Building Education Startups

Stephen Interview

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:00:00] so traditional institutions have traditions, which is both their strength and in some ways they're lessons strengths, and that they're going to be much slower, or they're going to be a reluctance to change.  Whereas with a small startup, you can be very nimble. You can collect data. COVID very quickly update. And so I think moving forward with these opportunities now for the, say the 11 different types of hybrid that identified to be able to try them out  

Brandon Stover: [00:01:02] hey everyone. Welcome to evolve. I'm Brandon Stover and today's guest is a serial founder, psychologist, neuroscientist, and an expert on the science of learning with over a 40 year career in transforming education. After having written or co-authored 15 books published more than 300 papers receiving numerous awards and being a center director at Stanford and a Dean at Harvard.

this brilliant researcher, the opportunity to put his ideas into practice by becoming the founding Dean and chief academic officer at Minerva, a startup to reinvent American higher education. to hear more about Minerva listened to episode 31 on the evolve podcast, where I interview founder Ben Nelson.

However, today's ambitious educator wanted to help more learners at an even larger scale.  So he went on to become founder and chief academic officer of Foundry college, which was recently named a top 100 ed tech company in North America. This online two year college is designed to help working adults develop skills and knowledge that will not be automated in the foreseeable future.

Within the midst of the 20, 20 global pandemic and the need for online education, he also published a new book, active learning online five principles that make online courses come alive Company active learning sciences, as he realized the best way to fulfill his mission in life is not to teach students directly, but to help others use the science of learning to design new cutting edge educational programs and courses. Today's guest is Stephen costless, founder of active learning sciences and Foundry college.

Stephen Spent decades in research that focused primarily on the nature of visual cognition, visual communication, and the science of learning and published over 300 scientific papers to really become a master of his craft. he was obsessed with the question about how one might cure society's ills.

And after digging into mental imaging, psychology and neuroscience, he started to theorize that education might be the key to this and began a path to deliver the most effective education he could.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:02:56] So I'd had this idea that the way to make society better is through education and you've got to start early. And so I started studying developmental psychology and discovered that there were these theories that the way the means the format of thought changes over age and in particular, during what I took to be a critical period sorta between say two and five, six years old children reportedly relied primarily on mental imagery. So it occurred to me that, Hmm, if you could figure out how to use mental imagery really effectively as a teaching aid, you could make progress. And that in turn required to understand what that dull imagery is all about. So that ended up being like a two decade long kind of diversion. I ended up getting very immersed and trying to figure out what mental imagery, particularly visual, mental imagery is all about it.

Seeing with the mind's eye. And that, that led me into neuroscience, where I was discovering that parts of the brain that are used envision when your eyes are closed or lit up, when you visualize. And in fact, over 90% of the same brain areas are activated both when your eyes are open, you're seeing something and when you're visualizing it. So all of that sort of positioned me pretty well. When I started thinking about higher education to think about just generally applying what we know about memory in general, perception, learning all that pliant systematically to try to further education and multiple levels, not just like K-12

Brandon Stover: [00:04:45] Yeah. Well, when you started to help Harvard with their general education and redefining that, what solutions did you start developing for them?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:04:56] That was an interesting process. It really went back to first principles as to what general education not to do. So I was a member of six faculty and two students on that committee. And we came up with a pretty reasonable program in terms of what we thought foundational knowledge ought to be. And then I discovered just how incredibly, incredibly political these things are.

I mean, I was, I was really naive and just incredibly naive. It hadn't really occurred to me and it should have that by changing general education requirements, you're going to change enrollments. And when you change in particular courses and when you change enrollments, that has ramifications for a number of faculty that can be hired and budgets and things like that.

So I, I just was very naive about the realities of how all this works. So it was kind of a crash course, and not only thinking about general education from a principled perspective, but also the politics of how things get done in universities where you have something called faculty governance or that the faculty really have a major say what happened.

So you'd have to bring people along. You have to make it clear why certain things are in everyone's best interest.

Brandon Stover: [00:06:11] One of the quotes that you admire from Albert Einstein is the value of education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think of something that cannot be learned from textbooks, what do you think that thing is? The mind should be able to do.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:06:27] So lately I've been thinking about it in terms of what I call hacks and heuristics. And this is derived from Daniel. Kahneman's work on thinking fast and slow where he has this really good idea which is actually very firmly rooted in a lot of neuroscience that there are these two systems. One of which is very fast and things are in parallel.

It's unconscious, it's automatic and the other, and that's he called the system one because it's evolutionarily older, share it with a lot of other animals. The other system to evolutionarily more recent is slow serial it's unconscious. It's not automatic. It's under voluntary control, kind of logic driven. So thinking about education from the perspective of those two systems it occurred to me that, one goal might be to try to get as much into system one as you can. So that relieves cognitive load is automatic. You have to think about it so forth. So hacks are essentially solutions to problems that can be automatically triggered by the, the appropriate circumstances.

So the way I think about that is like a funnel where you wanted to find a wide range of circumstances. That'll plug into a given hack where it's appropriate and then a wide range of circumstances under which you can actually then do something with it, it. So for example, there was something called five paragraph form, which many students are taught in high school, but how to write a little essay?

Well, it turns out that way of thinking about things where you have your introduction, where you lay out in this case, three points, and then you have each point addressed in turn that gives you four, the paragraphs, and then a conclusion at the Emory pull it all together. That could be used for speaking. You can use for making arguments. It's actually quite a general. Format schema. So you can define the top of that funnel in terms of a lot of different ways, situations in which it's appropriate. And then the trick is, and the bottom part of the funnel, you need some system to cause system one, or just pull up the form, but to fill in the slots as it were, you know, what are the three things I'm going to talk about?

That's going to come your assistant too. So this led me to start thinking about how the two systems interact dynamically over time. And that that's where the heuristics idea came from. That a hack is a solution to a problem of your Ristic is an approach. A method that may often will solve a problem, but not necessarily.

And hacks are very much loaded on system. One heuristics very much loaded on system two, but they interact. So thinking about education from a. Broad perspective. This approach has led me to think about how you can educate almost anybody. If you, if you think of it this way, in terms of how you get that top of the funnel, where the circumstances under which a hacker appropriate, laid out well, that's active learning. You do lots of different kinds of active learning, different kinds of circumstances. We're all playing. If we've got a problem solving, debating where people get specific examples of what those circumstances, that conditions as it were that trigger the hack. And then of course you teach them the hack. And then again, you have to give them examples of how you apply it, how you actually fan out at the bottom, flush it out to help build in what will trigger the appropriate system to slower logical reasoning process to plug it in. So this, this general way of looking at things is turned out to be really useful from my perspective.

Brandon Stover: [00:10:12] Hmm. I, it makes me think of having a sort of system, as you mentioned you know, like the five-paragraph form that can automatically be used. And then it takes the person, the thing that their mind should be thinking about, but should be working on is how do I actually use this? System in this circumstance.

So taking all the input from this circumstance and now how do I use this system to actually effectively solve the part?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:10:38] Exactly right. And so you'll have to draw on some system too, for that latter part. So all this stuff going back to Einstein, you can't learn this from books. You you've got to do it.

Brandon Stover: [00:10:49] something that I really admire about you is this desire to put your research into practice and to action, which made it very easy to see why you would jump at joining Minerva as the founding Dean how did you start developing my nervous first curve? Regulam and what were the early days like for you.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:11:07] Minerva is a liberal arts university four years very selective taking less than 2% of the applications when I, when I left. So the first question was what's your general education program look like? So if you think about curriculum, north American curricula have three components, they have general education, which is supposed to give you a broad foundation most of last year, rest of your life.

Usually it doesn't usually it's as you probably experienced, you have three columns, you know natural sciences, humanities, arts, humanities, and social sciences. And you pick two from each. I mean, somebody like that as a standard general education. Approach, no structure, no relations, nothing. So I didn't want to do that.

So we instead developed four cornerstone courses that we thought were we're really going to give them foundations and how to communicate clearly how to understand complex systems. That was probably the best thing we did because so much can be understood in terms of complex systems. And you don't learn it formally in most college settings in a way that can be applied to daily life.

So we developed a real general education program, a very high level, very rigorous, quite difficult, actually. And then we did similar kinds of things with the major and the electives. So general education, major electives. Those are the three components that all curricula tend to have. Do you have, as far as I know, in north America, so the approach that I took for the general education program.

Who was sort of the precursor to hacks and heuristics. It was based on production systems. So production systems comes out of a mathematical formalism by some guiding posted, and it was really developed by Newell and Simon at Carnegie Mellon back in the day, early artificial intelligence approach to problem solving in particular where the ideas of production has a condition and an action, sort of an infant of that. So if it's raining that's condition, get an umbrella. Yes, the action. The trick is that the output of one can now be input of another. So for example, if it's raining, get an umbrella. Well, get an umbrella. I don't get an umbrella. Well, if you want to get an umbrella, go to your closet. Okay. Now what about in the closet?

How I find the umbrella? Well, if I'm looking for a Brella in the closet, look on the show, somebody like that. So they have thousands and thousands, these little then things. Which would be triggered as appropriate. So at Minerva, I thought about habits of mind and foundational concepts. So habits of mind, where were the condition part became automatic and foundational concepts was sort of the other way around.

So like doing a T test the hard part is not doing the test. It's knowing when to do it. So the test itself can be quite automatic, easy whereas for the habits of mind. So the other way around it was figuring out how to actually apply it. So, you know, you just adjust what your message is depending on your audiences, that's straightforward, but actually doing it. action part is harder. So you can see how this led to the thinking about system one and system two and the interaction between them. So that was a kind of descendant of the original approach.

Brandon Stover: [00:14:40] How did you approach the challenges of entering the startup world coming from research and academia?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:14:46] Not as well as I probably should have. I seem to have a history of he was slightly naive when I first get into things more, more than slightly truth be told. I had this incredibly naive view, which I really should have known better. The quality Quan quality was going to win out. And we know that that's not true.

We know that marketing is at least as important as the quality of what the product is.

Brandon Stover: [00:15:11] Absolutely.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:15:12] Yeah. Well, I know that quite well now. Good. Okay. But yeah, it was a awakening. Let us say, to figure that out that, you know, my view was build the absolutely best curriculum pedagogy built the technology to deliver it.

Yeah. You know, the world will beat a path because there's a better mouse trap. Well, that doesn't actually happen. Sad to say so. Yeah, it was a learning experience. It was fun though. I learned, I learned a lot about business and stuff that I had no inkling was even out there because I was sort of really sequestered in a kind of academic environment for decades.

Brandon Stover: [00:15:53] what did you happen to take away? You know, working with Ben Nelson and Minerva that would later help you in launching Foundry.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:16:01] I learned about the importance of marketing I learned about, well, so Minerva is an elite institution. So a lot of what we did at Foundry was kind of a reaction to that. It's kind of like, well, and lead institution works really well with seminars. It's all seminars. Least when I was there. I've been gone for years now.

So I don't, it may well have changed since I left. But when I, when I left in 2018 he was all seminars and that doesn't scale very well. And Minerva was not going to scale. I mean, it's going to be under a thousand students last I heard. So I wanted to do kind of the something that would be not for traditional college students who are very well qualified but for ordinary adults and not liberal arts, but something that was going to be job relevant. So the, the thing that was driving me was come up with what adults need to know so they can get jobs that will not soon be automated. That was really what's driving ideas behind founded college, at least when I founded it. So all of that called for a different approach from what. Whenever it did. It required thinking about a scale.

So it's not going to be seminars, but seminars are really good because you can do a lot of active learning. So I realized that there was a way to have your cake and eat it too, which was have massive lectures. It doesn't really matter how many people are sitting in the audience at your lecture, but have breakout groups.

And so the breakout groups small groups where you can have the active learning, taking place. And you can now take advantage of the fact you've got this large end from the lecture. We've got a lot of data about what each individual does well or doesn't do well or is interested in and so on. And you can use that to compose the breakout groups. So you can actually have some real advantages over just having straight seminars by composing groups that are relevant, particular learning objectives to your things you want to accomplish. Based on student profiles. All profiles sounds bad. It it's all it's data that's kept anonymous, never, never discussed outside of the system.

It's just used to further education. It's think of it as a bar graph where the higher the bar reflects relative strengths or weaknesses on different dimensions that you can measure. So, so there was a way to have our cake and eat it too, and scale up. And this idea, this emphasis on relevance information they could actually use.

Let us start thinking about knowledge and skills and different kinds of learning objectives. The ones that are based on information that you can use in multiple different ways and ones that are more like these hacks houses discussing, they really skills that are triggered.

Brandon Stover: [00:19:00] Hey, this is Brandon Stover, and you're listening to the evolve podcast with Steven costless, founder of active learning sciences and Foundry college in just a moment, you're going to hear about the groundbreaking innovations he developed at Foundry college to prepare students for the 21st century.

But first I want to let you know that all the resources and lessons from this episode are available as a free worksheet@evolvethe.world and clicking on the worksheet button in the upper right-hand corner.

All the expertise and lessons that Stephen is sharing today are super valuable, but they're only as valuable as the ones that you're actually going to put into execution. So that's why I distill all the action items from each episode into one, easy to use step-by-step worksheet. So now you can immediately start applying these to your life and business.

These lessons include how to turn years of research and expertise into startups. How to iterate and scale successful solutions and opportunities for entrepreneurs to tackle in education. And so many more, all these lessons are available@evolvethe.world and clicking on the worksheet button in the upper right-hand corner. That's evolve the.world, or you can follow the link inside the show notes of your podcast app.

Now let's get back to the evolve podcast with Steven Koslin founder of active learning sciences and Foundry college, as he describes a problem, he was trying to solve in education with Foundry college.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:20:19] Here's the problem trying to solve. knew two people. It turns out who were on the board of a non-profit here in New York, where they work with high school dropouts teach them to fix cell phones. But you know what they discovered happens after a few years.

Brandon Stover: [00:20:33] okay. Cell phones, update.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:20:34] Exactly. So you do not want to teach vocationally generally to teach them that fix the current cell phones, because then they're not going to be able to adapt and be able to roll with the changes and fix the new ones. So they need.

More than a brittle vocational training, they need a foundation. So that, how was the idea for the first part? I Foundry give them a broad foundation and the kind of skills that are going to be enduring, professional, soft skills, or call them things like critical thinking and communication ability and problem solving ability and so forth.

This is pretty standard list out there by now. And then on top of that have a two course sequence where they learn what they need to be able to get an entry-level Salesforce administration job or project management and various other ones are now being built out. So they get a certificate from a third party is the idea which is qualifies them for a decent job.

And then the idea is stacked on top of that, you focus them on a major. So you can think of that as general education with this other thing on it has specific, but then you can have a business administration actually business management as well. We can call it a major that will result in an associate degree. So cause Dreek degrees are still relevant. So right now the founders involved in the accreditation process

Brandon Stover: [00:22:05] Yeah. Could you talk a little bit about the signaling power of the certificate versus like a degree to the eyes of the employer and how they're looking at this education?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:22:16] right. I'm not sure there's one answer to that. I think it, it really varies depending on the employer also varies depending on the certificate. So not all certificates are created equal. I think the key is to get a track record and to have the proof be in the pudding as it were. That is, if your certificate means something and the people who will hold it are naturally be able to do certain things and you want to get a reputation for that.

So it takes time degrees. Yeah. On the other hand, everybody understands. They think they do anyway with the degree signals. Yeah. I know. It's like, I don't know. I mean, if there's a book called which did the one by Brian Kaplan some incredibly provocative title the case against education, somebody like that.

Brandon Stover: [00:22:59] Okay.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:23:00] where he argues in there that that 80% of the value of a degree is just the signal that you were able to hang in there for four years and put up with all this stuff you had to do now that you're actually very little that's useful. He might be right about some of that. I don't know where that number came from.

Exactly what he, the general point is fairly well taken, except that it's good to have a lot of tools in your toolbox. You know, liberal arts education does provide you with a lot of stuff that seems kind of random at the time, but you don't know how the world's going to change. What's going to turn out to be useful later.

So I don't think it's a complete waste of time.

Brandon Stover: [00:23:37] Active learning within a contained classroom. Which is all happening on an online classroom environment. So if I'm a student coming in and say, you're the facilitator, what is actually happening during that session? How am I learning?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:23:52] So I like to think about what I call learning sandwiches, which is an idea I got more recently, but it kind of codified what we were doing, which is there are two types of them. A front-loaded learning sandwich is where you get some just-in-time content. So you've got a little lecture, maybe 10, 15 minutes where you're told something that bears directly on a learning objective, and you're told what you need to know.

Then that's the first part. Then you go into some kind of active learning, typically in breakout groups where you use that information in some way, that's where you're really going to learn it. You're not going to learn it just by passively sitting there listening to it. Maybe you're arguing it down. So you, you use it in the service of problem solving or role-playing   and then at the end you have a debrief. So typically there's some kind of work product that you're focused on during that middle phase, the active learning and those then get evaluated, get feedback based on them at the end.

So that's, front-loaded you can also do a back-loaded version of a learning sandwich. Which is you know Eric Missouri's peer instruction so he's a physicist at Harvard. Who's really innovative, higher education. So he developed this technique called peer instruction. Let me give you an example that I'll explain what, what it is say he's teaching kinetics.

He would, he'll start off with a puzzle. You'll say, okay. Say we got this sheet of iron, say it's a yard by a yard and it's about a quarter inch thick. Okay. And we cut out a foot in diameter hole, round hole, right in the center out. It goes, now we heat the entire sheet of iron up uniformly. It's that's important.

So it's red, hot, not melting. It's really hot. Okay. And he asked the class and they have clickers. They're gonna vote. Do you think that hole is going to get larger, smaller, or stay the same size three alternatives, larger, smaller, say the same size after it gets heated. After the sheet gets heated, quick, quick, quick they vote.

Then they go into small groups. Pete, this has done a lecture hall. So people near you and they discuss it. And the teaching assistants and the faculty kind of wander around and listen, when they give hints like that, that were uniformly was important hit. And then they vote again after about five minutes.

It turns out by the way, the, the votes, get it more accurate. Second time, even if nobody got it right in the group, going into it, that process of discussing it turns out to be a useful way to start to learn active learning. It shows the results of the pre and post and then gives a little debrief lecture.

So a standard response that I get is people think it would get smaller because they've got this intuition that when you heat it up, the molecules will get more energy and start pushing against each other. So they think if you think of the four quadrants, they they're expanding and they push in. So the hole gets smaller.

The trouble is that the term without the uniformly thing was important that the molecules right around the rim, there have the same energy as all the other ones. So in order to overcome that and push them further in you deed additional. Andrew as you, if you don't have, cause it was uniformly heated. So the answer is expanse.

It gets larger. So if you have a lid on a jar, that's stuck, you run under hot water, it'll expand the lid so that more than the metal lid, more than the glass so that you can get it loose. So people have these intuitions, they know when it eats up, it's going to expand somehow. But in this case they didn't think about what's called constraint satisfaction, where you have that same amount of energy pushing.

So the whole thing just kind of goes, goes out. So the back-loaded learning sandwich starts with a puzzle or an issue or problem something. Then they struggle with it for the active learning. And then there's a reveal, a debrief debrief at the end. So basically you can do variants on both of these. So that the information contact information is loaded either at the beginning, the Justin time front-loaded or at the end, when people know it's really relevant or interesting.

So I want to know the answer to that puzzle was either reveal. So a typical class at Foundry would have a little mini lecture and then someone had a breakout group and then a debrief and then that kind of thing. So typically they were more front-loaded

Brandon Stover: [00:28:40] Part of Foundry's innovation is the learning platform, the forge. So for all of our educational listeners who were stuck teaching on zoom this last year during the pandemic, tell us what is different about forge that allows for active learning. That's far superior than trying to teach on zoom.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:28:58] Yeah, because the Ford was, was built with active learning in mind from the very beginning. so it could do standard types of active learning very, very easily. So for example if heard of a jigsaw

Brandon Stover: [00:29:11] I'm familiar with the term because I had read your book.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:29:14] So they're not used very often in a traditional classroom. It's probably obvious why. it was an idea developed by Elliott parents that are the early seventies, 1970s for completely different application.

But the general idea turns out to be very useful in many contexts. So you start with a set of groups which are homogenous in the sense that everybody in them has the same role. the simplest example is a debate where you have some groups that are preparing for propositions of her composition, and then here's the jigsaw part.

You break them up and you create new groups where you have say two from each type of the previous group. So two, four pro group two from a con group put them together. So was for half pro, half con another group, additional four people had two from each of the visual to pro to con and so forth. So you can do that where you start off separate groups and it can be for roles, not just.

Two, you can do role-playing game four roles, which we have done where you might be talking about water rights say, and you have people preparing for a negotiation over who gets water. And some are far representing farmers. They need the water for their crops. Some are homeowners who would take showers and water, their lawns.

Some are engineers who have to worry about how to get the water people. Some are environmentalist who want to try and save as much water as possible. So each type of group, and you can have multiple copies. So you might have four people in each group, but six in each group say prepare for their role, knowing what the other ones are preparing for a negotiation.

This, I think we did in the context of a BATNA that is we're teaching them best alternative to negotiated agreement. BATNA comes from urea Fisher getting to, yes. So we would. Have them prepare and then do the jigsaw. So now we have groups that have one representative of each type. So one farmer, one engineer, and so forth, multiple, multiple groups.

And that their job was to try to figure out what the badness were, the other members, what their backup plans were. That's what it is. You can't get what you want, what's your backup plan. And then they would report back. So we built the forge to be able to do this kind of thing easily. So you keep track of the original group so they can report back to them.

They can have work products, easily filed. You can collect lots and lots of data like how much each person's talking in the groups, how much each person's cursor is moving in the shared document, the repairing all of this sort of thing. So you can use it as formative information to give them feedback they're most engaged.

They should be, or whatever, lots of ways you can use such data. So the forge was built with active learning in mind and collects a lot of data. There's a dashboard faculty can see really what's happening. There were other platforms like this now, by the way, they're engaged only has one that's some ways it's very innovative, different metaphor.

Brandon Stover: [00:32:19] I'm familiar with Minerva's active learning forum. Could you speak to maybe some of the improvements or changes that you guys have made in your guys's platform from that one?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:32:28] well, ours is built for lectures. So there is there's this really built for seminars that that's the fundamental construct behind it. Whereas ours is built for this, have your cake and eat it too. Thing where you could have a lecture. I spill for 200 was the number that we had in mind, but there's really no specific reason.

It has to be limited. Just was for practical. Ha had to do with the ease of setting up of monitoring breakout groups. So we had a dashboard where each breakout group was represented by a little bar, which changed color to pay how much talking was going on is for the faculty. So at a glance you could see which groups were problematic.

There wasn't much going on in them. So you could click on that and join that group instantly. And the breakout groups could be anything from two people up to, I think eight was larger than we ever had them.

So it's very different approach than what we Nerva had in mind. No lectures at Minerva,

it's a flipped classroom model.

Brandon Stover: [00:33:25] Building a startup is a lot like running an experiment. And obviously with you guys collecting data and figuring out what's working inside of these classrooms, how did you approach maybe running the startup when you were originally there using the same techniques that maybe you've learned during research, your years in research.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:33:44] So a crucial thing that a lot of people don't realize is that most experiments fail. So I remember when I was in grad school I was talking to my thesis advisor. I was complaining because half of my experiments were failing and he looked at me, he said, you're doing something really wrong.

Two thirds of them should be failing. They had, I looked, I remember looking at me. He said, if you're doing stuff that's really innovative and not just twist. So other people are doing, most of them are probably going to fail because you're not gonna understand it well enough to make a well formed hypothesis.

He was dead. Right. He was absolutely right. So that kind of an understanding that you have to be willing to accept things are not going to work, but look carefully at the embers. There are the ashes of the field, whatever it was and try to pull it out. The beginnings that are going to rise Phoenix, like from the ashes for the next experiment, what is it you think you got right?

What'd you get wrong? How are you going to fix it? So that general attitude, you really have to take that in, into anything that if in my opinion, that's starting up fresh and it means you have to really be very sensitive to data and multiple forms. They can be attic data. So people will make a comment.

Doesn't mean you take it as gospel, but it is one observation that there's a pattern that emerges. You'd be on the lookout. If this pattern emerges, take it seriously. Also measure things wherever you can. And a crucial, crucial thing is don't lose sight of your goals. It don't get nudged along where suddenly you're doing something different than what you were trying to do.

So this, this is a crucial thing that I, that I learned through Minerva and Foundry. And it's really informing what I'm doing now, big time, which is be really clear on what your learning objectives are. Yeah. And by that, so these days, the way I think about that is hierarchically that if I think about a course, I think at the very top level, how do I want the students to be changed?

Where they leave the course, they have the course, how are they going to view the world differently? What's going to be different about them. So that, that's the kind of thing that I would try to put into the course description. Could a big picture. Then what I do is come up with four to six, a course level learning objectives, sort of big things, a little more granular than just, you know, overall change, but still quite capacious.

And then each of those typically corresponds to a unit that has a set of, I don't know, five or six individual lessons. And that's where the lesson level learning objectives come from. So people get confused. I think topics are the same thing as learning objectives and they're not. Learning objectives, hypo verbatim. And they're not a verb, like understand by the way, they're verbs, like explain or describe or summarize, summarize, or analyze synthesize things you can measure. So the idea is you want a learning objective that leads you to select what information you need to convey, to achieve, help the students achieve that learning objective.

And then what activity is going to use that information in the service of learning that a mastery of that learning objective, and then what you're going to measure by way of the learning outcomes. So you've got learning objective on the front end on learning outcome as a result. And ideally they're the same thing that the students actually get the learning objective, but where do those learning objectives come from or the way we do it is hierarchically.

We unpack the big picture, get it down to the level of individual units. What you're trying to get across and then really get concrete and, and measure often it's formative it's feedback to help them learn. But we want to know if we're achieving our goals.

Brandon Stover: [00:37:44] A common thread that's come through your experiments is this idea of active learning which requires the learners to use the information and service of those learning outcomes. Explain to our listeners why active learning actually helps students master this information.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:38:00] Funny you ask. So I wrote a book on this that was published last October, called active learning online. And it's it's got five principles that I pulled out literature. So the book that we get at Minerva called building the intentional university, that the founder of Ben Nelson and I edited which was chapters by various people of Nerva kind of four year for four and a half years, maybe into it kind of progress report.

So I've written a chapter in there on the science of learning, which looking back on now, I kind of cringe. I had 16 principles, which was way too many and I just, I don't know, I hadn't digested it enough, even though I I've come coauthor for textbooks in psychology and cognitive science. I had been immersed in this stuff for decades.

I hadn't really distilled it as well as it could have been done. And   I realized that some of those principles were actually special cases of other principles. Some of them were actually combinations of other principals. They actually weren't separate in their own. Right. They were actually derived from. So when I sort of thinking about it in terms of what were the absolute. ACE principals look like I was able to get, get it down to just five. And it, it seems to work really well.

I mean, those five, I'm not revising them. At this point, I can't think of exceptions or other things that I've read don't fit in as a, as either specific cases, special cases up one of them or a result of combining them in some way. So I can tell you what they are if you're interested. Um, Okay. So the first one is deep processing.

So let me ask you a question at the end of the day. Can you reflect back on what happened during the day? Think about it. Okay. Here's the question. What percentage of what you remember at the end of the day, do you think at the time it was happening, you intentionally tried to memorize it. So you'd be able to call later.

Brandon Stover: [00:40:03] Probably very little.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:40:05] The modal number of I've asked probably about 1500 people this now the modal numbers 5%. So I've done it with large groups where I ask them to raise their hand 50% or more, no one ever raised their hand. And I say 25% or more three people have. And then I go down in increments of five and by far the, the modal number is somewhere around five, five, 10, somewhere in there.

So think about this, but then implies is over 90% of what you recall at the end of the day. You didn't try to remember at the time it was happening. How can you remember it is because you paid attention and thought it through. And the more you process something, the more likely to use, you're going to remember it also understand it, which is not unrelated by the way.

So deep processing important Crucial thing about deep crossing is what you focus on is what you remember. So if I ask you to focus on how a word would sound, you read it your later. Remember it sound better than its meaning in terms of a cue that I can use. If I ask you to make some judgment based on its meaning, you remember meaning better than the sound.

This is a study done by John Bradford and company Vanderbilt in the late seventies, actually classic classic study. But the point is, it's not that one type of information is necessarily more memorable than another type. It's really what you are focused on thinking about. Okay, so that's deep processing.

Another is deliberate practice. So deliberate practice is where you focus in on the specific components or aspects of what you're trying to learn that are hardest for you.

They require the most effort. Usually you identify those via feedback. So when I was learning French, which I never fully mastered, but it's a good hobby. I had a tutor and I'd say we're trying, and she would then repeat it back the way it's supposed to sound. And I would listen really closely for the disparity, for what was different between how she said it and how I said it.

And then I'd try it again, trying to reduce the Delta, a golf coach or any of these kinds of things. So where you get feedback trying to zero you in on what you really need to focus on practicing better. That's deliberate practice Anders, Ericsson. That's the main man there.

Another is Dual coding. So that goes back to my imagery stuff. So it turns out you remember more, if you get both a picture and verbal description or your form, a mental image and you get the verbal description. So if you have two ways to remember it showing a tele, you're going to do better than just one by itself. So Allan Paivio is the main guy there. I did work on that too.

So these three cluster, they're all about processing, how much you process and what you process. So deep processing, basically the more processing you focus on it, the more you're likely deliver practice zeroing in what's hardest work on that to a coding focusing on two different kinds of things. You'll have more memories that you can later use

the next two of the five or different thereabout connections. So chunking is one where based on. Similarity and proximity things that are grouped. You can imagine if you're listening to music and there are different instruments or different registers, like a bass in a league guitar, you can group the different notes and lead guitar based on their similarity over, over time or that their pitch tambour and seven with the base. So you got proximity and time and similarity, which will help you group things auditorily.

In fact, there's auditory streaming. That's what this, this is called. So the, the trick about chunking is that, It's hierarchical. That is each chunk and you should have no more than three or maybe four. Although I advise three, each of those can contain three or four, So there was this famous study that a Carnegie Mellon by Andres Erickson was a author on bill chase, Steve Falloon, where they brought in undergraduate lab sat him down and said, okay are you willing to come to the lab at least three days a week for the next year and a half volunteered? What'd they do. They read him random digits. So they started with one, maybe it was four. I don't know what it was. And they said, okay, can you repeat that back? He did that just fine. And they gave him two renovators, maybe six, three, repeat them back. Just fine. Then three, maybe seven to one, and this kept adding, making a list longer and longer.

The end of that first day, I think he did seven standard kind of short-term memory working. The trick was they kept bringing him back, just doing the same thing with different digits. One a second, by the way, you want a second at the end of a year and a half, you know, many digits you could repeat back

79,

Brandon Stover: [00:45:10] that's incredible.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:45:11] incredible one, a second, 79 rendered digits.

How do we do it? It turns out he was a marathon runner. And what do you learn was to convert the digits into times of different segments and then create this hierarchical structure of a race as he could have run by putting together segments had he came up with other techniques too, but that was the main one.

The idea being that digits start off as individual units. But then you can start grouping them. That's why telephone numbers are set up the way they are with a prefix. So you group them creates chunks and then each of those chunks can be a member of a larger chunk segment of a mythical race or whatever.

So you can do it, not just visual, not just auditory, but conceptually. So in fact, right now I'm doing it because I said the first three of those principles were based on thinking and paying attention. The next two aren't connections, that's the way of chunking them. So chunking was the fourth. So do processing deliberate practice, do a coding for three.

Last one's associations, you use associations of you remember things by integrating new information to what you already know. There, there was something called the paradox of the expert where, what it turns out, the more you know about something, the easier it is to learn even more. That people found out intuitive.

Cause it felt like, well, why isn't your memory kind of getting full or filled up or something? Well, it turns out the more you know, about something, the more hopes you have to hang your information, the easier to stay integrated. Yeah. And that's what it's all about integrating and making these connections.

And those will in turn, help you organize so feeds into chunking and can be used as cues to help you recall it later, to be able to dig it out. All this stuff is in that book that I wrote. But the last piece I want to say about this is that it's really the combinations of these principles. That's critical.

They don't really operate alone. You saw that a second ago. When I start talking about how associations can be used to help you chunk.  If you understand what these principles are and you see how you can combine them, you then can devise active learning techniques.

This is where mine have come from the kinds of problem solving kinds of role-playing games and so forth. They're all kind of designed to draw on these principles. So take that water rights thing. I talked about if the learning objective was to learn the best alternative negotiated agreement, how to do a good BATNA, big, good backup plan.

What we want you to do is focus on that. So that first set of groups where you're planning, how you're going to argue for your farmers or your engineers or whomever. So they get what they want that focuses you coming up with a strategy, which includes the Patna it's part of our learning objective.

And then the second phase where we jig saw you put you together with people from the other constituencies, we want you to try to figure out what their badness were. So we're getting you to focus your processing on that, to pay attention to that. So we're using these principles and then we, we bring you back to the original groups and you're going to discuss it.

So the idea is we designed the active learning exercises with these principles in mind to try to promote learning. And that that's, what's all about for us.

Brandon Stover: [00:48:35] Yeah, you have a, quite a few great examples in your book. And so I highly recommend people to get that in order to integrate this into an education environment. But for those that maybe are doing self-directed learning or personal learning by themselves at home, are there any ways that we could personally use these in combination with one another?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:48:54] yeah, there are. But I got to tell you, there's a book by someone I've ever met named Scott Young called ultra learning. I've never met him, but it's an excellent book and it's, it's not. So the book that I wrote was about teaching how to teach. So students will learn was focused on structure is really the book he wrote is on self-learning, he's a world-class self-learner got through the entire MIT curriculum and in a year he learned how many different languages, stuff like that.

So he, he, I went through that book carefully and I, what I was looking for was anything he did that didn't fit into these five principles and I was impressed. It all worked.  The stuff that he did, all of which every single thing in there could be understood as individual or combinations of these principles in exactly the way that I would have hoped uses deliberate practice.

So he talks about, for example, he's learning to draw, teach himself to draw. So he I think it says, hold face, he tries to draw his face. He has a photograph. So what he's doing is instead of having a teacher give you feedback, when you say a word, he tries to draw something and then uses the photograph as the feedback.

And it iterates that way in terms of the cycle of zero and eight and the, what you need to focus on more and get better at it. So he used the same kinds of things I'm talking about here. Totally independently, just self-directed learner.

Brandon Stover: [00:50:17] Hey, this is Brandon Stover, and you're listening to the evolve podcast with Steven costless, founder of active learning sciences and Foundry college. And just a moment. You're going to hear why. After having such success in his education startups, he decided to launch another in order to reach more learners at scale.

But first I want to let you know that all the resources and lessons from this episode are available as a free worksheet@evolvethe.world and clicking on the worksheet button in the upper right-hand corner.

All the expertise and lessons that Stephen is sharing today are super valuable, but they're only as valuable as the ones that you're actually going to put into execution. So that's why I distill all the action items from each episode into one, easy to use step-by-step worksheet. So now you can immediately start applying these to your life and business.

These lessons include how to turn years of research and expertise into startups. How to iterate and scale successful solutions and opportunities for entrepreneurs to tackle in education. And so many more, all these lessons are available@evolvethe.world and clicking on the worksheet button in the upper right-hand corner. That's evolve the.world, or you can follow the link inside the show notes of your podcast app.

Now let's get back to the evolve podcast with Steven costless, founder of active learning sciences and Foundry college, as he describes why he decided to launch another startup called active learning sciences, focused on teaching others to implement the science of learning.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:51:41] I wanted to go from retail to wholesale, basically. So active learning sciences is about three things.

It's about. Designing courses for institutions from scratch that use active learning. So we have quite a number of groups we're working with now putting internationally it's about helping faculty take courses they've already got and upgrading them to use app active learning, which in some ways is harder than starting from scratch by the way. And then it's about teaching faculty and course designers how to do this themselves. So, so there's a course that I've done in collaboration with noodle partners which is it's an always on a synchronous course. I worked with a guy named David Green and we, we have it's 10 modules. It goes to eat the book as the textbook, by the way for it.

So it, it builds on the book and teaches. Students or faculty, whoever it is, how to actually use active learning in the course of teaching. So that that's scalable. So those are the three things that active learning sciences do all of cause all of which have in common, this idea of really trying to scale up big time to get these effective teaching methods out there so they can be used effectively.

Brandon Stover: [00:53:08] Yeah, I've seen in an article. I was reading you guys are working with a medical school too that relies on the active learning. So the students can, you know, master these things, no matter their background. Can you explain using this project as an example, how you integrated the active learning.

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:53:27] that's a great project. That's a new medical school it's starting from scratch at the Keck graduate Institute. It'll it, the first thing that that it's doing is a two year master of science and community medicine, and that is going to be a sort of on-ramp into the medical school proper they're also making arrangements with other medical schools.

It's a novel kind of master's degree. There's not, there is no other one like it. And part of what we're doing is we have so it's focused on community medicine. So we have courses on infectious diseases, chronic diseases, kind of thing you'd expect, but also courses on health systems, sciences that direct to consumer technologies and various other things that you'd really want to know about if you were interacting with people in a community and try to help community get better, not just the people in it have them too, obviously, but chase structures.

So part of what we're doing is just a capstone where the students actually spend the day a week working in some community institution where they're applying what they're learning in the classes and bring it back into the classes. So the active learning that we're using, some of it, not all of it is very, very much integrating what's happening in the real world with what they're learning in class.

And again, we use a variety of different kinds of techniques. So that's a synchronous that's set of sacred as courses. Most of the stuff we're doing is asynchronous. So the huge challenge has been to do active learning. Yes. Grizzly, which has not been the focus of any other group that I'm aware of. That's our entire focus.

So that, of course I mentioned we did with noodle it, we, we, you know, the Silicon valley expression eating your own dog food. So we used active learning to teach active learning, but it's always synchronous. So it was kind of an interesting challenge.

Brandon Stover: [00:55:23] So you're been mentioning these terms, asynchronous and synchronous. And right now you're thinking about a hybrid learning. So can you give us your four-quadrant breakdown of hybrid learning?

Stephen Kosslyn: [00:55:34] I think hybrid learning is going to end up being the future. I think it's going to be the residue of what's happened during the pandemic is going to be where the pendulum kind of settles. Prior to the pandemic, I think people have this idea that hybrid was just a combination of in-person than online.

That was, it was the idea. And I think that some of that is probably still how people think about what hybrid is, and that would, I think be unfortunate if that's. The way we continue to think about it as we come out of the pandemic. So what I, what I've the way I think about it is it's two by two table, as you just alluded to think of the columns as being the modes, synchronous and asynchronous.

So synchronous faculty members, students were there at the same time standard traditional classrooms weren't example, asynchronous is where they're not there at the second time. Faculty member may design a recording or something that student later watches. So you got synchronous, asynchronous columns, rows are in-person or online.

So you have these four quadrants, which I think of as different modalities. So asynchronous online Coursera would be a good example or any of these kind of a typical online asynchronous course where you attend canvas, you've got modules and you work through with your own days. Asynchronous in-person is an interesting one.

That's like what you do in a community project or traditional distance education, where you get materials mailed to you or something where you don't have interaction with anybody else. It's just your anybody else and other students, or the faculty member. Other people may be at this project, but it's, it's not the same as online where you can post questions and so forth.

You're really just doing it yourself. And then the synchronous, in-person as a traditional classroom, we you're all sitting around or lecture. And what we're doing right now, isn't gonna have all online secrets. You know, we're assuming here and as many people pandemic and that's what a Foundry does, it's synchronous.

That's what engaged he does. And there was other platforms Minerva also synchronous online. So when it's interesting to me is that there are 11 possible ways to do hybrid so it's not just in person combined with on online. each of those cells has strengths. You know, like the asynchronous stuff is good. If you want to take your time, be self paced, learning, no one's breathing down your throat.

You may have a week window or something to do a project in, but it's not like you have to do it right. This incident. Yeah. Whereas small group interaction, it turns out it's really good online. And with, with even zoom can be really good at that in a way that's hard to do that. That's the reason that the jigsaw.

Method really never caught on. It's just logistically super difficult to do in person people, drag chairs in the corner where we won't be here, I'm all talking and you run out of space. You have to figure out how to rearrange them. It's a pain, whereas push of a button, you can do it on the, you know, Foundry platform, forge push of a button.

So there are things that each of those four cells, what allergies do particularly well. So then what I, what I want to do is I want to say, okay, take a step back. You're going to have a course or program. Tell me what your goals are. Tell me what resources you and your students have and tell me the constraints.

And when you start thinking of it, that way you go through the four cells, you say, well, if I'm teaching people in India who are. Core, they have cell phones, but they don't have computers, but they have the L boxes. What can I do? How should I combine those four modalities to really teach them effectively?

That's going to be different than if I'm teaching teachers, how to use a new piece of software so they can teach those students who have very different resources. So think about the constraints, time zones, the amount of money they have think about resources, computers, access to a broadband et cetera.

Brandon Stover: [00:59:53] Excellent. Well, one of the pieces I've found pretty intriguing in there was this idea of using one modality and then maybe moving to another. So starting, in-person getting that connection with everyone and then being able to move that online so that they still had that established community. But we're able to use the benefits and the powers of online learning later on.

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:00:16] exactly right. So that's the other piece things change. So I think initial meetings in person are really important, especially if emotion is going to be at all relevant depending on the content of the course. Cause I think we pick up on nonverbal cues from other people, much better in person than over a screen. after you get to know somebody a little bit, or it's not as important to be in person with them it's one reason so I think there's a huge range of possibilities for how future education can move forward after this pandemic. And I really hope that they get explored and I hope that they're, they're done right.

And people measure and there's feedback about what's effective and what isn't and so forth. Let me ask you this gigantic opportunity. You have major advances in education.

Brandon Stover: [01:01:08] Yeah. What questions in the science of learning or education are you still grappling with that? You know, if they were answered would be a pretty big breakthrough or, you know, tremendously move education forward.

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:01:19] So that the big stumbling block for me right now is really about assessment and assessment at scale.   So there've been these approaches from latent semantic analysis. And then of course the bag of words where they just score it without any relations among the worst based on relative frequency. So different words, things like that.

These approaches are out there. They're not good enough. I really like to have an automated way of having a machine really understand what someone has written so they can get feedback. I want to be able to scale the 10,000 people inexpensively and I want to be able to have a richer set of assessment measures than just multiple choice. We do deliberate practice at scale. So doing deliberate practice on rich assessments would be fantastic. And that's going to require some advances in technology.

Brandon Stover: [01:02:15] What what opportunities do you see for maybe for-profit education startups in the current mark market over traditional institutions?

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:02:24] so traditional institutions have traditions, which is both their strength and in some ways they're lessons strengths, and that they're going to be much slower, or they're going to be a reluctance to change in many ways, especially the , the research one institutions 130 or so that are kind of the leaders in the segments.

They are, they often incentivize faculty to focus on their research and not none of their teaching. So it's, it's harder to get big changes. Now people teach them quite a lot of effort. It makes sense in terms of the incentive structure, why, why invest energy in doing that? Whereas with a small startup, you can be very nimble.

You can collect data. COVID very quickly update. And so I think moving forward with these opportunities now for the, say the 11 different types of hybrid that identified to be able to try them out and find out what the fit is for different kinds of goals. Do you realize the things you're trying to teach to different kinds of people, names and so forth?

I think it would be much, much faster and probably more efficient in a for-profit environment where you gotta make it work. So I think there there's some potential real advantages that the small startups may have over larger traditional institutions in terms of being able to innovate and. Refined innovations moving forward.

Brandon Stover: [01:03:55] I think it's looking at those, you know, 11 approaches. You could look at the audience that you are trying to teach. Look at what resources that audience have, what resources do you have. And then you could start, you know, going through those 11 approaches and deciding, okay, which one is going to be best to reach the learning outcomes we want for this audience based on the resources we have.

And then there's a business opportunity, right? They're choosing

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:04:21] that's it. Exactly. I think that's right. So that's going to be way easier for a startup that a traditional institution.

Brandon Stover: [01:04:29] Well, before I get to my last question, is there a call to action? You'd like to leave the listeners with today.

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:04:33] Yeah, I, it, it seems to me that. There's a huge consensus. That education is the key to a better future for everybody. I don't, I don't think there's any argument about that and multiple levels of education from K-12 through postgraduate to upskilling on the job. I mean, just in general, education is the key for individuals and for the society at large, to be able to prosper.

And it, from my perspective, there's no debate anymore. That active learning is just way better than their traditional methods of lecturing. And having students write things out and taking midterms and finals and all that. And if I had a call to action, it would be to try to promote more active learning that people should understand what it is.

It's not just a discussion. So active learning is where you do something in the service of achieving a learning objective. So there's a reason you're doing it. There's a point to it. It's not just talking, it's actually trying to achieve a goal. And that sort of thing is vastly, vastly better than many traditional methods.

We really, really should be trying to adopt it more widely.

Brandon Stover: [01:05:55] my last question is how can we push the world to evolve?

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:05:58] Okay. So going back to my naivete about the world will be the path to your door. If you have a better mouse, mouse trap, which turns out not to be true. So demonstrating success it's not enough, but it's a necessary first step and changing the regulatory environment would help a lot. If we could convince politicians, we need more innovation in education and they would support, nurture that there would be dividends for everyone.

So we, we've got to have an environment where we can innovate and see if it works. And the current environment it's hard. I mean, just accreditation is very, very difficult. It's something I've learned in the last couple of things I've done and it's really a barrier. So changes in the regulatory environment would really make a difference.

So if anybody hears discussion of such or has any connections with politicians who are interested in this sort of thing setting up a situation so that it's monitored, you have, you have tight. Responsibility. You're not just letting people innovate any which way and let, let fly. On the other hand, you're not just killing it in the cradle. I mean you want to set up an environment where innovations can be tried out and evaluated and the best ones actually adopted.

Brandon Stover: [01:07:31] Steven. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I will definitely put all the links to your books active learning, the five principles and also to your active learning sciences so that people can start engaging more with us and implementing these things. I think it will be a great, great benefit to education.

So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Stephen Kosslyn: [01:07:52] Thank you, Brendan. I've enjoyed it immensely and I wish you all the best take care.

Brandon Stover: [01:07:57] That was Steven Casa, founder of active learning sciences and Foundry college. A big takeaway from today's interview is the opportunity start-up tab in the education space. As Stephen was describing, startups are nimble and have access to data and are not bogged down by the traditions and bureaucracies of traditional education institutions.

As we discussed startups should assess the audience that they're trying to teach. Look at what resources that audience has. Look at what resources you have as a startup. Then look at the learning objectives that you're trying to get across to the students and then create a solution that best matches that criteria by deciding between an asynchronous or synchronous delivery and in-person or online congregation.

Now, if you want an easy to use resource full of all the lessons from this episode, they are available as a free downloadable worksheet@evolvethe.world and clicking on the worksheet button in the upper right-hand corner. You can also find all the show notes and transcripts from this episode at evolve, the.world/episode/sixty.

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