David Rosenthal: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think Google does [...] that Google is the chief futurist or something? Oh, I don't know, maybe. I'll have to look that up. Alex's new role as futurist (and he says this on his LinkedIn profile which we’ll link to in the show notes), it's quite amazing. He says his job was to research the future trends of education and learning, specifically identify opportunities for breakthrough innovation and social impact and convert ideas into prototypes and applications. What did this mean at the time in 2012? I remember this super clearly, I was about to start business school at Stanford. What was all the rage, both in the tech world and in the education world, were MOOCs. Coursera and Udacity had just launched (both of them out of Stanford), raised tons of money, and they were going to digitize universities, learning, and education, and bring it all online. Both of them are still around, but neither of them would go on to realize the potential that everyone thought they had at the moment or at least, not in a near-term timeframe. Interestingly though, it was actually an enterprise software company to you that would go public and become quite a large company that would help existing schools manage their online degree programs. Actually, my old undergrad classmate, Jeremy Johnson, who's now the CEO of Andela was one of the cofounders of that. It was enterprise software. You could paint a story why it made sense for Alex to be working on this within SAP. As he gets deeper and deeper into it, he becomes really convinced that there are a couple of problems with the way MOOCs and online education is being approached at that time and he was totally right. The biggest one, as he digs in is that nobody finishes the courses. Not only nobody finishes the courses, nobody even finishes a single video of a single lecture, they're just too long for most people unless you're in an actual degree program where you have to. Students at colleges barely stay awake through lectures, who's going to watch a whole course of their own free will and volition? Yeah, reflecting back on it, I think if I'm going to watch even the Khan Academy type stuff, it's going to be like one video at a time and maybe not even the whole video.…

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