Online Education: Expanding and Personalizing Access
Released on 02/04/2014
Solving education is not just to solving education
it's kind of solving everything.
You know if you care about AIDS in Africa
if you care about poverty in the inner city
if you care about the environment
whatever you care about, you care about education.
It is the ultimate gateway problem.
I absolutely believe that we need a revolution in education
and the good news is that it
very much appears to be happening.
(pensive music)
The history of the human race
is really a history of education.
Great moments in education have
dominated the great moments in history.
Out of the industrial revolution we took what we learned
about factories and processes and efficiencies
and we turned education to a giant assembly line system.
You'd never build a system like the one we have today
if you're building it from scratch.
It's a crazy system.
It's intuitive that not everybody has the
exact same learning style and works equally well
for each kid, for each thing that they learn.
Education is very, very slow to innovate
but when it does two things happen.
There's a kind of Cambrian explosion
of access increased access
and also of improved quality simultaneously.
I believe that we are on the verge of the next great jump
and that's going to be online education.
If we can suddenly mine all of the data
that you've always been producing when you study
we can personalize education to you.
We work with partners like publishers and schools
and we take their content and we make it adapative.
You get your own personal textbook.
It's literally unique.
It's created for you every single day
and within a couple weeks I know
how strong you are at every single concept in the course
and I know how exactly how you learn it best.
If you learn math best in the morning
between 8:13 and 9:00 a.m. I know that.
If you learn science best in
24 minute bite sizes, I know that.
It's really personalized,
I mean there is some belief that
the education is not just one-on-one
but you do collaborate if learning.
So kids learn from one another.
You type a question into our system.
Our system can go find everybody
whose online right this second who absolutely
knows the answer to that question.
And then we ask that question to 15 people
just pops up in their screen
and you get like the wisdom of crowds
harnessed with this adaptive A.I.s
We can't teach the higher level critical thinking skills.
We can't build the imaginations.
That's what the teachers do.
Online education is not going to
supplant traditional education.
It's going to be a supplement to it.
Now if you have a great teacher in the room with you
obviously that's better.
Many people around the world don't.
We want to expand education access
as far and wide as we can and that very much
includes in the developing world.
Most of the price of a textbook is just
wasted on paper and printing and shipping
so I believe we're on the verge of solving the
access problem of the developing world.
We're gonna power about a million students
starting this fall in the United States
but very soon thereafter we expect to start
spreading all over the world.
We want to make sure education
in the next decade or two becomes available
to everybody anywhere in the planet.
It could well be that the person who cures breast cancer
is growing up in some Cambodian fishing village
and will never be discovered.
The world's best lecture notes on Hamlet
might be sitting in some desktop in Dublin somewhere
and shown to 30 kids a year.
Well we can actually unlock that
trapped value for the first time.
(upbeat string orchestra music)
Starring: Jose Ferreira
Safety and the Self-Driving Car
Hierarchical Design
Milk Refrigeration Systems for India's Off-Grid Communities
Engineering Sustainable Biofuels
Online Education: Expanding and Personalizing Access
Global Sustainability & Planetary Boundaries
The New Frontier of Medical Robots
Using Smart phoness to Farm Better
Preparation & Recovery for Catastrophes
Creating a Digital Ecology That Works
Unlocking Brain Data
Breakthroughs in Nanomedicine
Curing Unhappiness
Persuasive Gaming
Optogenetics and Enhancing Brain Functions