Bror's Blog

Performance by education trio: Gates, Khan, Saxberg

I had the good fortune to be invited to attend the Microsoft CEO Summit in Seattle last week.  This is a yearly gathering of 100 or so of the world's most prominent CEOs (covering 30 countries and 11 million employees this year) to talk together, with Bill Gates, and with the Microsoft brain trust, about key themes in the world and how they are all engaging with those themes.  

Part of the attraction of the summit, which has run for 16 years, is that no press, no social media, almost no information comes out from the meeting - it's a very relaxed, informal set of informed panels and engaged discussions between the CEOs and a few visiting experts. The topics, and the presenters, are a pretty wide-ranging group, from Daniel Kahneman and Tom Friedman talking about the structure of minds and implications for our future, to workshops on branding, social media, Brazil, growth, and (of course) technology, to wide-ranging discussions with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jamie Dimon about business decision-making, strategies, innovation, and more.  

This year they released the video of one session on innovation in education, where Walter Isaacson interviews Bill Gates, Salman Khan, and myself for about 45 minutes on how education is beginning to innovate, especially now with a variety of players using technology to offer more and more learning opportunities that are starting out free to users.

We talk about learning, employment, cognitive science, evidence-based instructional desigh, technology, the role of for-profit in a world of free materials, and more.  See what you think!  

Teething troubles for tech-based test grading?

A recent study by Shermis et al looking at how a number of automated essay scoring (AES) systems fare compared with human raters has generated a bit of press about advances in automated test scoring and the implications.  Not all that press is favorable – what should we all be doing, then?

Crossing the street - can start-ups and researchers connect?

Just coming back from both the main annual American Education Research Association (AERA) meeting in Vancouver and from the Education Innovation Summit in Scottsdale Arizona (EIS).  Curiously, the two meetings were scheduled to overlap, which reflects, perhaps, how little the world of learning research (as exemplified in AERA) and education technology investment (as exemplified in EIS) overlap.  Yet there’s much to gain from both these worlds – and perhaps even more to gain by a conscious juxtaposition.

Where should “learning engineers” draw their principles from?

Many folks are seeking inspiration for their approaches to learning (new and old) from results that are emerging about how the brain works. Inspiration can come from anywhere, of course – but when you're building “real stuff” that's supposed to work in the world at scale (“learning engineering” we might say), the best sources for evidence-based principles to guide design success are likely to come from cognitive science, not (yet) lower level research from neuroscience and brain science.

 

Should we all be paced like U-Pace?

At the recent Educause Learning Initiative meeting in Austin Texas, I came across some very interesting recent randomized control trial results from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.  They’re testing a combination of mastery learning plus “amplified assistance” (data-driven suggestions for faculty about who to intervene with and how) in an introductory Psychology course, and, with thousands of students (!!) having run through controlled trials, they’re showing significant improvements in pass rates and long term retention.

It’s great to see this kind of work taking place: a learning institution at scale, using their scale to test out instructional approaches that fit in with learning science in careful ways.  And getting good results, creating a runway for more work and impact.