ASU: Educators Are Failing Students By Not Individualizing Learning… So We Are

And we continue with our American Stories. And up next, a visit with Arizona State University President Michael Crow. We’ve already told Michael’s powerful personal story that you can hear at OurAmericanStories.com. And today, Alex Cortez brings us more from this transformational leader who’s tripled Arizona State University’s enrollment from fifty-three thousand students to one hundred and fifty-eight thousand, while dramatically increasing quality at the very same time—something that’s never been accomplished in academia, at least on the college level, before. Let’s now go to Ali. Michael Crow is a university president who grew up eating government-issued Velveeta cheese, and to this day, he still craves it. And so, naturally, he’s a pretty straight shooter.

I suffered a little put-down the other day by a trustee of an elite technological university in Los Angeles, also known as Caltech. And so he said, “Well, Michael, you know, we just try to be better, not bigger.” And I said, “I got that.” And Caltech is a fabulous, one-of-a-kind, unbelievably powerful institution with a few hundred factor members and a couple thousand students, and it’s always going to be that, and it’s going to do things that really nobody else has to do. But we can’t build our society on that. We have to build our society on an institution that has a Caltech-like environment in it. That is our fact. They can do those kinds of things, but can scale in every possible way. And, you know, so we have this idea of the emergence of a new kind of university—a national service university. You’ve got a Starbucks cup there. And so we think of us as a social-scale motivated university. Think of Starbucks as a socially conscious company. So, Starbucks, we started this program with them a few years ago. It’s been wildly successful. Our students who are their partners—that’s what they call their employees: partners. You know, we’ve got twelve thousand Starbucks partners who are our students. We’ve graduated five thousand Starbucks partners from ASU. All the kids that have graduated and graduated with no cost and no debt. That’s pretty powerful by itself. Here’s what they found. And so they found higher retention, higher outcomes of performance, more mobility within the company, more leadership candidates within the company for their manager positions and regional manager positions. And so, this notion of invest in the person, and you see tremendous things start to happen. And so, we wouldn’t have done the program with them, by the way, if they would have required the employees to stay at the company, so they don’t even have to stay at the company. Starbucks is going to be expanding that program, moving that program forward in new ways. And we’ve agreed to produce twenty-five thousand graduates, and I think we’re going to agree to produce a lot more. So, Starbucks’ new CEO, who we have elaborate multi-level relationships with Starbucks because they’re attempting to advance three outcomes. And Kevin Johnson is his name, and he uses a concept of what he calls profit-positive. The company must work, and it must generate a profit for shareholders and for it, including their partners who are shareholders. Planet-positive. It cannot have a negative impact on the planet, period. Their entire supply chain, and they intend to move in that direction. And people-positive, that is, the person that works at Starbucks must, while at Starbucks, be enhanced in terms of their own human, individual personal development. And he says—and we agree, and we’re working with him, and this is very consistent with our logic. And this is how Howard and Schultz and I got this thing going. If every company thought that way, we would even be able to conceptualize having a completely different government. You know, we’d be able to think in different ways. And so, not only do they do very well, but they’re doing well in the stock market. They’re doing well in global, and they’re opening thirty thousand new stores in China. They’re graduating five thousand graduates. They’ve got shareholders in every employee. They’ve got medical insurance for everyone that has at least a fifty-one appointment. They’re going out through the programs that we work with them and finding kids that didn’t go to college, don’t have a job, giving them a job and getting them in college. And they’re doing unbelievably well. Every year we have this ‘cryfest’ before these graduations, and so, we get together with the Starbucks partners, and they tell their stories. “I was a freshman at Princeton, and I got cancer, and I dropped out, and I had debt, and I couldn’t go back. I went to the University of Washington, and I just, you know, I had a breakdown. I couldn’t get through my freshman year, and my grade point was so low, I didn’t know what to do. So I’ve been ‘exed out.'” So all these kids then come back through ASU and finish college, and they’re there with their parents, and the Starbucks brass is there, and the ASU brass is there, and we’re all bawling. I mean, we had… who did we have? We had? Even when bringing outsiders, we all get teary-eyed, and we hear these stories. And, yeah, so David Brooks, he was over, and he was here for graduation, and he came to one of these things. I looked over David. He’s a pretty hard-nosed guy, you know, he had a little tear coming down the side of his face. He understood; he understood what we were doing. So, it’s been a very good relationship under Michael’s leadership. ASU succeeded because of the relentless focus on excellence and access, but also because they’ve tackled the fundamental problem of the education status quo.

High school and college are basically at the level of technological sophistication of like a Henry Ford auto manufacturing plant from nineteen ten, meaning they’re mechanistic; they’re structured. The French philosopher Foucault said, “If you want to—if you want to understand the outcomes, you have to understand everything.” So, he even commented on the desks in the classrooms and how they’re placed, and the rigidity of the system and the way people learn. And then what’s happened along the way is that because of that rigidity, because of the lack of recognition of the way that different people learn, because of the lack of the understanding of different types of intelligence. Is like Howard Gardner’s work coming in, the different types of intelligence out of all his work at Harvard. We’ve just been annihilating people. We think they’re stupid because they can’t learn organic chemistry. No, we haven’t learned how to teach organic chemistry. We think that they’re stupid because they haven’t mastered evolutionary biology, or they haven’t mastered simple biology. We think it’s them. It’s not them; it’s the teacher. And so, what’s happened to us is that, you know, what we saw was that these ‘killer’—what we call ‘killer courses’—there, they were getting half the students taking the ‘killer course.’ Were getting a CE or below. And the general academic mind says, “Well, that’s normal. That’s the bell curve.” Or, “The bell curve?” Are you kidding me? What a joke! You have to master these subjects; you can’t have an average outcome. So, we were seeing that if you got a C or below, or if you didn’t master college algebra and you didn’t master a whole series of classes that we have, your chances of dropping out of the university increased by fifty to eighty percent. And so, we would have half the students in this one math class didn’t do very well, and they dropped out of the university. And the reason they dropped out of the entire university was this one math class. And then in the broader society out there, people just say, “Oh, isn’t that too bad?” “They must have been—they must have needed to be better prepared.” And so, I have this thing. It’s like, “What do you mean, better prepared?” So, the most complicated thing that any of us know is not math; it’s actually a language, which is infinitely more complicated than math. And almost every person masters, if you’re a native English speaker or a Spanish speaker or Arabic, whatever, you master that by the way in which you’re taught by your families largely. And so—so here we figured out how to teach that. And math, which is simpler, we apparently can’t teach that because who’s teaching the math? Math geniuses are teaching the math, or math teachers are teaching the math in books written by math geniuses. And so, what’s happened in all of that is that then we’ve ended up with a system of overly rigid, overly structured, fifty-minute lectures in the colleges, taught in a certain way, blackboard equations, all these other kinds of things. And I’ve seen this over and over and over and over, where learning wasn’t individualized enough. And so then, as computational power has evolved, as algorithms have become more and more capable of reduction to use and reduction to practice in things like learning, I became obsessed. And therefore, the institution has become focused on this notion of personalized or individualized learning. And you’ve been listening to Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, and he’s been talking about, well, how he thinks about and how his school thinks about learning. When we come back, more of Michael Crow: individualized learning and how it drove and improved Arizona State University. That story continues here on Our American Story.

And we continue with Our American Stories, and with Arizona State University President Michael Crow, on their extraordinary innovations in individualizing learning. Let’s return to Michael. There’s a science fiction version of this from a book written in nineteen ninety-six by Neal Stephenson called “The Diamond Age.” And in “The Diamond Age,” there’s a young girl living somewhere in what I think is Eastern China, but the world’s completely different at this point. It’s one hundred years in the future, and she’s a poor kid who accidentally comes in contact with a device. Think of it. This was before iPads, but think of it like an iPad. And it was called the “Young Ladies’ Primer.” And the “Young Ladies’ Primer” was a device that then could work with this individual person by understanding their psychology of learning. So, I read that book in nineteen ninety-six, and I read that book several times, and that book and that object—the “Young Ladies’ Primer”—has become like an icon for me to think through this notion of how can we individualize learning? And so, we’re not all the way there yet. We certainly can’t build the “Young Ladies’ Primer,” but I will say that we spent half a million dollars with a group of students to build much of it. And so, we’re working on the idea of the “Young Ladies’ Primer.” You pick up the device that knows who you are, it knows how you learn, it knows how you learn through your life. So, we’re working on all aspects of that using artificial intelligence-based programming. But adaptive learning is like an early version of individualized learning, and it works like this. And so, if I’m studying college algebra, I have to understand all the way back into third-grade arithmetic, and I have to understand certain concepts along the way to actually master algebra. And the way algebra is taught is, it’s always taught relentlessly and mercilessly by almost every teacher. And there’s no way that I can go back and remember what I didn’t learn in the fifth grade because I didn’t learn it. And there’s no way that I can even remember this concept that I had in the sixth grade, which is essential to me understanding something that I need to do in college algebra. So, adaptive learning allows you to take college algebra with a machine that will answer any question that you need to know to do the algebra. Including, it will say, “Well, Michael, I see that you are having problems with negative numbers,” and then it goes back and reteaches you negative numbers and then says, “Well, you’ve mastered negative numbers in a way. Here’s the new path for you to go.” So, we’ve built adaptive learning now in math, in biology, economics, and in psychology. We’re expanding the number of courses. We’ve used it in math the most with unbelievable outcomes. So, in math, we’re getting like mastery. So, this whole notion of getting an A, a B, or a C, and a C’s okay? You’re kidding me! If you get a C in college algebra, your chances of being able to graduate from the institution are cut in half. Your chance of being able to complete any degree that requires any kind of analysis of the unknown, which is what algebra is about, is more than cut in half. So, we now have an entire adaptive curriculum: twelve courses, thirty-six college credit hours in undergraduate biology. So, when you take—let’s just make it simple—if you take Bio 101, and then three years later you’re taking Bio 420 and you’re studying the driving forces of evolution in this four-hundred-level class, but you can’t remember the evolution of the cell structure that you learned at the level that you need. Back in Bio 101. It goes back and teaches you that again—you personally, individually—so that then you can master that subject, which it knows that you don’t really understand. All twelve of these courses are tied together. We call it the ‘biospine.’ All of these courses then become adaptive in the way that they work; and so, they become your individual tutor. We have spent years and millions and millions of dollars to build these things. Lo and behold, ‘voilà’—as I say, ‘voilà’! Now we’ve got kids science-majoring that we never had before. We got sixty thousand STEM majors online and on campus. We’ve got kids mastering math and then moving on and finishing in psychology—which requires algebra; mastering in economics, which requires algebra; mastering in political science, which requires algebra. We did something here years ago that had a huge impact on me. So, we said, “Okay, well, let’s use these early versions of our adaptive learning stuff in math and see if we teach math using these adaptive options and optionality instead of the one way that we teach the math class where we expect everybody to get it. How many different ways will students take out of a thousand students to advanced?” So, we thought there might be fifty; there were a thousand. No two students learned in the same way. The second these guys told me this, I thought, “Huh, we are the stupidest professors the world has ever created!” And so at really, really highly selective schools where you have kids that all had seven-fifties on their SAT math score, in the way that math is taught and the way that math is tested and the way that it’s then taught at the university, no problem because everybody has been… This will sound strange; I don’t want to overstate it, but they’re sociologically geared to that method of learning math. Well, turns out most people aren’t, and most people even can’t. I don’t mean that they can’t learn math; they can’t learn math that way. And so, what we’re looking for is ways in which we can empower this plethora of learners—this very diverse set of learners. And we’re early in this process, but we’ve seen huge outcomes. You know, we’ve seen huge improvements in retention; huge improvements in graduation rates; huge improvements in understanding; huge numbers of increases in double majors and triple majors; and people taking courses and understanding things. Now, the next step will be actual artificial intelligence assets that you can talk to and query with, and then other things that we’re building now, which are full-immersion, avatar-driven, emotionally empowering learning experiences. And so, Dreamscape is a venture-backed Hollywood company founded by a guy named Walter Parkes, and a whole bunch of other brainiacs that came out of Disney, came out of DreamWorks, which Walter used to be the CEO of. One of the investors in Dreamscape Immersive is Steven Spielberg, and so Walter and Steven, as one example, had built this idea of this full immersive avatar experience—not like watching the avatar in the movie Avatar, where you’re watching the avatars, but you’re the avatar, you’re in the movie—and then creating the environment in which you, your entire body, is an avatar, and everybody else’s that’s in the thing with you as an avatar, and you’re going through this kind of experience. And so, they were building this and have been building it the last few years for entertainment use. So, they have several sites: LA, Dallas, Columbus, Ohio, Dubai. And they’ve got like four or five experiences that they’ve built. And you put on these goggles and these other things on your feet, in your hands, and then you go into these things, and you’re alive in these experiences, and they’re unbelievable. They’re unbelievable, believe me. And so, I had met Walter before I went for the experience of the Dreamscape thing, and I could see immediately—immediately—that this was going to be this enabling technology for what we called ETX (Education Through Exploration), which is this whole new way of learning where you’re the explorer. In this case, you go to an alien zoo located ten light-years away orbiting a planet, which then a species that you don’t even know as collected animals from all over the galaxy and brought them there to protect them, to conserve them. And then you are fully immersed in this thing. And now they were using it as a fantastic entertainment experience, and then you could see, “Well, we could teach biology this way, and then it wouldn’t make any difference anymore, you know, whether or…”