xTalk April 14, 2021: World of EdCraft: Adventures in Online Teaching, with MIT Prof Andrew Lo

so i i want to begin with uh um just a a brief disclaimer and uh first let me just switch to uh uh it's my format of presentation the disclaimer has to do with the fact that i am not an expert by any means in online learning and you know i i i say this with you know all do uh modesty and transparency because as an academic i'm pretty confident about my abilities in other domains but this is one domain where you know the imposter syndrome is really not a syndrome um prior to august 2020 i knew nothing about audio visual technology gaming live streaming all the things that i'm going to be talking with you about today and i i say this because um in the interest of full disclosure some of the things that i'm saying may not be what the real av experts would tell you but it's actually a kind of a feature not a bug in my case because i think that you know i was in the position that many of you were and maybe are in in terms of struggling with online education and figuring out how to deliver content via zoom and if i can do it i assure you that all of you can i have no particular expertise or or you know an inborn skill in doing any of this um it really it was through the help of one of my mit colleagues sean williams a chair professor at the university of tennessee knoxville a former phd student of ours uh who's been visiting us for the last couple of years uh it was really through sean's efforts and his uh great advice and one of his colleagues at tennessee brian stevens that i was able to learn about the kind of things i'm going to talk about with you today so um my goal is really just to describe to you my own journey uh in thinking about and dealing with the pandemic and how we deliver content online and uh my co-authors now sean and brian and i've written a paper titled world of ed craft uh and uh i'll uh give you a link for this as well as some other uh content uh in a few minutes so with that as the uh the preamble let me uh start with a little bit of motivation um also i wanted to mention a book of uh sanjay sarma's that i discovered fairly recently um this book i wish i had before i do started doing online teaching because it covers a lot of the issues that i'm going to talk about today it's a fantastic and insightful perspective on both why online teaching is so difficult but also why there are some really tremendous opportunities that we now have so i'll come back to this a little bit later on but i just want to acknowledge uh simon j's enormous contributions let me start with some motivation and the motivation has to do with the importance of teaching in my life i was not your traditional learner by any means you know when i was growing up through elementary school junior high school and high school i had a number of learning challenges uh oddly enough surrounding mathematics because that that's a field that i um i'm quite familiar with now but struggled with it for a significant part of my early education and so i really appreciated teachers that took the effort to really reach students like me and when i was a college student i was blessed with three amazing teachers saul levmore sharon oster and herb scarf these are individuals that were and are first-rate scholars fresh scarf passed away a few years ago but but uh professor levmore and professor roster are both still active in research and and they were first-rate scholars but spent enormous amounts of time preparing for class working with students basically being uh award-winning teachers and when i was in grad school i was very fortunate to work with andy abel who's now at the wharton school and took classes despite the fact that i was a student at harvard was able to cross register took classes with bob merton and again i encountered people that were first-grade scholars but at the same time were also incredible teachers and not just naturally gifted teachers they may have been that but they invested a tremendous amount of time and effort in their craft of teaching then when i got to mit i made the acquaintance of jerry sussman and patrick winston and they also epitomized this idea of first-rate scholarship and enormous dedication to the classroom and jerry sussman was i think one of the first who offered mitx course and and spent enormous amounts of time creating problem sets and lectures and interactive widgets during that very first offering and of course patrick winston is renowned for his extraordinary dedication to undergraduate teaching and his lectures were just just extraordinary works of art in my opinion when you watch some of his lectures online you'll be amazed at just how fluid he is and and he really worked at it i mean he really spent time rehearsing his lectures and going through the chalkboard and writing out the things that he was going to be presenting the next day so i was inspired by all of these amazing teachers and for much of my career i took pride in my teaching i spent a lot of time invested in teaching and clearly since i teach at a business school that's certainly something that's come to be expected our students pay something on the order of 75 000 a year in tuition most of them are paying for them by themselves after tax dollars and so they obviously expect some some investment on the part of the faculty so that's the motivation for my spending time on teaching and all of that was going pretty well i became fairly proficient at giving in class lectures and and really enjoyed it and the students seemed to get something out of it so it was great until last year when covet 19 hit in february march of 2020 all of us were taken by surprise and those of us in academia were thrown online unceremoniously with no preparation no warning and very little support uh from the usual sources because none of us with the exception of a few who had already been teaching online in years prior none of us were prepared to do this and it was a really really frustrating experience and i i want to illustrate to you you know the the frustrations by showing you a clip of me teaching in the classroom one of my mitx videos that we recorded and i wanted to compare that to my very first online lecture in the last week of march 2020 after we got back from spring break where for two weeks we were desperately all of us trying to figure out what the heck zoom was and how to use it and all these various different buttons that we had no idea what to do with so this is me do you think it's really important to pick somebody really smart to be a race car driver i'm giving a lecture in a lecture hall to pick somebody really smart to be a jet and you can see that i'm walking back and forth i started looking to the left of the classroom now i'm leaning on the desk looking at the right of the classroom it's a tiered room about with about 120 students and i'm talking to somebody specifically in the right and now i'm going to start focusing on the middle of the room and while i do that i'm actually monitoring what's going on throughout the entire room and i'm about to go to the left of the room and start talking to them this is all taking place within about 30 seconds this is what happened in march this is what i did for my first online lecture as i expected uh a majority of you are feeling more stressed than normal and uh that's not surprising because frankly these are very stressful yeah that's painful to watch i know i don't want to see more of it either the bottom line is the online lectures that i delivered in the second half of the spring semester of 2020 sucked and i knew it the students knew it it was really frustrating for all of us you could see that you know i wasn't nearly as dynamic i couldn't move around i was in this little box and at the time i was using a laptop so the sound was pretty bad the video quality had lags uh but you probably didn't even see that because it was a little tiny box in the upper right hand corner and i was chained to that location because of the microphone i didn't have a lavalier mic so i had to sit there right in front of the mic and i couldn't move and you could tell that i was stuttering i was very halting in my my lecture because it was just totally unnatural to me and we were forced in a way to do that because you know part of the design principles were what we were supposed to be able to accomplish in rather short order was to deliver high quality video as much as we could back then i didn't even realize that zoom had different settings of hd versus standard and we also were required to provide asynchronous access because people were in different time zones and we didn't want to be unfairly uh disadvantage disadvantaging one group while you know advantaging another group and we were trying to maintain interactivity to some degree but but nobody really understood how to use the platform at that early stage and so it was really stressful despite the fact that we were supposed to reduce stress so that was what led me to be really really frustrated um with the platform and tried to figure out you know what we could do we've got to be able to do better and so that summer of 2020 i started looking for other alternatives and unfortunately our deputy dean at the time ezra zuckerman hosted a series of town hall meetings every friday where he would invite various faculty who have been doing teaching online during the second half of the spring to share with the rest of us what their experiences were and i think a number of my colleagues were as frustrated i was but you know they came up with different uh alternatives but the one the one alternative that that really really struck me was when sean williams this faculty member that i mentioned from university of tennessee who's been visiting with us in the operations management group he came and showed us his platform and this is screenshots of sean's setup he built a home studio that seemed to be just incredibly natural and engaging and more importantly he had these different scenes that he could switch back and forth from a document camera a light board powerpoint and back to the main page and he he did it seamlessly almost as if you know by magic and it was just the most incredible thing to be able to go back and forth and you know allow the audience to see different views and actually prevent them from from getting bored and getting distracted so as soon as i saw that i said i want that that's what i want i want i want to do that and so i called up sean i sent him an email actually because i never met him he didn't know who i was and so i sent him an email asking can i give you a call and just get some advice and over the course of the following three weeks in august sean basically led me by the hand showed me his home setup via zoom gave me a list of all the equipment sent me links to where i could order the equipment there were a couple of parts that were hard to get so he actually sent me extras that he happened to have lying around i mean it was just an incredible act of kindness and he didn't do it just with me but with many of my colleagues uh i was just really i can't say enough about how generous he was with his time to all of us at mit we owe sean a tremendous debt of gratitude and he brought colleagues from university of tennessee brian stevens who had been teaching online for years and who helped sean with his setup and you know the beauty of sean's experience is like me prior to the beginning of the spring of 2020 he had no clue either about online teaching and about this kind of setup and it was only because he was frustrated as well as i was that he made his investment and he happened to do it five or six months earlier than i did which is great for me because i got the free ride off of the amazing uh information that he put together so i'm going to just give you a very brief overview of my setup and then i'm going to talk a bit about the things that i've learned as part of this process i discovered that in order to deliver the experience that i wanted and where what i thought the students were expecting you really had to change the way you were delivering the content and so the way that i think about it schematically is all of the inputs to a lecture my audio video powerpoint i'm using some kind of a writing pad or in sean's case a light board and document camera other devices you need to take all of those inputs and feed it into a software package that's called obs studio this is an open source piece of software that essentially combines all of these inputs and allows you to manipulate them and create a scene much like a hollywood film a scene that you can then feed into zoom via a computer and you've got the people on the other end that are observing uh this scene and one of the things that i learned early on is that a typical laptop the laptop that i had was just not powerful enough to do all of this particularly if you wanted to do the kind of things i'm going to show you in a few minutes and so it was pretty important to get a dedicated computer for this now there is an exception to it that i'll come to a little bit later on but for the most part for us academics the kind of laptops that we use are simply not powerful enough to do this in a way that will be seamless and high quality so here's a picture of my setup it's actually a backup site that is in patrick winston's office at the mit computer science and ai lab i am broadcasting now from the basement of my home but here where i live in the suburbs we have power outages pretty regularly and so i asked and was able to get uh permission to use an office at mit where they have somewhat more reliable internet and power and so in the paper that i referred to the world of ed craft i actually described this particular setup you can see a a clip of it in the home studio setup of here and i use this setup to teach the fall 2020 course on healthcare finance you can see a video about that up here and then finally here's a link to the paper that sean brian and i wrote so this is a pretty big investment it took me three weeks during the month of august to actually build it and learn how to use it uh three weeks of several hours a day so it is a sizeable investment but it turns out that actually you don't really need to make this kind of an investment if what you want to do is parts of what it is i'm going to show you and to give you an example this took me three weeks one of shawn's colleagues put together a much simpler setup here's a picture of that setup and it took this colleague of shawn's three hours to put this together so and you can do a lot of what i'm about to show you with this setup including what i'm doing now this kind of a weatherman format with green screen background so you can project slides and things like that all of that stuff you can actually do with this setup so it it doesn't have to be the same kind of investment that i made so once we built this the question is what do we do with it how do we use it and that was the question that i started dealing with in the end of august all right now that i've built it now that i can do the kind of things that i was hoping to do how am i going to get the most out of it and so the challenge that i set for myself uh at the end of august was is it possible to create an online class that's not just okay and as good as live but is there a way to use the technology that can go beyond live in other words can we create an online class that's actually better than an in-person experience because after all with all of this fancy technology you would think that the technology should enable us to do stuff that we otherwise wouldn't be able to do that that actually exceeds what we can do without the technology right that's certainly true in other areas in biotechnology in manufacturing communications there are things that we can do now that we could never have dreamed about doing what's the equivalent in teaching and so i struggled with it until i started thinking about how teaching interacts with the technology and what students are looking to get at when they come to business school and the answer is there are three particular areas where i think technology like what i'm using now can actually go beyond what you can accomplish in an in-person class one technology can allow students to connect much more efficiently because they can systematically meet with people particularly if they have a reason and a format and a structure and i'll describe to you one as part of my class you can actually meet many many more people online as you'll see soon see in a minute with some examples second because of the online format we can actually bring to sloan many many more industry leaders to get students exposed to business practice much sooner and much deeper than they otherwise might be able to it would be very very difficult to get more than five or six speakers to physically come to campus during a semester unless you have a particular roster of people that you use all the time because people are busy in the scheduling and the class times it's very very difficult in the online version of healthcare finance that i taught in the fall of 2020 we had 32 speakers 32 speakers every single class two or three people would just drop in and share with the students their experiences for how they sold a five billion dollar pharma company or biotech company or how they engaged in discovering this particular cure for cancer really remarkable uh approach to uh you know accessing the kind of talent that you wouldn't otherwise be able to and finally with the online format students can actually interact much more easily with some of these business leaders in fact we had practicums where students would work with these individuals on specific problems that the the leaders were actually interested in engaging with so it is possible and i set the goal of actually implementing some of this uh in the uh the fall of 2020. so i want to describe to you a little bit about uh how we did that because it obviously makes sense that the technology should be able to do it but implementation is a different matter it turns out that others have actually figured it out and in particular hollywood and nintendo have both figured out how to make a online experiences better than live because after all aren't movies better than live in many senses you've seen an oscar-winning film that just transports you it brings you into another world and there are clearly video games that actually are another world totally immersive in fact i'm sure you all know of examples of people that are addicted to video games this is a literal use of the term addiction an individual here who is a university professor in english ended up losing a couple of years of his life to world of warcraft because he was so immersed in that world that the interactions in that world actually exceeded the expectations and and preferences of his real-life interactions and so it is really powerful this online platform if we use it in that way and so the question is can we take some of these ideas and apply them now actually my co-author brian stevens had been doing that for years in fact he's been live streaming on youtube uh and teaching in that format in ways that i'm just totally blown away by so so during august of 2020 i learned a whole new vocabulary and the two words that came into my vocabulary that i had no idea about beforehand was esports and live streaming esports is the idea of actually watching video gamers playing each other in a battle and literally watching live so going to a physical location an arena and watching two video gamers compete in league of legends or world of warcraft or something you may think that that's silly but let me tell you in 2019 one of these events drew 173 000 participants in a stadium and another 40 million people watching online a video game competition just by way of background in that year the super bowl hosted 75 000 people in a stadium so 173 000 that's that's that's real that's significant this is a multi-billion dollar industry and this company twitch.com is one of the most popular sites for doing live streaming what is live streaming it's literally allowing gamers to broadcast themselves while they're playing now uh youtube is a great platform for doing that and what i want to share with you is a short clip uh that was put out by youtube about gaming and live streaming and and they're going to give you examples of a couple of live streamers and how they actually do in terms of you know their business now while this clip is going on i want you to think in the back of your mind imagine if they weren't talking about live streaming content involving games but live streaming your content imagine they're talking about live streaming a course on differential equations or a course on chinese history let's let's see what what you think after you uh after you see this i actually discovered youtube live and youtube gaming because of my roommate garrett so i started streaming on it and my first stream i had over 75 000 comments on the stream i was like it did better than my videos do people really enjoy interacting with their favorite creator live we're creating a live stream daily we start off every day with thinking about the metadata around it the thumbnail the titling for that to help bring in the audience we'll tweet about it make sure we socialize that episode but consistency is a big part of that right yes we can draw in a good number of people via twitter via social media but your best reliable source of audience is to just stay consistent so people know every day exactly they're going to be tuning in each live stream that we do has a different purpose right so the mario maker live streams are all about featuring the fans hey submit us your levels we're gonna celebrate the work that you're doing in this game through you we did a minecraft live stream where it was me and a bunch of other theorists who had joined in taking the world's largest minecraft selfie then there are the ones that are personality driven where it's getting to see us react in funny ways or put into funny situations where you get a sense of who we are as people as creators with gt live we originally had it slated as like there's gonna be highlight reels of every episode and then there's going to be the long form uncut two hour long streams that we're going to do no one wants to watch two hour long streams but like oh this six minute cut is gonna do really well and that serves as a gateway to this other stuff but what we found was that based on traffic sources suggested video traffic was far and away much much higher for those long form content videos and so that kind of has shifted our programming strategy on there where every once in a while we might throw on a highlight reel to to like capstone a series or something like that but the primary brand butter of that channel now is just like hey we're doing very light edits on the actual long-form live stream and just putting that up it's hard to reply especially when you're putting out the volume of videos i am to every comment like by typing but with a live stream it's easy to glance over and answer a question and when you answer that question 15 people might have the same question so you just you just serviced 15 people right there and made them feel great that's the most fun part of interacting with an audience live i'm reading your comment and they'll go back and watch the replay of that live stream and they'll be like that was me we people send us that all the time the meme notice me senpai you know like oh my favorite creator please notice me the live stream bridges that gap it's awesome to see a fan freak out in the chat and you just see like a thousand messages like oh my god he replied to me this is the best day of my life you know we end our streams just saying goodbye to as many people as we can that we're seeing in the chat because they took the time to be there and so they deserve to be noticed too everyone likes to hang out with a friend playing on the couch but now you're hanging out with hundreds thousands of friends playing on the couch and that's really cool now there are so many things to unpack from that little segment first of all you should know that that segment was exactly 3 minutes 15 seconds long that is an amazing amount of information that's packed into a very short period and my guess is that it took several people about a day's worth of effort to to film that one three feet three minute and 15 minute segment it took that long and had that much editing to get it down there but you can see the use of data the fact that you're you're focusing on consistency the fact that the audience really prefers the long-form format meaning a two-hour video they're watching two-hour videos rather than six-minute segments so so many of these ideas of live streaming fly in the face of what we've been taught about online interactions the so-called chunking of six minute and fifteen minute segments this is a very very different circumstance and you know the fact that that individuals respond when they get noticed by their their creators uh it's it's it's a little bit like getting noticed by a faculty member if you're in a very large mooc and you're engaged in learning about linear algebra and and you know gil strang uh makes a comment in the chat windows that that's a really good point about uh you know uh inverse of matrices the point is that there's so much we can do with this technology there's so much to learn from the video gaming community and a number of people are doing that like my co-author brian stevens at the university of tennessee he's been teaching statistics online using youtube in a live streaming format as well as all of the other gaming techniques that you've seen he's making use of that and we can too so in the remaining time i'm going to just go through very quickly some lessons learned and i'm going to try to wrap up in time for this there's plenty of q a which is going to be by far the most informative part of this discussion rather than me talking there are a number of things that i learned from my experience that actually i could have learned much sooner had i read sanjay's book and had i learned more about the live streaming community high production quality using multiple senses of the viewer video audio animation sound effects and so on changing scenes regularly audience participation maximizing network opportunities those three i'm going to focus on in particular but the role of the ta or moderator soliciting feedback at the end of every class informal one-on-four interactions with students afterwards in different zoom sessions and then after class meetings those are all things that i think could really make the live the live classroom um you know something that is not believe it or not quite as good as this kind of a online experience if you can do all of these things so um you can find out more about these other items in the uh the paper and the videos that i uh refer to but let me talk about the three in particular first changing scenes schedules and breaks it's really important to make sure that you don't bore the viewer and again this is something that all hollywood filmmakers understand from the beginning as well as youtuber youtubers who are doing live streaming you've got to change up the scenes so that people maintain their focus and the way that i would do that is with a schedule that takes into account the fact that there should be breaks along the way in the narrative of exactly what we're showing to students so for example i taught on thursdays from six to nine so class begins promptly at 605 so the students know the schedule and i usually send them a schedule like this the day before class so they can plan around it and before class in order to build up anticipation i take a page out of the live streaming playbook by providing a kind of a countdown timer so that the students know when class is going to be happening and i'll probably you know put some music to that so right before class they'll get in the mood just like molly did with the splash page for this lecture and as we get closer to class i'll bring the music down and we will get back to the class view then class begins and very quickly i will transition from lecturing to a poll typically within the first 15 minutes we'll take a poll after that we'll go for another 10 minutes or so and we're going to put the class into breakout rooms that are pre-assigned the breakout rooms are really there just a five-minute meet and greet so that they can make those network connections that i was telling you about and i'll talk a bit about how we construct those assignments in a minute and then after the five minute meet and greet class resumes for another five or ten minutes then we'll have another poll and then after that we'll have another breakout session but this time around they get 10 minutes in the breakout session to work on a specific group exercise that i give them and they come back after 10 minutes they report class resumes and then after that we that usually is about the halfway point we'll take a 10-minute break we'll come back students will go on we'll do some more interactions guest speakers during the second half of class i get the students to moderate this way they are constantly being stimulated and there's never a period of time where they're just you know sitting around with a talking head you know this kind of a view we can certainly do but it's not nearly as engaging as when they actually see something like this i'm moving around it's as if i'm in their living rooms that's what we mean when we try to transport them into a different world so let me now talk about the second point which is the power of the chat window this is something that i was completely transformed by you all know by now and some of you are already using it uh you're you're chatting with your other colleagues in the class and i have to admit that when i first came across this chat window and i saw students chatting away putting these messages while i'm lecturing i thought wow that's that's really rude you know you know hello i'm here i'm talking why are you chatting away with each other and it's in the case of chat it's not just with the person sitting next to them they're chatting with everybody in the class and you know that i thought was was you know really troubling because it would distract the students until i realized what was going on and i started looking at the chat window after the fact in the zoom transcripts most of the time the chat was about the material i was lecturing occasionally it would be to make jokes or side comments to other students inside jokes among them but for the most part they were about the lecture for example in one case i was lecturing and in this particular case i happened to use the terminology in the ch that was uh asked about in the chat window and the terminology was an acronym called pbm i used that without defining it turns out that it means pharmacy benefit manager but i didn't realize that the student didn't know it and he didn't raise his hand so he put in the chat window what's pbm second student responds pharmacy benefit manager a third student points out pharmacy benefit manager like cvs or express scripts and then the ta posts the wikipedia definition of pbm and then a fourth student who actually has experience working with pbms point out that they're often the middleman between your payer and then the drug companies and that's why they're important in the ecosystem and and then the student says thanks this entire interaction took place in the space of 29 seconds so while i was lecturing i had neglected to define my terms a student was confused and in the space of 29 seconds he was no longer confused because his classmates helped him to figure it out and i suspect there are other students in the class that were also confused but didn't bother to ask but now they know and so it allows the lecturer to continue whereas if if we didn't have the chat maybe the student would have gotten the courage to raise his hand but but what if the student happened to be an introvert like i am and not really comfortable raising hands or or didn't want to interrupt me or just felt like he didn't want to feel like he was uh you know he was dumb and maybe it was in the readings and he should have done the homework there are all sorts of reasons why and it i it dawned on me at the time that this is an incredibly powerful tool for facilitating learning in a setting that is just completely transformative in fact interestingly enough after i realized what was going on i started to respond to the chat while i was lecturing and you know the ta told me afterwards you know um you may not want to do that you know because i think you're you're kind of putting the students off because a number of them they want to answer the question uh and and and they don't actually want to interrupt you because you know you're on a roll you're you're you know you've got the flow and they just want to you know get their questions answered and and at that point i i realized something really shocking which is that when i lecture live when all of us when we lecture live it is all about us the lecturer right we're in the front of the room everybody looks at us the focus is all about us but in fact learning is not all about the faculty member and it's an incredible challenge to our egos to realize that we are not necessarily teachers we are facilitators you can't force somebody to learn who's not ready to learn is not interested in learning or is not capable of learning you need to allow them to figure out how they're going to learn and facilitate that process and so that was a really big wake-up call for me uh and you know it turns out that sanjay's book actually has provided me with a clearer statement of this issue and the fact that there are different people that have different ways of learning and they don't always conform to what we think of as the ideal student using technology we can reach a much broader segment of students and customize the way that students learn and the way that we offer content in ways that we were not able to before there's a whole set of issues that i'd love to talk about here but in the interest of time let me continue on with the last point i'm going to wrap up so the final thing i want to mention is that the technology does allow us to do more networking and and we actually have done an analysis that in the class that i taught in the fall of 2020 absolutely online technology dominates live in allowing students to network both with each other and with industry colleagues so the various different interactions that we had in the class you can read about in the paper but we actually measured the number of new interactions that students had with each other because during the course of the semester we engaged in group exercises we had them informally meet with me and with each other i had office hours and there were practicums where they met on teams with some of the industry leaders so we actually kept track of the number of times that a student met another student for the very first time and there were 90 students in the class so this is a 90 by 90 matrix and every cell that is colored green is one of these first meetings so the cells that are white are students that have never met at least in this class and i would have loved to have this entire thing be solid green but given that we've only had a limited amount of time and a limited number of engagements you could see though that there are a lot of meetings and i would argue more so than in an in-person live class where you meet the person sitting next to you and you hang around with people that you're comfortable with but you are not forced to meet with that person on the other side of the room because you've never met them before and you may not have anything in common with them it turns out that the minimum number of new connections that a student made in the class was 35 the mean was 43 connections and there was one student that actually met 51 other people uh during the course of the semester now we designed it we had these assigned pre-assigned breakout rooms in order to maximize the number of meetings and um you know given that this is an mit presentation i have to have at least one slide with some equations so this is the algorithm that we used in order to maximize the number of new meetings in the pre-assigned breakout room sessions and all of this is online if you want to use it we've got a spreadsheet that's available you're welcome to download it's got an open source license i really have to thank my 15 482 students for being so patient with me in experimenting with these technologies so they i owe a huge debt of gratitude to them for uh for this course okay so let me wrap up where do we go from here well i can tell you one thing when i do go back to the classroom in the fall and believe me i am looking forward to that i do not enjoy teaching online nearly as much as i enjoy the live interactions but i'm going to be using all of these technologies in one form or another when i'm teaching live in person for remote and hybrid teaching uh that it's particularly for faculty members i would argue that at some point we're going to have to create a home studio in a box what i described in terms of my setup is quite expensive because i had a particular set of objectives that i wanted to achieve including having a computer that could serve as a as a data science server for doing machine learning so i got a very expensive computer but i believe that at some point we will transition to being able to give faculty a studio in the box basically um you know a light um a a laptop that's a gaming laptop that allows you to do this uh interaction and then uh you know a mic and then you're good to go under a thousand dollars i believe that's possible and imagine if at some point universities could offer the same kind of support as we saw in that live streaming clip that three and a half minutes of the these various different individuals thinking about the storyboard advertising the thumbnails making sure that the live streams are different every time that would be something that i think we can we can uh hope for and lastly i'm going to be using this platform for research particularly we already do pre-recorded talks but i'm thinking video abstracts imagine a three and a half minute segment about your latest research that has the same information content as we saw there in fact just recently i had to give a short 30-second clip about a book that i'm publishing with my co-author and uh let me just show you what that clip looks like hi i'm andrew lowe this is my co-author steve forster of our new book in pursuit of the perfect portfolio it's about the stories and insights of 10 investment pioneers who shape the way we invest we talk to nobel prize winners and financial industry giants and ask them what their idea of the perfect portfolio is we describe their answers and then pull it all together so every investor can put these ideas to work right away thanks for watching and please stay safe and healthy now it turns out that my co-author videotaped his part in toronto sent me that clip he was in front of a green screen i did mine here uh in boston and we basically edited it together a 30-second clip and uh it was presented at a book publishing fair and apparently uh we were now able to uh to receive a number of uh foreign rights requests for our book because of that short little clip and last but not least i would say that even something as mundane as you know an invitation inviting a colleague for an endorsement on a book is something we can do recently i was asked to give an endorsement by a woman named thames and webster she is a professional communications coach that was terrific in the two tedx cambridge talks that i gave i worked with her and she's just incredibly professional so she recently asked me to give an endorsement for a book that she's writing but instead of sending me an email or a letter or a phone call she uh she sent me this hi andrew it's samson as you know and i am sending you this today as a way to ask if you'd be willing to write an endorsement for my new book um so i've been working on this book for a while which i think i may have mentioned to you but if not it is the culmination of the process that you yourself experienced with tedx cambridge and particularly the salon which is building that red thread in fact the name of the book is find your red thread make your big ideas irresistible that is an amazing request for an endorsement i've never received that personal and that compelling request now i probably would have done it anyway but you can bet that i'm going to do it now and i'm going to do a really good job of it because of how compelling that kind of a personal appeal is so this is the power of the technology it has the power to change the way we learn the way that we teach the way that we conduct business and i'm hoping that we're going to take these learnings and continue making use of it over the course the next few years thank you very much for your time and uh be happy to answer your questions and um uh let me turn back to uh molly and uh actually andrew i'll thank you hi andrew it's krishna i apologize i was gonna introduce you at the beginning i i arrived at exactly 205 and missed the opportunity um uh so i will i i i won't do a real introduction now but i'll host the questions but i'm going to just mention two things that i was going to mention um one is that um andrew is overly modest when he pretended at the beginning that he's a complete rookie um and in addition to his many accomplishments he's already built three moocs that have been quite successful on the edx platform so he um kudos kudos kudos for for uh those accomplishments in addition to what you saw today and then the other thing which i was going to put in the introduction and he's now um made it obvious i suppose um it's very unusual when you look at teaching scores for an mit faculty member i don't know how many of you are familiar with the system many of you are but it's a it's a one through seven scale and the students answer each question with an integer one two three four five six seven and for 15 482 this past fall the course that in fact he described to you today instructor stimulated my interest in the subject 42 people answered the question instructor supported my learning 41 people answered the question in both cases an average of 42 and an average of 41 integers his average score was 7.0

it's quite unusual to get a 7.0 average when you have that many answers and he did it on both those are the two most important questions so i think i was i was going to do that as before but i think now you can see um that your students appreciated the class and we can all see it in the in the in the public domain so thank you very much for sharing what you did what your students so much appreciated um and i'll take questions there's there's one in the chat i see michael schrag i'm going to ask you to unmute in a second michael if you're still here if michael is not here i will read his question i'm here but the the question is speaks for itself but uh i've done breakouts in exec ed and the variance is very big on breakouts because some teams immediately gel or they exchange others unpack their question and i'm just curious have you come up with a framework or a scaffold a trick or a technique that you've learned because i think my students are as smart as yours so i'm hoping that that i can get comparable ratings if we structure it that way without a doubt i mean i think that the approach that we took in terms of the breakout rooms was to actually pre-assign them so there are certain occasions you know when you're giving an exec ed lecture you can't do that and the breakout room function in zoom allows you to just you know create a random ordering of uh you know five or six students per room whatever you want but when you're doing a class and you have the class list and their emails you can actually create uh pre-assigned breakout rooms and so we would actually do it using that optimization algorithm to make sure that people weren't paired with the same person more than they uh you know for the the number of students and uh meetings that we had but you could also pair it in a different way for example in another class that i'm uh doing now where we have um students that are in biotechnology as well as in business we want to pair students that have different backgrounds you don't want all the scientists together and all the business students together so by using the pre-assigned function coming up with a spreadsheet a csv file that has the identities of the people that you want in each room you can actually spread the wealth in terms of you know particular skills and i think you might find that to be a bit better it does take more work so um you know you're going to have to you do it either yourself or have a ta work with you to do it uh but i think that's probably the best way to get a little bit more consistency in those breakout rooms did you do report outs from the breakout rooms or or we we did but informally so in other words we all came back into the main room and then we asked for volunteers for the different teams the different breakout rooms to tell us what they did and then we would have two or three of these teams report out okay and so this actually relates to something i was going to ask which is so you said and i think it's true of of basically all of us that we're all looking forward to teaching in a classroom in person um in the fall um how are you thinking of doing breakout rooms when you have all your students in the same room with you in person in the fall what's what's it's clearly important very important as it the many the insights that you've learned are how are you thinking of reproducing breakout rooms when everyone's in the same room it's it's really tough and so i think that what i'm going to do is to start off slow by first trying to find an app that allows students to chat with each other and with my ta as a moderator obviously there's lots of social media that's out there you know whatsapp and instagram and so on but i'm trying to find an app that is something that i can manage within a class and will allow the ta to be able to moderate so the first step is to figure out how to bring the chat into live lectures so that they can actually start interacting with each other in ways beyond just whispering to their next door classmate once we do that then i think this the next step to breakout rooms is actually pretty easy because what you can do then is to create sub chat groups to allow them you know on a on a you know class by class basis to only be able to chat with five other classmates spread around the room and then i'll ask i'll ask a question and i'll have them you know talk amongst yourselves but you know through the chat and you know that's one way to sort of get that going so so i think many monia velo has said it in the chat many see the need for a chat app in in in the new normal um as you've just said but i think there's an advantage beyond chat you know when we do a zoom breakout so so i could break out by chat i get um but um when we do a zoom breakout we're talking with each other through as you and i are talking right now um and and i think that's a better breakout experience and in fact it would be a better breakout experience still if you could send if you have 90 90 students in the room you broke them into groups of five they each went to a separate room and had a conversation together in person that would be better still but the you know the the time lost by the twoing and throwing is of course a huge cost um so so i'm curious you know going beyond beyond chat um but sort of thinking about the actual dynamics of a classroom are you thinking about saying okay clump in your groups of five or are you thinking of chat i actually i'm thinking about using the chat because you're right that the physical cost of actually having people get up and move around it's it's challenging and it will you'll lose a lot of valuable class time i'm thinking that we will define the chat group at the very beginning of the class allow them to interact during the course of the class and maybe at the end of the class when class is over i'm gonna ask people to just gather for like two minutes so they can walk out of the room together and get to know each other so there's got to be a human element to it as well as the online interaction okay so let me take another question but before i do i'll just say some someone actually aaron kessler in the chat has suggested that some of this functionality might be accomplished by a slack integration with canvas which is worth looking into um uh chris manos you have your hand hand raised uh yes thank you and i appreciate the talk very much in the content just one question for you generally could you um talk to the subject of your seeing the students and by that i mean are cameras mandatory on the other side and if they're not mandatory what do you do to encourage them i find a lot of camera resistance and i haven't gone to camera mandatory but the camera resistance uh is an important thing for me because i i i think like you benefit from seeing my students and their facial expression and so on and so forth you know i i couldn't agree with you more i benefit as well from having that kind of human interaction and seeing who i'm talking to i i haven't found a way to uh to do that other than to develop rapport with the students so first of all like you i do not make it mandatory i encourage them to keep their cameras on but you see on i i taught on thursdays from six to nine pm and i i didn't think it was really appropriate to require that they keep their cameras on because you know at eight o'clock at night students are at home they they're relaxed and you know i i don't really feel like it's appropriate for me to impose on them given the whole covid situation so in that sense i i wanted to keep things relatively relaxed but the way that i actually encouraged them to keep their cameras on and and most of them did was you know for the first two weeks i actually met with all the students in my class uh during these you know four four on one meetings i would basically put my schedule for a block of three hours have 15 minute appointments have them sign up in groups of four to meet with me on zoom just to talk about stuff not not no agenda but just to get to know each other and the first two weeks i did this and after that you know once i got to know who the students were and i i would learn about them and i would use their backgrounds as illustration in class i would call on michelle who worked at a pharma company last summer or or brad who actually worked at a biotech startup you know last year i would actually bring them into the discussion and through that process once you get to know them they naturally want to be seen and they want to be heard but but it really so it changes the anonymity of the class if you're able to meet with them four on one and it's pretty efficient you know within a five or six hour block i pretty much was able to meet with you know all 90 students so i think we'll take one more question um stuart curcell had a question in the chat but if he's still here i'd ask him to um ask in person yeah um hi andrew um good to see you um was curious about um the lessons you learned and how we take those international i mean obviously you know your idea of getting 32 or whatever visitors into on the class it's a great way of bringing other people in um so i'm thinking not only into the classroom but engaging different audiences well that's really the power of this technology you know the live streamers routinely look at their international statistics and it's amazing how universal gaming is so you can imagine that people around the world will tune in to a really interesting event i think in that same that on that same token if we have the right content uh and the right format uh meaning you know having this kind of a live stream where you're able to allow people from all the various different platforms to be able to log in some people use prefer youtube other people use zoom youtube is actually a really good way of doing live streaming if you don't have access to zoom and you know i think that that's exactly uh you know the reason for the popularity of the platform i couldn't agree with you more that actually internationalizing you know our research and and uh teaching uh is um you know something that mit has been at the forefront of ever ever since the beginning of open courseware thank you andrew um i want to thank you very much uh quoting from the chat i see in the chat uh words like thoughtful thought-provoking terrific and inspiring and i really think you're this this was an inspiring presentation i thank you so much for uh sharing your perspective both on what you've done but i think even more important for all of us your your look ahead so thank you very much thank you it's an honor thank you very much bye-bye

2021-04-27 00:12

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