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#8 - Frank Leone - Using science to improve education
22 Plays5 years ago
What actually makes a good learning experience and how does it affect learning performance? We talk about this with our guest Frank. He has a passion for understanding and improving learning as well as education. He is currently an assistant professor in Neuroeducation & Artificial Intelligence at the Donders Institute. We cover many topics ranging from AI in education to online learning all the way to the important effect emotions have on learning.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's up, everyone? This is Sajmal Savary and welcome to another podcast episode. Today, we talk to my old office mate, Frank Leonet. He has a passion for understanding and improving learning as well as education. He shares with us insights into how education can be drastically improved. Enjoy.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another podcast episode. If you're new here, my name's Ajmal. I'm a neuroscientist and entrepreneur. On this podcast, we explore the links between science, technology, business, and the impact they have on all
Exploring Education Science and Design
00:00:47
Speaker
of us.
00:00:47
Speaker
Our guest today is Frank Leone. I had the distinct honor to share an office with him during our PhD time. Frank has a passion for understanding and improving learning as well as education. He's currently an assistant professor in neuro-education and artificial intelligence at the Donders Institute.
00:01:05
Speaker
His focus is to integrate insights from multiple disciplines into a coherent perspective on learning experience design, which is the topic of today, and into intelligent educational apps and games. His own background reflects similar interests, covering multiple disciplines, including programs in psychology, AI and neuroscience, as well as entrepreneurship in serious games and gamification.
00:01:28
Speaker
On top of all that, he has also received multiple awards for his teaching. In this conversation, we talk about the science of education and learning design. What actually makes a good learning experience and how does it affect learning performance? We cover many topics ranging from AI and education to online learning, all the way to the important effect emotions have on learning. Enough background. Let's get into it, shall we?
00:01:54
Speaker
All right. Well, Frank, welcome. Thanks for taking the time. It's a lovely Friday evening at home as we've spent most of our time at home lately in this period.
00:02:08
Speaker
That's how it is. That's our new experience. That's true. And I already have to apologize if James is running through the camera image. Yeah, I mean, just so you know, it's my cat. I mean, you know, James, but just if you're wondering what's going to happen. That's so fun. And this is also a first for me because it's the first remote podcast recording I do. Cool, fingers crossed. And I'm very glad I'm doing that with you.
00:02:38
Speaker
Because, you know, I really can't remember the last time the two of us actually sat down and had a serious conversation, a serious discussion. Uh, it's way back. That's the way back. It's way back because not one, not one prepared with four, a four questions. Well, you know, I do my homework. You know that. So do you. And I had two stories. Yeah. And now it has been a while.
00:03:04
Speaker
But unfortunately, yeah, the days of sharing an office during the PhD times is some time ago. That's way back.
Effective Learning Principles and Gamification
00:03:13
Speaker
That's way back. But not bad. But now, sorry. But not bad at all.
00:03:18
Speaker
No, no, that's true. That's true. But now we can just do it over the internet. That's fine. Exactly. That's a good way to do it. Yes. As long as we're all staying healthy. That would be nice. But all right. So what today is supposed to be about is about the science of education with a specific focus on learning experience design. And I so particularly wanted to talk to you about this because
00:03:43
Speaker
you're just a great teacher. And not only are you a great teacher from me saying that you've been awarded for this and you get really good reviews from your students as well. And it's not only that you get good reviews or things like this, good input, but what I really like is that you try to be very methodical about actually being a good teacher.
00:04:12
Speaker
And that's why I'm so excited to talk to you about the learning experience design. But let's start broad. Let's start super broad. What makes a good learning experience? Interesting. In the meantime, there's a cat in between. I think you could answer the question in multiple ways, but let's start with two ways.
00:04:40
Speaker
I think a good learning experience is built and it's totally dependent on having a good design. So these two parts, you can't do the one without the other. And actually the design aspect is most often the thing that teachers are not that well educated in or is basically not a common practice.
00:05:02
Speaker
So basically being a designer in some sense, and I'm also only dabbling in design, but being a designer in some senses, I think, built an effective and engaging learning experience. But that's a kind of dodging the question because it basically says, yeah, you should think about it beforehand in every design. If I would rephrase the question, what are the ingredients of a good learning experience design?
00:05:31
Speaker
It's interesting, but science-wise, many design disciplines are pretty empty. And the same is true here. Actually, this entire phrase, learning experience design is hardly present in the scientific leadership to start with. Although there is a quite big group of professionals or practitioners that actually use the term and see themselves as a community.
00:05:56
Speaker
What I often distinguish as a teacher and a scientist are four key aspects of an effective learning experience. With the first being a higher calling or meaning, so a higher meaning to the experience you have and a higher reason to do it.
00:06:13
Speaker
invoking deeper emotions, invoking a connection to the outside world, to the persons involved. Basically, not being a dot disconnected from the rest of the world would actually be integrated in this way, having a higher meaning or a quest behind it. Second, a mere feeling of metering. That's the other side of the meaning.
00:06:37
Speaker
So the meaning is that something means something to you. And the metering is actually the you matter to the experience or to the person, to the people involved. Such as, for example, I find it important and it's been quite a big challenge with a big group that my students, because then they also feel they
00:06:58
Speaker
they basically then start working both for me, for themselves and for the higher meaning, because they feel they have actually, and that same metering is also in the case of, if you do an assignment where you feel you're just one of many and it's not really relevant, or you feel that you actually take on a critical role or get a lot of responsibility, you again feel you matter for the setup of the learning. The third one
00:07:26
Speaker
It's often called also in classic educational science autonomy. While from a game design perspective, you would rather call it indirect design, indirect control, basically stating that you look for measures of control that are not direct and not saying something, hey, now you need to jump or hey, now you need to do X, but actually try to
00:07:51
Speaker
build triggers
Critique of Traditional Grading and Personalized Education
00:07:53
Speaker
in your experience, and that can be basically formulating clear goals and formulating clear boundaries, giving clear choices and good incentives, but also trying to make an environment and a kind of embodiment that trick people into the way you set up the surroundings. It can be basically what kind of music you play, what kind of colors you use,
00:08:17
Speaker
Anything like that can basically trigger people into action. And if you have those three ingredients and basically you hope people take action, and then what you don't want as an experiencer of the design is basically you have a feeling of progress. You feel that you move forward and what you're doing has an impact.
00:08:38
Speaker
That's the fourth one. And that can be, it's the fourth one. Yeah, progress. So then we have meaning, metering, autonomy, less indirect control, and last one is progress. And that's, of course, in many cases, students, people often think of basically giving points.
00:08:55
Speaker
and reaching higher levels, et cetera. But it's also just noticing that you are noticing that you can do something new or noticing that you can share what you learned with someone else. And in that sense, any experience where you don't feel you're making progress, especially learning experiences, will quickly fade out, even if those other three are ingredients are there.
00:09:19
Speaker
So that's how I look at it. So when you describe this now, this is all from the perspective of the person who's, let's say, the student, the one who's absorbing the information. Because when you say, for example, the first part, like a higher meaning,
00:09:40
Speaker
It could also be seen as the teacher is, you know, conveying this because they feel a calling to do this. But that's not what you mean. You mean like the higher meaning of the content. Yeah. No, but I think that's also the critical distinction between the classic field of instructional design, which is strongly taken from the perspective of the teacher and from the content that should be conveyed.
00:10:05
Speaker
versus learning experience design which explicitly takes the perspective of the learner and what he or she finds interesting what he or she wants and what he or she feels and that's how I saw what you should be yeah yeah definitely because if
00:10:21
Speaker
I tried to look at it also a little bit from the perspective of a product consumer or business consumer relationship, where whenever the business is trying to make a product, it's not about how they see it, it's about how the customer or the consumer is going to experience it. Not what they think, but that's the customer-centric approach.
00:10:52
Speaker
Many of these things I now mention, there are a mishmash of many disciplines, but actually quite some inspiration comes from game design in gamification. And many of those gamification principles are heavily used in industry, but mostly with a heavy focus on the
00:11:13
Speaker
on the easy and flat stuff, basically the giving points or warning badges, partly ignoring the higher meaning. And that's also, you have a book by, it's actually, I think,
00:11:31
Speaker
I'm not totally sure, but I think most of the time of his life, he mostly played games, and I was one of the most sought-after game-ification gurus, Yuka Ciao. He wrote a book, Actionable Gamification, Beyond Points, Betches and Leaderboards, it's a subtitle, where he basically scores commercial products on different factors, such as higher calling and meaning is also one of his factors.
00:12:01
Speaker
and basically showing or discussing, hey, how is Facebook doing on a higher calling on me? Not that well. But it's doing pretty well in, for example, avoidance, a kind of negative stimulants. Because you don't want to, and that's one of the reasons why you stick to Facebook. This is the way, for example, there's Scratch LinkedIn and many other commercial products.
00:12:23
Speaker
And I find this analysis really insightful. And actually, there are not that many models, scientific models of gamification. And his model is not the scientific model nor a pretty well-thought-through model, which comes, at least for me, quite well recommended. Not everyone agrees with it.
00:12:40
Speaker
Right. So, okay. I will definitely put that in the show notes, that book. But can you, for the people that don't know what gamification is, can you explain to them what that stands for? Even though, I mean, the word is a little self-explanatory, but just to broaden the spectrum here. Yeah, I think it's actually good to define the term. At least for the reason that
Emotions and Vulnerability in Learning
00:13:07
Speaker
the term is often misused.
00:13:09
Speaker
Okay, but officially the definition is applying principles from game design in non-game contexts.
00:13:17
Speaker
So basically, yeah, you design real world experience or real world systems in such a way to trigger the same kind of response as the game does. So for example, adding points. But the example is actually quite badly chosen because that's what everyone expects. Basically people kind of see if a platform, at least the platform or anything, gives points and leaderboards and badges, people are like, hey, this is a game application. While X also, as you guys showed, defines it with also many others.
00:13:46
Speaker
It is basically user-centered design. That's what it is. Because that's what the game does. The game is nothing else than trying to attract people and trying to keep people's engagement and make them motivated to engage. And that's user-centered design. And that's far more, so that's why it's good to actually ask the question, what is gaming patient?
00:14:12
Speaker
When you say it's user-centered design, because when I was doing the research, what I found when I typed in gamification was exactly what you said. It's scores, it's badges, it's leaderboards, basically these principles being used. In essence, correct me if I'm wrong, right? To me, this seems just like a
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, like a quantification of offer reward. And that's kind of it. And to me, it seemed so much gamification, or at least how I was thinking about it of what a game, games that are super engaging to me entail more than just that.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's why I think the terms I mentioned with some of the higher order terms like the meeting and the metering have far more bearing on what games actually are than all the points and leaderboards. But that's the easy stuff. But that's also within the literature and also within the professional field. There are quite some people now saying we're basically doing it wrong. We shouldn't only focus on the flat stuff. We also should be thinking about the easy stuff. We should also be thinking about this meeting. We should also
00:15:28
Speaker
be thinking about all those other more complicated. But initially, the professional field and also the scientific field mostly went for the low-hanging fruit. And that's the points and leaderboards. And for example, I think that's what you say with the quantification, also with the badges.
00:15:46
Speaker
I think that's a good point to think about. So when I once designed a series game or alternate reality game for secondary schools, and what we did there was explicitly saying each points or bettas or anything else, there should actually be a message with it.
00:16:06
Speaker
a message giving you the basically the compliment or the reason why why you get it, which makes the batch, in essence, only a monomic of the actual feedback or the, the social reward you got. So then the, the basically the words you get with with the reward is well, if only you only give points and badges, then without the message that actually gets it mean, it isn't worth anything. Yeah.
00:16:35
Speaker
So in that sense, it's also kind of mantis, kind of mnemonic. And the other thing is, because many of those things you now mentioned are actually in the progress domain, a bit in the measuring, because the badges gives also a feeling that you measured. But mantis in the feedback and progress domain, if you would put it in the thinking I referred to earlier, well, actually,
00:16:59
Speaker
The most meaningful progress is often not on those points. The most meaningful progress is if someone says to you, wow, you grew as a person, or if your, your, your, your father, your mother, or someone in your neighborhood says, wow, you can do something new. Or if you want to really want to be able to do something, I don't know, learn to program and you can finally
Redesigning Education for Meaningful Learning
00:17:20
Speaker
compile your first script or you can buy your first game. That's the, that's not the quantification might help.
00:17:31
Speaker
But only in the short-term. For the long run, you need that real reward. And in the end, you need the mix. And that's also what you got Ciaossi and other people who thought a bit more deep about it. You need the mix of the short-term stuff.
00:17:44
Speaker
and the long-term. In the long-term, you need the higher meaning and the other feelings. Right. Because I can imagine that, of course, points make it clear where you are along a trajectory. But if the trajectory is too far out and, I mean,
00:18:03
Speaker
We work on our PhDs and we know how that feels. If it's too far out, it almost doesn't feel like you make any progress if the trajectory is just too long, even if you get points until somebody might come along and give you, like you said, some person who's close to you or
00:18:25
Speaker
a mentor, a teacher, a supervisor, a parent who can then put it into perspective rather than just, yeah, you scored 95 points.
00:18:41
Speaker
Whatever that means. Yeah, no, that actually makes me think back about what you had hanging on your wall during your PhD. Basically the numbers 1 to 4 for your four papers you need to score. If I would have had those numbers, so I'm not talking about your PhD, I would have had them online. I would have my first day frame at 4th year. So this 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 would have
00:19:06
Speaker
who would have hanged on the wall for years, not doing anything, just looking at me like, Frank, you're not doing a good job, you're not doing a good job, you're not making progress. Well, as a person and as a scientist, I was for sure making progress, not as a person. Yeah, for sure. But that's also true as a teacher. Also, to bring it back to that topic,
00:19:30
Speaker
If you give feedback to a student, say I get a paper from one of the PhD students or I get a paper from one of the undergrad students, I can give feedback and color it completely red. And the next time they hand it in,
00:19:48
Speaker
In many cases, we also have had this experience in the past. You get it back again completely red. So the sense of progress is zeros. Especially even that, and that's also a drawback of how the education system often works, especially if the focus is so much under negative.
00:20:08
Speaker
If you, times and times again, only focus on what is still bad or what can still be improved, you never notice the progress. Yeah, that's true. And in that sense, I also tried to do it with my students and I'm not always succeeding. But to again, also give them the feeling, yeah, you're really making progress. That also means that the post moved a bit, so you have to actually feedback, but
00:20:34
Speaker
whoa, we're getting there. And it's important to realize as a teacher and also as an employer or anyone actually. Yeah, but I can imagine that it's difficult specifically because talking about metrics again, the metric when giving feedback of writing is
00:20:56
Speaker
always negative. As you said, it's always negative. It's what can be done better or what can be written differently, which is then almost inherently saying this could have been done better. Basically, the scoreboard is built to go in the negative direction because there is no whatever was made not red, make that green. That's not what's happening.
00:21:25
Speaker
No, no, no. I think it's spot on. You have a book by Lee Sheldon.
00:21:32
Speaker
The multiplayer classroom? Yeah, I think it's the same. Actually, I just saw on Facebook that the second edition is coming out. Again, I highly recommend it. He's a game designer, basically designing his entire game, his entire class as a game. And he says the classic grade system in the US, which is quite different from us in the Netherlands, but still similar in essence, is basically you have an A or you have a 10, and now we're going to subtract. That's basically only going to look for the negative.
00:22:00
Speaker
which is again the inverse from progress. And he says to his students, okay, you now have an F or that's a gradient, you now have a zero. And now we're going to add points. And we're just going to keep adding points until you reach a certain level, giving you the sense of progress. So we're now actually wrote the grand proposal to actually
00:22:22
Speaker
Basically compare these two grading systems. So it's a negative or average grading system because typically grades are based on averages. And average sets a tendency to do this. Up, down, up, down, up, down. Moving my hands doesn't work well in a podcast. Up, down, up, down. Handsgiving your nose as a progress. Well, basically giving you a
00:22:47
Speaker
a point system which starts at zero and shows you that you're moving forward. And it also means this works out if you do something extra.
00:22:55
Speaker
bonus assignment, or you put some extra effort in or anything else, points can be added. While getting an extra grade, if you, I don't know, already calculated an average of 10 grades a day, you get an effort grade, doesn't add anything. So there's no incentive to do something extra. That's right. And I think that the tiny fixes with which we, if you want to keep grades,
00:23:21
Speaker
can basically help or basically the essence of our education system already be more motivating. Because yeah, grades is a big part of the motivation for students. Regrettably. But yeah. Sorry, no, please continue. There's already basically a design flaw in how we designed our education. But then do you think so?
00:23:47
Speaker
that the standardization, is it the standardization part that stands in the way of a good experience? Or is it the reference that the current standardization used that's causing this? What do you mean with the reference? With a reference of what you just described with just getting another grade or starting with zero.
00:24:14
Speaker
That's what I meant with the reference. And with standardization, as in, you mentioned the educational system in the United States. And when it comes to standardized tests, I don't know any other system that can be that standardization. If that is the issue. Or it's just a matter of how it's done. Yeah. I think the last,
00:24:41
Speaker
It's a bit of everything. It also depends a bit on how strongly you want to change it. You can be as strong as you want here. On the side of standardization, in essence standardization might not necessarily be that depending on what you standardize.
AI and Technology in Education
00:25:03
Speaker
If I now make an awesome design for education atmosphere or someone else, let's let someone else do it, probably better.
00:25:10
Speaker
And that becomes the new standard. The standardization is totally aimed and totally meant to control and measure students. That's the prime goal. Then it's going to be bad in all ways possible. The system is largely based on mistrust.
00:25:36
Speaker
the following, assuming students don't want to work and building a system that forces them to work because they have to pass the exams. We don't get everything directly afterwards, but then we at least check the boxes and they pass. Then it goes bad in many, many, many, many, many, many ways.
00:25:57
Speaker
At the same time, what I just referred to with the grading system, there are tiny fixes that can fit in any system. You can have the system completely standardized and still change the grading system to at least make it more motivating. What I often advocate, you can think about the big stuff, but don't forget to do the small stuff, because in many cases, it's pretty hard to change education, but these small changes can hopefully already get us a long way.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, I always try to think of it like a mountain. Say you can't move the mountain, but you can always take one step to get one bit up and that helps. Just like the PhD. But then do you think, I agree with you. I don't think standardization necessarily is the problem.
00:26:47
Speaker
as long as it's done. I mean, yeah, the goal of what is supposed to be accomplished is that it has to be asked first, and then it can be looked at. But you know, I thought... No, no, please go ahead. Just to interrupt you. No problem. I think that one problem with the standardization is that it often stands in the way of actually having personal contact.
00:27:16
Speaker
So one reason for personalization is actually to make everything kind of fair and equal. But in that case, also trying to buy effective debt is that any subjectivity or any personal aspects are mostly removed from the system.
00:27:37
Speaker
because you want everybody to be objective, you want everybody to be comparable. Hence, everyone needs to do the same thing. Hence, no one can make their own assignments. Hence, there should not be a deep relationship between teachers and students because it stands in the way of objectivity. We should all keep our distances. We should all basically have a professional distance rather than an in-depth connection where you actually get to know each other as fellow human beings.
00:28:07
Speaker
and learn from each other as fellow human beings. And I think that's where the discussion a few weeks ago and there I stated that to some extent we might need to step away from the standardization and from the
00:28:24
Speaker
from trying to make everything perfectly fair and equal, because the collateral damage that that does is just not worth the little gain you get, at least at the long end of the tail. If you get any. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Just to give an example, we have now at our university an initiative to make tests anonymous. So as teachers, we can't see the names anymore of students.
00:28:54
Speaker
which from an objective standpoint is perfectly understandable. Basically, you as teacher then can't use any subjectivity when you are grading the test, except maybe when you recognize the handwriting or anything else. From a
00:29:09
Speaker
formative aspect, basically seeing the assessment as a part of learning. It's, of course, really bad because you basically don't know anymore which student is doing well, which student is doing bad when you're grading. And from a personal connection side, one of the few things that allows me to go through, I don't know, more than 100 exams is the fact that they recognize names in their personal connection.
00:29:35
Speaker
I'm sitting all alone in the room often, maybe some TA's helping me appease these students. But the fact that I still see names is what gets me through those long days. That makes it still somewhat personal. I'm basically trying to replace other teachers as they can.
00:29:52
Speaker
Making us replaceable by machines and making everything perfectly objective makes basically work for everyone for students and teachers. Only worse. And the last quote I want to throw in is, I actually don't know where I have it from. I stole it somewhere, but there was no source there.
00:30:13
Speaker
I think we should think about what if university or school or life would be about improving yourself rather than proving yourself.
00:30:23
Speaker
To a large extent, we're basically now asking everyone to just keep proving themselves in tests and everything. Same is true for me as a teacher or as a scientist and for many, many jobs, the same thing. Just prove yourself, prove yourself, prove yourself, which to a large extent keeps you from improving yourself because you're afraid to make errors with a big source of learning. You're afraid to try new things with a big source of learning.
00:30:48
Speaker
And basically the proving gets in the way of everything that makes learning possible, makes improving possible. And all those tests is only proving, proving, proving, proving. Now, I'm glad you interrupted me because this fits perfectly with what I actually wanted to ask you. Okay, cool. This was literally, I wanted to ask you if you think that the educational system or at least how we do it at the moment,
00:31:19
Speaker
the whole, all the other problems that you talked about, basically the recovered standardization, we talked about the disconnect of the students and proving versus improving. And specifically on the latter part, do you think the problems at heart in the educational system is because it is so focused on learning things that you have to learn things by heart
00:31:45
Speaker
in order to prove that you know this, rather than a focus on teaching you to understand things. Yeah, I think that's a part of the problem. And it's also a really weird aspect of the problem in that sense that
00:32:06
Speaker
All the scientific studies out there showed that you basically forget the stuff you learned for an exam within days, a big part, within weeks, a lot, and within months you don't know anything anymore, close to anything, depending on the course. So in that sense, the check mark doesn't say anything, right?
00:32:30
Speaker
No, no, it doesn't say anything. So in that sense, it's a weird measure in any way. Okay, maybe this is a bad comparison, and maybe it probably will work for a big parker audience, I hope.
00:32:45
Speaker
To a large extent, scientific conferences seem to be the same as professional conferences. On the outside, it's all about the talks. It's all about basically exchanging information and being there to learn from each other in those talks, in those sessions.
00:33:03
Speaker
Everyone who has been to many conferences and you ask me, what's the deal with the conferences? They tell, you know, it's all about the networking at the background. It's basically that you get to know the right people and learn to get to know the field and get to know the slang and basically get in the field. And those sessions, many people don't even go there. Many sessions are far more empty than should be based on a number of attendees. Same as maybe with two for school.
Systemic Educational Challenges and Community Building
00:33:30
Speaker
You basically all those courses,
00:33:32
Speaker
Yeah, sure, you pick something up. But a lot of stuff is basically socialization, what happens in the background. But if that's the goal, and the same is true for conference, by the way, happy to talk about another time. If the socialization is the goal, then you might as well set the entire thing up totally differently. Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. Yeah. And then you're going to think about, okay, what is the stuff that we actually want them to learn within the socialization domain?
00:34:00
Speaker
And what are the learning skills they actually need to learn? Because I think it will be a big part about skills. And for those skills, sure, it will be important to get to know some facts. But often those facts will be a surface of a higher goal of learning something useful in daily life or making a big project rather than learning content for the content. Yeah, that's what I think that's what I meant with, or I think that's what I tried to get at exactly what you said with
00:34:28
Speaker
The focus of understanding being then what am I, why do I need to know this? What is it good for? And I need to understand the concepts and how they're interlinked rather than just the sky's blue. Yeah, it's not a trivial fact, at least for young kids.
00:34:48
Speaker
And that's part of the meaning I emphasize. It should have a higher meaning for actually to have value for you and to help you remember and help you stay engaged. And for a large part,
00:35:08
Speaker
I think, okay. And there's another example I would love to mention. It's a bit long story here. So I think I'm ready to give. Sure. Yeah. You have, you have all the time that you want. Okay. Okay. Okay. There we go. So, um, I had an, I'll do the, yeah, I'll do the full story and then you're going to almost cut out if you want. I won't.
00:35:37
Speaker
Okay, so I gave a workshop in October and I talked to the audience. It was about learning experience time. I said to the audience, you could actually design a full lecture or a full meeting just to invoke an emotion, as I think emotion is a big part of learning. And in many cases now within the education system, basically we shy away from emotions.
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, that's a big part of what causes personal development. Well, and also actually memorization, but let's focus on personal development here. So when I went back by train, we could still go by train back then, way back. And I thought, okay, I'm going to try this on Monday. It's a business Friday. I thought, okay, I'm going to design a lecture with a totally focused on emotions. And I picked a particularly sensitive emotion.
00:36:30
Speaker
Namely, uh, for nobility. And then basically set up a full action, a big part of the lecture to only invoke this single emotion. Uh, okay. I put in some, um, so safety guards, I want to do this beforehand. It's going to be a heavy lecture. I put that to understand if you're not there, we ain't going to record it. We're going to trigger a kind of feeling of emotion of, uh, affordability. So I totally understand if you're not there. Um, okay. Monday morning, age 30.
00:36:57
Speaker
Full. Almost everyone was there. And I said to the students, okay, disclaimer, as I said, this is going to be a sensitive lecture, an emotional lecture. Let me know afterwards if you follow it. Yeah, let's see what happens. Okay, the first part was still a bit dry. It was a bit about perfectionism. A bit confrontational, but not the heavy stuff.
00:37:25
Speaker
And then I moved to the actual personal stuff because the first part, everyone's like, Oh, what's going to happen? What's going to happen? What's going to happen? Okay, I have to go and get over this first part quickly. And then I went, I said, okay, now is the personal part. And here you also see that I really tried to build an experience. There's also a new experience for me and a totally, a total experiment for me also. So I, um,
00:37:52
Speaker
I said, okay, I'm now going to totally turn the lights off. I'm going to turn my microphone off and I'm going to join you in the audience. It was a big lecture. I think it was 100 to 120 students. I'm going to join you in the audience. And I'm going to ask you now for the next 10 minutes, just watch the screen in silence and listen and reflect on what you hear.
00:38:18
Speaker
And again, I clicked the button and the screen turned black. And a woman, I think probably about 30, was shown on the screen with the camera pretty close to her face. And she was a spoken word poetry artist. And she talks about her depression. She talks about how it is to be depressed and what she feels and what she thinks. And she does that for about five minutes. It's just really in a really intense way.
00:38:47
Speaker
And after those five minutes, and the rest of the room was completely pitch black. This is basically, you saw a really big face in front of you, and that's the only thing you could basically look at and listen to. And after roughly five minutes, the screen turned black again. And there was a single question in white letters on the screen. What do you feel now?
00:39:09
Speaker
Do you feel pity? Do you feel jealous because someone opens up? Do you feel superior because you don't have this feeling? Do you feel inferior because you don't dare to speak up? And so more of those keywords. Second question, so screen turned blank again. Second question, what would you do in a similar situation? I would just keep studying and working to try to forget.
00:39:38
Speaker
I would ask my friends for help. I would ask my family for help. I would ask online for help, etc. Then the screen turned black again. I think the third question was, how do you feel if others ask you for help?
00:40:07
Speaker
or open up to you. I feel threatened, I feel honored, etc. More options. Fourth question. How do you feel if you open up yourself or ask for help? Okay, it's a relief. And a few more options. Last option was I feel vulnerable. Next question. Do you dare to be vulnerable?
00:40:34
Speaker
Do you dare to say that there's something you don't know? Do you dare to ask for help? Do you dare to propose something new? Do you dare to tell sensitive stuff to other people, which people might laugh at or confront you? And the last question, there were no options. Do you allow others to be vulnerable? I think it was on the screen for 30 seconds.
00:41:05
Speaker
black screen, white letters. Okay, then the screen turned white. And there was a black text on the screen. I also mentioned that to the students. And I just invite you to talk about what you just saw and reflect on what you just saw. And then afterwards, we're going to discuss this some more in the group. Okay, then many students were silent and basically were staring right in front of them.
00:41:34
Speaker
some students were talking whispering something was talking out more likely some were actually laughing so it was really diverse how basically this part influenced the students and then after five to ten minutes i basically sat still without a microphone still still basically sitting among them i stood up and the lights were still off etc i said to the students okay for an ability you can experience at many levels
00:41:59
Speaker
on the small level, basically, asking for help or saying you don't know anything, don't know something. And up to the big level, being depressed, having other mental issues or anything else, and anything in between. And at that moment, I gave three examples from my own life, a small, medium and big, just to show that this is true for everyone, also their teacher. And then that was kind of critical moment, I asked to the audience,
00:42:31
Speaker
What do you associate with the word for an ability or with an ability of what you just saw? As first instance, it was basically tumbleweed all the way. Nothing happened. So it's like, okay, nice indeed, Frank. It's where it ends. But then one of the mentors, the second year students, I invited to join this to support the students. And one of the second year students actually spoke up.
00:42:55
Speaker
And I ain't going to repeat what all the students said because it was highly personal. And in the end, I think 15 or 16 students spoke up in a whole of 100 to 120 with extremely personal stories. And we had quite a few students crying. And actually the stories that were shared there, it was so emotional and so
00:43:23
Speaker
And I think to some extent transformative also for me as a teacher, that I still think back to that moment quite often, especially some of the students who spoke up are still basically burnt in my mind. Only by talking of, yeah, only by bringing up the topic of vulnerability and talking about it and sharing experiences, Pandora's box was open. That was my experience. And then afterwards I said to the students,
00:43:51
Speaker
And this was all done, I think, also by the students in a really respectful and open way. I was really humbled by what the students shared there during the lecture. And then after the lecture, or after that part, I said to these students, okay, I'm basically going to stop the lecture in a few minutes because I ain't going to continue to the rational stuff now anymore. Now it is basically, yeah, we should basically talk about these emotions together and basically leave the hole and give this a place for everyone.
00:44:20
Speaker
and not go back to the, oh yeah, I'm a teacher and now we're going to go on with the lecture. But I did explain them why I did it. So I said, okay, all of this, and for many people this will sound familiar, all of this is inspired by the work by Billy Brown, the power of vulnerability, one of the most popular tech videos that exists. And I did it for, I think, roughly three reasons.
00:44:49
Speaker
First reason, it was in the context of the academic and professional skills course. So it's a skills course. And for many skills, you need vulnerability. Because in how I define the skills, asking help is actually a skill. Asking questions is a skill.
00:45:04
Speaker
Creativity was also a requires vulnerability or taking initiative is a skill leadership. Many of those skills require for an ability. Hence, it is something you should reflect on and work on. Just give me one second. James has turned you off. Okay, I can hear you again. That's a nasty trick of things. Sorry. No problem.
00:45:28
Speaker
Yeah, so the first one is, it's, it's, it's basically a meta skill or a property that underlies many skills you probably want to develop. And for that, we shouldn't shy away from the emotion, but should actually try to talk about it and basically achieve personal development by working on such an emotion and sharing this. Second reason
00:45:53
Speaker
In many universities in the Netherlands, and I doubt it's much different elsewhere, there are actually quite big worries about the mental pressure that there is on students and basically a lot they're experiencing. And often the response is, at least in the Netherlands, basically adding more study advisors, adding more psychologists, and basically
00:46:17
Speaker
to some extent standardizing, but also basically professionalizing the entire problem. Let's put this in boxes. And this doesn't belong in the talk among students box, but it's clearly belongs in the professional box. Let's not touch this topic ourselves. With the effect that study advisors, at least one colleague study advisor once told me,
00:46:41
Speaker
She said, many students I meet here in my room don't have a clue how hard other students are having it. They basically say, I'm the feeling I'm the only one with suffering. I have the feeling that friend X is having a great time finding it easy and friend Y is having a blast and finds it all too easy. I'm the only one with suffering. While the study advises things to herself, hmm,
00:47:06
Speaker
friend X I saw last week, friend Y is coming over later this afternoon, but I can't tell you because we're all in those boxes. Hence, this lecture was a way to basically open up and show everyone we're all on the same boat. Many of us have these kind of issues, small and large. Let's get this out in the open so that we can talk about it. And the third reason was the
00:47:35
Speaker
first year students first course they get. So they basically, this is one, one thing, their university life. So they're pretty young and fresh. It's also to build a group and to let them, to make them learn. Hey, you can also ask for help with your friends. You can also, you can, you basically, and you built, you now built a support system and your social support system for later in your study career and also for later in life.
00:48:02
Speaker
And this is something you should be aware of. And basically, please ask for help. Ask for help from your friends, ask for help from your mentors, from your study advice, from me as a teacher. It's okay to ask that. We are all very good. Okay, and that was basically the end of the lecture.
00:48:24
Speaker
I showed another video of the same spoken word poetry artist who kind of recommend to everyone that they don't know the name, but we can fix that later. And in that video, she basically explained what happened the one time she did spoke up and how beautiful the experience was. And then afterwards, the screen turned black again. And there was one quote by Brene Brown, something like, vulnerability is our greatest sign of courage. And then I
00:48:53
Speaker
I thanked all the students who spoke up and I stood by the door and basically got overwhelmed by the emotions I got back from the students. And yeah, I'm curious. I think this is a one time experience, but this was transformative for me as a teacher. And partly also for the students, what I'd heard back was really many positive comments and also that students found each other to help each other and all those things.
00:49:21
Speaker
And everyone who I asked, okay, do you think I should do this more often? They said, yeah, you should definitely repeat this next year. But it's scary, in essence. It's scary that basically asking the question and bringing up the topic of vulnerability in a world where you're continuously proving ourselves shakes up things so heavy and so strongly, but this is the response. And I think I'm curious what would have happened if you would have done this in our generation, like 10 years ago.
00:49:51
Speaker
or 15 years ago, what would have been the same? And how would it have been 30 years ago? No clue. And I think this topic, and talking about these kind of hard topics, should also be part of education. And it's more important than knowing, I don't know, the year some famous battle was. Well, basically, this lecture took not much longer than a short interaction in history.
00:50:19
Speaker
And the same is slightly different, but still a related topic for me. I once asked to a group of secondary school students, what do you want to do in life? Or what do you find interesting? And what do you, basically, what's your goal? Or why do you do the things you do? No clue. Big cars, big houses, fancy washers, and pretty women. That was their answer.
00:50:45
Speaker
And if you never ask a question and just never ask the students why do you do what you do, they also never think about it. They basically are force fed all the content you need to learn in high school and other school levels without any reflection, okay, why am I here or where am I going? And in many schools, many more transformative schools will do better. But yeah, overall, I think that's pretty typical.
00:51:14
Speaker
It's, man, that's quite a story. It's interesting that you say this because specifically the part of the study advisors, because I was also teaching academic skills and I was the mentor for first year students of my course.
00:51:39
Speaker
And I was so the rule was this, if there's something in air quotes significantly wrong, you should not do anything but send the student to the study advisor. And I was already thinking, when when they told me this, like,
00:51:56
Speaker
But what's the title of mentor then good for? It's just gatekeeper, I don't understand. So then what happened was quite a few times actually is that I had students
00:52:12
Speaker
who I have then sent to the study advisor. I mean, we had in the course, of course, multiple personal meetings. And when I saw already in the first one, something was going not well. I mean, of course, I was asking what it was, but I was not supposed to do anything about it, even though if I wanted to. And then when I sent them to the study advisor and I noticed during classes things did not improve,
00:52:39
Speaker
I was just really thinking, okay, fuck this. This is stupid. Let me ask what's up and see if I can do something. What they all told me, it was exactly as you said, they went to the study advisor and then a box was ticked. Yes, they went to the study advisor. Tick.
00:53:03
Speaker
And now I'll continue your studies. And I was just thinking, what? These are, you're totally right. These are first year students. They are so young. They just come from school. They are thrown into this new system. They have nobody to talk to. And they are expected to figure all of this out.
00:53:23
Speaker
by themselves, which is a completely new social situation. And everything is so distant, distanced from them to make it professional. But I think that's the last thing they need in this moment. They just, they need a friend in this moment. Like an actual advisor who is not sitting behind a desk that's five meters wide, you know, to make the distance even further. That's not what they need.
00:53:54
Speaker
And I think you don't build social connection based on titles. It's not basically because someone is a study advisor, you get a social connection and you open up. No, not at all. And for some people, it might be as small as they need. And for some people, it might be someone else they need. But in the end, we should build a social support system as a network, as a complete university as a whole, rather than
00:54:21
Speaker
Focusing on this few professionals because yeah, that's I think in the end doing more damage than good Sorry, it's funny advice to really good work. They do a part of the system and we should use the full system Yeah, but I think this this entire because that's also a big time to pop out of the metering
00:54:37
Speaker
You basically want to matter as a human being to your fellow human beings. And that's not the fellow human being that's sitting behind the desk of the study advisor somewhere deep down in the building. That's your fellow human beings that's sitting in the hole there. It is with you in the lecture hall. And you should be able to open up to them and feel appreciated by them. But yeah, if the system basically, and the entire emphasis on proving, basically keeps you from sharing it, then there you get Pandora's box.
00:55:07
Speaker
I thought this was so strange because they saw me, obviously, way more often than the study advisor. And I'm not trying to say they had a very intimate relationship with me, which they didn't, because they're not supposed to do that. But with whoever, whatever students' problems were, I mean, I remember that at one point I was talking to their parents.
00:55:29
Speaker
Not because it was requested of me, but because I thought that was important. Uh, and, and, uh, it, it helped. And I'm not saying this is the solution for everyone, um, or that the mentor, as you said, is the solution for everyone. It's not, but the mentor or whoever is closer has a much better idea. With a few questions of what that student needs at that moment, and then just laying the path to get there. Yeah.
00:56:00
Speaker
Yeah, no, and it reminds me of, again, of that video. It sounds like I only have a shallow, that video, shallow books as the references, but I think it's most easily accessible. But no, I actually, they're not shallow at all. I'm not sure what the name is, but very smart for the tasks.
00:56:25
Speaker
a cleaning person has in the hospital and what basically they ask to the cleaning person, what do you find important in your job? And they list the things that they obviously should do. And the things that the cleaning person finds important, sorry? They're saving lives basically, that's what they do.
00:56:45
Speaker
Yeah, but they're also pretty explicit on that. So, for example, they also say, yeah, what I find important is cleaning a few times extra in the room where I know it's actually needed, or not cleaning in a room where someone is close to dying and their family is visiting. And all those things are not part of the job description. But it's basically the job runs the risk of narrowing their mind of what they should and shouldn't do, because that's the boxes that I picked.
00:57:13
Speaker
And the same is true here. You're a fellow student, you don't have anything to do with my personal life. You are a mentor, you're only a gatekeeper. And basically, that aspect of, we could call it standardization again, that aspect of standardization is, I think, killing for the fact that we are social beings and we want to feel we mess with.
00:57:33
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you. This actually, this is a nice segue into the next question I have for you actually. It's a mix of, well, because you and I are also, we enjoy technical stuff as well. And I was wondering, because we've been talking now about personalization a lot, personalization,
00:57:58
Speaker
and emotion and maybe not standardizing so much or if standardizing then focusing on specific aspects only with the end goal in mind. Now, you and I know very well, spending in the educational sector is being cut and cut and cut and cut. And I can just keep saying cut for five minutes and it still doesn't capture how much money is being cut. Coming to the technical part,
00:58:28
Speaker
Do you think AI can be the almighty savior here which has been promised to be the almighty savior for personalizing education and teaching?
00:58:46
Speaker
Most times when I get this question, my answer is that to a large extent, AI strong and always AI is implemented to a strong extent actually goes completely counter to building learning experience. It is focused on to a large extent standardizing. Yes, personalized standardizing, but still standardizing. And it's often still focused on basically getting
00:59:13
Speaker
the quickest and most effective way to get sex into your mind or anything else.
00:59:19
Speaker
So to a large extent, I'm actually worried if the tech kids are going to govern the education system, but actually the focus on experience and learning experience and actually the social aspect will only go further and further to the background. I think that's actually the aspect that makes learning effective, but also long lasting and also in the end motivating and keeps you
00:59:48
Speaker
a life and happiness, I think more important than not the other aspect. As it's currently often implemented, it's actually more a risk and a threat than a savior. In theory and also partly in practice, I do see options that could well happen.
01:00:09
Speaker
maybe not directly AI, but things like virtual reality and augmented reality are ways to actually build experiences. But also even something simple like what we now have, say you're having, okay, this is maybe a bit of a long shot, but okay, there are many smaller examples of this, but say you're talking, you have a course about history in secondary school.
01:00:33
Speaker
and you read and people during war have a hard time. No shit, you don't feel anything. You give some numbers, you still don't feel anything. Okay, now instead you have a few options which you could do where technology can help, technology in the broad sense, not even in AI.
01:00:53
Speaker
One thing you could do is talk to someone who actually lived during, for example, the war you're talking about, second world war, find an elderly person who still remembers something from the war and talk with the person. That might help. Second option, you could actually, I don't know, try to set up, which is a long shot, but try to set up a Skype call to someone who talked to that person, ask how it is.
01:01:17
Speaker
Third option would be, and actually there are, I think, some AR videos, even on YouTube, I think, from, for example, Somalia, or a Somalian city after the war, and look around. That's experience. And I think also there, history lessons about facts. Just don't cut the cake for how you say it. Yeah, they don't cut it, yeah. It should be about experience. You should feel it. That makes you actually
01:01:46
Speaker
That makes you almost puke if someone tries to, again, set up parts of the
01:01:55
Speaker
population to basically increase hate among the population because basically you felt how bad it was last time someone did that. For example, learning about the second world war. If you only learn facts, it doesn't do anything. And there I think by creating experiences and creating experiences, that technology can help a lot. And part of it is also AI. Sure, you also need image processing for this and that stuff.
01:02:18
Speaker
But yeah, that's only a small part of where AI is used for and technology is used for. And I hope that that will shift. Yeah, I hope so too. But it's, I mean, what you just said reminds me of this quote, I also don't know who said this, which was, one person dies is a tragedy. A million people dying is a statistic.
01:02:43
Speaker
Yeah, true. Yeah. And it's literally, it's you don't, it gets, it gets diffused away. The impact of the event is diffused away by the often the horrifying nature of it.
01:03:01
Speaker
For example, I was in Boston, and you have many of those memorials, but there was actually a memorial where they, like they often do, basically list all the numbers, basically the identity numbers of all the people who died in certain concentration camps in Germany. And there were basically a humongous towers, basically glass towers, which stood there in a small park.
01:03:31
Speaker
And that already gives me a better grasp of the sheer quantity than seeing those numbers on paper. We have a project running to try to build a serious game that actually gives people better.
01:03:46
Speaker
grasp on large numbers, because people in the stories, they're bad in understanding big numbers. Because again, you need an experience of that number and not only learning what it is, but basically our entire system isn't geared towards learning sheer facts, they're geared towards learning from experiences and using experiences to
01:04:12
Speaker
to build a network of understanding of a meaningful world. And for that you have to... I think for that the technology can help. But it again starts with a good design. And for that we shouldn't give the wizkits. Because we say, yeah, we can crunch data and make you...
01:04:31
Speaker
or optionalize the order of the words you learned for vocabulary. That's not the experience. Just to add to what you just said, when it comes to numbers, there was this, I also don't remember who did this, but I think it was a team of artists or just one artist.
01:04:51
Speaker
They drew on the beach in France at the Normandy, the amount of people that died that day, they drew them on the beach. And it was, you can look this up on Google or Google images, you will find this picture very quickly.
01:05:16
Speaker
It's crazy. It's really, you see this and you just, you have to pause. I just could say anything for like quite some time. That's, that's how confronting this is because it's, yeah, we're all very bad at just imagining these numbers. Um, but yeah, so I encourage everyone to just look at that as well. And then you, then you experience immediately how bad you are at imagining these numbers.
01:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, in that sense, imagining experience where you were and dare yourself. And I think that's actually what the education should be largely about. And I think, okay, what will be the, I think I can make many lessons now, and I think that it will cost a lot more time.
01:06:08
Speaker
per individual thing you want to learn but that single thing and all the implications of that single thing you learn and how it generalizes and how it relates to other things and also how it influences the person itself
01:06:25
Speaker
All those aspects will be far bigger and deeper and more long lasting than all those single small facts we now bump into your mind and quickly forget. Plus, I mean, we know from research that if you pump these facts and you tie them together with the emotional experiences, they're also longer lasting. Yeah, big time. Big time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is, yeah.
01:06:53
Speaker
Okay, coming back to the AI question, I mean, I totally agree with you. And here's the follow-up question that I have is, do you think, and you kind of answered this already, so don't worry, there's a follow-up on this one as well, but do you think technology in general has become an excuse for bad learning experiences? Hmm.
01:07:21
Speaker
I think I'm not sure excuse will be the right word.
01:07:25
Speaker
I think what for me stands out in many cases also if I interact with teachers, we're all doing a great job and trying to do a great job. They're often not educated to be designed. I think also to apply technology in a good way, but actually to apply any learning tool in a good way and build it into a system, technology and social aspects and the environment and everything.
01:07:52
Speaker
You first need to design, and in many cases, technology offers seemingly easy solutions. Same is true, for example, for serious games. Serious games basically appear to offer a kind of, here you have the packets, you just run the game and students will magically learn. And it differs a bit between games and setups, but there are some review papers that show that
01:08:18
Speaker
In many cases, the effect of games mostly depends on how it is introduced and how it's discussed after the teacher and in the class. And that is basically part of the design. How do you put the game into context and how do you actually employ it for the learning goals you actually have?
01:08:38
Speaker
So in that sense, I think the ease of the apparent ease of technology is misleading and that leads to bad design and maybe an excuse for bad teaching.
01:08:49
Speaker
Yeah, because so the reason I'm asking this is I have seen, I have experienced it as an excuse. I don't know if it's an intentional one, but as more like, and I don't even talk about AI, I just mean the simple fact that now you have, let's just start with the change in way you can communicate with students, which can even introduce more distance rather than reduce it.
01:09:18
Speaker
I have received WhatsApp messages from students where I thought, okay, this goes a little far. I mean, this is my phone number. We need to have some boundaries. But for example,
01:09:33
Speaker
I have an science community I think suffers from this as well. Just by thinking, oh, I made the content available, you can download it on whatever teaching platform university or school is using. Ergo, you should know the material. You should have understood it, et cetera, et cetera. You know, I've seen this happening a lot and when
01:10:00
Speaker
I mean, I still remember the time when there was no internet or these types of systems when I went to school, and then this type of an excuse was not possible for a teacher to give. And I've seen this now, having been a teacher myself, I have seen many use it. I'm not saying it's necessarily because these are bad teachers, but I think it has to do with
01:10:30
Speaker
spending is being cut so much that teachers are just on the brink of collapse. Not even overload. They are overloaded for years. Collapse. Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think in addition to that, or maybe that's a different way of phrasing what you said. Many teachers
01:11:00
Speaker
basically mostly think about instructional design. And I think that's for sure true in university where we all far too cognitive and far too geared towards content, not thinking about the experience. And the same is true for the
01:11:17
Speaker
the management higher up or the computer people who select the digital systems we use or design them, actually. It's geared to being practical to convey content, not to build experiences. And each time I try to build an experience in our LMS, I turn away totally frustrated. It's not doable. It's all geared to being functional, not to give you the feeling of a journey or give you high meaning or anything. Function.
01:11:48
Speaker
So in that sense, there's a pressure from top down to use fancy tools because, man, that looks good for the outside world and you can check another box. Yes. Happens a lot. Yeah, happens a lot. Yeah, which is strongly geared towards being functional.
01:12:08
Speaker
And teachers who have a focus on instructional design, not less caring about experiences, which is also a different almost, it is a discipline in itself. It's quite hard to build experiences. And then indeed, you're totally right. It costs time, quite a bit of time.
01:12:31
Speaker
And that's also an experience in itself to build up. And yeah, if you press it for time, then it's not the first thing on your mind. Well, in many cases, if you actually, the lecture I just told you about was pretty light on prep. It was, yeah, I've quickly found the videos, I quickly made those questions. And I think it was one of my more efficient lectures. And many of my working groups are also pretty light on prep.
01:12:59
Speaker
because many of the things I designed come from the social interactions between the students. So it's also partly just a different mindset.
01:13:07
Speaker
But where do you think now, given the times we're in, with talking of distance, now the social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, where do you think now the link with technology, in this case then being online courses or these video chats, can open a door into maybe approaching it differently?
01:13:37
Speaker
Or maybe being a slippery slope into doing the same thing, focusing on content and just using technology again as a crutch to bridge until the next collapse comes. And this collapse, I don't mean necessarily a pandemic, but just the next collapse in personalization or personal contact or whatever it is. Yeah.
01:14:06
Speaker
what I now see happening at our university and I think also elsewhere. So I basically everywhere. This is a big boost to all distance education. And in some cases, I think in many cases, it actually can work out really well. Just to give an example, I
01:14:26
Speaker
I'm not sure where I take this example, but okay. Basically, the difference between getting a course taught by a teacher standing in front of her room with, I don't know, a lecture hall with 150 or even more students, or actually, which is actually interactive, because you can actually talk with the teacher and everything, but it's with many students. First is having a video of that same person, but then just as close as we
01:14:53
Speaker
And students often say that they find the second far more personal.
01:14:57
Speaker
because they see a face and they see it from up close. While you don't have the interaction. So in that sense, you can do many positive things now. And I did it before the COVID. That's interesting. Yeah, but I added for a few working groups where actually, instead of telling my TAs, hey, you should explain the meaning of this working group and what they're going to do in this in this way, I said, I'll send you a video and you can just play the video and I'll explain this meaning. And I got back from a few of the mentors.
01:15:25
Speaker
they said that the students really loved it because they felt that I took the time to record this video. So I kind of made them feel that they met her. And I, yeah, it felt a bit like I was in the meeting. And that's also if you, and so in that sense, digitally, you can sometimes do more than you think. Well, that's interesting. That's super cool. Yeah, if you think beyond the
01:15:51
Speaker
The content is the same. I could also just make this into an announcement, this type text. Yeah. So I think there can be many positive things, but I think one big discussion point, which is now happening at our university and probably also, and for sure in the Netherlands also, probably also the other places. One big thing is the testing. Because doing tests, the entire proving,
01:16:21
Speaker
Basically, it's based on mistrust. And if I actually now would give you a test, I have hardly any way to, especially not if you don't have classes for hundreds of students, have any way to track whether you're not using your phone in the meantime, not using your book in the meantime, not talking with friends in the meantime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we should, to some extent, if you want to do this well, we have a few options.
01:16:47
Speaker
Or we go totally to the mistrust side and say we're going to use online proctoring systems, basically having a camera on your face all the time. The microphone has to be on while you make the exam. And each time you scratch your nose, the system sounds an alarm. He's doing something he shouldn't be doing. Please check this.
01:17:11
Speaker
And you basically have observers who try to check the webcams and you try to make sure everyone does what they do. That's one side. I've been asked about this, by the way. Okay. Yay. Oh, okay. That's interesting. That's one side that our university is now also looking at. I think it's crazy.
01:17:32
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Now, one thing we said, and we're now writing a text about internally for the university, we are teaching a learning center said, let's have this discussion. Shouldn't we trust our students? And shouldn't we basically, I know one of the university in the Netherlands did that
01:17:49
Speaker
basically ask the students to sign a declaration that they will basically not attempt to plagiarize or anything else. I talked to another colleague the other day and he said, yeah, I taught at Harvard, you basically have an honor code that you just don't do these things. So you can give people an exam to take home and they don't plagiarize or do anything else that you can do. Based on a mutual respect, a mutual trust,
01:18:18
Speaker
And then you're going to do your testing a lot differently. And the third option, which resonates with the second one, the third option is basically design your courses in such a way that the testing is an inherent part of the course itself, and not as summative as one single test at the end. But it's also integrated in a bigger picture. But that requires quite good design. So earlier this week, I
01:18:48
Speaker
One of my colleagues suggested, hey, maybe we should set up exams that are actually linked to an assignment students made themselves. So for example, in my course, students need to write basically scientific paper. And now we're going to set up an exam, which is actually the questions are linked to what they wrote in their exam. So for example, how did you do X in your paper and Y? That's a hard question to plagiarize.
01:19:13
Speaker
Oh, yeah, yeah, certainly. Totally. And it's a really good check for us when they actually understood what they wrote down. So basically, it's a double win on both sides. And sure, we still need to trust them that they are who they are. We ain't going to check whether all the faces are the faces. We ain't going to use webcams. But basically, yeah, it's by using a different design, we can hopefully force them to enforce them. It is indirect control all the way. Encourage them.
01:19:43
Speaker
encourage them to take it, do it fairly. And that's also if you dive into the literature, the question papers will show that.
01:19:54
Speaker
The more, as a teacher, you emphasize grades and the exam and rules and restrictions, etc., the more people plagiarize. And the more you emphasize intrinsic motivation, responsibility, the higher goal, the reason for the course, the less they plagiarize. And in that sense, if we, because of this entire transition, need to build a testing system more on trust,
01:20:24
Speaker
This could have a trickle-down effect or an oil spill effect over the entire setup of the education if we build it on trust. Which would be great. I totally agree with you.
01:20:40
Speaker
When I came to the Netherlands and I had to be in the lectures, I was thinking literally, what the fuck is this? Why are you taking my own responsibility away from me? Because I signed up to study here. It should be my responsibility, my own judgment call if I think I will need this lecture to learn something.
01:21:04
Speaker
Or if I think I don't need this, I already had this, or I read this book by myself. It's a matter of responsibility and allowing the student to have it while you as a teacher trust the student to be able to make that call.
01:21:20
Speaker
And of course, the studying process is then also you being able to make better predictions of you making this call because certainly there were times where I made the call and I made a wrong call. But I definitely learned from this and I made sure I caught up or I made sure to then not go to other classes.
01:21:43
Speaker
But when I was teaching and my first question was, do the students really have to come to all the courses they have to have to? Yes, they have to have to. Why? Because they have to have to. Okay, yeah. And then I had to make a student list and stuff like this. So for me, it starts already there. It starts already there because that's part of the experience as well. And talking about online courses,
01:22:14
Speaker
I did a lot of online courses. And of course, for me, I did them for the, let's call it, I knew my why. I knew the higher purpose of what I wanted to get out of this. But it was tangled in with, it had to matter to me as well, which then is also the own responsibility and the trust relationship. Because in the online course, nobody cares if you watch the video or not.
01:22:40
Speaker
It's up to me. And when it comes to the testing, it was also an honors code, but there the code was that this, I thought this was quite interesting. You could retake the test as much as you wanted, but the questions changed each time.
01:22:59
Speaker
So they were literally geared towards you should understand these concepts and not just have learned things by heart. And I thought that was great. And all of this in combination with each other, I thought is unbeatable.
01:23:15
Speaker
You don't need to hire all these, let's just call them teaching police and forces to see if you're cheating because I think it's a fool's errand to go down that road. It's dumb.
01:23:31
Speaker
Yeah, it is a bit tricky though that many of those online courses have a dropout rate that goes through the room. It of course works for people like, especially people like you. It works like a charm. But I think that's part of us.
01:23:50
Speaker
No, you're right. You're right. It's in here. It shouldn't be seen. You're totally right. They have a very high dropout rate, but a lot of them are also literally geared towards. Just deliver the content and that's it. No, no, there's no, there's no emphasis or adjustment to the medium that has changed.
01:24:15
Speaker
And then, I mean, yeah, it's like me trying to describe a picture in a podcast. It's like, it's not a smart way to do it. And I think the most important thing with life teaching can do better, but we often neglect, is again, the sense of community, because I think that's the thing that gets you through.
01:24:40
Speaker
Um, okay. That comparison, but, um, as we were talking about normally the, uh, the earlier, um, where is this from?
01:24:52
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know the show where this fact comes from. But, oh, I think this comes from a book. It's only a book is only available in Dutch. But the most people are good people. And he refers to... I strongly have to disagree with him, but I know the book. But no, please continue.
01:25:15
Speaker
I strongly agree with him with capitals, really strongly with their capital. So take a recommendation from my side. Oh, wait, wait. Doge means are good people. It doesn't mean they are submissive. No, they are good people. Oh, oops.
01:25:35
Speaker
Fair enough. Fair enough. It's also not a word that we often use. So, most people are good people. That's the meaning. Yeah, okay. Now, with that, I can agree. Sorry. Okay. No problem. So, but he said that during the Second World War, the Allies, the English and Americans, tried to convince many Germans to basically quit the war with many propaganda and many pamphlets, etc.
01:26:04
Speaker
And afterwards, the scientists basically checked, hey, what was the impact of all these campaigns? And why did this work and then this work? It basically didn't work. And what the response was from the German soldiers, my friends.
01:26:27
Speaker
And that's what the German army did really well. They basically built strong front ties. And that's also what you, as I said, it's not the best comparison ever. But in essence, you want to build this sense of community and that your method to the bigger group in your education, online, which is hard, or in real life, it's a bit easier. But not if we basically treat the education system as
01:26:55
Speaker
We're only focused on content. We're focused last year on individuals and we don't think about the bigger picture and the connection between people. And another thing is making things obligatory. If anything makes teachers
01:27:10
Speaker
lazy, that is making things obligatory. Because they don't have to try to make it interesting anymore. You don't have to make any propaganda for your course anymore. You just have to do your little trick. And the same is true with basically a lot of aspects of tech. In that way, as a teacher, basically your job only almost automatically reduces to
01:27:34
Speaker
Just bring the content because it's a clear and go you don't have to do anything fancy there you don't think about any design or anything. Simple they have to go to the court to the to the lectures or the meetings and they have to make an exam at the end you're done so yeah making things obligatory is one of the worst things you can do for both teachers as students in my opinion.
01:27:59
Speaker
Yeah. No, I agree with you. It's, uh, uh, so many discussions with former colleagues. It's, uh, yeah. Um, dude, I just have a few more questions if you have the time. Yeah, sure. Yeah. It's a quarter to 10. And quite, I expect quite a few still, but we don't have to go through them all because I'm sure this is not the last time we got to have a conversation.
01:28:28
Speaker
That is good. That's good. But okay. You know,
01:28:35
Speaker
I've been wondering about this for a very long time, and it's principles from psychology that are known for decades. I'm not sure if I can say century by now, but for a very long time that we know of, let's just call it attention span insights, that we know how those things work. We know principles of memory,
01:29:04
Speaker
We know those things. Why aren't any of these principles utilized in designing a learning experience at all, I must even say? That's a good question. That's pretty hard to answer, I must say. One thing is the big divide between different fields.
01:29:29
Speaker
and especially the big divide between the more fundamental sciences because quite a few of those things you mentioned actually come from cognitive science originally and partly from education science but for large part from cognitive science and basically the the gap to educational practice is in essence really big. But even those courses that's I mean even even the teachers that know these things don't take them into account
01:29:57
Speaker
Yeah, but I think that's a really human aspect. Okay, what I always have as someone who's a really bad presenter, I always ask myself,
01:30:06
Speaker
Okay, if you would be in the audience now, would you actually like this? Or do you just not implement the things? Basically, are you aware of your own lack of skill here? Or basically, do you have a totally different taste than me? Or what happens here? And I think in many cases, it's easy to know something, it's a lot harder to apply. It's actually, in essence, the flip side of experience. Yeah.
01:30:35
Speaker
Yes, I don't think that's any different here. Another big aspect, I think, is I was talking to a teacher training earlier today, and she said, at least in the Netherlands, there's not really a training for teacher trainers. So yeah, you also run in a bit into, okay, where does it stop? But
01:31:00
Speaker
But so in that sense, you just might miss a lot of that content and not arriving at the right place in the right form. Thirdly, what I can, I don't know. So yeah, as I said, I don't know the answer to this question. I do totally agree to this statement. Another aspect might actually be that we are now pretty used to all knowledge being everywhere and always accessible.
01:31:28
Speaker
That's not that long. Yeah, that's not long at all. That's pretty recent. That's far more recent than many of those findings.
Resistance to Change and Educational Practice
01:31:36
Speaker
And then if you have such a big system like the education system with many
01:31:43
Speaker
individual schools, but also individual teachers who have largely their own responsibility, a bit like academia, to set up their courses. And you have many, especially now that's not surrounded elsewhere, many big publishers that control a lot of big part dedication. Many of those, it's just an extremely hard to change system, extremely hard to change, especially with the limited time and limited budgets.
01:32:08
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a tricky one. It's mind-boggling, I agree. Yeah, I think something we should... Yeah, maybe it's because there's just so little time that...
01:32:24
Speaker
Teachers just can't really, you know, it's, it's, it's easy to go with the flow then try to push the mountain. And if you, I just remember when I wanted to change something very little, I would even say in minutia, they were like, no, you cannot do this. Why not? No, you cannot do this because then it's not.
01:32:44
Speaker
unified anymore with what all the others are doing. And I was like, okay. And yeah, there you go. Yeah. But there's also another unexpected hindrance for James here. And that's actually the students themselves. I had it once when we, again, when we were making the see the ultimate reality game for secondary schools. Sure. The design was far from perfect, but I think there were some really nice things in there.
01:33:12
Speaker
But the students, it was actually geared towards teaching entrepreneurship to secondary school students. The students got a lot of personal responsibility. And the teachers had to give quite some freedom and responsibility to the students. And from both sides, this was new. But it were in the end, the students themselves who were the first to ask, Can we please get a bit more structure? We're not used to that. And the entire
01:33:42
Speaker
what is normal and what is normal in other courses, what is normal in the earlier school system you did or any other system you were in, that tracks everything back to the state school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's state school bias, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's extremely hard in the education system for any single teacher to change. And I think at least in the Netherlands,
01:34:06
Speaker
The schools that actually went through a big transformation and are now basically having different systems and having a big impact on the students and also on the education system as a whole, I hope, are often led by visionary managers who basically say, okay, we're going to do this with all of us. And then it's possible that any individual almost is close to impossible. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Then one of my last questions.
01:34:35
Speaker
Actually, one effect actually I would say that should be used more, but it goes a bit counts to what I said earlier, is retrieval practice. We've known for ages that actually are quite a long time, ages a bit long, but that testing is the most effective way of learning. So that is actually a reason to do more tests, not sure. You should make sure that you have
01:35:03
Speaker
An educational design can be tested something else. It actually requires people to retrieve the knowledge they have because that's the way they learn. But that's also hardly applied.
01:35:14
Speaker
That's true. You actually went with answering one of my final questions, which was which principles can we use to make things better? No, I think it's the retrieval, certainly. I think that's one part of the memory principles that we know.
01:35:36
Speaker
I think attention span is one thing. I think changing up the type of input that's given like having a very monotonous voice and talking like this for two hours straight
01:35:52
Speaker
Yeah, no way, no way. Even even the most skilled person who can his super focus is going to pass out. It's, it's, it's, and I think a lot of teachers are not trained in those disciplines.
Creative and Diverse Teaching Methods
01:36:07
Speaker
And I'm not saying you need to be in a clown in front of the classroom, you don't have to be that. But
01:36:17
Speaker
There are certain, I think certain principles of engaging that are very well known and they can be used to make things nicer when it comes to the content delivery of the content, the design to actually have as we started out.
01:36:37
Speaker
think about how can we create an experience first and have the rest flow into that rather than how can we fit in as much information as possible into 60 minutes. It's not that way. No, I think for that,
01:37:02
Speaker
The fact that design schools are so distinct from other schools and universities is actually because it's the kind of design thinking or thinking of an entire system and all the aspects of it and how those different aspects interact to build a single experience that builds engagement.
01:37:29
Speaker
That's why that's not what we, for example, as a scientist, we have the tendency to tear stuff apart and only look at the single part. So also, there's the single phenomenon, like retrieval practice, or attention span, all those things are bits and pieces, which together should build a system. And none of our scientific studies can show how those things interact if you actually put them all together in a system. Because for that, it hasn't too hard to complex.
01:37:58
Speaker
Then we indeed, which is basically designing stuff and seeing how it works and measuring kind of the impact, which doesn't tell us much about the single aspect, which we are used to in our experimental kind of research. But let's show in practice how things interact in the bigger system and basically those things.
01:38:18
Speaker
The scientists should think about, okay, these should be the ingredients. And then the designers should come along and, okay, let's try to package these ingredients with a big design sauce and see what happens if we put it into practice. And probably quite a few of those aspects will actually fail in practice or they will cancel each other out or anything. But we should think about the bigger picture. Yeah, and we should definitely try it.
01:38:44
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's what all those learning experience designers now around the world are trying to do. And yet, the awesome thing about that community is that it's so, it's so diverse in backgrounds. There's so many basically that teaches there, but also designers there and artists and neuroscientists and computer scientists, a lot of many people come together there to basically try to think, okay, what if we bring our minds together?
01:39:11
Speaker
what kind of experiences could we build, and what would be the impact, and how can we build lasting impact. And not only think about, basically, not think like a scientist or an engineer, only think about the single parts, but think about how it feels. I'm not sure I should say that too often to my colleagues at university, thinking about things, how things feel, it's too squishy.
01:39:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's why you say it towards the end with the context of everything you said before, then it's not so squishy anymore. Yeah, no, it's true. It's true. I hope. So you've also mentioned quite a few resources. I'm going to put all of those into the show notes as well. That would be, yeah, I think that's going to be super interesting for the listeners that want to learn some more.
01:40:05
Speaker
Cool. It's fine. Frank, man, this was great. I could go out for hours and hours. I still have more questions, but, but I think this is, this is, this is good for the first part. Yeah. I think this has been long enough for the listeners. Sorry. No, you don't need to apologize,
Conclusion and Contact Information
01:40:27
Speaker
man. Do you, um, if people want to find you, where can they, where, how can they reach you?
01:40:34
Speaker
That's a good one. That's the kind of thing I never have time for because I'm also a teacher. A good one. They can find me on LinkedIn, so let's put that also in the notes. I'll put that in there, yeah. And they can also find me on Twitter, on the website of the university, and you can also put those in notes. I know that active on Twitter, it's something with this tool. Not yet.
01:40:56
Speaker
I know maybe now actually being at home the entire day with a one and a half year old, I might sometimes tweet something because I don't see any people, but we'll see. But happy to talk about these topics and happy to help people along.
01:41:12
Speaker
and have discussions about how we can help our youngsters and also other people actually, because we should learn our entire lives, help them hopefully transform the education system, because it's such a big aspect of our lives. That's why I said that what if university, what if school, what is it about improving, what is improving ourselves? What if life was about improving ourselves, what is improving ourselves? And if we can together make it happen, that would be awesome.
01:41:37
Speaker
I totally agree. And this is a really good note to end with. Frank again, thank you so much. Thanks a lot. It was cool. To everyone listening, you have now a great evening or a great day.
01:41:54
Speaker
Hey everyone, just one more thing before you go. I hope you enjoyed the show and to stay up to date with future episodes and extra content, you can sign up to the blog and you'll get an email every Friday that provides some fun before you head off for the weekend. Don't worry, it'll be a short email where I share cool things that I have found or what I've been up to. If you want to receive that, just go to ajmal.com. A-D-J-M-A-L dot com. And you can sign up right there. I hope you enjoy.