- "Grasp" is about the science of learning
in the era of online education.
What does it mean to form a memory?
Is testing good?
Is it bad?
How people actually learn.
These are very fundamental questions.
I mean, the human being
is a learning animal
and I have this great
partnership with Luke Yoquinto,
who was my co-author.
He was able to help me craft the narrative
and it became clear that there was
a really beautiful arc here
that needed to be explained.
A lot of the things
that we take for granted
are not necessarily based
on any particular science.
In a lot of educational institutions,
the classroom is basically you go in,
you sit down and you listen
to the professor lecture.
And a lot of it's about memorization
and having students cram for an exam,
which they sort of forget
right after the exam.
In fact, the science shows that.
There's another fallacy
in education that somehow
a student's ability is
something very innate.
And we see the education
process as a way to find the God
given talents of a few
students and to winnow.
This model is antithetical
to what we should be doing,
which is every student is good enough,
let's make them a success.
I went to school in India,
I got into the India Institute of Technology.
At IIT, I personally
felt I lost purpose
and I sort of wandered.
I went to work in industry
and that really reanimated
because suddenly I found purpose.
So when I went to grad school,
I realized that purpose
creates engagement.
It became clear to me that
we need to rethink education
because what we need to
do is create empowered,
capable, self efficacious individuals
who can take charge of their life.
And you cannot do that, if
you don't engage with them.
The office that I lead,
MIT's Open Learning,
We want to make knowledge
a resource that almost anyone can access.
Through OpenCourseWare through
MITx with the MicroMasters
and through other programs.
And we had to be very sure
that we were doing it right.
The things that we do better
online, we should do online
and the things we can't do online,
we should be doing in the classroom.
At some level, what the pandemic has done
is it puts a spotlight on
what makes in-person worth it.
I hope the book will help
clarify that the classroom time
cannot be squandered away
on things you could do online.
If you take all the other
challenges humanity faces,
climate change, political strife,
perhaps the next pandemic,
the underpinning of that is education.
(gentle music)
