media-7

Transcriber:	Doris Wu 吳貞芳 (doriswu60@yahoo.com)
Brief Bio:	CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FRESNO 語言學碩士&學士 文藻語專英文科畢 曾任文藻外語學院英文科講師
Date finished:	Feb. 6, 2005
Proofreader:	Estela Tseng (avatseng1119@yahoo.com)
Brief Bio:
Date finished:	June 27, 2005

3rd draft 2/13/05

Educational technology initiatives in business education in the Sloan School of Management, MIT

Hello, I am the Learning Technology Initiatives Director at the Sloan School of Management. I’m part of the Executive Education Department, but I also report to the Deputy Dean here at the Sloan School of Management. What I’d like to do is really talk[ing] about three things in this brief time we have together. First, I’d like to explore two dimensions of education and I’m thinking in terms of not only the classroom education we’re familiar with but also the distance education which is so prominent in the developments today. Second, I’d like to identify two key questions that I really feel are important for us to be thinking about and addressing in the area of new technologies in education. And third, I’d like to answer those questions from Sloan’s point of view and tell you a little bit about what we are doing and how we are doing it.  Finally, I want to pose a challenge to you and ask you a question. So let’s get started.  

(0:58)

When we think about these two dimensions that I’d like to explore first, I’d like to think about for a while the purpose of education. Now if we think about the purpose of education, I’d like to invoke Professor Russell xxx’s (name) point of view. He is a great thinker as a system thinker and as a strategic planner. And he asked companies and organizations to think about not only the explicit purpose for which they exist but also the implicit purpose. If we really think about education from the explicit point of view and we think about the school age of the youngster population, there’s no doubt that content is very very important. Clearly, important information needs to be conveyed to students from people who’ve studied in the fields for a long period of time. Second purpose for the explicit purpose of educational institutions is to allow students to practice and to apply what they’ve learned. A third explicit purpose I think we probably all agree is that school environments create a situation where students can learn together, where they can learn from each other, so it creates a community of learners. If you compare the explicit purposes for adult education, I think we’d agree that they are all the same. Again, content has to be conveyed, practice or application of what is being learned is very important, and thirdly, it’s an opportunity to learn together and to learn from your peers. Now let’s think about the implicit purpose of educational institutions.

(2:37)

From the point of view of the school age of youngster population, there are really I think two implicit purposes. First, there’s an issue of socialization. I think we all understand the importance of children growing up together and having the opportunity to work together, to become friends, to learn how to resolve conflicts and to basically interact in a social environment. A second implicit purpose for the youngster age group is a baby-sitting purpose. And I think you can test that theory by asking the question - if you could educate a child by the age of six as completely as what’s possible and is necessary, would you choose to do it? I think the answer is no. As young children come along, they need a period of gestation where they in a controlled environment grow up. Now let’s compare that to the adult learner. The adult learner gets tremendous value if an educational institution is able to provide an environment where networking takes place, where friendships are made, where connections are made that can be used outside and later beyond the confines of the educational environment. Babysitting, however, is NOT an issue for the adult learner. In fact, it’s really just the opposite. The adult learner has enormous pressures on them (to) to not take time out to learn, but instead, to continue working in their work environment in the context that they are in another day-to-day environment.  So I think the comparable the parallel structure for the babysitting for the younger children is that adults need time-out. (They don’t need) They need time-out from their working environment so that they can take time to learn. So I think it’s very important to keep this in mind and I’m gonna be coming back on this a number of times as we talk about the experiments we have been are doing at the Sloan School of Management. I’d like you to keep in mind the fact that these two categories of purpose, both the explicit and the implicit, are something that we need to be responsible for in whatever we do as designers of educational situations. Now I’d like to shift gears.

(5:00)

Another dimension to keep in mind throughout this discussion is the dimension of technology. We have a dizzy array of choices that are available to us as we think about new ways of providing education and they fall along axes. So for instance, we can think about - do we want an educational experience to be facilitated or non-facilitated? Do we want it to be synchronized synchronous or asynchronized asynchronous? Do we want it to be electronically delivered or do we want it to have a face-to-face component? Should it be customized or in other words made specific for the particular audience or can we create something that is an official product that people can use in many different environments. Should it be interactive or should it be one way? Now, these are not just academic choices. There’s technology that’s available now and it’s wonderful congruence of developments that let us do all of these things. So the challenge has come its back to the instructional designer where do you fall on these different axes, what are the choices that you’re gonna make. Technology is there, you, as an instructional designer, have to think of it from the point of view of fulfilling both the explicit and the implicit purposes of the educational experience you are creating.

(6:25)

So, if you think of the effect of technology on the two different populations, the young-age and the adult-age learners - for the school age, technology provides just an extraordinary opportunity for enriching what goes on in the classroom. And I think that the conversation that we had with Bonnie Bracey was perfect for that. She talked so beautifully about how can you engage students. However, the teachers have a luxury of the students remaining in the classroom. Because of the baby-sitting function, they will not empty the schools.  So the teacher can create this system which is multi-dimensional and its purposes and take full advantage of the technology without jeopardizing all the different dimensions of learning. For the adult learner, the technology has the capability of freeing us in terms of time and space. If we do that, we’re in great risk of jeopardizing the implicit purposes of education – the socialization where they get to know each other and create bonds and relationships, and also that time-out - that time to learn.  You put them into a work environment; it’s uh “Here. Go and learn. And get back to us when you’re finished.” This is very difficult because there’s no hiatus and the pressures they of day-to-day work get at work get in very much the way of learning. So I think these are aspects that we’re gonna be thinking about and talking about. And they lead me to my two key questions.

(8:03)

I think the questions that we need to be asking ourselves in the area of management and of education for the adult learner. Yes, do we face a period of disruptive technology? This is a the notion that technology comes along which changes the game, changes the whole way in which you are doing business. If that’s the case, then we, as a business school, need to be thinking about in fact changing the entire way in which we proceed to do business. So first question - are we facing a period of disruptive technology? The second question is, from a pedagogical perspective, not from a business perspective but from a pedagogical perspective, do we know what the learning system is all about? Do we really know how people learn? And are we confident therefore to decompose and recompose these elements of learning so that we are still consistent with fulfilling all the purposes, both explicit and implicit, of an educational environment. So those are the two questions that we are struggling with. Those are the two questions that Sloan asks itself. And I’d like to go on then to my third area what we really talk about what is Sloan doing, how do we answer those questions and what have we done as a result of those answers. If you ran a business school, how would you answer them? It’s challenging. So let me give you Sloan’s answers and then tell you a little bit about what we’ve done.

(9:39)

Sloan’s answer to those two questions is, to both of them, we don’t know.  We don’t know and therefore we need to do some experiments. And in those experiments, we not only need to learn what there’s to be learned but we also have to learn what it is that we don’t know. So that was really the design for the activity that we’ve been pursuing since Dean xxx (name) Donald Lessard convened the educational technology task for us force in 1999. So let me move in to the third area of what I’d like to talk to you about, which is what has Sloan done and how have we done it.

(10:18)

If we think about content as the first explicit purpose of education, there are a couple of things we’ve done and I’ve mentioned these before. We’ve done the work with UNext where we took a pre-MBA [package] preparation package from their list of available titles if you will and made it available to our incoming MBA students. This was very successful in that it was enrichment. It gave the students an opportunity to do rust-removal and self-assessment on the topics that they are gonna will be studying when they came onto campus. So it was an opportunity for them to challenge themselves in a comfortable environment really preparing for the time they came come on campus. So this is just an experiment of using an online distance product to enrich what it was from a content standpoint that our students will get.  Now another content of experiment that we are doing are the knowledge updates and we spend some time talking about this. This is an opportunity for us to see if we can electronically package and deliver the results of current research in the way that it’s really engaging to the person that’s looking at it. And the challenge [that we gave] given to ourselves is “Can we do that packaging in such a way that it lays a ground work for community communicative learning coming out of people who’ve got involved in looking at these frontier topic knowledge updates.” So those are two experiments that we’ve done in the content area.

(11:58)

In the area of learning communities where we have technology facilitating people learning from each other, we’ve done a development of a learning platform called “SloanSpace.” You’re gonna have an opportunity to try it, so I’m looking forward to that. But let me just give you the sort of overall picture of it which is that it is a student-centered portal that allows the students to customize for themselves which portlet they want to [have] open when they come to their area in SloanSpace. And some of the portlets that are available to them are announcements, schedules, class discussions, classes’ material distributions, membership in the various communities and classes in which they participate. So this is an experiment that we are doing in developing and refining our ability to provide a learning community platform. But as you can see in the way I’m talking about this they are really only our experiments in a couple of dimensions of the educational purposes that we talked about in the very beginning. So now I’d like to shift to talking about the Merrill Lynch Andrew Lo investments course and talk about it and describe it to you along each one of the five dimensions that we laid out in the beginning.

(13:26)

When we talk about the development of the investments course through the Merrill Lynch partnership effort, we on the education technology task force thought of it as our experiment in how do we create a window into the classroom. So if you think of it, that that was the metaphor that we use as we were thinking about the work that we’re gonna be doing. And we challenged ourselves to do this system’s design, so that we responsibly took into account all of the dimensions that we talked about in at the beginning.

(14:00)

So thinking about this course, let me take them in turn. If we think about content, the investments course picked up on a semester long course taught by Professor Andrew Lo to second-year MBA students, very advanced theory taught by a star who’s a lead thinker in this area. We videotaped the classes as Professor Lo taught the MBA students live and then converted them to CDs. And we used the technology that allowed us to synchronize his teaching materials beside the window in which the video was playing. It wasn’t particularly high touch technology. We didn’t allow for indexing. But we did by putting it on CDs give students the ability to watch it any place any time. In addition, in terms of conveying content, we prepared a notebook where they would have all the teaching materials that Professor Lo used in his lecture on paper. Why do we do that? Because he teaches a very quantitative course. He speaks in the language of math. And it’ll be very important for students to be able to have hard copies so that they can take notes on the [on the] paper rather than be working very hard to copy down the equations that he used in his lectures. So we captured the content and stored it electronically. There were 12 lectures; 6 of which were added that were optional lectures.  Now if we think about the application or the putting of the content into practice, we put a great deal of emphasis on that.  We wanted to make sure that if the students were not going to be given the time-out to learn, we needed to provide a vehicle where they can take advantage of learning in their work context to actually put the theory into practice. In order to do that, we build a project. Groups were assigned and these students came from all over the world, so we made a great effort in [in] the selection of the student groups that we put together. And we set up the project in 3 phases. The first phase required them to identify a customer that was not well served by Merrill Lynch or perhaps a new customer, and to profile those customers in terms of their risk and investment preferences. Part two, whereas they had to design a new product or service that Merrill Lynch has never offered before, that was specifically appropriate to meet the needs of this customer group. And third, they were required to put together an implementation plan where they did the cost benefit analysis to Merrill Lynch for offering this new product or service.

(16:52)

These were very sophisticated projects that we developed. They shared their projects with each other as they were preparing them. In fact they had this interesting situation where the project of one group of students was in fact a great solution for the product of another group of students. And then in the end of the course, they presented their projects not only to Professor Lo but also to senior managers at Merrill Lynch. This is how we address that [that] purposes of education to give students an opportunity to apply and practice what they’ve learned. So we’ve talked about content, application, practice. Third explicit purpose of an educational situation was to provide a learning community. [This we did] we set up a number of vehicles for peer-to-peer exchange and peer-to-expert exchange. With each lecture, we put together pre-lecture questions and post-lecture questions that the students were required to answer and they used that learning community space that I told you about before, SloanSpace. On SloanSpace, there’re where discussion groups for each one of the lectures and as students posted their pre- and post-questions, they went directly to the discussion space about that particular lecture.  They were accompanied in this dialog by the TA who came from Sloan who was a subject matter expert and the learning director who came from Merrill Lynch who was responsible for managing the lives of the students and the pressures on them. So both the TA and the learning director got involved in the discussions by overseeing the activity, intervening when help is needed, either because people were becoming overwhelmed or were dropping by the website wayside or because they were confused and they needed some help from a content standpoint.

(18:58)

In fact, part far away through I want to tell you this story. We actually changed the assignment. We were dissatisfied with a dialog that was taking place. And we asked students to answer one question and then comment on the response of another student. So this is one of the things that we changed in the midway through. So understand we didn’t get it right first off. We experiment it throughout the project.

(19:23)

Another venue for community communitive learning we set up to have office hours synchronized synchronous office hours with the students and the professor where using [a text chat room] a text-based chat room they were able to communicate with Professor Lo to ask questions and to exchange views and to have his feedback on their projects. So we devised a number of different ways for them to learn from each other and from the experts. So those were really the three explicit purposes that we identify in the beginning. Now let me switch to the implicit purposes of socialization and time-out.

(20:04)

For socialization, we designed a course so that at the beginning of the course and at the end of the course, the students were brought literally from all over the world to New York and they spent a day with Professor Lo and with each other. During the lunch of the first day, their project groups were assigned and to eating, so we assigned them to sit together over lunch and begin to develop the report, get to know each other because after that first day, all they would be doing is communicating through technological means. Ah we ah asked them to identify themselves and identify themselves not only in terms of the work that they were doing but the capabilities that they might bring to the group as a whole. From a socialization standpoint, again at the end of the course after the final day, we had a very nice graduation party which was attended by Professor Lo, by the head of the Global Debt Market Group, and [senior membership] senior sponsors from the top management team. Very … they were not fancy but having a chance everybody together, sitting down around the table, be presented with graduate certificates, be congratulated individually. It was a very very important part of cementing the friendship bonds that had started at the beginning of this 12-week course and that would take them going forward. An interesting piece of data is that the students reported that one of the primary values they got out of the course was the opportunity to learn and get to know people throughout the company that it would’ve taken them years to get to know on their own. That was how we address the socialization issue. And how did we address the time-out? What we did with this course because we made it time and space independent was we in fact violated the time-out rule. We plunged them into this intense learning experience in the context of their own work. Let me tell you the way we solved that problem. We solved it by focusing a great deal on motivating the students. Why? Because these are students that don’t know how to spare time-out. They are very aggressive, type A people who just simply make two extra hours out of their 24-hour day. So it was very important that we keep their motivation high so that they would not in a compression of time and the requirements of their very high stressed jobs collapse under the way. How do we do this? [We started] we had the good fortune to start it with the very top person in the Global Debt Market Group feeling this is a very important initiative [within] within his organization. Why did he feel that way?

(23:01)

First of all, he wanted to embed in his up-and-coming high potentials [the] the use and application are very really advanced investment theory, so he wanted to imbue them with a new way of thinking about how they did business. Secondly, he was very interested in treating them as a group to a particularly significant communication from him and from management that they were a valued part of the team. The students that [were] were brought into this course were in that interesting gap in the professions where they had been with the company for a couple of years, but it would probably be four more years before they are considered for the big leap for the big advancement. High potentials during this period of time are very likely to leave and what the head of the Global Debt Market Group wanted to do was (to) send a signal that these people were high potentials, were recognized as such and that Merrill Lynch was willing to invest in them in order to increase their retention.

(24:12)

So, we had the head of the group having had a very high priority. He then asked his Director of Boards to work with their Director of Boards to nominate the correct people. 70 people were identified; 30 were selected for the course with 5 alternates.  So you can see right away that these students knew that they were being selected as a very honored pool.

(24:40)

Throughout the course, the people who had nominated the students were encouraged to be good sponsors and to take an interest in their studies. We had senior executives from the Group sponsoring the group projects. Might it or not have been somebody who had sponsored the student, but it was somebody who is very interested in the business that project might be integrated into. And finally, [we had] when the project was presented not only to sponsors but also the business heads that will be the top two layers of the organization listen to the projects, evaluate them, and then feedback whether or not they will be taking them forward and putting them into practice.  This kept the students highly motivated as you can imagine. This is a degree of exposure that was very very unusal for people at their age and stage. And I think it was successful in terms of creating motivation as a way to simulate the time-out that was not allowed to them in the design of the course.

(25:52)

So I’ve gone through all these dimensions because I wanted to make sure that you could understand that when you are creating an entire course or an entire educational engagement, it’s very important to think about both the explicit and the implicit purposes and it’s at your peril that you ignore any one of these dimensions. It is a system and [the] their interdependencies among the system. If you don’t account for all of them in your design, the system may not work. That gives you a little bit [of an] of an exposure to what we’ve done. So let me just tell you what we are doing next.

(26:32)

We’re gonna take what we’ve learned and run the course again at Merrill Lynch and then we want to take it further and take what we’ve learned and see if we can be developing additional educational experiences with new components and see if this is a way that we can [have] have learned how to do education taking advantage of technology and not having technology get in the way of the ultimate learning experience of the student.

(27:04)

So this really wraps up the material that I’d like to cover [in this] this [con] brief conversation with you. And I’d like to leave you with a challenge and a question. The challenge is for the work that you’re gonna be doing and the class time we’ll spend together that what we are talking about is not about creating fancy, technologically composed content. It’s not about making the material relevant and easy to apply and giving opportunities to do that. It’s not about creating interaction in community. It’s not about providing [opera] opportunities for people to get to know each other and to build friendships. And it’s not about giving either time-out or motivation to keep people engaged. The challenge is about all of them. It’s about all of them.

(28:02)

So as you think about Professor Miyagawa‘s class. When he talks about education and media and the market place, I’d like to suggest that your jobs, our jobs, are to figure out as we produce anything and work on anything, we need to put in the hands of educators a comprehensive product, a product that helps teachers know not only how to convey content in a new way or create interaction among your students in a new way but how does it fit into the other dimensions of the educational experience. What I’d like to at least introduce to you is the exercise that we are gonna be doing together. Homework will be posted. I’ll be giving you a write-up about it. What I’m gonna be asking you to do is help me develop ways to improve the Andrew Lo course. And the dimensions that we are gonna be focusing on is the dimension of building a learning community. This is the area we identified for ourselves that we need to do a better job with and I think that you’re good brain trusted. That will be a good opportunity for us to tap. So I’m gonna be asking you to experience not only the lecture but also the learning community. I’m going to be asking you to read the evaluation that we did of our own work. I’m gonna be asking you to find resources that help inform your opinions about how we can do a better job at building a learning community. And then I’m gonna ask you to begin to design an approach. Give me some recommendations that we can take forward and put into the new courses that we are gonna be developing.

(29:50)

Look forward to working with you on this. I appreciate the time that you’ve spent watching this video. If you have any feedback on this video, as a way of communicating to you, from me to you, I’ll be very much appreciated hearing from you. Look forward to seeing you at the next class.