00:24.02

Kathleen Sestak

Thank you for joining our podcast - Tech in EdTech. So today I am joined by Christine Looser, she's the Senior Director of Solution Design, Minerva Project.

00:32.61

Christine Looser

Thanks, Kathy. It's really wonderful to get a chance to speak with you.

00:36.02

Kathleen Sestak

All right. So, Christine, can you share your journey from neuroscience and academia to leading the curriculum development at Minerva?

00:55.03

Christine Looser

Yeah, I'd love to. So I was a very traditional academic and went straight from my undergrad degree to PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I did a postdoc at Harvard Business School and taught in the Harvard Psych Department for a year. Then I met some, as I will say, wonderfully endearing crazy people who were going to reinvent liberal arts education and really think about how to build a new university from the ground up. And that was 10 years ago, and I've been there ever since.

01:24.47

Kathleen Sestak

Wow. Wow. So that leads me to my next question of what makes Minerva's approach to higher education distinct from traditional universities?

01:35.80

Christine Looser

The thing that really captured my attention at the beginning was that there was an understanding that higher ed was at a point in time where it wasn't in line with the way that the world operated anymore. It has gotten very siloed. It has gotten very gig-economy at most universities. Faculty have a lot of academic freedom, which is great for the kinds of research and teaching that they want to do. But it means that there's less of a coherent model of an institution working together towards student success. So as a cognitive neuroscientist, one of my passions is helping people learn the way that the brain learns. And we often don't teach that way at all. If you knew everything about the way that the brain learned and said, hey, let's just do the opposite. That's what a classroom would look like in a lot of cases where there's someone standing at the front telling you information and expecting you to memorize it and regurgitate it later.

And what drew me to Minerva was this idea that we want to give people practice with skills that will help them do stuff outside of the classroom. The classroom is only a vehicle for making sure that people can contribute to the world.

02:44.92

Kathleen Sestak

Can you give me an example of what you mean by that?

02:47.64

Christine Looser

Yeah, I think that if you look at college mission statements, they're all about student centricity, but that's not really at the center of their actions. They say things like we want to create critical thinkers or we want to create creative thinkers. And then you say, where do you do that in the curriculum? Like, well, there's a bunch of distribution requirements, and that teaches them to think across fields. And how do you make sure they get those skills? And they say, oh, well, they learn a lot of content knowledge. Like, how do you get that? Like, well, a person at the front of the classroom usually lectures at them and then there's an exam at the end to show that they know the stuff. And we really wanted to flip that on its head. We wanted to be very intentional about the specific frameworks, heuristics, and skills that students should acquire down to a granular level. Like critical thinking is a really big aim. We wanted to be much more specific. We want to say an aspect of critical thinking is making good decisions. And to make good decisions, you need to know how to create a decision tree. And so we can point at the curriculum and say, in this particular class session, we worked on decision trees. And then we can give people assignments where they have to go and apply that. So when they're out in the unstructured world, they have practice with the actual skill and they can use it to accomplish goals, not just that I've set as somebody who designed an assignment, but that students can set for themselves out in the real world.

04:13.58

Kathleen Sestak

Fascinating. I love this. So Minerva is known for innovative principles in education programs and partnerships. Can you walk us through Minerva's four innovation principles for designing new programs? And how do these principles translate into actual steps for other institutions looking to innovate?

04:36.35

Christine Looser

Yeah, I think before I jump there, I want to make sure that I make a distinction between Minerva University and Minerva Project. And so Minerva Project is the big kind of umbrella organization. And the first thing we did was build a university from scratch. It's got a really unique learning model and it's accompanied by a unique experiential model. Students spend the first semester in San Francisco at Minerva University and then they all pick up together as a cohort and they move to Taipei. And then in the second year, they live in Seoul and Hyderabad, the third year in Berlin and Buenos Aires, the fourth year in London, and back to San Francisco to graduate.

05:12.50

Kathleen Sestak

I want to be in this program.

05:13.84

Christine Looser

When I heard about it, this as an idea. I might be too old to go, but maybe they'll let me teach.

05:20.27

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Maybe they're looking for new instructors.

05:25.58

Christine Looser

And I think that that serves two purposes. The first is that liberal arts education was really meant to make people good citizens. And in 20 whatever, that means being a global citizen. And that goes beyond just sort of reading great books on a hill behind a gate. It's really a privilege that the world exists in such a way that we can go out and live in it. So students get this crazy global rotation, and it's really about understanding what it means to be a global citizen.

05:55.99

Christine Looser

And it's attached to our North Star for skill-based learning because skills are only acquired in a really effective way when you see how they're useful across contexts. So when we talk about those skills that are in the curriculum, one of the important things is that they are durable and transferable. We want students to learn things that we think will improve all of the humans, no matter what humans grow up to do because we can't predict what jobs will exist.

And to train people to think in that flexible, agile way, you have to show them why these skills are useful, no matter what context they're in. So the classroom time is focused on how the skills come to life across different disciplines. I think a good example, one of my favorites is audience awareness. Everyone knows you should take your audience's perspective, but to turn that into a habit in a muscle, you can practice using that, whether you're writing a grant application or whether you're making a marketing plan, or whether you are in a communications class thinking about how to pitch to a venture capitalist. So those are the kinds of skills that we ask people to transfer. And the travel aspect is students at Minerva University transferring what it means to be them into all of these different cultural contexts.

07:11.88

Kathleen Sestak

It's really interesting. So there's the Minerva Project and then the Minerva University.

07:18.51

Christine Looser

Yes. And so basically what happened was Minerva University was founded to be a light post for our research and development in terms of saying, Hey, what are the things that will work really well? And what can we do if we were able to start from scratch to really refine our approach to taking evidence-based practices and building them into a curriculum and a student experience? When Minerva University got its own accreditation in 2021, there was sort of an organizational split. The University spun out of the Project and the people who had been there for quite some time had the opportunity to pick if they were going to continue to shepherd the University or if they were going to engage in the partnership side of it. So Minerva Project, starting in around 2020, started to partner with other institutions to take what we learned from building Minerva University combine it with more traditional universities, mission, vision, and values, and really create a bunch of new programs that took what we honed building MU and built things that look incredibly different from it, but have those same core innovation principles.

08:32.62

Kathleen Sestak

Okay, can you give me some examples of your partnerships?

08:35.29

Christine Looser

Yep, sure. One I'm really excited about is with Quinnipiac University. We are helping them redesign their nursing program. And the beauty of that is we are not experts in nursing and health education. We are experts in curriculum, pedagogy, and student experience. So there's no way we could have built this program without them. And our job was to take the subject matter experts and help them think outside of the box about how they could re-envision their curriculum. It came from a place of new accreditation requirements, and I think what we'll see is a lot of nursing programs who say, okay, we have to be more competency-based. We're going to teach exactly the same way we've taught. We're going to teach exactly the same classes we've taught in the past. We're going to assess in the same way. We're just going to say that if you pass this class and this competency is attached to it, we'll say students have acquired the competency.

But the leadership at Quinnipiac said this is actually a mandate to change. And we should go back to the drawing board. We can rethink the structure of our classes. We can rethink the content of our classes. And so we really facilitated the design process for them to think through how to take these accreditation competencies at a really granular level and build a curriculum bespoke for the kinds of outcomes that they expect students to see.

09:57.71

Kathleen Sestak

That is just fascinating and sounds like a tremendous amount of work.

10:02.67

Christine

It's not easy. It is fun and it is engaging, but it does take time. And it's not at the level of the curriculum. It's really at the level of change management because at its core, and I can circle back to those innovation principles, we're trying to get students and faculty to change their mental model for how a curriculum can look.

10:13.43

Kathleen Sestak

Right.

10:25.74

Christine Looser

Because if we know anything about brains, we know that they are cognitive misers and they like the path of least resistance. So we're really influenced by the status quo bias. And when we partner with other institutions, we see our job is helping them shake out of that kind of being an agitator.

We know that they know so much about what they're teaching and how to bring it to life for students that our job is just kind of to pick that up and show it to them from different angles with the influence of our innovation principles.

10:56.55

Kathleen Sestak

I can definitely see how impactful this work can be.

11:03.08

Christine Looser

Thank you.

11:05.13

Kathleen Sestak

So, with the partnership with Quinnipiac, they chose the nursing program. Do you have other examples and other disciplines that you've worked with? And I really, I have a question around just, with your background in how the brain works, like what's the, you know, everybody talks with the low hanging fruit. Like what's the, what's one simple best practice that you could put into place as an educator?

11:30.73

Christine Looser

Oh

11:33.93

Kathleen Sestak

To help students to help students learn more effectively.

11:39.33

Christine Looser

The lowest hanging fruit for that and the one that's most overlooked is reflection. And I think that there's a growing awareness that active learning is the right thing to do.

And I think we know that when students get involved in something, that they remember it better, they're able to apply it more effectively. But there's a field of research about experiential learning. The Kolb cycle has people go through something, and the end of it's always reflection. And for me, I think that that's missing in a lot of classrooms, even active learning ones, which is just pausing at the end of a session and saying, hey, what are you taking away from this? How can you use this outside of the classroom? It can be really transformative for students to take ideas with them when they leave a classroom, not just keep the classroom as this place where I learn some stuff and then I go out in the world and learn different stuff. I want more integration.

12:42.22

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah. And I'm just, I think that's such an important point and, given our current environment today where, you know, kids are on their phones or on their devices. There's just a tremendous amount of distraction and you see that it could be having this fabulous conversation. If they're, I don't know, psychology, they walk out of that classroom and they start talking about, you know, anything else, but besides what was covered in that class and during that discussion or that interaction in that classroom. And then, how do they, at what point do they allow themselves time to reflect on what they've learned?

13:21.86

Christine Looser

It's a really great question, and it's hard to answer for everyone. But what I love about having faculty think about what those questions could be to help those students reflect, they also have to reflect on their own teaching practices. They have to say, wait, what is the right answer? What did I tell these students that's going to go out and serve them in the real world? And maybe a psychology class is pretty straightforward. Imagine it's about decision-making. You can see an application there. But even things that feel a little bit further away, computer coding.

Not going to go code when I'm hanging out with my friends necessarily, but there's a granular skill in coding well. Maybe we'll call it algorithmic thinking. It's like, if this, then that. Here's a loop that I can recognize. I want to accomplish this goal, so I'm going to backward plan from it. And that approach, I think we often see ourselves as experts, but it's not foregrounded for students so they don't get the benefit of wisdom that we have as adults where we've seen these things in lots of different contexts over time. And my goal at Minerva is to help faculty highlight that for students so that there is this dissolution of the idea that we only learn in classrooms.

14:40.11

Kathleen Sestak

I think that's a really critical point. As a subject matter expert, I've been in my field for a long time. You get comfortable in being the expert. And for somebody to challenge that or question that, how do you…you have to be open to accepting that, right? That feedback, that input to become even better in your space, in what you do. So I'd really appreciate that differentiation on reflection.

15:16.64

Christine Looser

That's a really beautiful insight. And I think one of the things that it triggered in my mind as I was listening to explain it is that all of the things that we know as experts or why we're invited to teach a class or manage people or give a talk. And I think that makes us feel like our job is to show how expert we are.

15:39.35

Christine Looser

But we really need to meet students where they're at one. And two, we need to remember that giving them content and oftentimes it comes through a fire hose because we're so expert is not the purpose. The purpose is not to give them information, it's to help them understand things. And they can't do that if we've oversaturated them. So I always try to get people to distill ruthlessly when they're thinking about the learning outcomes that they actually want students to achieve. What are the things you want them to be able to do outside of the classroom? And that can really help faculty think through, oh, am I trying to do too much? And it's not that we're trying to make classes easier, we're trying to make them more effective. Focus on really hard things, but focus on the distillation of the most important hard things.

16:31.85

Kathleen Sestak

Absolutely. I love this conversation. I was a liberal arts major, so you had me at liberal arts.

16:37.60

Christine Looser

I'm having a great time too.

16:42.81

Kathleen Sestak

We were talking before we kind of went off of this tangent about how Minerva has evolved since the accreditation and working in partnership with other institutions. You had mentioned Quinnipiac. Can you expand on some others?

16:58.72

Christine

Yeah, we have a couple of different partnerships all around the world. There are probably 25 at this point that are active right now. We're working on a general studies program with the University of Tokyo that's really exciting in terms of a liberal arts core. The goal is to give people those durable, transferable skills in a really active environment and then scaffold them throughout their upper-level courses. The University of Miami was an interesting example. We started from scratch with a group of innovation fellows. These were faculty members who were chosen explicitly to shepherd change into Miami's new century. And we built a degree program that's three years long in innovation, technology, and design. And we designed that with these faculty members in about six weeks. Took a little bit longer than that to get it through Faculty Senate, but we'll have our first graduates from that class this May. And I'm just so excited to see what they'll do because the curriculum is very hands-on. It's practical in terms of being really workforce-integrated.

So from the very first day, they have an employer partner who is in this class with them saying, hey, here's a challenge and you're going to take these classes and you're going to learn these skills. But I want you to think about how they apply to this particular problem. So students graduate with a lot of practice and a lot of portfolio building. So then when they interview for jobs, they can say, oh, I've seen this before. This is like the time I worked on this project. And I think that's…

18:33.28

Kathleen Sestak

Practical, right? Like it's very practical.

18:35.98

Christine Looser

Say it again. Yes, I think practical is a tricky word for me because I don't think we should design education to train workforce cogs.

But I do think we have to be really honest that there are durable, transferable skills that help people get stuff done in the world. And the university should own that. It shouldn't just be narrowly focused on an esoteric area of neuroscience, no matter how much I personally love the brain. I'm not training neuroscientists when I'm working with undergraduates who are in degree programs. I'm trying to train people who are going to go out and accomplish stuff in the world that I can't even predict.

19:21.06

Kathleen Sestak

I love what you're doing at the University of Miami. I just see such relevancy as you know needs with a consistently changing environment um around just...we define the work that we do in the K-20+W, right?

19:46.24

Christine Looser

Yep

19:46.74

Kathleen Sestak

So…

19:47.64

Christine

K to Gray.

19:47.66

Kathleen Sestak

But really focused, I think everyone right now is just focused on ensuring that education is giving students - and I use those words really chosen very carefully because anybody can be a student, right? And anybody can be educated at any point - so it's this continuous learning that's going on and the thought that's behind what the Minerva Project is doing in collaboration with the University of Miami. I just, I'm really, I'll be really interested to see how this goes.

20:29.08

Christine Looser

Us too. Early indicators are strong.

20:29.67

Kathleen Sestak

Very exciting, yeah, yeah.

20:31.33

Christine Looser

Minerva University grads are probably our longest-standing group of people that we have “proof points about”, and they're all just doing such fantastic things. There was an article today, a woman who I had at this point years and years ago. She graduated in 2019. She built a company called Seabound with one of her classmates, and they're two young female founders who are doing carbon capture in the shipping industry. And just watching so many people graduate having all of this practice thinking agilely makes the outcomes of those students much higher than you would expect from a traditional institution. So I think the current stats are 12% of Minerva University graduates have raised venture capital to start their own companies.

21:19.98

Kathleen Sestak

Incredible.

21:21.42

Christine Looser

It's much higher than the next closest, which I think is Olin and Stanford, which is down -  Stanford's like 0.5%. And there's a much bigger pool of them and not everybody goes down this entrepreneurial track.

But I think it speaks to the fact that when you give people practice out in the real world, they're eager to make change happen.

21:36.41

Kathleen Sestak

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Those statistics are astounding.

21:46.55

Christine Looser

It's boot camp. It's thinking boot camp.

21:47.63

Kathleen Sestak

Yes.

21:48.47

Christine Looser

This is the thing. And people are like, Oh, well, is it an entrepreneurship program? And I'm like, no, we just built an education system that gives people a sense of agency and empowerment and the skills to back it up.

21:58.47

Kathleen Sestak

And application, right? Like, yeah, yeah, I love that.

22:00.56

Christine Looser

100%.

22:03.34

Kathleen Sestak

So you had talked about it earlier in our conversation about this global classroom that Minerva embraces of going to different cities across the world. So it leads me into the conversation about how does Minerva balances synchronous and asynchronous learning to maximize engagement.

22:24.67

Christine Looser

It's a great question. And one of the things that's really unique about Minerva University, and I think is a potential opportunity in partnerships, but it comes out to play in different ways, is that students have a travel rotation. So we had to figure out how to solve for the fact that you can move a handful of students around the world somewhat easily. But you're not going to pick up your entire faculty. So sometimes people think that we're sending them to take courses at other universities and just kind of organizing the rotation. But what we actually did was create a synchronous virtual classroom. It was way more unique before everyone went to terrible Zoom school. But it is more high-powered because it was designed not just to be a window, but to be a platform that nudges students and faculty towards active, engaged learning. So as an example, when I press a button and I'm teaching a seminar on the Minerva Forum platform, I can press a button and everybody gets color-coded based on how much they've spoken. And so I know that Kathy is usually really quiet, but hasn't been quiet today. So I'll invite somebody else into the conversation. So I'm getting these analytics about participation and that's really helping me do active learning more effectively. That platform, it's really neat.

23:43.64

Magic EdTech

That's yeah, that's really cool. 

23:47.11

Christine Looser

It's fun to teach on. When I first started, I was like, oh, virtual classes. And it sort of still has a negative connotation. But when it's intentionally designed for bringing a skill-based education to life in an active learning environment and creating moments for frequent formative feedback, it comes to life in a way that my classes at Harvard never did. Because it has an intentionality behind it and it's focused on student contributions rather than me kind of winging it with my lecture and going through it rotely or relying on whoever's going to raise their hand to participate. In Forum, I have a lesson plan that's helping me shape the contributions because it's really intentionally focused on those skills.

24:33.40

Kathleen Sestak

Well, I think that just for the instructor too, that this would just be such a catalyst for inquiry, right? Like you're looking for the input from your students. And so your every lecture is going to be different now as a result of this.

24:51.61

Christine Looser

Yes. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is we'll often get objections that students just won't do it, that they don't want to participate, that they don't want to do homework beforehand. And this is where it gets that balance of synchronous and asynchronous.

When we're designing for an active learning environment, you need to adopt that flipped classroom mindset and have students reflect on something, read something, do something before they come to class so that there's some meat behind the activities that you have them do.

And we'll often get these objections that it would never work in our context. Our students don't want to do that. They don't want to show up together. They don't want to participate. They don't want to have to prepare.

And while I understand that, I also think that, that's kind of a cop-out answer because as educators, our job is to shape that experience for them. And I think it's malpractice that we don't do a good job of teaching people how they learn and explaining why we're asking these things of them. And so if you can change the culture and the onboarding for students to understanding why it's active learning, why it's going to feel like you're not learning as much as you think you are, but you're really going to end up retaining it much better as compared to a lecture where you feel like you learned a lot, but you didn't actually remember any of it.

Those are all of these and important things that you can do in structuring the student experience.

26:19.91

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

26:21.73

Christine Looser

So that you get that adaptation to this new community learning culture. And then students realize that showing up is actually more fun. I'm not bored when I'm sitting here. I'm thinking about stuff and I'm talking to people.

26:33.10

Kathleen Sestak

Well, then you're flexing that muscle while you're in that environment, right? As opposed to cramming for an exam to show what you've learned all semester.

26:42.93

Christine Looser

A hundred percent. And this is where when you show up on the job, no one's waiting for you to take the test.

26:48.04

Kathleen Sestak

Right? Every day. Every day is a test.

26:52.13

Christine Looser

It is just constant learning, constant demonstration, and constant interaction. And I think…

26:57.56

Kathleen Sestak

And constant inquiry.

27:01.15

Christine Looser

It should be. And I think part of the reason we're seeing drama, we'll call it intergenerational drama in the workplace, is that students show up lacking social skills. And there's a lot of reasons for that, maybe increases in technology, maybe COVID. Maybe mental health challenges, but I think if we don't look at the classroom as an opportunity to correct some of that by changing what and how we teach, it's very, very hard to feel like we're doing our jobs well if we're not preparing people to thrive in the world that they'll inherit.

27:35.92

Kathleen Sestak

I totally agree. What can traditional universities learn from a nervous focus on active friction-filled limiting experiences? And it's pretty much back to what you've been talking about during this time.

27:49.02

Christine Looser

Yeah, I love the idea of friction and just as a social scientist. I think that we often try to create products that reduce friction. And I think we've hit a point where we might be making life far too easy and we're seeing some pushback on it. Not everything is about optimization to really engage and get things in your head. Learning should feel uncomfortable. You're changing a mental model that's inside of your head into a new one. You're incorporating new information.

And I think a lot of what we do is not being scared of that and helping other institutions think about a curriculum where faculty and students can embrace the friction that is required for really effective learning.

28:34.19

Kathleen Sestak

Absolutely. So what steps can higher ed leaders take to incorporate experiential and skills-based learning in their programs?

28:44.92

Christine Looser

I think it is a really important question and it gives me a chance to go back to some of the innovation principles that we work with institutions to implement. And really briefly, they are pick your skills language. Be really intentional. Don't stop it. Creative thinking. Break it all the way down into maybe a learning outcome, like break it down. That's important for creative thinking. Root cause analysis is important. And once you have that shared institutional vision for the kinds of skills you want people to have, you can be really intentional about creating experiences for those skills.

That could look like tagging them in experiences that students have outside of the classroom, building assignments around those skills, making sure that when students have a capstone project that they turn in, they're explicitly tagging and highlighting those skills. And really it comes down to having a vision for the kinds of humans you want to create. Backwards designing the skills that they should have, and then backwards designing the experiences and the reflection exercises that will give those students space deliberate practice, applying those skills across contexts.

30:08.53

Kathleen Sestak

Wow.

30:09.59

Christine Looser

That was a lot.

30:09.57

Kathleen Sestak

Yes.

30:11.62

Christine Looser

You're like, where, how can we do it? Like, here's a plan, but it's not easy.

30:17.45

Kathleen Sestak

But I like going, you know, it's going back to Quinnipiac where you're starting with the nursing program or you received Miami, the innovation fellows like you're, you're not looking to tackle the entire university. It’s like you said earlier too, it's just change management, right? Let's start in one program, let's build this new way of thinking, redesign this class, this course, this program. Then others are gonna see, others from the university are gonna be seeing, will see the outcomes of this new model and they'll begin to embrace it.

30:59.88

Christine Looser

I think it's really important to have proof points. The things we see where sometimes institutions will stumble with innovation, and this isn't just in higher ed, it's in a lot of industries, is that they want to innovate on the margins.

31:02.48

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

31:14.71

Christine Looser

And that's often where innovation goes to die. It can be a pilot and it can be a proof point, but if it is not given the clout by leadership to say we're doing this because we think it's important and we're going to do it holistically. Innovation tends to fizzle out if it's too weird and too different from the core of the institution, which is why a lot of what we work on with institutions up front is like, who are you? How are you distinctive? What is your vision for what you're trying to accomplish in the world?

And bring that to life in terms of kind of the ground rules for developing a new program or reformulating an existing one. But the model should be institution-wide. And then the initial way to demonstrate proof points is to pick one program before you scale it out to an entire institution. So I think it's a yes and to what you just said. Yes, you want to show a fast proof point in a particular program, but it really needs to not just be one that will be so weird and different than the rest of the institution that other people won't be able to see how they could do it too.

32:28.79

Kathleen Sestak

Totally agree. I wanted to move on to tackling some of today's higher education challenges and advice that you would have for leaders in the higher ed space. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see facing higher ed institutions today and how can they be addressed? This is a big question that we could probably spend the next three years tackling. But I would love to hear your perspective.

32:58.08

Christine Looser

I think I can be concise. I will change it to what I think the biggest challenge ‘full stop’ is.

33:00.40

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

33:04.24

Christine Looser

I think it's the declining faith in the value of higher education because it encompasses a lot of the other challenges, right?

It's that the cost is too high. There's ideological echo chambers. People graduate underemployed, if not unemployed. And so there used to be a sense that college was a thing I did to create opportunity.

And I think we're at a watershed moment where in some cases the emperor has no clothes. People are going in and not coming out better than they would have been had they not gone at all. And there's still plenty of success stories. It is a huge opportunity for economic mobility. People find their passion at universities. They find a way to lead a meaningful life. But I think that that used to be taken for granted and now it's being questioned.

33:57.38

Kathleen Sestak

Wow.

33:59.83

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, I think you've hit on you know just this overall overarching issue facing higher education today.

34:10.48

Christine Looser

It's so sad because I want it to be good. Sometimes I'll tongue in cheek say, like I'm trying to save college because I think it is this really wonderful institution that should be able to embrace lifelong learning.

34:13.81

Magic EdTech

And it is good.

34:21.42

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

34:23.74

Christine Looser

But if we're not being student-centric and we're not being sensitive to the demands of the outside world, I think we've created a lot of silos and it is time intensive and it is expensive.

And that means it should provide value. Not just monetary, but really making people good citizens who can engage in civic discourse, civil discourse.

34:46.42

Kathleen Sestak

And give back.

34:47.74

Christine Looser

And really, that's the focus, right? Minerva's mission sounds cheesy. I probably shouldn't say that on podcasts.

34:56.89

Kathleen Sestak

Say that again.

34:57.82

Christine Looser

It's “Nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world.” But what it means is like, develop skills that will help you do something for people beyond yourself. So I love your focus on giving back.

35:09.76

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

35:12.79

Kathleen Sestak

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree with you. So I think you kind of answered this one, though. But how does Minerva tackle the challenge of evolving organically to better serve students in the 21st century? We touched upon it briefly in that last section. But just can you expand upon that a bit?

35:32.57

Christine Looser

Yeah, and I'll answer it pretty simply and then explain why it's more complex, which is that we were so privileged to get to start from scratch. So many institutions have this weight of the status quo of the way it's always been or this departmental structure or this operating budget. And so we didn't think that everything universities did was bad, but we said, if we didn't have to have them, what would you keep and what would you give away? And I think universities can do that, acknowledging the constraints that they have, but really being more creative. So employer partnerships are huge but don't just send people out to go do a co-op. Talk to the people who are in that experience and say, how are you using these skills that you've learned in the classroom out in the real world? To your point from before, how do we make sure that teachers aren't just experts that are sharing knowledge but are really getting information back from students who are out in the workplace or employer partners who are asking for different kinds of programs?

36:40.89

Kathleen Sestak

Absolutely. How do you see institutions being able to bridge the gap between academic programs and the workforce? And you touched upon that as well. And I think from what I understand, the partnerships that Minerva creates with these additional institutions or you know workforce nursing programs, there's just a natural connection there that seems to be where Minerva is focusing its time in order to properly prepare students for the world.

37:19.16

Christine Looser

What I love about this question is I get to entertain it a lot. And it sometimes comes from this place of stress. Like how can we keep up as a university? Do we need this kind of coder? Do we not need coders? We need to teach prompt engineering. And the world is increasingly complex and changing rapidly. And I have to sit down with people and I have to say, you can't keep up. You really cannot keep up with the changing demands, but you can play a different game. And this is where I think the over-specialization of universities comes back to harm them. Because we've lost that focus on a core educational experience that gives people durable, transferable thinking skills that will help them adapt to the real world once they're there.

You need to make sure that the core of an undergraduate education is giving people those durable transferable skills that are evergreen and then layering in maybe technical certificates or on-the-job training.

But so often people are focused on How do we make sure they have the technical skills at the cost of those broader thinking skills? And then when those technical skills expire, you're left with nothing. Instead of when those technical skills expire, you still have that grounding in these durable transferable skills that will help you communicate well, that will help you think critically, that will help you think creatively, that will help you learn how to do the next thing that is being required of you.

38:46.28

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah. Well, I think what you're describing is training for now, as opposed to trick training for the future. And when you learn these sorts of these critical thinking skills, I was a liberal arts major or an English major, I credit that to my ability to be transformative in my space for you know in longevity. I can look at relevancy right and then figure out where do I fit in this space as opposed to, oh, they don't code anymore, so I can't do that. I have to retrain myself. But a career is a constant retraining, right?

39:34.33

Christine Looser

It totally is. And what I love about your particular example is that it's almost flying in the face of what we're seeing with schools saying like, well, no one's enrolling in humanities program, so let's cut arts or something like that.

39:47.20

Kathleen Sestak 

Yeah.

39:47.98

Christine Looser

And it's devastating because that is where a lot of these soft skills can come out. And I hate that term because it makes people think that they're not important or they're easy when they really are quite difficult, which is why we call them durable and transferable.

But it's also on the responsibility of schools to communicate that to students. Students should be enrolling in these courses because they see their relevance, not fleeing from them because we never explained that it might not help you get your first job, but it will help you get your fifth.

40:19.84

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

40:21.29

Christine Looser

And if we're going to say it's not going to help you get your first job, we also have to then say, and here's what will. So this is how we put it together in a coherent student experience for you.

40:28.27

Kathleen Sestak

And it's a balance. Yeah. I love that. So if you were advising a university looking to overhaul its curriculum, where would you suggest they start?

40:40.12

Christine Looser

You had the answer to this a couple of questions ago, and you said it really has changed management. And I think you have to start with culture before you can touch curricula. Curricula is a reflection of the decisions that universities have made over time, codified into what we say we expect of students. And if you haven't changed the mindset of your faculty to be open and innovative to really saying, how can we create a curriculum that will prepare people?

You're not going to get anywhere with a Gen Ed committee. You're not going to get anywhere with a new program development if people are just trying to do more of what was already there before. So we always advise people to understand what they're trying to accomplish for students, how that's different than what other schools are trying to do, what makes you special and unique.

And then how does each person's contribution to their aspect of the curriculum relate to that big picture for the institution and for individual students? So I think you have to really go back to that culture and that mindset in the people who are developing curriculum and teaching the curriculum to rethink what and how they teach before you can give any advice on how to overhaul it.

41:53.83

Kathleen Sestak

I love the answer. I want to transition into AI in education, into opportunities and risk. I think you have to have not raised your head up the last two years.

42:09.65

Christine Looser

Never heard of it!

42:14.13

Kathleen Sestak

Not talking about AI. So there's a growing trend to integrate AI into education. What are your thoughts on implementation in higher education?

42:23.75

Christine Looser

I think that if we keep our heads in the sand, it is deep malpractice. And if we let people do whatever we want with it, it is also deep malpractice. There's so much potential for AI to help people learn better, but I don't think we leverage it properly. And one of the things that has really struck me is the way we interact with it is almost the way we interact with a professor who we're expecting us to learn things from. We rarely ask people to teach us stuff, in a way that it is effective. And this hearkens back to that idea about friction and active learning. So there's a great study that came out in 20…, I believe it was 2016. And they looked at how much students learned when they sat in a lecture and how much they learned when they did active learning. Not only did they look at what they learned, but they also looked at the perception of learning. And so how much did you think you learned from the lecture? How much did you think you learned from active learning?

And it turns out people learn more from active learning, which is not surprising. But what was surprising was they thought they learned less. Students were like, this was hard. This was uncomfortable. I didn't get anything out of it because they couldn't separate the friction of the experience from the outcomes that they were going to see eventually when they realized they remembered all of this stuff. So the experience felt hard. And then I thought that it was not very good for my learning.

We treat AI the same way we treat a lecture. We think that it gives us really good input if we don't go back and forth with it. And if we spend a lot of time iterating and asking it to ask us questions using it as a thought partner, we actually create more creative solutions. But we actually think that those solutions are not as good as the ones that were generated by people who had very little friction with it. And so the research on how people are using AI for learning mirrors the research on how people are using active learning, where if I'm doing it well, I don't think it's going very well, which is just counterintuitive and fascinating.

It sets us up to make really bad design decisions when we're making products. And it sets us up, I think, as learners to make bad design decisions when we're engaging with it.

44:52.50

Kathleen Sestak

Fascinating. I had a question, but it went on in my head. Oh, I loved your comment about ‘we look at AI the same way we look at teachers for that.’

45:04.55

Christine Looser

Like an oracle.

45:05.50

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah I'd never really thought about it, but you're so right.

45:12.16

Christine Looser

Like you have all the knowledge, please download it into my head immediately.

45:16.24

Kathleen Sestak

Yes, answer all of my questions and then take my test for me.

45:20.41

Christine Looser

And then we have teachers who are looking for AI detection. So are you having teachers who are using AI to detect things that were written with AI?

45:24.22

Kathleen Sestak

Yes.

45:27.85

Christine Looser

Like it should be embraced and be much more transparent and it can be a really effective part of the learning process, but you need students to understand.

45:34.51

Kathleen Sestak

It should be a source. Cite your sources.

45:37.19

Christine Looser

Yeah. It does a much better job now. It just gives me the link and then you can fact-check it really easily.

45:43.00

Kathleen Sestak

That's true. Christine, during our earlier conversation, you mentioned a fascinating study from Stanford that looked at how people collaborated with AI to generate creative ideas. For our listeners who might not be familiar, could you share it with us?

45:58.27

Christine Looser

Yeah, this was an HBR article. And so when I just referenced and didn't, I don't think I actually nailed it very well.

So I'll take one more shot of explaining it, and if that is helpful, I am happy to answer any more questions about it. But really briefly, what they did was they brought people into the lab and they said, we want you to come up with creative ideas.

And it was in the context of a marketing case study and they had to generate all of these ideas for possible products. And then they had third parties rate how creative the ideas were. And what they found was that some ideas were really good and some ideas were less good. And the group that had really good ideas, actually there was a subgroup of them that thought that their ideas were bad. And there was a group of the people who came up with bad ideas who thought those ideas were really quite remarkable.

And it went back to how they interacted with the AI. This is where we're adding friction to the equation. So the ones who came up with good ideas but thought that they were just okay, were the ones who had a difficult time but really engaged. They thought that it was hard to come up with ideas with AI, but they were going back and forth and they were editing and they were revising and they were iterating. And that experience made them think that the product wasn't as good as it actually was.

Whereas people who asked AI for advice and just took it at face value and didn't go through that process of iteration, they conflated the ease of doing that with the effectiveness of their answer. And so you get this really interesting parallel to the active learning stuff. So if I'm using AI as an active learning partner, I generate creative ideas, even though I code them as not being very good. And if I use it kind of as that lecture or Oracle, and I just assume that they had good ideas to begin with, and all I had to do was regurgitate them back to you. Then we see people thinking their ideas are really good, but other people don't see those ideas as very effective.

47:54.71

Kathleen Sestak

Interesting.

47:55.55

Christine Looser

Did that make sense?

47:57.33

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, I'm still kind of, I'm gonna be thinking about that for a little bit, a long time after our conversation, I think it's really…yeah.

48:04.77

Christine Looser

I think the trick is when you go back and forth with a person or an AI tool, it feels like there's friction there. And then I'm slightly less confident that this is a good answer, but it really is because good ideas are a product of iteration.

And if I have no friction, like I'm listening to a teacher tell me things, or I'm just taking AI at face value, I think it's a good answer because I didn't have to work very hard for it, even though it's not actually a great one.

48:37.18

Kathleen Sestak

Got it. I need to find some examples for myself. I know I have. Thank you for that. What advice would you give an institution to institutions looking to integrate AI into their classroom or operations?

48:54.79

Christine Looser

I think there's an important distinction that has to happen, which is are we trying to use AI to teach people other things or are we trying to teach people about AI? Both are important. And I think we, I often see conversations happening where it feels like people are confusing those two things. And so that's the first one. Be really clear about what you mean by integrating AI and figure out what you're using it for.

So many products are coming out now that feel like things which people created because they're cool. And now they're a tool in search of a problem instead of being really intentional about, Oh, I want to create more student engagement. How can I use AI to do that? Or, Oh, I want to reduce attrition. How can I use AI to track engagement so that then we can have early warning signals? I worry a little bit that we're just throwing AI into everything, even where it's not useful. So the advice is just go back to purpose and backward design.

49:58.70

Kathleen Sestak

I think that's really good advice. Just to conclude our conversation around AI in education, what should educators and tech companies keep in mind to use AI intentionally and effectively?

I think that backwards designs is the answer.

50:16.43

Christine Looser

Yeah, start with a problem. It feels so cheesy to say that I teach marketing and branding classes now. And it's the reason we have to keep telling people that is because people keep creating products that are not solving a problem. They're cool and they're interesting, but they're not going to catch on or have the impact that you hope they do if you don't know what their goal is. So start with a problem, work backwards.

50:41.95

Kathleen Sestak

I think that's really good advice. And speaking of advice, as we wrap up our podcast today, just looking for your advice and in your future outlook, clear calls to action about what's your vision for the future of Minerva and how do you hope to continue driving change in global education.

51:02.93

Christine Looser

I think what education needs more of is unique models. And the thing that I really love about Minerva is every time we work with an institution to build a new program or rethink an existing one, or even build institutions from scratch, they all look different. They can share innovation principles. You can say, how do we build an experience around skills? How do we build an experience around active pedagogy? How do we build frequent formative feedback so students have lots of input into how they're developing over time? But with those as a baseline, you can do so many different things. And one of the challenges in higher education is that we've kind of created a copycat machine where we're all using the same criteria for rankings, which means that everyone's trying to look like the schools that have a lot of brand prestige. And what I hope happens is that people are more focused on the unique experience and the value they can get from a particular school rather than saying, well, this is the best one, quote-unquote, “that I got into”. I want learners to be able to say, this is the best school for me. So that's why I'm going there.

52:17.76

Kathleen Sestak

Very good. For those hesitant about change, what's one small step they can take today to modernize their institutions?

52:31.77

Christine Looser

It's a really good question. I think that the step you have to take before you can even think about change is saying, why are we changing?

52:51.65

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah.

52:53.51

Christine Looser

Most people are hesitant to change because they don't want to be changed by the outside world. There's this really lovely quote in a book called The Fifth Discipline, The Art and Science of a Learning Organization, where he quotes one of the people in his workshop, Peter Senge, “And she says, it's not that people don't like change, it's that people don't like being changed.”

And I think that that's really important for institutions that are worried about the changing world. They need to not do it in reaction to, they need to do it because they're trying to proactively manage the change.

53:31.01

Kathleen Sestak

It's a very clear distinction.

53:36.76

Kathleen Sestak

So parting thoughts on the future of higher education over the next decade, which is a long time, and a lot's gonna change.

53:46.05

Christine Looser

Like, I don't know about next week.

53:47.35

Kathleen Sestak

Yeah, like what about tomorrow?

53:48.39

Christine Looser

Next month, we'll see.

53:53.26

Christine Looser

Next decade. It feels a little trite. Everyone's talking about this. It will be lifelong learning. It will be K to gray. It will be this fluid. We work at our institutions and we learn at our schools and that goes away. And the really interesting stuff will happen when we embrace the idea that life is about learning and that we need to look at higher education as a way to help people do that fluidly over time. The thing that I am most excited to see is who gets it right. And it doesn't have to succeed, but it has to be a big swing and experimentation and a thoughtful implementation so that we can all learn as a field. I think that if you focus on student success, and are really intentional about the way you design programs, you will be successful. But really what we need is to get out of this mindset that there's four years that are super protected and people come to a campus because it doesn't reflect the reality of the world anymore. And I am excited to see the new things that people build that help us get out of that outdated perception.

55:09.71

Kathleen Sestak

I love that. I think that's really great advice. I think that it's very relevant given our current environment and we are a global force at this point, right? And I think we're all interdependent upon each other. I've just, I've really enjoyed this conversation with you, Christine, and I just really appreciate learning about the Minerva Project and the work that you do.

55:37.38

Christine Looser

It has been really lovely to speak with you, Kathy. These were great questions and I very much enjoyed getting to go back and forth with you about them.

55:52.25

Kathleen Sestak

Thank you. Happy New Year.

55:54.60

Christine Looser

Happy New Year.

55:55.39

Kathleen Sestak

We'll talk soon.

55:57.14

Christine Looser

Take care.

55:57.69

Kathleen Sestak

Bye.