(upbeat music)
- [Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome back to the stage
our MC for the day, Nina Angelo.
(exciting music)
- All right, welcome back everyone.
Hopefully you all got a chance
to check out the How I Taught
This sessions upstairs.
Pretty cool, right?
It was great to be able to see
what people are actually doing
with the Top Hat platform
to engage their students.
Well, we've had a busy day so far.
I've really enjoyed the
discussions we've had
in the sessions as well as out and about
during lunch and the break-outs
and I hope you're enjoying them as well.
We are now at the final talk of the day
and this is our customer keynote.
Please join in with the
following course code,
seven nine one three seven eight.
Seven nine one three seven eight.
For those of you who joined us last year,
Jose Vazquez is a familiar face.
Jose teaches one of the largest
economics courses in the entire country
at the University of
Illinois, Champagne-Urbana.
With over 900 students in his course,
he's spent a lot of time thinking
about what really engages students
and what motivates them to succeed.
He is here today to share some
of those insights with
you in a keynote entitled,
The Evolution of Instruction:
A New Paradigm for Teaching.
Please welcome to the
Engage Stage, Jose Vazquez.
(applause)
("Let's Dance" by David Bowie)
- So, I am going to start
by showing you a video
and then I'm gonna ask you
a question about that video.
So, I kind of explain it afterwards,
it should be pretty
self-explanatory as you watch it.
- All right, so our track's becoming
a little bit more complicated now.
It's got two humps to go over.
It's having to travel a little
bit further up and down.
Let's see if that's going
to be enough to slow
the ball down so that the
race is going to be equal.
- Got it?
So, there's two tracks.
One is flat, the other
one has a bunch of dips
and I'm gonna ask you
a question about that.
Which is, which ball, the same balls,
is gonna reach the end first,
the one who goes over the flat
or the ones that go on the dip
or do you think they get
there at the same time?
All right, so that's the first question.
I think the polling is open and
you can vote your answer on that one.
And I'm gonna give you a few minutes
or a few seconds to see
how you guys are doing.
You can vote individually.
All right, so that's --
So here's what I'm gonna do.
So I already know that
about 30% of you are wrong,
so why don't you talk to
the person next to you
and try to convince the person
next to you of your vote, all right?
Because you're not
doing so well right now.
(audience talking)
All right, so one thing.
So one thing that I already know
one thing I already know is that
you guys kind of care
about this stuff, right?
You wanna know what the answer?
I've seen the video before.
And then, you know I
mean, why do you care?
Because I'm not giving you extra credit
or any of that stuff, right?
But let's assume that you didn't.
I know you do because you
can't wait to hear the answer
but let's assume that you don't
and I wanted to incentivize you
to actually care about this stuff.
Well, one way I could do is I say,
"Well, you either answer this correctly
or you don't get paid this month."
Would you care?
Yes.
Would you enjoy it?
Probably not, right?
And you probably made a lot
of mistakes or something.
But think about it, we make the same
deal with our students all
the time when we tell them,
"You don't get it right,
you don't get points."
Points are a big deal for them.
It's like money for us, probably more.
But let's see if I can actually
motivate you in a different way.
I know that a bunch of you, actually,
the largest number of you voted for C,
which is the same time.
That's wrong, that's not the right answer.
I've seen the video, believe
me, that doesn't happen.
It's not gonna happen.
So I'm gonna give you another 30 seconds
now that you know that's not true
to see if you can actually
figure out what the answer is.
So why don't you, again, talk
to the person next to you.
The voting is still --
you can change your vote.
Don't vote for C because I swear to God
that is not the right answer.
(audience talking)
So, here's what happened.
Let me tell you what just happened.
Let me tell you what just happened.
I don't know if you noticed,
the noise this time was
a lot more than before.
I did incentivize you
to actually care more
by just eliminating a choice.
Now, let me tell you one more thing.
Have you ever ridden one of these things?
Or seen it?
If you have seen it or ridden,
you should know what the answer is.
It's the same thing.
There's no reason you should
not be getting this wrong.
It's the same answer.
So here's what happened.
I bet a lot of you,
particularly people who
actually answered C,
now really, really care
what the answer is.
You really, really want me to
tell you what the answer is.
And I know the answer, right?
Now, some of you are saying,
"Well, this is physics
because physics people, they
have these cool experiments."
So, that's why it works with them.
Well, I teach economics, which I think
is a best-case scenario of
the complete opposite, right?
Because this is like the class,
people talk about boring classes,
it's usually the example, right?
So, let me see if I can get you
to care about an economics question.
All of you know about opportunity costs,
it's a central concept in economics.
If you do something, the
cost of doing something
is what you give up.
So the cost of being here is whatever
food you're not eating
or if you were working,
the money you would now be
making in the job market.
So, now that I told you
what opportunity cost is,
you should be able to answer an easy
multiple choice question
on opportunity cost.
Okay, so here's one.
So, suppose Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan
are performing tonight, and
like I tell my students,
these are musicians, both of them.
So, suppose they're performing
and these are the only
things you wanna do.
Suppose further, that if
you go to see Bob Dylan,
you have to pay $50 to see him,
I mean $40 to see him,
but you value him at $50.
I have given you all the information
you need to answer this question,
what is the opportunity
cost of seeing Eric Clapton?
And just to make it easy for you,
I'm gonna give you four
choices, zero, 10, 40, or 50.
All right, so I'm gonna open this poll
and this is the same question
and you can try it on your own
and I'm gonna tell you how
you're doing in a second.
I can see how you guys are doing here
if you're voting on it.
And very similarly, most of
you are wrong about the answer.
Let me say, I will say that most
economists will not
agree with your answer.
That's better.
So, why don't you turn
to the person next to you
and try to convince the person
next to you what the answer is.
(audience talking)
And again, I'm seeing your answers
so I am getting some feedback from you.
I'm getting some feedback and I can try
to use that feedback to make you care,
kind of internally, right?
So, let me tell you, most of you
are saying that the answer is D,
that's not the correct
answer, that's wrong.
So, you know, all of you who voted for D
probably care more because
you hate being wrong.
We all do.
And all of you who didn't vote for D,
now you perhaps care
more because now you have
a higher degree of being right.
But let me tell you, this
question is actually --
And by the way, the noise in this question
was exactly the same as
the noise in the first one
so I just proved to you that economics
is actually not that boring.
So, this is actually a
very famous question.
About 15 years ago, some economists
wanted to know how much
students were learning
on the principles of econ classes.
So I said, how do we test that?
Well, we just design a really easy
question on opportunity cost
and we give it to a random sample
of thousands of students in the US
who have taken a class
on principles of econ
in the last year.
Right, so they did that.
This was the question.
And what percentage of students
that took a class in
economics within the last year
were able to answer
that question correctly?
You did way better than them,
actually in the first vote.
But that's pretty depressing,
but it's actually got worse.
Then they say, "Okay, why don't we just
give the question to people who have
never taken a class in economics,
random sample of thousands of students
who've never taken
economics in their life,
what percentage of them were able
to answer the question correctly?"
So, it's not that you're not learning
opportunity cost or economics,
it's after you take the class,
you know less economics than
when you started to class.
So then you have to kind of fix that
after you've gone out of the class, right?
But they didn't stop there.
Then they went to the AEA,
which is a major conference in economics,
thousands of economists,
Krugman, Greenspan,
every famous economist go there
and then they gave the same question
to a random sample of PhD economics.
How did they vote on the
answer to this question?
Well, they split
themselves in the same way
that you split yourselves.
So, perhaps students are
not learning economics
because we don't even know, economists,
what opportunity cost is so
how can we teach it, right?
Obviously.
But the point is, this
was really revealing to me
because most economists will look at this
and say, "Well, this
is obviously a problem
with the question and this question
should not be put in the exam."
But my approach is different, right?
My approach is that this
is a fantastic question,
precisely because we
cannot agree on the answer.
This is the reason why you care about it
when I did this question with you.
So, this is a different way of seeing
choice and technology and
motivation in the classroom.
So, I think a lot about that
because I teach in a very large class
which is even way larger than this one.
It's not a classroom, it's an auditorium.
So, I said that I shared the stage with U2
who played there in the 70s or 80s.
So, this is my students taking
an exam, it's 900 students.
I have three sections of that.
That's the actual class,
they never come there.
They don't come to class
sometimes, you see?
So that's why I started
using Top Hat, obviously,
to see if I can encourage them.
I also teach online.
I've been teaching
online for about 12 years
at the University of Illinois
and this class has been turned into a book
for I think it's 2012,
almost seven years ago.
So, it's an eight-week
version of the course.
It's essentially the same course
but open to the masses and
the exposure that it gave
people about the class and economics
is pretty staggering.
These are some of the
numbers about two months ago.
100,000 students registered
number of quizzes
that I've taken and views.
Now the number of 100,000
students registered,
it's a little misleading, right?
My mom took the class and
she dropped the second day
and my brother lasted a week,
but then after that he dropped.
The head of my department
dropped after two weeks.
But they give you an exposure,
a fantastic exposure to economics
and it also has let me
really try a bunch of stuff
in this environment that I wanna try first
before I do it in my face-to-face class.
So, essentially, what have
I learned in doing this?
I think we have made a huge
leap in the last 20 years
of really, kind of, providing
research, classroom research,
and a lot of evidence, empirical
evidence in the classroom
that learning takes place
in the student's brain.
So, students have to learn themself,
so active learning is
important, it's a way to learn.
It's amazing that we have to do
30 years of research for that,
but that's another question.
But that is a huge leap forward, right?
Most people would agree
that that's the case.
But I think that's a little incomplete.
Because you cannot really
have learner-centered teaching
until you actually know a little more.
Let me try to prove that to you.
This is a marketing photo that
I use in one of the clickers.
I've gone to many classes, I use clickers,
so I advise on using
clickers and polling devices.
I have never seen a person
this happy by clicking.
(laughter)
Clicking is not that fun.
I've been clicking this
since the beginning
and I really don't get
any satisfaction for it.
So, in fact, I will tell
you that if this person
is clicking on that question,
then he's definitely not
gonna be smiling like that
because this is super boring, right?
You either know it or you don't.
Even though this is the type of question
we actually use most of the clickers for.
Kind of the testing question.
In fact, I would argue that
if you're doing this in class,
this is not motivation or engagement,
this is assessment, right?
And this is gonna work,
kind of in the same way
that your exam works and
it's gonna make students
to behave in a very similar way
that they behave during exams,
which is that they don't
really like it so much,
so now they have an exam in every class,
which is worse than before.
Plus, their behavior is also gonna be
impacted by the incentive, right?
So this is what you're gonna get
if you actually make this high-stakes
on top of the initial questions.
I recently went to a clicker conference.
A lot of the presentations
were on academic honesty
so this is one of the slides
that I thought it was amazing.
So, the speaker was
saying there's other ways
to prevent false
participation with clickers.
Are you kidding me?
I mean, who is gonna do
this, all this stuff.
I mean, look at this, right?
This is so much work.
And plus, this is not really
creating any engagement.
The reason I actually think
it's because a technology
like polling devices,
sometimes those can work
is we know a lot about how people learn
but we know very little about
why people want to learn.
And I think it's not
until you get students
to want to learn, not
because you give them points
but because they really
want to from inside them,
then you really can't have
learner-centered learning.
So you need to understand how that works.
And the reason I started
thinking about that
is with my daughter, so this is Mara.
She's really angelic there,
but she's obviously just a kid.
So I started thinking about this idea
of wanting to learn, motivation,
when I started thinking about
how I'm gonna teach her to ride a bike.
Because I'm not an expert bike rider.
I'm not an expert bike teacher.
But I knew what I wasn't gonna do.
I wasn't gonna sit Mara in front of
a PowerPoint presentation on Friday
and tell Mara, "You watch the PowerPoint
and then you come back tomorrow,
and if you don't ride the
bike, you don't get fed."
That would be ridiculous,
right, if I do that.
And most of us do that all
the time with our students.
But I know that if Mara wants to
ride a bike, learn, she has to ride it.
Isn't that obvious?
So, I know that, that she's
gonna have to ride the bike.
But I also know that Mara's a child
and she's gonna get distracted.
And I also know that Mara's gonna fall
and I did not take a
picture of my daughter
when she falls, I mean that's mean.
So this is not my daughter falling,
but I know that if you're
gonna learn something,
the way that we learn anything
is by falling and correcting
ourself and getting up.
So the question is, then I have to
provide Mara with the space to fall,
and I need to get her to get up.
And I cannot get her up by telling Mara,
"You don't get up, you
don't eat tomorrow."
Right, that would be crazy.
She's not gonna like the bike very much.
She's gonna make a lot of
mistakes, she's gonna be stressed
and she's gonna hate it
for the rest of her life.
So, I would argue that we cannot
do the same thing with our students.
If we actually always tell them,
"You have to do it
because you get points."
Because it's exactly the same thing,
I don't think very, very much difference.
So, what I'm gonna try to do,
so what I'm trying to prove to you
is that it is possible to motivate you
or to motivate students by using
that internal rewards system.
We know a little bit about motivation
and I've been working on one of those,
which is curiosity.
You still wanna know what the answer
to those poll question is?
I know that.
I mean, I've done this before.
It's like an itch, right?
You have to scratch it, right?
I've done this presentation
and people in the back
usually find the answer on their own.
They just start searching the web.
In fact, I don't argue that.
I don't have to tell you the answer,
I'm pretty sure you're gonna
search for the answer yourself.
But the point is that this
is really strong, right?
And it's a drive, you have now a drive
to satisfy some kind of
knowledge gap that you have.
So it's directly related to knowledge.
But I also know that that is a pleasure.
I mean, you wanna kill me
right now, obviously, right?
But I'm trying to demonstrate the point.
But when you are curious, you
are enjoying that activity.
And this is, again, my daughter,
when she's curious, she's focused.
She's enjoying that activity very much.
We know, also, from animal research
that animals also are
happy when they're seeking,
which is the Latin meaning
other words, curiosity.
And this is my dog, Dashall.
and he knows he's really,
really happy, I know that,
and we know that from researching animals,
when he's seeking something,
he's really focused on it
because that's a very
pleasurable activity.
But he's also, like I
said, he's very strong.
So it is possible to motivate
students in that way.
And then you can bring
your daughter to your class
and then combine both, right?
So what I'm gonna do in the
next time I have with you
is I'm gonna try to make the case
that our role actually is changing
and a lot of that is gonna drive us
to care more about motivation.
And what I'm gonna do
is essentially tell you
how I see technology
changing in two major ways
in the last 20 years and
how those two changes
are gonna really drive
the role of the instructor
from providing content, which
is what we were doing before
to something else.
And then along the way, we're
gonna learn a little bit
about technology in that way.
So we're gonna start one by two,
so the first thing that you provide
as an instructor is you provide content.
I have to tell my daughter
where to put her hands
and I have to tell her, this is a bike,
and all that stuff, right?
And that's what we've been
doing for a very long time.
So, how does technology
change how we do that?
So, this story begins with my dad
and this is my dad, he fought in Vietnam.
He died in 2014, but when
I think about technology,
I think a lot about my dad because
he was in the typewriting business.
That's what he was doing for his life.
This is a typewriter.
This is the last typewriter.
It was build in 2011.
Typewriters are not built anymore.
And this is amazing because this is
a good product that was sold to us
and our students, if they wanna see it,
they have to go to like, a museum
because they can't really
see a typewriter anymore.
But the typewriter,
when you think about it,
the evolution of a typewriter
was very similar to the evolution
of any good that is
effected by technology.
It started very rudimentary
in the late 1800s,
very, very expensive, about $6,000
in corrected for inflation.
And then, eventually, people find ways
to be more productive with it,
suppliers actually
supply a better product,
technology get better, and then we deliver
typewriters that are better
and cheaper, more accessible.
Unfortunately, for my dad,
that peaked in the 1980s,
which is when my dad
opened a typewriting store,
so he's a really bad
businessperson, my dad.
So, that was awful for my
dad and awful for my family
but that was amazingly good for society
because that typewriter was became
really accessible, really, really cheap.
This is the amazing power of technology
that makes our lives so much better.
And you can think of any product
that you can imagine is the same thing.
The record music, right?
Technology made that better and cheaper.
TVs, right?
Technology made that obviously
a lot better and cheaper.
This is the classroom in the late 1800s,
that's today.
(laughing)
Now, you missed a major
technological breakthrough
in the 1990s is the overhead projector,
you probably missed that
so let me just do it again.
Got it?
And then maybe PowerPoint
that one can argue
that made things worse, right?
So, you needed this type of
classroom to deliver content.
So what changed?
Well, what changed is that --
Or why did we have this type of classroom?
We're gonna think of technology,
we need to understand why we
were doing the things before.
This is a very good classroom
for one person to teach a bunch of people
where one person is the
only knowledge of content.
But it's actually more than that
because textbooks have been
around for a long time.
So it's not that the content
was not available before.
Textbooks have been around
for a very long time.
So, we need to understand the idea of
what is an effective way to
provide content for a novice.
If textbooks have been
around for a long time
and content was there,
why did the lecture halls survive?
And I think the reason for that
is because textbooks
are not very effective
at transferring information to novices.
And think about it.
This is a textbook on economics.
It's a major textbook in economics.
This is a lot of text.
With definitions on the
side and, you know, graph
and then you have to look at
the diagram on the one side,
sometimes it's on different pages,
so this takes a lot of
effort, look at this.
And obviously, no econ textbook
should ever have this graph ever, right?
Because this is horrible, right?
But this is a lot of work.
It's a lot of work for the brain to do
and the thing is that the brain
really doesn't like to
do that kind of work.
The brain has survived for many years
by doing a lot with very little.
That's the way we have been
able to survive as a species.
The thing is that the students know that.
You ask them to read the
textbook before class
and you flip through the class on the way,
and I did this for many years.
And I asked students, I mentioned
they have to answer questions
before coming to class.
They were answering the
question, no problem,
but they weren't reading the text.
And then I was puzzled, I said,
"Why are you not reading the text?
How are you answering the questions?"
"Well, you know, we guess, and you know,
after a little bit I ask my friend.
If we continue to miss
it, we search on Google."
The very last thing they were doing
is going to the textbook.
That was the very last thing.
And the reason, I said, is because
the brain doesn't like to receive
information the first time that way.
Let me try to prove that to you.
Which one of this is the real penny?
There's only one penny here that is
the correct depiction
of a penny, only one.
The other ones are wrong.
Which one is it?
Just call it when you have it.
No.
Call it.
No, no, no.
See, some people started,
the people in the back
are looking at their
pockets for pennies, right?
How can you not identify, is it too hard?
How about now?
The thing is, how can
you not identify a penny?
You've seen it millions of times, right?
Why is that?
It's the same reason that
if you were hunter-gathering
millions of years ago, and
you were in the Savannah
and a lion came to your periphery,
you didn't stop to check which color
the eyes of the lions was.
You know it's lion, run
for your life, right?
That's the way that you have to survive.
Details are really, really annoying
and they're really not the way to survive.
So, the brain doesn't like to do details.
Our cognitive thresholds are pretty low.
And it's not that the
students can read the textbook
and then, okay they read the chapter
and if they only remember 10%
at least that's good, right?
It's just the brain
doesn't work like that.
It's not like you put water
and then some water stays
in and some water comes out.
The brain is more like this.
You put too much water, it just breaks.
And then it's very possible that
if a student reads the
textbook, a chapter,
and come to class, that
student's gonna be less prepared
for class than a student who
actually did not read it.
Because overload, cognitive thresholds.
That's what happens.
Reading is actually very, very hard.
Now, what about the lecture?
Well, the lecture uses your eyes
and your ears at the same time.
This is why it's so effective.
You know that when you come to lecture
and you're drawing on the board
and you're talking to students,
you are delivering a multi-media lesson.
You're talking and
coming through their ears
and you're also drawing and
actually using their eyes.
This is a much, much better way
to receive information the first time.
This is how humans actually
like to receive information.
So, this is why this classroom prevailed.
Because the lecture is an essential part
of the learning process.
You cannot get rid of it because
it's a very effective way
of delivering information to novices.
The problem, or the
issue, is that you don't
have to do it in a classroom anymore.
And this is the first
technological breakthrough
in the early 2000s, compression
of passing files through the web.
Actually, the cost of that
went down dramatically
to the point that now it's very, very easy
to deliver an effective, recorded lecture
very, very low cost and effective enough
to actually merit whether the lectures
should continue to take
place in the classroom.
You can take your iPad
and you can make a --
- [Instructor] Suppose
Harry hires a fourth worker
- --a very easy thing.
Takes me two minutes to do this.
- [Instructor] Would Nuvy
increase the efficiency
of the washing process as much
as Marty?
- This is the same content
that was in the textbook.
- [Instructor] Also, Nuvy can increase
- But I'm providing it in a
multimedia message
- [Instructor] The output,
the overall number of cars,
- I'm seeing, I'm hearing
at the same time.
- [Instructor] Watch with four workers.
- And you can have this
- [Instructor] The facility
- in a rudimentary way
- [Instructor] becomes
a little crowded, and
therefore in the number of cars
- which works perfectly fine.
- [Instructor] is not as high
as with a previous worker.
In other words,
- Hey, listen to my voice
- [Instructor] With some little input,
Mario and the product begins to fall,
in this case, to three additional cars.
- Or you can have it
very flashy, like this.
- [Female Instructor] And
hiring a fifth worker,
might increase output
- There's no benefits
of having the flash
- [Female Instructor] By an
even smaller amount.
The flash with this is the same concept.
You're getting through the eyes
and the ears at the same time.
But one of the benefits of this
is students can pause and can rewind.
So one could argue it's not
only cheaper to provide it
but it's actually a better experience
because now students can
actually identify themself
as different learners and they can
actually progress through, receive
the content at their own pace.
So, I think the technology
in the early 2000s
that decreased dramatically
the compression cost
of passing files is really the major
breakthrough in education I
think in the last 200 years
in terms of delivering content.
There's no way, there's no reason
for anyone to be delivering a lecture
in the classroom anymore.
And you may say, "Well, that can't be true
because my lecture, it's
always something better
of me doing it live."
Of course, I mean, you are seeing me
I'm an awesome presenter, right?
And it would be totally different
if you see me in a recording of this.
But that is not the issue, right?
Because I love Miles Davis, I
wish I would've seen him live.
I never did and I'm perfectly happy
listening to a recording.
Music, you have live concerts and
you have recorded music at the same time.
There's no reason that you ask,
the question is whether you should
do the lecture in the classroom.
It's not whether what you replace it with
is exactly the same thing, right?
So, you have to consider
whether you can use
the classroom more effectively
for something else.
And the classroom is a time in which
you guys are seeing each other.
I cannot generate the noise that I created
with those two questions online.
I can't, I've tried it, you can't.
So therefore, the classroom
is the only way I can do that,
then you have to ask yourself
whether keeping the lecture
in the classroom has merits
because you'd be sacrificing
what you cannot replace.
So, in my opinion, technology is such
that even if we like it or not,
the lecture is actually in the classroom
should not take anymore.
Now, the second service that we provide
I think that we have to design as such.
It's how do we organize the content
so that our students can actually
provide it to learn something?
My daughter have to ride
a bike, she has to fall,
I need to make sure that she's focused
and I also have to make sure that
she has enough time to test
herself and to correct herself.
How does technology in the last 30 years
have changed the way
we design instruction?
Well, I mean, this is not very difficult
but the major breakthrough,
this doesn't take me very much to explain,
I think most of you know this.
What the machine does is that it can
provide testing and repetition.
I'm falling and I'm coming up.
I'm falling and I'm coming up
in a very democratic way because you can
actually have different learners
progressing through a
lesson at different times.
This is what Top Hat assignment asked
this is what the learning
management system.
Through mastery learning,
it's an assignment
in which Student A can actually finish it
in an hour or two if he had the skills
and Student B can actually take longer
to finish that assignment, right?
And you deliver randomization
and you deliver the content in a way
that the students can actually provide it.
The machine is very, very
good right now at doing that
to the way that students can now progress
through a lesson and assessing it
very, very effectively online.
So, now think about that.
I just gave you, the
first thing I told you
is that technology,
we'd have the technology
to get rid of the
lecture in the classroom.
So, the students came to the
classroom for two reasons.
To receive the content,
we couldn't provide it other
ways, a multimedia lecture,
and to be assessed.
We have to give pencil and paper exams.
Those things had to
happen in the classroom
meaning that it has to
happen at a particular time.
We had to fix time because
that was the only way
that we could deliver content
and assess our students.
But what I just told you is that
we don't have to do that anymore
because a machine is much
better at doing that.
So, this has profound effect on teaching
because what I'm telling you, essentially,
think about the bell curve, right?
Why do we have the bell curve?
We have the bell curve
because we had to fix time
because the students had to come
to the classroom to receive content
and had to come to the
classroom to be assessed
so we had no choice but to fix time.
And if you fix time, you
have to let something change
and performance was that
that you let change.
This is the reason for the bell curve.
But what I'm telling you is that
the machine is so good right now
at delivering assessment
and designing the lecture
that we don't have to fix time anymore.
We can let time change.
And now if we let time change,
that you fix performance
and you let time change.
So, you will determine what
you want your students to do
and you assume that all of them
can do it at different times.
And then you have a new bell curve
which is the right bell curve.
Because everyone actually finishes
but everyone take different times
and the benefit of
students finishing first
is that they will take less time.
But for the merits, this
is a profound change,
it's a benefit, right?
So the machine has benefited society
by actually providing those services
much better than us, I think.
So the question is what are we left with?
And I think motivation is the other one
and this is a key one and
this is an important one.
Because, see, my daughter
falls and she needs to get up,
why would she get up?
Because that's the question,
why would she do it?
I mean, this is really hard stuff, right?
And I need to get her to get
up by her wanting to do it.
I cannot give her points.
So, this is the idea of motivation.
And motivation is hard.
But we know some things about motivation.
For instance, I've been
working in the last two years,
I've been working a lot on curiosity.
So let me try to tell you
a couple of the things
I did with you at the
beginning of the presentation.
What I used is the idea of
the Gap Theory of Curiosity,
that's the best definition of curiosity
we have to operationalize curiosity.
And it basically said
that you become curious
when all of a sudden there's
a gap in your knowledge.
This is a very simple definition
but it's actually very, very useful.
And I'm gonna try to
explain that definition
and the way I use it in two ways.
Official way first and then a content way.
So I can try to convince
you that I can actually
use this definition to make you curious.
So, imagine that this space here,
imagine that the red represent
the amount of information
that you know about a topic
and the white is obviously
what you don't know.
So red is what you know
about opportunity cost
and then white is what you don't know.
Where do your eyes go when
you look at this screen?
Where do your eyes go?
They go to red.
There's no way that you cannot see white
but white is background noise.
So in terms of curiosity,
you are focusing,
this is the opposite of curiosity
because you are focusing
on the little you know.
If I ask you a question about
opportunity cost right now
and you have no idea
what opportunity cost is,
you are in this space.
You are completely the
opposite to be curious about
in that situation.
But look at what happened as I start
filling the space with red.
At some point, your attention
is gonna shift from red to white.
So your attention is
now on the little piece
that you're missing,
and then you're curious.
At some point, I shifted
that visually, right?
Your curiosity was born
along that process.
Let me see if I can try to --
what I'm saying is I give you a question
and you're 100% sure or not on the answer,
there's a curiosity area, right,
which is that you're not really sure
but you're also very close to the answer.
So, what does that mean
in terms of questions.
Well, let's talk about this question.
Let's say I do a clicker question.
I do a five minute presentation
and then I do a clicker question on this.
Would there be any noise in the classroom?
No, because you're there.
You're not curious.
Now there might be an emotional
reaction to this question
but there's obviously
not a curiosity reaction.
So the question, you're in that space
you're not curious, there's no gap.
What about this question?
I've done this question
with thousands of people,
there's only one person
that knew the answer,
that was actually Mike Author
and he actually knew the spelling,
he corrected me on the spelling.
So, you're probably not curious right now
because you're right there.
I can kind of give you points, who cares.
But one other thing that I could do
is I can actually do this.
So you're there, I can actually do this.
I can take three choices out.
And now make your vote.
And now you care a little bit more
because you are closer to the answer.
I have actually incentivized you to care
by managing information, that's all I did.
And also there's a
difference in the names,
you might use your own previous knowledge
about names to actually take a guess.
It's a more educated
guess and it's a guess
that has a higher
probability of being right.
So you care more.
And I just did that by
changing the information,
by managing information.
This is the same thing, and this was
delivered by two economists.
The idea that attention is important
was actually delivered by economists
which are the inspiration
for George Loewenstein
who came up with the idea of curiosity.
So, you wanna make curious, you have to
focus the students' attention
on their curiosity gap.
So, what I did with you at
the beginning of the lesson.
So I did five things.
I asked you to answer a question,
all of you answered the same question,
I forced you to make a
choice on that question,
and then all of you made
the choice at the same time.
And then I asked you to turn
to the person next to you
and to defend that choice to that person.
And then finally, I actually used
the information you were providing to me
to manage information and keep
you on that curiosity area.
There's a method behind
the madness, right?
And I did all of that
and the result of that
is that you turned to your neighbor
and you wanted to talk to your neighbor
and you want to find the
answer to the question
and you still wanna know the
answer to the ball question.
So, this is what I did with this question
and I knew that you were
gonna split yourself like that
and this is a good thing that
you split yourself like that
because now you turn to your neighbor,
there's a high probability that
your neighbor has a different answer.
And then what I do, I said,
"Well, I can actually play with this
because I know that C is wrong
and I'm not gonna lie to you about that,
that would be really mean,
C is not the right answer."
So I eliminated C and all of a sudden
I incentivized people
who actually are for C
and they need a new home,
they need to find a new home.
So now they really have to
talk to the person next to them
because they have nowhere to go.
The floor has fell out of their feet.
And I did the same thing
with this question.
And another thing I did was I told you,
had you ever seen this machine, right?
So what I'm doing is I'm
managing your information
and constraining the
information set you have
and I'm pushing you,
telling you you can do this
and because I'm telling you that,
you know your previous
self has this information
and now what I'm trying
to do by doing that
is putting the knowledge
in the tip of your tongue.
Because if we're curious when
we're missing information,
then clearly the closer
that information is to us,
the more we're gonna want it.
It's like when you run in a marathon
and you really run really
slow the whole race,
but when you see the finish line
you start running like, for your life.
It's the same idea.
Let me try to prove to
you in a different way.
When are you the most curious
during the nine month
of, you ever had a child,
during the nine month of pregnancy.
When are you the most curious?
And I think that if you ever
got a ultrasound like me,
not me but my wife,
when were we the most curious?
Well, it was in the sonogram room
when the doctor look
at the thing and said,
"I know what the gender is."
and she was already next
to us, and I was like,
"Jesus, tell us, right now."
At that moment, you're the most curious.
It's because that information is there.
So, here's a very easy way to
make your students curious.
Tell them that they answered
the question already.
Their previous self already
answered the question.
The point is that you can
actually manage curiosity
and curiosity, we know something.
So this is a motivational technique
that we can use in order to try
to motivate our students from within them
not from actually the current point.
So I've been doing a lot
of research on curiosity.
For instance, I know that you now really,
there are two reasons why you wanna know
the answer to that ball question
is because you wanna be right.
You wanna know whether
you're right or not.
So I test that with my students
and I found out that yes, they do care
quite a bit about being right.
But I also know that after I tell you
what is the answer to the question,
you're also gonna care
about the explanation
to the question.
So I did some clinical trials
by showing my students,
asking them a question
without showing them a video
and then I also had a
random sample of students
who actually answered the same question
after watching the video.
And then I said I gave you one point
for answering the question.
And then after they answered
the question, I said,
"Will you give me half a point
if I tell you the answer?"
And the students who watched the video
who had more information,
it was actually three times more likely
to give me the half a point
than the other students.
So information matters and
information has an impact
on students' motivation and curiosity.
So my point, and the major point here
is that I think the machine can do
a very good job at the first two things.
And if the machine can
replace me on some things,
I think the machine should replace me.
That's better for society.
It's bad for my father,
but good for society.
But, should we be worried about that?
Well, there's one more thing,
there's motivation, right?
And the thing is motivation
is actually pretty hard.
And I hope that I gave you kind of
an idea of how hard it is.
And it's more than just
giving people points
so you know, in the case of my daughter,
I need to get her to get up.
And I would argue that no one is as good
at getting my daughter to get up
because she wants to get up than me.
If she were gonna pay someone
to teach her how to ride a bike,
I would be able to collect
the most money from her
because I am the person,
not because I can provide content to her,
not because I have any special
knowledge on riding a bike,
I have the most value
to her simply because
I love her and she loves
me and she trusts me
and I can motivate her
better than anyone else.
That is a good thing.
That is a good thing for us.
It is a good thing that we
have been forced by technology
to move into the part
of teaching that's hard
because that means that if it's true,
what happens with technology is that
it increases the wage of the people
who actually are really, really good at it
and people who are here, you
have self-selected yourselves
as those types of people.
So, we need to understand
how motivation works
because that's where our value is
and we should be happy
that that is the case
because that means that
people who are really good
at motivating students are
gonna be the best instructors
and there's very, very high likelihood
that you are those people
because you are actually here.
But we need to understand motivation.
We need to understand
how to get people up.
This is important that we do that.
If we can't really do that,
then our value is deteriorating.
So, let me try to make the point.
So a lot of the people say,
"Oh, you're manipulating students"
or "Motivation is tricky."
Yeah, it is tricky, right?
But one of the ways I think
about teaching and stuff,
so I think all the stuff
that I'm actually
learning how people learn.
For me, that's interesting,
but that's like teaching as a
science, learning objectives.
I think part of teaching is a science
and I guess what I'm
telling you right now today
is that the part of
teaching that's a science,
the machine is doing really great strides
and getting really, really good at it.
But I believe that a big
part of teaching is an art.
It's not a science.
It's about inspiring.
It's about motivation.
That's really, really --
there's no science to those things
of why my daughter trusts
me than no one else, right?
And that should be good
because that's actually very
valuable because it's hard.
Now there's art, that I think is actually
very similar to teaching is movie making.
So, I'm gonna try to make the point
that when you're really good at that art
of teaching or movie making,
it has profound effect on
the people who receive it
to the point that they are grateful
that you are actually doing this for them.
So this is a clip of the
movie, Before Sunrise.
It was in the late 90s,
early 2000s or mid-90s.
It was a really low budget.
These two people met in
the beginning of the day
and now you're catching them
halfway through the day.
It's a very low-budget movie.
The director is actually
using all of what he knows
about what motivates people in order to
deliver this message in a more
effective way to his audience.
So it's very similar to
what you do as a teacher.
So, let me play you the video
and then I'm gonna see if I can
ask you a question about it.
- Have you ever heard of this singer?
I think she's American, a friend
of mine told me about her.
- Do you wanna go see if that
listening booth still works?
- Yeah, okay.
("Come Here" by Kath Bloom)
♪ - There's a wind that
blows in from the north ♪
♪ And it says that
loving takes his course ♪
♪ Come here ♪
♪ Come here ♪
♪ No I'm not impossible to touch ♪
♪ I have never wanted you ♪
- Do they kiss?
Do you wanna know?
But you wanna watch the movie, right?
Thank you, that's all I have, thank you.
(applause)
So, I do have the answer
to those two questions
if you wanted to see them.
Or you can ask me later if you want.
Do you wanna play the --
do you have them at the edge of the --
I forgot to work on this with the people
at the beginning of the thing,
so let's see, are there any more slides?
There's some slides there towards the end.
I don't wanna see the video again.
You saw the video already.
So you saw that.
By the way, this is actually important
so it is really important
that you understand
that basically what I'm trying to say
your job is opening
questions not to close them
but here's the answer to the
opportunity cost questions.
So I have just closed the correctness gap
now you wanna know why, right?
Okay, so you talk to me after
dinner I can tell you why.
And here is the answer
to the ball question.
Again, you have switched from being right
now you wanna know why.
But there's no funny
business here, there it is.
But you're still curious
because you wanna know why.
Thank you guys.
You've been really good, thank you.
(applause)
