybody has to say? Hi, I'm Michael Feldstein.

Michael Feldstein: I'm a co-publisher of an ed tech weblog and analysis site called eLiterate. And I'm also a partner in a company called Mind Wires Consulting. We focus on using educational technology to improve teaching and learning in higher ed. A teacher from a family of teachers, and my father was a school principal. And now in my current life I find other ways of helping teachers do their job better in the same way that my dad did. It's funny because my dad was a college professor who was involved in a lot of administrative kerfuffles.

And my mom was an educational psychologist. She actually studied with Benjamin Bloom and Ralph Tyler. So it's inherited, we second generation, kind of ed people, and it feels lousy with us. So you're a perfectist person to talk to about ed tech and where it's going and kind of where it should be going. I mean, what have you seen that you think is maybe there's more of down the road that's actually good, or are there some things you want to call out as, well, this is coming, and we should run fast the other way. Well, unfortunately, I think we were talking about this before we started recording, you and I. There's a lot of stuff that comes and goes without leaving much of a trace because we tend to take what we'd like to call a solutionist approach, which means you start at the end.

You say, well, I've got this hammer. Let me find some nails. That's the wrong way. And it is the wrong way, especially if you're trying to bake a cake, which is exactly. Often what we find ourselves trying to do in education is trying to bake a cake with a very fancy and expensive hammer. So what happens is we hear a lot of hype. We hear a lot of new ideas on the horizon that are going to change everything, like MOOCs. Remember those? There's still around. A lot of these things, there's, a lot of these things are still around.

And ultimately, they settle into some useful niche or other. But if you're not in that niche, they become largely invisible. So there are people doing good work in MOOCs. I know you've done one yourself recently, but it's not swept the universities aside. And I think it was the CEO of Udacity, Sebastian Thrun, who said someday, there will only be 10 universities in the world, and we hope to be one of them. That's clearly not happened. So I'm spending a lot of words telling you that not much is happening, really. When you turn over the magic eight ball, it wasn't one of the options, a cloudy check later or something like that.

Yes. And I think there are good cultural reasons for that. This solutionism thing happens not only because products get marketed by companies that need to sell things, but also because the economy is not terribly good as a sector, as a community. Looking at how we can improve teaching and learning systematically, every classroom is its own domain. That I should say that's a gross generalization. It varies pretty wildly by institution type and individual institutional culture. And even by discipline. But generally speaking, when you don't know what to ask for, you generally don't get what you want.

A lot of individualists go into higher education. And even if we say we want to focus on learning, I think people who care about that think about the individual learner and the individual learner's needs. And so the individualism and the organizational structure are a little bit incompatible. I don't want to say radically incompatible. So if you're looking for one solution to something that's highly individualized, I think that's why the idea of adaptive learning is so appealing in a way. It's like, we're going to get one tool, and it'll be different for everybody.

Everybody will be different in the same way or the same in different ways. This is predictably so. Yeah. So there are three dimensions to this individualism. It's important to sort out which is which so that we don't end up conflating them in our decision making processes. One is the one you've called out, which is that learners are different. Humans are different. And not only are learners different from each other, but they change over time. They're different from themselves. They're different from themselves. And they may change from course to course.

You may be a student in one class where your goal is just to get through the darn thing because you need to fulfill your requirement. And another that you're completely passionate about, that you may be strong in one topic and weak in another and so on and so forth. I think a second dimension is cultural. So I read a political science study a while back that said that most people who identify as liberals, which is the majority of academics tend to believe that they think differently or are different from other people, whereas people who identify as conservative tend to think that everybody else thinks like them.

So there is a cultural thing. I think that academics tend to value individualism. Students come to school with different goals in mind. And some of those are a lot more practical focused than others. And so I think there is a desire for individualism as a core academic value can sometimes motivate faculty members to be a little reticent to adopt something that everybody else is adopting just because everybody else is adopting it. Almost as a knee jerk reaction. And there is a whole attitude towards the LMS that the learning management system that it's normative and anything that it's normative is kind of disciplinary and dominating.

And that is very much the kind of liberal knee jerk reaction against anything that looks kind of in a sense humanitarian. So there definitely is an ideological dimension to the whole individualist atomic approach that we find in education. And I think a third thing is frankly, faculty members in many parts of academia, and I should say academics in general, because it's not just faculty members. It's deans and provosts and presidents and support folks. And they have been actively disincentivized to think about teaching as important and have never been trained to think about teaching as having some underlying craft never mind science.

So in that environment, they don't necessarily get exposed, most faculty members don't get exposed to the now very old research that we have, for example, that learning styles have just not proven out. Right. People have preferences, they don't correspond to better results. We know that the learners are individual, but how they are individual is more complex than you like to learn visually, and I like to learn auditorium. And so this third dimension of individualism, I mean, I almost again kind of hear this paradox that the paradox of the culture of a higher ed is that everyone's an individualist, which is to say it's a norm.

Yes, exactly. There's a Monty Python's life Brian thing in here somewhere. So with teaching, I mean, one way of describing what you're pointing to is that administrators feel like they don't know where the levers are for teaching. Like if teaching could be controlled, it can be invisible because there's no obvious kind of gas pedal and brake. I mean, a teaching award, you know, or two months a year doesn't really do it. And that student performance is measured by individual instructors. And so the idea of measuring the effectiveness of teaching is a little bit obscure.

You can look at the grades or the evaluations, but that's not quite it. So there's a way, but teaching kind of disappears in here. And if teaching has disappeared or it's hard to put your hands on, then educational technology is hard to connect to anything. If no one can agree on the goals and no one can agree on the measures, then how can you know if any particular intervention is better than any other? So what is the answer, Michael? We need to create better incentives and better support for educators to become empirical, to apply at least some fraction of the same scholarly rigor that they apply to their research work.

There are medicine analogies in education and I take our rampant and some are more benign than others. But I do think it's a fertile ground for thinking about education. The idea of a treatment, you know, you have a treatment and is it better or worse than does it improve something or not? So let's talk about the analogy a little bit because it does give us a clue about where we can move forward and where we tend to stumble. So on the treatment front, yes, there is absolutely this fundamental idea that if you need to learn something, then we can apply one type of intervention that will help you learn and have a different effect than another type of intervention.

The analogy that particularly textbook vendors and ed tech vendors like to make is to drugs and they like to use the term efficacy, which is a medical term, right? But this is where we start to go stray because if you have strep throat and your doctor prescribes you penicillin and you take that penicillin as prescribed, there are only a few contextual factors that will affect your chances of getting better if you're allergic to penicillin. If you fail to comply. Right, if you fail to comply, if you take another drug that interacts with your penicillin or you have a antibiotic resistant strain of strep, but we can probably count the number of factors that have a significant impact on one hand and the effect size absent those factors is pretty dramatic.

Right, but if someone uses a specific piece of learning technology, I think what you're going to say is there are too many factors as to whether it will work or not. I would even go further and say it's not a pill if someone says to a teacher, well you should do active learning in the classroom and then they read an article in the chronicle. There's no guarantee that what they do in the classroom is gonna fit that notion of active learning. So there's the context and there's the treatment and both of them are so highly variable.

Now I would even go further let's not even talk about technology yet. Right, for most educational interventions by which I mean a classroom activity or a assigned reading, right? Even those, the effect size, that the measured impact on learning can vary just dramatically from student to student or class to class or topic to topic. So before we even get to the toys, just thinking about any kind of an educational intervention. When we start thinking about this as student has a disease that we call ignorance and we're going to give them a knowledge pill and they're going to get better, right?

That's just not helpful. That leads us down the road to ridiculousness pretty quickly. Teachers are empirical all the time. Every day if you, unless you are horrible, unless you just go in and do the same thing you've done every semester for 20 years. If you respond to your students at all, you're being empirical but you're not necessarily being consciously empirical about it. You're not necessarily aware of other experiments that have gone on in other classrooms or how to evaluate the degree to which those experiments amount to something that gives you evidence of a change in your style or approach will help your students.

Edward O'Neil: One problem with the medical analogy and I do this when I work with professors is it's individualized. When I meet with a professor, I ask them what's going on. It's very much like a clinical interview. What's going on, what's happening, what's working for you, what's not. And I do the kind of diagnostic work because I know something about the science of learning and then I listen a lot and ask a lot of questions. So I can prescribe something I can say, well, it seems like there's a motivational problem or maybe the rewards are not in the right place or maybe the students are too apprehensive because you're doing high stakes testing and maybe you could try some low-stake testing.

That's all individualized, which fits the culture of education. But as they say, it doesn't scale. What I almost hear you pointing to is that science is also a community that people are doing research and practice and they're connected with each other. So is the programmatic level which could have a technology side to get people together to talk about teaching? I mean, is it possible that it's simple as that or be aware of what other people are doing? I think it is exactly as simple as that, which isn't the same as saying it's easy.

Michael Feldstein: No, simple is not easy. No, absolutely, that's right. You know, the analogy I like to make is that we're right now in a tech we're trying to invent a pharmaceutical industry in absence of a medical profession that believes in some modern science. So if you introduced penicillin, which was practically available for prescription in the 1940s, if you had introduced it in the 1840s before we had a theory of germs or on concepts of asepsis or anticepsis, and most folks thought the disease traveled either by an imbalance of the humors or by bad air, then introducing penicillin would probably not have much effect on any of the many, many diseases, many of which were deadly, like scarlet fever, that it could treat.

It wasn't until physicians as a profession decided to get together and over the course of many decades really come to a shared notion of what evidence is and what excellence is and what they need to know in order to feel confident that one approach is better than another, that any kind of advancement in pharmaceuticals or medical technology could ting hold. So yeah, it's all about conversation. So I want to then connect it to technology and since I'm using these two exemplary ones, the learning management system and maybe adaptive.

Edward O'Neil: To what extent does either of these things, something like Blackboard or something like an adaptive textbook respond to your concerns? There's the scientific concern that it somehow fits an idea of learning which the adaptive might do a little better and then there's the kind of social community concern that it helps professors be aware of behaviors which would suggest learning is happening or behaviors that are blocking, learning are happening. I mean, do you see either of those technologies as being kind of closer to what you want to happen or as more supportive of a community of teacher practitioners?

Michael Feldstein: Well, both have potential and both are moving in the right direction, but again. It's comforting actually to hear you say that because we're talking about the future of ed tech and you're like, well, professors thinking about teaching and thinking that it's actually an empirical question and talking to each other is the first step. And the word clickers isn't really in there. I mean, clickers would show you evidence that the students had or didn't have an understanding so it would be in the empirical direction at least.

And when we say empirical, all we're really talking about is a feedback loop. It's that simple. Yeah, visible. I try something. I have a hypothesis about what's gonna happen. I see what's happened. I compare what I thought would happen to what actually happened and I adjust, right? That's it, it's that simple. And Jerome Bruner wrote about folk pedagogy. You know, psychologists call our unscientific ideas about the mind folk psychology and he said, well, there's a folk pedagogy too and I think there's some sense that folk pedagogy could be okay.

Edward O'Neil: The best professors I would work with, they'd come to me and I'd say, what's up? And they'd say, well, this is happening. This was happening and I didn't really like that. And so I thought it was happening because of this and so I made this change and that helped this one thing but then this other thing started happening that I didn't really like. So now I'm thinking about doing this and I'm wondering if this tool that you guys support would help me do this. And so it was exactly what you describe which is there's an overt behavior.

Michael Feldstein: There's a hypothesis about how it relates to learning, supports their blocks it. And then there's a very conservative strategic change and then another observation or measurement to see, you know, was this change, you know, beneficial or not? You don't need to know about cognitive load to do that. That's right, exactly right. So there's a really interesting connection to be made here about, let's say, folk psychology versus cognitive science. It turns out that there were certain little corners of Europe where people knew several thousand years ago that there was something about moldy bread would make certain diseases go away, right?

And it took several thousand years for us to get from that to penicillin being widely available to everyone. And apparently researchers knew if there was mold growing in your specimens, so that would interfere with your experiments, they just didn't see it as a solution, they just saw it as an irritant. And what changed over the course of those several thousand years, mostly over the last 150 years, is mainly the degree to which the people making these discoveries talked to each other over long distances and in large groups.

They started debating with each other, they started sharing anecdotes, they started challenging each other and out of those discussions came method. Well, here I'm gonna prove to you that I'm right in your role. So in the process of doing that, I have to invent a method of proof that a standard of proof that you will find satisfying, right? And that is how we got from folk medicine, which by the way, made many great discoveries, some of which were still... Willow Bark. Right, exactly. White Willow Bark. You could go on and on and on.

And many of these discoveries were still rediscovering and learning it. Lithium. Lithium, yeah. So when you talk about the elevass and adaptive learning, let's talk about the ability for them to give a feedback loop in a way that takes us to a conversation across classroom barriers and institutional boundaries to get to a place where we have a more learning science approach. From a folk learning pedagogy to a learning science-based pedagogy. And from individualistic to some kind of community. Digital environment, even the, you know, the plain old, you know, sort of minivan of an LMS, can be useful and can start conversations about, well, okay, well, what are the indicators here that show a student's at risk?

You can actually measure those. You can share them with each other. You can say, well, you're getting different results than I am. That's interesting. Why is that? That's really just the beginning. The various LMS vendors, particularly Blackboard at the moment, are experimenting with other ways that they can quantify the activity that's happening in this system and reflect that to the students and the educators in ways that get them to think and talk more about what's going on and whether it's leading to learning or not.

So the LMS could give you data. And if you do form a community around discussing data and how to look at it and data, people feel it's a fancy, cool thing so they might actually want to get together to talk about it. So the LMS has the possibility, at least, of leading towards these conversations, which can be about learning. And sometimes, at the very least, those conversations happen whenever your school decides that it might consider switching LMSs, right? You come and you get the dog and pony shows and you get all the bells and whistles and hopefully those conversations are going to be increasingly about, well, look how we can help you get to know your students better and get to know what they need better.

And hopefully the selection committees and the faculty and students and administrators involved in that process will begin to zero in on that as something that's particularly important. First, those committees are always suspended once the choice is made, they should really keep going. I mean, those should be standing. Not only are those committees the last time that these people get together and talk about what they need, they're also the first time. And so smart institutions use these procurement opportunities as a community building exercise and a way to begin to identify common pedagogical needs and interests and then create other activities that start to build a community.

Edward O'Neil: So for Michael Feldstein, the future of educational technology is science or being empirical or communities that get together and discuss when we see learning and when we don't and looking at tools to ask, is this something that makes learning visible and helps us sway it in one direction or the other? That's exactly right. And so let's turn to your other technology that you brought up, which is adaptive learning which is often sold as a kind of teaching by remote control. Well, you don't need to worry about this anymore.

Michael Feldstein: You know, just put your students in front of this product and they will be learned. Yeah. And there's some history of that. There's kind of a co-dependent relationship between faculty and textbook publishers in particular or has been for a long time. I think it's finally starting to break down and that's a good thing because now they're trying to invent healthier, find healthier relationship and it is a sort of sense of, you know, I'm, again, I'm running to three different adjunct jobs or I'm trying to get tenure and I've got this giant lecture class and I don't just don't have time.

Edward O'Neil: I'd love to be a good teacher if I had the time to focus on it, but I don't. So give me something that allows me to do a minimally adequate job in the time that I have. One way you can think about adaptive learning is as the evolution of that. And you've made a wonderful video showing math teachers, I think in a community college, where the class is the students coming down and using the testing software to kind of practice identify problems and then when they have a question, the teacher works with them, you know, one-on-one.

Michael Feldstein: So another way to think about these tools is that they're tutors. And I mean that in the sense of the human tutor that you might bring in as a teacher, right? You've got maybe a more advanced undergraduate student who comes in and helps less advanced undergraduate student. And you don't trust them to be able to do everything that you can do, but you trust them to be able to help with some sorts of problems. And if you're a conscientious teacher, you interview your tutors and you know what their strengths and weaknesses are, you know when to trust their judgment and when not to trust a judgment.

Imagine if you could change the economics of tutoring so that you could give a tutor to each student, just again, a more advanced undergraduate to each student. And you could have them come together and talk to each other and write up a report every night for you so that when you woke up in the morning, before you went into class, you had that report from all your tutors on how the students are doing individually and collectively. Because right now, what students do at home is often invisible to faculty, right? So if you had them working one on one with tutors, you could see a lot more.

And if those tutors work together to kind of boil down the information to help you figure out what to pay attention to because you can't look at it all, then you start having richer feedback loops. You're able to reach more students that you're not reaching now and catch more students before they fall through the cracks. So one of the things I hear you saying about what EdTech could do is that what teachers say is give me time and what you say is kind of make learning visible. So if EdTech could make learning visible, you could see what was, when learning was happening or wasn't.

And if the teachers were freed up to have time to react and to respond and change, then EdTech would really be going in the right direction. I think that's spot on. So you brought up two aspects here, right? So first, let's free up instructor time to focus on the students. Second, let's make the students learning process more visible to the instructors. Third, and crucially what I would add is let's make that visible learning process shareable in a way that enables instructors to have conversations with each other and to benefit from each other's learning and experiments so that we can begin to develop a common vocabulary, a common evidence space and a common standard of evidence.

So to go back to the beginning of our conversation, I believe that the future of EdTech is really about conversation. And it really is about us coming to terms with how we can teach better by studying that empirically. All of the tools that are available to us either help us see more clearly, help you intervene in that opportunity more clearly in a way that lets you see whether that intervention actually has an effect. And if they don't do either of those things for you as a professional responsible for your students, then they're useless.

Yeah, that's probably in an overstatement, but at this point, it's the kind of overstatement that we need. Right, because it's a remedy to something else. Show me the learning, save me time, make evidence and methods visible and charitable. Exactly. Cool. Thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you for having me. So, Deb, what do you think? So I thought that YouTube by the end had come up with a really nice list of ways in which we should think about EdTech improving how we teach and improving student learning.

Edward O'Neil: It becomes, it becomes like a shopping list like you're looking at technologies. If you're shopping for technologies, there are certain things you should say, well, does it do these things? If it ticks off all the boxes, that would be kind of ideal. Right, and I think a lot of times the boxes that we think about are like specific features like does this classroom polling system do word clouds? Right, right. And we're going to my iPad or Android. Yeah, and like this list, I think is way more high level and in some sense much more practical and it works for a variety of different kinds of EdTech.

Doug McKee: How do you see that list? Well, it's okay. So what I thought we could go through the, go over the list and then see how the MOOC that you taught this summer that you built over the summer fits these criteria, okay? So the first one I have is EdTech can support teaching by providing the faculty more information about what the students are doing and where the students are succeeding or struggling. So I think Michael talked about making learning visible. Yeah. And is that true, was that true in the MOOC? Well, when you have an online class, people kind of go into the discussion and discuss with each other.

Edward O'Neil: So you can kind of see, you can see how much people are contributing, you can see how much they're interacting. And I think in a MOOC, oftentimes your criteria for their performance are not super, super specific because you may not be measuring at a very individual level. But the interactions are kind of the platform on which the learning is going to happen. And so that making learning visible part, I think the discussion is visible and the discussion is kind of another dimension which is the social dimension bringing people together.

Right. And so the MOOC can't really tell you anything about the quality of the discussion. Well, you can give quizzes, which we didn't do. What we did was we had students rate each other's work. And so, I mean, in a way, it's like bootstrapping because you're going to learn how you met the criteria by how I think you met the criteria. But we're also going to learn that I think you didn't meet the criteria and everyone else thinks you did. So it's a funny kind of way of making learning visible. And that tool in the edX platform is actually a little bit opaque to the students.

Doug McKee: I don't necessarily know when I rate you, hey, Ed, you're kind of the ringer. You gave a really low rating and everyone else didn't. I wonder why that is. So edX could be better in that way in terms of making learning visible when we're doing peer instruction or kind of peer evaluation. Yeah, interesting. I mean, I think that one of the nice things about MOOCs is because almost all the interaction is intermediated through the, has to go through the website. Yes, you observe a lot. Like there's a lot of information there.

That's right. And that's why the LMS as clunky as it can be is kind of your best friend because you can count behaviors. If you're interested in seeing, are they doing the work and to what degree? A lot of is kind of all there in one place. And I mean, I would put clickers in this category too in a way, it's just clickers. For sure. Learning visible, you can see where people are. Yeah. So the second box on this nice checklist is edTech can make faculty more efficient. So they have more time to devote to kind of human interaction with students like, or other things that are more interesting and more useful than manually grading a multiple choice test.

Edward O'Neil: For example. Somebody told me that years ago someone did a study and you could see a vague this is already that every time saving technology in the home, like the vacuum cleaner, for instance, actually created its own kind of work. And so that none of the time saving devices in the home actually created any more leisure time. I actually think that that's like intentionally provocative because I've actually seen studies that show that the technology in the home is a major, major driver of women entering the workplace.

I think it's tough to do so much the home production. Yeah, that would be great. So it makes a cute academic paper to say that's like a vacuum cleaner means the people's standards for clean go up. Right, but I think it's just false. Yeah, that's right. That's where it's nice to have a human as an empirical scientist like this, exactly, exactly together. So saving time, I think the problem is that if you save that time, does it go into your research? Does it go into your teaching? That's right. The MOOC, you have all these people discussing and there's 3,000 people in the course, only really like 60 of them, 50 or 60 are highly, highly active.

So you can just go into the discussion and since they're grading each other, you've saved that amount of time, you can spend the time looking at their work and giving them feedback on it and commenting on the discussions and things like that. And that's very personalized. I think it's supportive of the human beings in the class. And I think if you support the people, then they feel supported and they can learn better. Okay, so the third category is, EdTech can help faculty share information about students, treatments, experiences with each other.

Doug McKee: So EdTech can help build this community of faculty. Right. And that's, I think it's hard for EdTech. I think most EdTech tools don't do that. Yeah, I agree. But a few do and it's nice when they do. And I wonder if maybe it's too much to ask the technology to bring teachers together to talk about results. Maybe that should be a face-to-face function, especially if that's most comfortable for teachers. I mean, imagine you're a professor and then you're supposed to go into a special app in order to chat about teaching or compare results or something like that.

I don't think you would do it unless you saw some pretty significant benefit. I do think at this point, there are teaching faculty that use technology to communicate. I mean, Twitter and Facebook, I think the biggest examples of this. I'm in a Facebook group of economists that really care about teaching. And it's great. We share articles that we can use in our teaching. We share articles about teaching. It's good. And I think people do these kind of education-related Twitter chats that I think are pretty useful. But it's funny, I think in some ways, this might actually be the biggest contribution of the MOOC because you remember a few years ago when MOOCs were just absolutely crazy and everybody thought they were going to eat higher education.

Edward O'Neil: Right. What it did is it caused a whole bunch of people to come together and talk about teaching that never would have before. Yes, it brought a lot of attention to the issue. I mean, I didn't find in edX that there was a lot of ways to connect with other MOOC professors. Right. Oh, no, no. I think it was a totally unintentional second order of fact, indirect effect of the MOOC. Scared people and got them to come together and talk about teaching. Some learning management systems like Blackboard and Canvas have ways of sharing course content with each other and selling it or publishing it or things like this.

And Canvas is especially worked hard to make a community of Canvas users, Canvas user groups. And so actually, I think the learning management system, old as it is, has done a lot to try and bring teachers together. And Michael actually talks about the way they try and use data and make it visible to teachers. So you may think of the learning management system as old-fashioned, but there's a way in which it's cutting edge. Yeah, but it's early days. I mean, the vast majority of people that use their LMS do not use it to communicate with other faculty.

Yeah, that's true. And matter of fact, in our next interview, Matthew Rascoff is going to suggest that the most innovative teachers do not necessarily use the LMS to innovate. And actually, this is a great segue. So Matthew Rascoff is in a role focusing on technology innovation for learning technology at Duke University. And he has an education perspective and a business perspective. And so he's very interested in which technologies, which learning technologies are more disruptive, which you would think somebody administrative role would not be that excited about disruption.

But he's very interested in disruption. And he also talks about this question and kind of disintermediation. It's our technologies like the learning management system going to take people out of their roles, going to say get rid of teachers, or is the learning management system itself going to actually be somehow removed from the equation? That's super interesting. And let's hear what he has to say about that.

Matthew Rascoff: My name is Matthew Rascoff, and I work at Duke University where I am the Associate Vice Provost for Digital Education and Innovation.

So you have innovation in your job title? I do, as is my second time with innovation in my job title. And there's something of a backlash going on, I think, against innovation as a discipline and putting it in job titles. And I think I've seen the good and the bad parts of it. But it certainly frames our thinking in broader perspective than just online learning. It's really about helping to envision the future of learning and realize some of the potential in that future. I sometimes joke that people ask me what I do.

And I say, you remember in high school the guy that wheeled in the overhead projector? I'm a very fancy version of that. Yes, exactly. And I think the idea of fancy takes. So that guy is today a chief innovation officer in some sort of vision. So to make it very literal, you do something that has to do with educational technology. Exactly. That's a role. Yes, so it's really at Duke two things. It's our online learning strategy, which includes both credit and non-credit programs. So we build courses on Coursera, not for credit, but we also have some fully online programs.

And it's also our academic technology on campus. So all the tools that we offer faculty and students to enable their learning here and beyond. So those two fields have evolved separately, but I think they're now coming together. And part of what's exciting about this role for me is to cross-fertilize between thinking about academic technology on campus and thinking about online learning for the world and try to find some of those connections and strengthen the connections and foster the learning across those two spheres.

Yeah, it becomes a Venn diagram if you're going to do it with any efficiency. Absolutely, absolutely. And certainly, if you think about platforms, the platform starts to make sense when you scale them. And you get network effects when you scale them. I think you get some learning effects for faculty who figure out how to teach something online. And then they bring those innovations back into the classroom and vice versa. And I think that's part of what I think about how traditional higher education should do. It's how traditional higher education can evolve and can compete because we have access to residential learning.

We have this unique opportunity for cross-fertilization between classroom and online. And translating those lessons back and forth, I think it's something that we can do that fully online institutions can't. And if it's part of how we're going to compete, it's part of how we're going to offer benefits to our students in the long term, I think. So I don't think that's just an incidental job benefit for me, I think it's actually an existential benefit for traditional higher education and it's how we're going to survive.

Right, so you could say what you do involves synergy or network effects, but can someone say the tail is wagging the dog? Like if people use the tool for one purpose and then end up using it for another reason that the tool driving the learning and so the other way around. I agree, and I think the challenge in positions like mine is to put learning first and to think about the tools and the service of learning. And I think it's hard to do that in the context of large enterprises where the bureaucracies want solutions that cover lots of territory, that solve lots of use cases, that kind of check a lot of boxes, like enterprise solutions across all classrooms.

And learning doesn't necessarily work that way. I have a hypothesis that some of the best learning applications and tools are actually discipline specific, so there is no enterprise solution. There's actually going to be discipline level solutions. And what we need to support at the enterprise is more flexibility, enable those disciplines to use the tools that they need with the pedagogies that they seek, and our job as central administrators whether in IT or in my case in provost office roles is to enable that flexibility and make it work for faculty.

Edward O'Neil: So figure out the integrations, make sure those tools work effectively with one another, make sure we can get data in and out of them well. And I think that's how you avoid the tail wagging the dog phenomenon, put learning first and think about what the learning needs are, and then figure out what the technology solutions are second. So that's a good segue, because I want to ask you about the future of ed tech is our topic. So kind of where is ed tech going? And one way of answering that would be, where should it be going, or what needs do you have?

So it sounds like where it should be going is towards learning. And you just described some I think kind of criteria for when you should steer towards the future. Do you have a sense of is this where ed tech is going is actually not towards the one side? Partly towards one side if it's all tool, but partly towards completely disciplined specific tools? I hope so. And we're trying to move it in that direction. I think it's important for institutions to give ed tech that nudge. What I'm describing I think is more of an app-driven style of ed tech, less of an enterprise IT style of ed tech.

Matthew Rascoff: In other words, devolving some of the decision-making to the front lines, allowing educators to make more of the calls. And our job is building the app stores, curating the tools, negotiating the agreements, getting the pricing in place, figuring out the security and the integration, making sure all those tools work with one another, and then freeing educators to figure out which ones they need, and to work with them, actually, to design learning technologies that match the learning goals that they've set for their students.

And that's a very different model of collaboration. It's much closer to the learning. It's much deeper collaboration between academic technology and instructional design and educators. It's not us providing a solution and them self-service figuring it out in an LMS. It's really much more of a curated approach to what we're calling the design learning experience at Duke. The design learning experience. Now, it sounds like the EDUCAUSE next generation learning challenge or whatever, the elements are plug and play instead of it being one tool.

It's an open framework. It kind of tends towards a marketplace. I mean, what would you say if someone said, well, you just want to turn education into a marketplace and it's not? That paper, the next generation digital learning environment paper definitely frames our strategy here, and it really resonated with me and with many others at Duke. It's hard to bring to life because there's nothing to buy. There's no next generation digital learning solution yet. And I don't think there really can be. There are some emerging frameworks that I think are exciting.

There are also some interesting analogies from the K-12 sector that I think we can benefit from. And we can talk more about those later. But just to answer your question about markets and are we moving the institution more in this direction of a marketplace? What I can tell you is that there already are a lot of tools in place on our campus. We surveyed the kind of learning tool landscape in 2012 and then we did it again in 2016. And there was, I think, 50% growth in the number of tools on campus that are being used for assessment and for content and for video and for collaboration.

It was in the 60s and now I think it was in the 90s in 2016. 93 systems in our last survey for assessment, authoring, communication, computing, content management, media storage. So that's already the case. And I think it's really a question for us about catching up to where the educators and the learners are. And it is a marketplace already. We're not making it into one. Exactly. And we should embrace that and make it serve our needs. And rather than just passively sitting by the sides and while the technology evolves, I think we can actually play a good role as being curators and integrators and dashboard builders to make those technologies more useful.

And to make them also more available beyond early adopters in thinking about enterprise strategy, we have to think beyond those who can do fully self-service into and supporting the scale up of powerful tools that would benefit lots of students, if only faculty knew how to use that, knew they were aware, could figure out how to bring them into their portfolio of teaching tools that they use in their classes. So where is the edict going? It's the future of ed tech is a framework, not a tool, and it involves supporting choice and integration.

So where does this leave the learning management system is the learning management system a hub where tools get integrated? Or is the learning management system still going to be necessary because you're going to have some online or free open courses? I like to say the LMS love it or leave it. Yeah, I think it's definitely an open question. I think it's already the case that the most innovative faculty members here and at other institutions that I've seen are the ones who use the LMS the least. And that's not a good indicator for the long-term health of the LMS.

Really interesting. I think it's probably going to move more in the direction of management and lessen the direction of learning along the lines perhaps of what you said, which is the launch pad for apps, but not necessarily the apps themselves, not the kind of conglomerate of different tools, but really more of the integration point where you launch those tools, maybe the dashboard for a faculty member, maybe where the roster is kept for them. But the tools are evolving too quickly for the LMSes to keep up. And what you see is more differentiation along the lines of disciplines, along the lines of different tasks, along the lines of different pedagogies.

And the LMS is going to be unbundled. What its future is, I think, is hard to prognosticate. What I think is clear is that it's going to be reduced. And over time, maybe completely disintermediated. Well, people talk about it being a frame or a gateway within a destination. I think that's probably realistic. I mean, there is going to be a need for one place to log into to find the different tools that are available. And it may just be that. But over time, that may also just be a website. As less and less of the LMSes use, it's not clear that institutions will continue to pay for something that's providing less value and less functionality.

So I think the next generation digital learning environment paper said new systems are needed. And that's kind of where we're at. That there's a recognition that LMSes are not serving those needs. New systems are needed. The learning management system has to be reimagined. That's what that paper said. And that reimagination is happening now. And I think there are a few exciting projects, like Elm's LN at Penn State, like the API efforts at Brigham Young University that are helping us see what the future of those integration points might be.

Edward O'Neil: Well, sometimes the future is the past. So when I was at Stanford, they had their own Unixi kind of file system. And one of the things you could do in it was there was a little permissions folder and every folder. And if you could put a tool in a folder like a wiki or whatever, you could put in then something saying all Stanford or all students or no students all staff or it was natural language. There was student staff and faculty. And you could say all or no. Or you could put in specific student IDs. You could put in a class that was referred to in the registration system with a specific term.

Matthew Rascoff: So anyone enrolled in the class could get into the folder and get anything in it, any tool that you put in it. Or you could exclude specific people. You could have everyone in the world except one person that you didn't like. And they couldn't see it. And so Stanford already had a way of, well, you can put resources and folders or tools and folders. And then you can give access to anyone you want. So that was solved ages ago, but no one does it. And amazingly, we're now into version two of the LTI standard. Many years after what you were describing at Stanford and still when an instructor here goes into Qualtrics and wants to use it to build a little assessment in their class, there's no easy way to populate their roster in Qualtrics and just automatically create a group.

Edward O'Neil: But integration is not seamless. Yeah, I think it's called the AFS, the Android file system. I don't know who else uses it. So then there's the LMS and there's the adaptive. I'm thinking of the big beasts or the big things. I mean, is adaptive a solution because it could potentially be adaptive or is it just something that you'll textbook publishers will be interested in because you need the time and money to develop it. And I mean, I as a human being can be adaptive quickly, but technology to be adaptive requires a lot of programming.

Matthew Rascoff: It does. And I think there is something of a soul searching going on in the adaptive learning space right now. There's been turnover at several of the top companies. I think some of the philanthropic funders of the adaptive learning efforts are rethinking their strategy. And there's kind of a collective breath being taken about whether it works, whether it's lived up to the promise. I saw a piece about personalized learning from the Fordham Institute yesterday can personalized learning prevail. I think it's part of this kind of soul searching that's going on about whether it's going to work.

That was about K-12. But I think the questions are the same about higher education. I think it's certainly clear that adaptive is not going to disintermediate faculty any time soon. That was, that a lot of those fears were overblown. It's basically incremental improvement, sustaining innovations, not disruptive innovations, that are going to make content delivery more productive, more effective on the margins, but are not fundamental shifts along the lines of self-driving cars. And that's another thing people worry about.

Yeah, yeah, but I don't think there is a self-driving textbook coming soon. I think we're going to have self-driving cars well before we have self-driving bachelor's degrees. You know, but it also isn't the internet the ultimate adaptive choose your own adventure. I mean, you simply ask students to do something or look for something. That's actually quite, and then report back and discuss with each other. That's adaptive and it's reflective and it's all kinds of other things too. So the idea that a piece of software needs to do this as opposed to human, I think, is the weird part of this.

But if you're in edtech, your bias is to thinking that the solution is technology. Yes, but there's technology that is kind of a black box that presumes to know what you need and doesn't allow you to participate in that discussion. And then I think there's another entire category of technology, which is much more humane that uses the tools for the much humbler but arguably more powerful purpose of connecting learners with one another. And I think those are the two big theories of change in edtech. There's the adaptive theory of change, I think still largely unproven.

And then there's the social learning theory of change, which has, I think, a lot of evidence behind it. So I think of tools like practice.xyz, one of my favorite edtech tools out there. And it uses video not to reinforce kind of sage on the stage broadcast models, but instead to allow learners to record themselves doing some kind of performance, say a nurse practicing some bedside manner technique, and then record and share that video with peers who mark up the video using a rubric design by the instructor. The instructor's role is to create that rubric, check for inter-reader reliability, kind of manage this process of peer review among learners with video.

And the technology is there to connect learners with one another to create the leader board. And the learning application is, can you improve your performance with feedback? Can you give feedback to your peers? Can you participate in a learning community as somebody who is a future member of a healthcare team at Les and Nurse will be? And it's incredibly humane and social, and it's a great application of video technology that has no adaptive algorithm behind it. It's technology is just in the service of making these connections, but it's incredibly useful and valuable in teaching things that have some kind of performance component that are otherwise very hard to teach.

So that's more of the theory of learning that I'm willing to bet on in edtech. Right, I had that idea about five years ago and no one was interested helping people learn more and helping more people learn. Those are the two big goals that we've set here. Helping people learn more, meaning using the best research, using the best tools, using the best evidence-based practices that we have to understand how the brain works and how we forget things. The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve is research backed thinking about how we forget things and we can use that knowledge about psychology to design learning experiences that help people learn more.

And at the same time, we can help more people learn and reach large audiences beyond the walls of our institution. Dukes enrolled 4.5 million learners on Coursera just in the past four years. That's an enormous impact in the world. And I think what's most exciting about technology is it allows us to break that kind of traditional thinking the iron triangle that says you can't have both. You can't have low cost, meaning lots of access and also high quality at the same time. And the way I see the potential of learning technology is that it allows us to kind of break that iron triangle and maximize access, reach large numbers of learners while we're also helping people learn more.

Edward O'Neil: And that's incredibly powerful. But if we can pull it off, it'll be really, really influential, really important for the world. So that's Matthew Rascoff's version of the Future of Ed Tech. That is. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen George Lucas's THX 1138. It's like a sci-fi movie with Robert Duvall. And in it, he has this future prison, Robert Duvall character is sent to prison. And it's just kind of a room and people are kind of allowing about. And at one point, the Robert Duvall character realizes that there's no door and no lock.

And that is the prison in the future is that people are so well trained that they don't even think to escape. And I wonder if higher ed is a little bit the flip side is that all this knowledge used to be so terribly valuable and rare and rarefied and hard to get to. And now, these great institutions leave the knowledge out there, but does anyone find it? I mean, it almost makes discoverability the next question. I mean, you could have all the knowledge in the world that's just lying there, but is it learned? Is it used?

Matthew Rascoff: Is it acquired? I think it's a good question to be asking, especially in our days of stratification, what are we doing to make sure that we're not just putting knowledge out there, we're making it useful and designing it for real needs. To some extent, I think that's a case for bringing some of those market oriented ideas into universities. You were asking kind of an skeptical way about the negative influence of the market. But there's something incredibly empathetic about capitalism, which is that it designs for the needs of users and learners rigorously.

And it's basically a system for forcing those who have capital to allocate resources based on what people want and what they need. And if they think they need, well, yeah. But if they're wrong, they fail in capitalism. And so what citizens think they need? Well, what citizens think they need? Potato chips. That's true, that's true, that's true. But with adults, adults education, which is what we're talking about, there's only so much you can do to get somebody to do something that they don't think that they need. It is a reasonable point.

And I think that's a very important point in K-12 education that sometimes learners need to be given things that they don't want, that they don't think they need because they do need it. And there's no better. But in higher education, that's not the case. And I think it's important, the value of that market-based thinking is that it forces us to design not just based on what we want to supply, but also where there is demand. And that forces a rigor about empathy, it forces an open-mindedness, it forces a certain transparency, that's very healthy for higher education.

So say what you want about the corporate university, I do think that's the positive case to be made for more market-oriented thinking in higher education. And I would flip it around to say, we in higher education need to be better at telling people how wonderful some of the stuff we do is and how it actually does meet their needs. So there's people thinking that they have needs and wanting certain things and us being able to give those things to them. And then there's us being able to help people understand the benefit we create.

And that's marketing too, which is fine with me. Absolutely. And in the online learning world, you can't succeed without that thinking. You can't succeed without that function. And even great institutions have learned that they need to participate in that discourse in order to be successful online. Yeah. Great. This has been a very provocative conversation. Thanks for being a guest. Thank you so much, Edward. My pleasure. So what struck you, a mere professor, and you use technology for yourself, you don't have that administrative role.

Edward O'Neil: I was in IT for a long time. So some of the things Matthew was talking about or more, kind of like how you make decisions about educational technology. I mean, what was your takeaway? I thought this idea of the coming of the thin LMS was really interesting. I don't see it yet. But I think he makes a pretty strong case that it's coming down the pike and that we will have these LMSs that don't actually have very many features, but are tightly integrated with lots and lots of potential applications. Right now, what we see is an LMS that has, LMSs tend to have lots of features that go unused.

And they're integrated, like they say they'll say things like Blackboard is integrated with Piazza, which is a third party online discussion system that I really like. But the integration is you can put a link on your Blackboard site to Piazza. Okay, that's not integration. That's the web. Yeah. Right. Now, integration would be, I never have, maybe my students go over to Piazza, but I go to Blackboard and I see a dashboard of how my students are interacting with Piazza. And that information is actually flowing into the LMS and is integrated with what they're doing on, with other apps and what they're doing, their problem sets that they're submitting and they're, whatever they're discussing inside Blackboard, maybe.

And can this right now is the kind of finnest of the learning management systems that I know. And the EDUCAUSE, which is the national and even international educational technology organization has a branch, the Learning Initiative, EDUCAUSE, Learning Initiative. And they've been promoting this kind of future oriented idea of the next generation digital learning environment, the NGDLE, which is what the learning management system will become and will link to some of their kind of white papers and updates on this. So that is the kind of ideal thin client that Matthew is talking about trying to build out.

But it's not something that comes in a box. You don't just order it and plug it in and it requires a lot of work. And so all the institutions like Duke or places very dedicated to learning technologies can really say, okay, we're gonna build something like this. And I think the way these things are integrated into the LMS and the information flows, I think it's just really early days and that's a hard problem. Yeah, I also think that the, I also think that Michael and Matthew might make a neat comparison because both of them are talking about communities.

But for Michael, it's the community of teacher scholars talking about teaching and learning that's really paramount. Whereas Matthew looks at these two communities. One is students connecting with each other and a robust kind of nuanced qualitative way. And professors who need educational technologies in a sense shopping for them. So really the community at that level is being kind of a marketplace which is very different than a community of scientists. In fact, I think that first one that you mentioned student community is an, I would add that to the checklist.

Doug McKee: One more value in the educational technology. Does it help students communicate with each other? So what's our checklist now? Making learning visible, making teaching shareable and connecting students to each other. That's Doug, short checklist. And saving faculty time. Saving faculty time. Those are your big four. I think everybody listens to Michael's interviews. It's gonna come up with a different four, or three, or five, or whatever it is. But I think it's nice to have a brief overview of them. My last thought on Matthew Rascoff is it warmed my economist heart.

Edward O'Neil: How positive would he view capitalists? Right, right. And I was much more skeptical. And he heard that very clearly and had a kind of robust defense. I agree with this point that markets can find needs very well. But if you go down the potato chip I love the supermarket. That's not really meeting, that's creating needs. You know, I want an ice cream Sunday. It's 11 in the morning, but I don't need an ice cream Sunday. So economists actually, actually consciously hate the distinction between want and need. Yeah, I just think the want need is not a helpful distinction.

If you go to any IT department meeting and you're talking about anything, any product or tool, the distinction that you will hear constantly made is is this a need to have or a nice to have? Yeah, okay. Is this an essential feature or something that would make life easier, but it's not essential. Which is why oftentimes we have such crappy tools in higher ed is that a lot of things become, but be nice to have that. But, you know, we have a budget. Right. So it may not be, you know, one versus need or need to have nice to have may not be an economist distinction.

Yeah, that's right. But it's an IT distinction. Yeah. And it's a moral distinction. Well, I mean, I think it's a nice way to kind of simplify a decision process. So the last guest is Bryan Alexander, and he has a PhD in, I forgot if it's English or literature, but in the humanities. And so he has a very different approach to technology, which I would describe as the future of technology has to be imagined. And so the imagination is always playing a role. And so thinking about the future of ed tech is not really a purely rational enterprise.

Doug McKee: Well, I think what Brian does is he takes your question, which is where do you see the future of educational technology and answering a somewhat different question, which is how will technology, as it evolves, change education and how should it change education? Yeah, it's nice, because it's not what is the future of ed tech, but what is the future of ed in relation to tech? Right. So not just how does technology affect how we teach, but how does technology affect what we should be teaching and who we should be teaching and when we should be teaching it?

Who's teaching, where they are, how they're going to get the learning. It's nice because it really, it is a step back, another step back, but it's pointing out that there's a lot more changes coming than which tool we use. Exactly, exactly. So let's hear it. Hello, this is Bryan Alexander. I'm a futurist, specializing in the future of higher education. Wow. So in your business card, it says futurist. It does. I was going to have a read consulting futurist because that is actually what I do. But I thought that might be too much.

Bryan Alexander: You consult. And so since you're a futurist, I thought you'd be the perfect person to talk to about educational technology in higher education. I mean, you do something broader, which is about education, but you know the technology, the learning technology part of it. And really think about learning technology, not necessarily the network or servers or something like this. And so I'm trying to ask people, where do you see EdTech going? And that could mean where do you want it to go or where do you fear it's going. Right.

Well, those are important distinctions to make. When I present on scenarios or trends, I often ask people to respond with what they think is likely to happen and then what they would prefer to happen. So when people say what's likely to happen, they actually say something negative. And we're more likely to say something negative. Negative neutral or strange. So they might say, I think blockchain is really huge. I have no idea what that means. Or what would you like to have happen and they'll talk about? For example, when I ask what's likely they'll often talk about medical education, does it have broadly construed medical education?

Is it going to increase? I say what would you like to see it? Rarely will they say medical education? They'll usually say, well, I want the humanities to recover that kind of thing. So it sounds like when people are thinking about the future of educational technology, when you're intervening, you come into a set of fears and fantasies. Absolutely. My background is in the humanities. That's where my PhD is. So I'm ready for this. And my dissertation is actually in Gothic horror. So I'm always very pleased to see people being terrified or anxious, that just warms the cockles of my heart.

But it's definitely a key to the projection of people projecting their, sometimes they're conscious, policy level fears or expectation. And sometimes it can be very revealing at a almost so conscious level. And so when you come up with scenarios, is this an attempt to kind of confound the kind of fear-laden kind of fantasmatic approach or is an attempt to address it? Both. When we present a future, most credit scenarios, we usually try and present between three and four in order to give people a range of possibilities.

But given the scenario, it was a nice thing piece that's a narrative, which lets people inhabit a particular vision of the future. So if we have a scenario where we say, for example, that higher education will shrink within 10 years, the total number of students, the total number of courses, all for the total number of campuses, will be less. Then that might be a frightening scenario. It gives people the chance to absorb it, to think it through. And then they could roll back and say, all right, I'm a librarian. What does it mean to be a librarian in a smaller higher education sector?

Or I'm a professor, or I'm a administrator, or I'm a student, or I'm a parent? How does that change things? So I usually try to offer one positive scenario, one frightening scenario, one very strange scenario, and then something that may be more conservative in a scenario based on minimal levels of change. It seems like thinking about technology and education, which is a little bit different than ed tech, in a sense. And I kind of like that shift. Thinking about technology and education makes you think about very different kind of learning outcomes, like how people can be aware that they are going to need to retrain for different kinds of work, even every few years.

Well, they have to. And you think about, OK, I used to show my kids episodes of the TV show Mad Men. And for them, it's like watching Tolkien, or historical reenactment. It's fascinating for them. Oh, yeah, I showed them the classic movie network. And they didn't think it was funny. I asked them why. And they said, well, this is the way TV works. That was interesting. But I showed them Mad Men. One of the things that struck them was this idea that you would have one job, one employer, one career for life. And that seemed to be, to them, very alien.

So we have this. And it's an interesting task for higher education. We often speak about lifelong learning. How much higher education is actually equipped to follow that up? For example, Rollins College in Florida has this great program for senior citizens. It's a full year, first year undergraduate experience. Biology 101, Spanish 101, great books, that kind of thing. And they just, they offer this. And it's always, always filled up. And the students are fast, they're 65, 75, 85 years old. It's great to hear their responses and why they applied this first year experience.

Should more college universities open up to that? We already have extension courses that kind of thing. Or should we ramp that up and make them more serious? Should we offer, should liberal arts colleges have classes for four years? Should research one universities make a better point, a bigger point of having courses for people who are 50 and need to re-skill? I mean, we haven't really re-tooled at that level yet. And so we have to. Who are we educating? Technology changes, jobs change. Who do we educate and hire at?

Well, in many ways, we are the best position sector to respond because we have so much professional expertise. So theory, we can deploy our economists, our sociologists, our political scientists to look hard at the changing labor force and get better understanding of it. And we can deploy philosophers, psychologists, and so on to give us more critical awareness of what this means for people and society. But then we just step back. And then we have, again, the humanities side. We have the question of to what extent is higher education responsive to the labor force?

So do we have a question of do we allow the business sector to determine our curriculum? Or to what extent should education be not about economics? But to be about the unendemic life or discovering one's voice or one's purpose in life. And there's a lot of contradictory, multindiar philosophies and practices based around this. So it's very, very careful. So I want to go back to learning technology and in science versus humanities. So you made a great pitch for humanistic outcomes as being important for higher ed, especially in the face of changing careers.

Edward O'Neil: Knowing who you are could greatly help making those choices. The way learning technology works in the science, I think, is clearer. You've got simulations of molecules and you have clickers and the active learning classroom and stuff. But I mean, what do you see as learning technology that supports humanistic education, understanding who you are and thinking about what culture and knowledge are? Gosh, let me count the ways. First, there's the entire digital humanities movement, which in my lifetime is a rare thing.

Bryan Alexander: It's a chunk of the humanities that's actually growing and making money. I have to sit down every self and just take that in and rest that means. But the whole digital humanities enterprise, which is still in its early days, many ways, growing and growing, that's one aspect where we can ask new questions and learn new answers about the humanities. Then we have to think about moving to the humanities. It's a Frankenstein monster, too. It's humanity plus technology. So it's perfectly in your bailiwick. Oh, quite, quite.

And I'm always happy to have Frankenstein enter into the conversation. But we also have other technologies that emphasize individual creativity. So you think about the whole galaxy of digital storytelling. People, new stories with everything from infographics to video to audio to games. I mean, that's just a tremendous, tremendous zone. And it's one that really appeals to millennials and listeners of generation. In part, because there are more immersed in digital creativity than a previous generation. But also because they look blank and reasonably honored, routes to jobs and careers.

On top of that, we can also remember that the humanities has always taken a critical stance of technology. I mean, the very precise, I don't mean that it's anti-technology. I mean, that we have a long tradition of humanists offering us new ways to think about technology, everything. So Heidi Gerber is supposed to order to classic essay technology to French Catholic critics, to writers like Howard Rengold, who brings great multidisciplinary approach to higher education technology. We've been thinking about this critically for quite some time.

And this is current. The literacy. Work on literacy. Absolutely. Technology. Currently, there's this meme going on that higher education is to uncritical technology. I wish I'd had that life experience, because I've always had the opposite experience. But if you want to integrate the humanities and technology in the higher education sphere, it's wonderful to bring in, if you will, the technology of criticism. Everything from psychotherapy to a Frankfurt School to literary theory to historiography. And the new field of history of the book and apply these to what the technology means as it iterates in human beings.

Edward O'Neil: So in a sense, you keep going back to the idea that in higher education, we should be able to solve our own problems, because we're smart enough when we have all the tools. We should be able to solve the problem of where we're going and how to be seen as useful and relevant, because we are useful and relevant. But it doesn't seem to happen. Are we just, is it hurting cats? Are we not organized enough? Or are people not focused on the problem? Are they too busy writing editorials about how nobody understands us? Why aren't we better at addressing this?

Bryan Alexander: It's a fantastic question. It's like the old joke. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but a practice that there is. Yeah, Yogi Berra. Yes, yes, yes. But I think there are a few reasons for this. And one is there's a great economic paper, 1930s by Kost about the nature of the firm, where he tries to figure out why people work for a company. Because if you do, it's really a bad idea. You get to give up your creativity or your individuality. You have to deal with bureaucracies. If this is a nightmare, why are they way to do it?

And his conclusion is, we do this because companies offer us all kinds of benefits that we can't do on their own. They take care of what he calls transaction costs. So if you work for Yale, you don't have to worry about putting out the shingle for classes and hoping students will show up because they'll take care of that. You don't have to worry about library budgets because they have that. You don't have to worry about HR and so on. Well, I think a lot of academics, we join the firm of university or college. And we outsource them one of that strategic thinking.

We focus very narrowly for all kinds of great reasons on our profession, the cell microbiology or business history. And it's, all right, you guys, you take care of all that. I have to dive deep into my sources or my lab. And we're incentivized all of them down to just do that. We want safety and numbers in order to be alone. So college is kind of bullying. See, urban it. You know, it's kind of bull alone. It comes down to administrative, as some people call it, or bureaucracy, that the enterprise that supports and enables us also traps us because there's so many managerial finicky fussy worries.

And the big picture and the steering that we might do seems to recede into the background. I really can't. And again, we're incentivized to do that. So that's part of it. But another part is the way the America looks at technology. On the one hand, we see technologies either utopian or dystopian. It's going to kill us all, or it's going to save us, right? But the other hand, we have this, do you hear the great science fiction writer Douglas Adams observation that technology is anything invented after your 30? Yeah.

So we have that problem. We're trying to, when we look at the technological one, and it's often a big leap to stagger forward and figure out, all right, for you as WordPress, what does that mean? What benefit can that possibly have? I like this idea. I mean, in one sense, it's a reflection on the future of EdTech, which is their technology is so disparate and fragmented that how could it have a single future? And maybe it should be the futures of EdTech. But I wanted to ask you about the kind of, what I think of as the big beast of EdTech.

Edward O'Neil: One is the learning management system, and the other is adaptive, which I think is supposed to almost be like the antidote. I mean, it's, you know, we've created something adaptive. It's similarly large. It's like the textbook that ate the learning management system, because a lot of kind of textbooks that have more that adapt more to the learner, maybe they're not adaptive specifically, but they're a little more personalized, have their own kind of learning management system. So there's a lot of debate about the learning management system, and we have a few more of them, but that's kind of a winnowing field.

And then some people say, well, we're not going to have a system. We're going to have, it's going to be like kind of portals to have things that kind of plug into it. Where do you see the learning management system going and adaptive learning going? Are we really going to kind of switch from one to the other? Are we going to, are we stuck with the LMS no matter what? Well, I'm thinking of, when I was an undergraduate, in 1988, I was the University of Michigan, and I was a Soviet studies major. And there was a debate in Soviet studies that one site thought the Soviet Union was going to fall apart any minute.

Bryan Alexander: And the other site thought the Soviet Union was going to last for at least for generations. And I was in the former group, and at my department, the latter group won the faction fight. Of course, two years later, it ended up getting renamed the Russian Eastern European Studies Department. And so, yeah, reality is so irritating. Isn't it, I mean, it's just simple. So what I think with the LMS, I keep wondering, is there a few fields like that, where we have a very large, powerful setup that could be fragile and fall apart with the slick.

So you think about study scholarly publication, but I don't know where we have huge dissatisfaction with proprietary for profit scholarly publishing and the services like widely else in here. And maybe we have a global flip, and the whole thing goes up in actions in the year. The LMS is kind of the same way. It's almost ubiquitous technology. Just about every campus has at least one. The major players are all technologically mature. So you know, we've got Moodle, we have Canvas, we have Blackboard, and then we have some smaller ones.

Yeah, like Sakai. And that's, and Daniel says newer. Well, Canvas is newer, but it's weirdly newer. I'm just trying to show some teenagers having his Blackboard about 10 years ago. They're horrified by it, because they had no idea how it worked, because the interface was cutting edge design circa 1996. Yeah, exactly. And so Canvas has the advantage of looking like he was designed after the year 2000, which is a big plus. But all of these, the improvements, the changes that are happening now, or the minute features level, although they're all still true, they may need to get onto mobile.

But they're more or less locked in place. They're basic ideas are fixed. They're not going to change significantly. So they now have to protect themselves. And one possibility is that they disaggregate themselves into what's called the next generation to do a learning environment. You say, a confederated system where you can include a third-party application very easily, where you can integrate the web, because the LMSs are fairly web hospital right now. I want to kind of wrap up with the idea of the question of the tail wagging the dog, which is learning technology can be kind of a fetish.

Edward O'Neil: People assume, oh, well, of course, we need technology to do things. And my motto lately has been that the ultimate learning technology is humanity. And I think you kind of started pointing to the humanities as a place that does understand and think about technology. And you have that wonderful formulation of we see technologies either saving us or killing us. Is there a pathway to a better relationship to technology where we know what it's good for? And we get out of the kill-save thing, and don't let the technology kind of wag us?

Bryan Alexander: I think it's possible that it takes work. It takes work on the future. Actually, one of them is we need to continue to appreciate science fiction. Hey, buddy, what year were you born? I went to college in the early 80s. OK, sorry, contemporaries. So you can think about how science fiction was pretty marginal up until around 2000. And it's become more and more mainstream as we foresee. That's a huge change. And in many ways, it's a beneficial one. And we think we're living in a time when we're seriously debating killer autonomous robots.

We carry super computers in our pockets. We're swiftly turning humans into cyborgs and multiple levels. So science fiction is, in many ways, something that we need to respect more of. I'm just finishing an online book club reading of Werner Venge's novel Rainbow's End, which is about someone who has to go to high school 20 years from now. And that's the plot of the book is how education changes under the impact of new technology. So science fiction has a lot to tell us if only we'll listen to participate. That's one thing.

Edward O'Neil: I like the idea of fiction as a way of thinking. I might almost call that dreaming and participation in multiple voices. And I see an underlying thread there as empathy. It's maybe one antidote to the idea of technology is leading us to do what they do in design thinking and to empathize with where people are and what they need and let that drive some of our technology choices. Instead of letting the market drive it. Well, the market is, of course, one way that we express those choices. That's true. That's true. As a matter of fact, in another interview, Matthew Rascoff talks about the market as kind of thriving on empathy and the market as being a kind of empathy machine.

So I would say at least it's an imperfect one. Well, we can also think about some of the technologies that may help us with that. So one of the great things about social media is that it does allow us to have greater conversations. And some of those conversations can be terrible. We have true lines. But we also, I don't think we're fully appreciative of this, how easy it is to connect with people or want. And you can think about saying looking at VR, which it's recorded in celebrate as an empathy machine. And so far the experience of VR is fascinating.

Bryan Alexander: We do think hard about this. OK, this has been great. Thanks so much for kind of helping us loosely dream our future. This has been a lot of fun, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. So do you have a big takeaway from this? I have kind of three, maybe four takeaways of varying sizes. I think this idea of the thin learning management system, I hadn't really thought about that before. And I think it's right. And I think Brian and Matthew both made this point that come. We seem to be moving down this path towards fewer features in the LMS and more integration, more and better integration with lots of other products.

Edward O'Neil: Because this is a market where there's massive amounts of innovation. And it's not all happening kind of in one company. So it makes sense to have lots and lots of companies building this stuff and helping the faculty use all these products by showing them where they are, having marketplaces, and integrating them with some sort of LMS. Yeah, that's one takeaway, I think. Yeah. And then my final takeaway is that I think the bottom line is we don't know what's coming. It's very hard to predict. It's this point that Matthew made and that you raised earlier about, it seems that the most innovative faculty here is at least likely to use the LMS.

Yeah. I mean, in some sense it's damning and in some sense it's, well, okay, well, we don't really know what's coming. We've got, I mean, we are still at this stage where we need to let a thousand flowers bloom. Yeah, and I thought it was interesting that nobody thought adaptive learning, which there's a lot of talk about now was going to be some kind of cure all. I think Matthew thought there was a good chance that it would be a useful tool. And I think Michael referred to it as a kind of a tutor. I think Brian's discussion really highlights the idea that when we think of these things, we're always, it's always either a panacea or a nightmare, it's a blissful dream or a nightmare and it's probably going to be neither.

And I think adaptive's hard. I think the lesson that we've learned over the last few years is like, it's a huge amount of effort to build some resource that can really pivot to meet students needs automatically. In some sense, we've learned that, aha, we found something that the professor can contribute as a person. One of the things I find troubling about adaptive is it's a heavy lift in terms of making the stuff. And so publishers who have the funding are going to do it. And that means it's not going to be what Doug thinks econometrics should be, it's going to be what a committee thinks econometrics can be.

And maybe it's large enough that a subset of that works for Doug. But the ironic thing is that when the student's choice becomes central, the instructor's choice becomes minimal. And I think a lot of instructors won't like that. I thought that the point, I think it was Matthew that made this point that the best tools are discipline specific. Yeah, I think that'll be really interesting to see if that turns out to be true. I think they're for sure as room for some really strong discipline specific tools. But I also think there's room for some really strong cross discipline tools.

And in fact, most ed tech is cross discipline right now. Yeah, a lot of the cross disciplinary things come down to simple functions like quizzing feedback, discussion, whereas if you're teaching statistics, you need some statistical software tool and IT needs to support that. That's how Matthew is partly talking from the kind of administrative perspective of what do we need to buy and for whom? Well, the statistical software can be used by search, can be used by psych, it can be used by e-con, et cetera, that English department is unlikely to need it.

What is the English department need in terms of technology? Well, they might need mapping software because they're doing more digital humanities. So I mean, the disciplines for sure have different needs. And I think the bottom line is the ed tech is not a mature market. It's not washing machines where we've got pretty good washing machines and no one has really amazingly innovative ideas about improving the washing machine. You stick your clothes in, you press about and your clothes come out clean. They're smaller and larger and there's the combined wash or dryer and stuff like this, but the functions are still pretty clear.

And ed tech's not like that at all. Yeah, I mean, I think my worry about this area and this topic is the more we talk about technology, sometimes it seems the less we talk about teaching and learning. And that's why Michael's interview is so useful. But again, it gets us back into choice so we're going to choose among these things. And it just, you're always in danger of losing the students. It's very easy to kind of spend your time figuring out the right class from a response system instead of figuring out kind of how to help a struggling student in your class.

Doug McKee: Yeah. Well, on that note, this has been a great ed tech summer Edward. Yeah, it's been really interesting. I've really enjoyed learning about all these different tools that I've never touched myself. And hearing how they actually get used, especially because the professors were all very enthusiastic about them. And I think going into this new school year, I don't think we're going to leave ed tech behind. I think we'll look, I mean, this has been fun. And there are a few things I still want to, I'm still curious about that are ed tech related.

Edward O'Neil: So we'll be talking to people. But I'm also looking forward to kind of doing more deep dives with particular faculty facing particular challenges in their classroom. And becoming more and going back to being more explicitly student and faculty focused. And I'm taking the emphasis off of technology. I guess it was a fun breezy summer. And now let's get back to work. All right, signing off. Yeah, good talking to you. It's been fun. See you next time. That's all for this episode of the Teach Better Podcast. If you want more, you can visit our website at teachbetter.co where you'll find all our old episodes.

Follow us on Twitter at TeachBetter.co and send us feedback at feedbackatteachbetter.co. Thanks for listening.