Speaker 1: I've been in higher education for about 50 years, almost 50 years, and last year one of our students, how old he thought I was, and he said 80 years old, and I thought wow, I wonder how many 80-year-olds are running universities. I don't think there are many. I'm going to tell you two stories I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I have an interesting beginning in education. I'm from New York, and when I was in kindergarten, we were playing musical chairs, and the teacher said to us whoever finishes and is seated last would win the game. So at one point in musical chairs, I got to a seat with this other student, and I knocked them off the chair, figuring I'd kind of win that way. So the teacher wouldn't let me play anymore, and when I got home, I told my mom about it, and the next day, I'm sure they don't have these anymore, a truant officer came to the door, and I was hiding under the kitchen table, and she said oh no, he's not going to come back to school anymore. So I didn't go to kindergarten, which probably explains a lot of my behavior, and then in first grade, we had moved, and we, in first grade, I decided with a friend of mine, Jerry Bread, that I was going to play hooky the first day of school, pretty amazing. It's even amazing for me when I think back on it, and I got a toothache about in the afternoon, and about 2.30, I decided to go back, and of course, as soon as I got back to the house, my mom knew that I didn't go to school, and so she was pretty upset about that, so the local kids were going to get a little ride in kind of a wagon or something, and she wouldn't let me do that. So that's kind of my beginning, my whole beginning in education, but when I was in St. Louis, I had this transformational experience in college, and I decided at that point that that was really an important thing for me, and I decided to commit myself to higher education, and that's how, why I'm here today. So this is a cell phone, and this is the future classroom of higher education. This cell phone, I'm going to explain what I mean by that. I didn't realize until I did the research for this project that there are 7 billion people in the world roughly, and there are 7 billion cell phones. It's only taken us 20 years to bring these cell phones together. Now, a lot of this that we're talking about today has to do with developing countries, because of course, everything that we need in higher education is here in our country, but the fact of the matter is that a very small percentage of the population of the world is educated. Even in the United States, there are only about 25% of the population, maybe a little bit more, who have a four-year or more degree. So there's a lot of work to do, and there are a lot of people to educate. Clayton Christensen, who is a professor of business at Harvard, talks about the fact that disruptive innovation is a key to how organizations change, and if you look at the steel industry or the newspaper industry, you'll know about that. And he wrote a book a couple of years ago called The Innovative University, where he says that the internet will be the disruptor for higher education. Now, if you think about this, every industry has usually two problems. It's got a problem of a resource, releasing resources in their organization, and then a scaling problem. So in the auto industry, it was speed that was a resource problem, and the scaling problem was the way they manufactured the cars. In higher education, it's the faculty member in the classroom. That's the resource problem. And the scale is the internet. That's how we get all of this education to a lot of people. So what I'm going to talk about today is I'm going to talk about three aspects of higher ed. I'm going to begin by talking about Harvard, 1636, and then I'm going to talk about where we were after World War II, and this won't be as painful as it sounds. And then I'm going to talk about where we are presently, and then what might happen in the future. So Harvard, 1636, Harvard was founded. And I don't know if you realize this or not, but the original university model was really kind of fashioned after a reality of the agrarian culture. So young men, mostly ministers, would be dropped off. There was no transportation at Harvard. And in September, at the end of the growing season, and then they would usually stay there for the 16 weeks, because how could they get back and forth? It would take four or five hours or three or four days. So they would stay and study there, and then they would be dropped off after the holidays and come back in May, because they had to go back to the farm again. But a lot of us think that the way higher ed is structured in the United States has something to do with some kind of scientific reality about education. But the fact of the matter is it really doesn't. It has to do with practical realities. And that's how Harvard was kind of formulated. And I think it's an important thing to keep in mind, because as I get farther down this, it'll sound like I'm really talking about heresy. But there is really no real basis for what we've done except tradition. And then the traditions have become regulations, and the regulations have become the way we operate in higher education. The second phase of what happened in higher ed, believe it or not, and think about Harvard, we're still operating the same way worldwide. It's still faculty members who are doing the research and doing the study, lecturing in a classroom, et cetera. And a lot of what we do is lecture method. You know, 70% probably of what we do is lecture method. The second big change, though, in terms of trying to switch things around came after World War II, and World War II really, the only change that took place where we had the commuter university. The cars were available then. People moved from the city to rural areas. They were able to get to a university, but it wasn't really a very dynamic change, I'm sure you'll admit, because the fact of the matter is the only thing that we did was the student was now able to get closer to Harvard by car. And as a consequence, they could study in a way that they couldn't study before. Because even in the 18th century in Cambridge and in Boston, across the country, there was no train transportation. So you had to get there in another way. The other thing that happened after World War II was we did have the correspondence schools came about, you probably know the University of Maryland was offering correspondence programs to the veterans. And then the open university in England, which is also kind of a distance learning university, began to offer courses in England. So that's the second phase. And then the third and final phase, where we are right now, is the internet phase, the internet university. Now, the internet has not been really, it has not been taken up in a very significant way, although it's expanding. But it's a very, very important development. It's a real paradigm shifter in higher education. The reason it is is it's asynchronous in that you don't have to have a faculty member in the classroom to be offering the course. It also disaggregates the curriculum. It takes all of the courses apart. You know, at the present time, in general, if you're going to take a program, you have to go for the whole 16 weeks, usually, unless you're in a part-time program. But now, with distance learning, you can actually take a Shakespeare course, or you could really take one act of a Shakespeare course if you wanted to. The problem with the online learning and the distance education right now is it's slightly better than a lecture method, in that you can repeat the lecture. But it's pretty much, it's a very linear type of experience. It really doesn't bring all the full-body technology that's available for us today. And that brings us to the present time in terms of the cell phone. So just consider for a minute, we've got 7 billion people in the world. We, and I don't think I mentioned before, but there are only 1 billion cars in the world, and only 1 billion TV sets compared to the 7 billion cell phones. So think about that. So a lot of what's happened in the past is universities would design programs for desktop consumption. And of course, our students, for example, at Stevenson, are not even using the desktops anymore. Probably by a ratio of 20 to 1, they're using the cell phones. Cell phones are cheaper. They're easier to, you know, I have one in my pocket. They're easier to deal with. So I'm going to kind of describe three different types of developments that might take place over the next 25 years. The one is a simple one where you just get three universities together. Let's say we get Penn State, Maryland, and Iowa together, and they're going to offer a state of the art agriculture program, and that state of the art agriculture program is going to be offered now in a different way. You know, most of us will develop a program on our own campuses at a very low cost, but this is going to be a little bit of a better program. They're going to collaborate on this. It's going to make it a better agriculture program. Everything from a one-hour lecture to a PhD, and then they're going to offer that to a variety of organizations, including schools. So kind of like Microsoft developing software, they might offer, they might license it to a variety of schools. Now, there are, in the world, there are about 570 million farms, believe it or not. So agriculture is one of our largest industries. It's not by dollar volume, but it's a very significant industry. So there's an opportunity there to do something really, really important. Another kind of idea that could come about is the notion of where an organization would develop, kind of like an NBC, like a television channel, and it might be not-for-profit or it might be a for-profit organization, where they would bring together, and again, this was not possible to do before in any significant way, but bring together, say, all of the world's mathematicians to one single location, and those mathematicians would work with 250 video-type people, and they would develop, again, degrees in mathematics from a one-hour lecture to a PhD. They would develop the programs. They would license them to organizations, to governments, to colleges, to universities. So in our case, we have a mathematics degree, but we don't have an agriculture degree. So it would be much easier for us to kind of have confidence in this agriculture degree that might be offered by these professors than to try to develop it ourselves because of their expertise, and the same thing would be true for mathematics. So what's really going to happen, the point that I'm making in this whole thing is what's really going to happen in the world over the next 25 years is the structure of higher education, like the newspaper industry, like the retail industry, is going to change dramatically, and I think for the better. It doesn't mean, you know, there are always these concerns about, well, what about engagement? Well, engagement's not going to go away. Actually, engagement is not really a big part of traditional higher ed today anyway because the fact of the matter is most of what we do are lectures. This was, I think, the challenge of the newspaper industry, for example, when you think about the fact that 70% of the newspaper is information, 30% is commentary, so it wasn't 100% commentary, and the same is true for higher ed. So I think there are many benefits and many outstanding things that can happen, and a lot of this is going to happen because of this cell phone penetration. It wouldn't be able, we wouldn't be able to do this in any other way. China, for example, has leaped over all the technology, and they're putting Wi-Fi everywhere in the country, and the only thing that people are using primarily are things like the cell phone. So I want to wrap up and conclude by showing you two final slides, and one is a slide that is answering a basic question, whoops, basic question that you may have, especially in developing countries is how the heck are they going to charge those cell phones? Good question. And of course, we have, we just, this is second nature for us. This is a solar panel. Maybe you've seen this. You can find this online. And in about an hour and a half, that'll charge that cell phone. Good, huh? So then every day, people are, want to follow a course, they can charge their cell phone. That set up costs about $50. But the primary thing I want to leave you with is this. This is a photograph, and it's really a pretty touching thing, and that is this was a show on 60 Minutes, The Future of Money. Some of you may have seen it, and this is a very poor part of Kenya, and these are two children of a family in Kenya. And he used to have to let the kids study by kerosene lamp. And because they've kind of created this Bitcoin project in Kenya where you can program money into your cell phone, this dad has a cell phone, and now instead of using the kerosene lamp for education, he's able to put money into a solar panel. And now his children are able to study at night. You see that light that's there? Well, that's powered probably by a nickel or so for an hour. So instead of studying by kerosene lamp, they're able to study now using electricity. So my hope for all of this, in the most positive sense, is that all of these changes that are going to take place, that will be significant and powerful, will permit us to help children, adults around the world, to get the kind of education that we've gotten, that our children have gotten, and that our grandchildren are going to get in order to make their lives better, their family lives better, as well as the community. Thank you very much. Thank you.