Pod Insights a16z Podcast Online Learning and the Ed Tech Debate About this episode This episode is all about education and technology, a topic that’s especially top of mind this week as students in much of the country return to school—virtually. The intersection of learning and technology has been accelerated by the pandemic, but the debate around education's "disruption," and what that means for educators doing the hands-on work of teaching, has been swirling for years.
In this episode, a16z general partner Connie Chan and host Lauren Murrow are joined by educators and experts Josh Kim, the Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth College, and David Deming, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Hi and welcome to the A16Z Podcast. I'm Lauren Murrow and today's episode is all about education and technology, a topic that's especially top of mind as students in much of the country are returning to school this week, virtually. Much of the discussion has been in the context of COVID and safety, but there's a greater debate around ed tech's potential that's been decades in the making. In this episode, A16Z general partner Connie Chan and I are joined by educators and experts Josh Kim, the Director of Online Programs and Strategy at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. His most recent book, Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, was published earlier this year, and David Deming, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard
0:41 Speaker 00 Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We explore the complicated issue of online education from a variety of angles. Can the quality of online learning stack up to that of an in-person education? What improvements have we seen over the past decade and what improvements are we likely to see this fall compared to the COVID scramble last spring? And might this moment be the push we need for educators and technologists, sometimes at odds, to collaborate more closely? The first voice you'll hear after mine is Josh, followed by Connie, then David. So much of the discourse around ed tech or online education is often posed in these stark terms. Much of the discussion seems to be, "Online education was this abject
1:24 Speaker 00 failure in the spring. Now kids are doomed to lose another year if we don't go back in person." So I think what I'd like to pose to the group is, what are some of the most common misconceptions you see in the discourse around online education?
1:39 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, we didn't really have online education in the spring, right? That wasn't anything that any of us who've been in online education for a long time would recognize as online education. So I think we first have to completely move away from... Making any conclusions about online education from this emergency pivot to remote learning due to COVID?
2:03 Connie Chan? Right, and I would argue that we should also make sure that we aren't just judging the concept of online education by what we see today. There's just so much potential for further innovation around the platform, around the medium, that I think we just don't see. But we already see in other countries around the world.
2:20 Speaker 03 I think one common misconception is more of a conflating of two things. One is the medium by which education happens, is it online or in person or some mix of the two? And then the pedagogical approach, is it lecture based, is it discussion based? How much of it is student facing, what is the size of the class? What's being taught and in what way? And I think what you see for most of the pretty brief history of online education is that classes that are online tend to be of one type that is often quite different than what you see in person. And so when people say online education, they often have this idea, maybe it's a superstar lecturing that's broadcast all over the web. Or it's a for-profit college that people perceive as being predatory on some types of students or whatever. But there's nothing that is intrinsic about online that makes it better or worse.
3:05 Speaker 03 At its core, online is a mode of delivery for education that has tremendous potential to reach people that couldn't be reached with in-person education models.
3:15 Connie Chan? With far better curriculum than they could have afforded.
3:17 Speaker 03 Potentially.
3:18 Connie Chan? Potentially.
3:19 Speaker 03 Although I don't think that's a guarantee, so I think we should get into that. I think there's a question of whether the education can be better and under what conditions. It is true that you see a lot of education innovators in the online space. But a lot of what they're doing could just as easily be done in person. What I would like to hear is more discussion of what should education look like? And then we decide whether it's easiest or best to deliver it online versus in person. Rather than debating about online versus in person and only later talking about what we're actually teaching and how we're teaching.
3:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree with that. One of the challenges we have when we talk about all this is definitions.
3:55 Speaker 01 People often talk about online education when they're talking about a lot of different things and very different things.
4:00 Connie Chan? Yeah, and I think to that point, some people are thinking of this as strictly K through 12 or K through college. In reality, you can also lump in things like a masterclass, things like lifelong learning, things like worker training, things like extracurricular classes that have been already online well before COVID.
4:17 Speaker 01 So, one of the confusions we often hear is to conflate online education at scale, which kind of started with MOOCs and now have moved on to what Coursera does and what EdX does, with what's been going on with online education now for a couple decades, which it looks very different than that, which is about very small classes, lots of active learning, lots of engagement between students and faculty, a lot of work with instructional designers. They happen to be in the same medium, they happen to be education that's done with technology, but they're completely different things.
4:52 Speaker 00 You mentioned the precedent of MOOCs, which is massive, open, online courses. So those have been hyped for a decade or so and have had limited success in disrupting education. It's pretty commonly agreed. So what has changed? Why do you see this newfound optimism now? What specifically are we seeing that we haven't seen in the past?
5:14 Connie Chan? Well, I think if you judge MOOCs, historically, it's been really targeted for college students and post-college graduates. And I think the effectiveness of MOOCs varies dramatically based off the age group and the kind of content you're trying to teach.
5:29 Speaker 00 This is an important point to make, which is, online education is not optimal for every subject or every learner. And so I think we can get into a bit more nitty-gritty when we're talking about how it translates for younger kids versus older kids.
5:43 Connie Chan? Shy kids, right? Kids who are bullied, you hear about them preferring online school. It really just ranges on the type of student and the age range. And I can understand why in the college bracket, it hasn't necessarily taken off. There are so many other things that a college provides the student. And oftentimes, the students want to be on campus, they do get different kinds of credentials with every university. But if you take that concept of a very large classroom and you target a different age group with different kinds of content, the value proposition could actually be quite different. So for example, if I was teaching, say, a singing class. And I opened it up to a thousand students. And because I had that many students, the prices were very affordable or could even be free.
6:27 Connie Chan? One could argue that that potentially could work. So a lot of the criticism around MOOCs has been, I think, a function of the age group they targeted and the type of content they tried to deliver.
6:39 Speaker 00 That's a good point to bring up in that many educators have been skeptical of online learning to date because it's difficult to run, say, discussion-based courses or lab work and group work can pose challenges. David, you've noted that what's called high dosage tutoring, so that's small groups, meeting frequently, has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to improve learning in addition to individualized feedback. So I guess the question is, can ed tech deliver this kind of personalized education that traditional education can?
7:11 Speaker 03 I think it definitely can. I think the question is whether it can do so at lower cost and to reach people who wouldn't be able to be reached. So it's an access question and a cost question. And I would put MOOCs toward one end of a spectrum where the extreme is just a lecture you post online or just like a TED Talk or content that's just online. You know, somewhere online, you can find the very best lecturer on the principles of microeconomics by the very best explainer of those principles and you can watch it. And that's something that's widely available. And the marginal cost of providing that to another person, once you produced it, is zero. And so you put it online and as many people can access it as possible, but there's absolutely no personalization at all. Everyone's watching the same lecture. And that's good for some people, but most people learn through some elements of personalization,
7:55 Speaker 03 you know, meeting people where they are, addressing their specific learning needs, motivating them to care and show up to class and turn in assignments and stay on task when things get difficult. And that's the hard work of education and that doesn't scale as easily as the MOOC or the online lecture. And so I think the question is whether ed tech can deliver that at lower cost. And I think it's possible. I think it's much harder than just creating great content and putting it up on the web and charging a very small fee for it. And I think that's basically why MOOCs haven't revolutionized the market because that's not really what education is. Education is not just content, it's also engagement and personalization.
8:27 Connie Chan? It's the peer group, it's the feedback. There are startups, though, that are trying to tackle that, that are creating these small breakout groups for any of these large topics.
8:36 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think those are very promising. I just think that, to me, that's where educational learning really needs to go is some combination of personalization and scale. It's a very hard problem.
8:46 Connie Chan? It is a hard problem, and the content has to be really good so that there's higher completion rates than what we have currently. I think a lot of people are realizing that content can be improved, especially with multimedia. Can you use some interactive hand gesture even to make sure the kid stays engaged and finishes the class? And the trickiness is going to be how it feels at the end of the day different than a YouTube video. So I think a lot of it still comes down to how do you design it in a way that will have a motivating factor for the student to go seek it out and complete it.
9:19 Speaker 00 Are there types of subjects that lend themselves better to an online curriculum versus in person?
9:25 Speaker 01 So I think about this a lot because my daughters are a rising junior and now going to be a rising grad student. Where I see the future going, which I see benefits and risks, is at the master's level and it's master's degrees at scale. Basically, low cost, hopefully, high quality master's degrees at scale. We see Illinois with its IMBA, we see BU with their low cost MBA, Georgia Tech with computer science. And basically, these are master's degrees that will not supplant MBAs or computer science degrees from elite institutions and not supplant the experience you get when you come to campus and can hang out with great faculty like David.
10:08 Speaker 01 There's no way to replace that intimate learning experience where you're with that cohort and had that experience that's priceless. But most master's degrees now don't provide that. My younger daughter wants to be an elementary teacher and she has to get a master's in education to get a good job. I'm not convinced that she needs to go to a very expensive master's program. I think that she could actually do fine with a master's program that is low cost, more at scale, where she gets the content, a peer group, she gets coached and mentored by maybe not a faculty member. So I think it would be wonderful if she could become a teacher with a master's degree without all that debt.
10:52 Speaker 01 I think there's enormous potential here.
10:54 Connie Chan? Yeah, Josh, when you talk about the master's program, it really makes me think a lot of it comes down to credentials too, right? And so can you use technology to allow more people to get those credentials in a cheaper way? And can you use technology to also have new signals that go beyond just the credential certificate? Like if your daughter took classes online, theoretically, whatever program supplied that service would know her grades, would know her scores, would know her performance. There's a lot of opportunity, I think, in helping people get those credentials in a more affordable way.
11:29 Speaker 01 On the downside, colleges and universities have used master's degrees to support their money-losing undergraduate programs. Tuition discounting is so high now that they really need these master's degrees, which have grown much more quickly than undergraduate degrees to balance the books. So what we're going to see is for middle-tier schools or schools without elite brands, their high-cost master's degrees are going to become less and less tenable as top-branded schools bring out these degrees as well as non-degree credentials.
12:00 Connie Chan? And in addition, there's other outside forces affecting it, right? Like losing international students this year or massive state budget cuts that we haven't seen the consequences of yet.
12:12 Speaker 00 So you're moving into the economics part of the discussion. And it's something that has been in the news in that many college graduates are graduating with debt. It's also popped up in younger age groups more recently as many upper-income families are trying to create their own pod schools. It's this question of the economics of education and whether it may be turned into some kind of a luxury good.
12:38 Speaker 01 You know, David's talked about this, what we have to guard against is this. bundled experience that my kids got that it doesn't just become the province for the wealthiest, for the most privileged. And it's very worrying and disturbing about how we're moving in this direction in this country. This is where the VC and the ed tech community really can't talk about inequality and concentration of wealth and hold schools like where David and I are, where there's more people from the top 1% than the bottom 2/3.
13:07 Speaker 00 Right, so Connie, you've talked about how you think tech may be this kind of great equalizer, right? With this one-to-many model, it can provide access to the best instructors at any location without the hefty buy-in of a year of tuition at Harvard. But David, you've also hypothesized that on-campus learning will become this increasingly important quality differentiator. So it may become a luxury good that only students with means can afford. How can we assess that fuzzy question of quality? Can online education provide that same level? And does ed tech pose the potential solution to the economic inequality?
13:49 Speaker 03 I think that it's very important to distinguish between different types of education that have different purposes. So Josh mentioned these master's degrees, but there's other things like coding bootcamps and other innovations out there in the ed tech space. And I think the ones that you see achieving success and will continue to be successful are the ones that A, offer something specific that people are looking for, they know what they want and they're going for it. And B, is sort of run assuming that the people who enroll in them have a set of basic, whatever you want to call them, 21st century skills. They're good problem solvers, they're self-starters, they understand how to work in a team, they can think abstractly, et cetera. And I think all of those things are also learned in school and are often learned in college, in a four-year program or in high school.
14:34 Speaker 03 And that's exactly the kind of thing that the public needs to be subsidizing because no company wants to subsidize you to go learn something that's useful everywhere. They want to subsidize you to learn something that's useful for the job you're doing for them. But those skills are incredibly important for succeeding in the modern workplace. And my worry is that all of the budget cuts and other things that Josh and Connie mentioned are going to cut to the bone in terms of the really core important skills that education is teaching. I do think those things can be taught online. I don't think it can only be done in person. But I also think the in-person experience, particularly at public flagship universities and mid-tier public universities, is much more successful than people give it credit for.
15:14 Speaker 03 It provides a very high-quality education in terms of future earnings at relatively low cost. And many of the schools that educate our nation's students are not the ones that are written about in New York Times where you see, you know, climbing walls and lazy rivers and incredibly lavish extracurricular things that detract from the core purpose of education. They're actually pretty lean organizations that do a lot of teaching and provide a lot of student support without spending very much money. And they're about to get hit terribly by budget cuts, as Connie mentioned. And so to me, I think ed tech and this general enterprise will all succeed much more when we, as a public tech base, subsidize those colleges to do their thing.
15:56 Speaker 03 And then we let the market do all the extra stuff, which I think it will do better than our public universities. That's how I would do it if I could play puppet master.
16:04 Speaker 01 And kind of going back to David's point, there's not a lot of history in the valley of being champions for funding of public education, post-secondary education. In fact, if you look at the rhetoric, it's often nothing. So I would say, you know, to the extent that academics feel comfortable and feel like we're actually partners and collaborators with the V E committee, the funding community, I think it's very important to engage, because David's exactly right. The crisis we have now in higher education is about the defunding at the state level of post-secondary education. There's no technological silver bullet.
16:42 Connie Chan? Point taken. Is funding the biggest problem in your mind, then?
16:46 Speaker 01 I think there's all sorts of entrenched challenges that higher ed faces, which we face. And kind of what David teaches about, I mean, all the growing inequality, these are structural issues that we have to work on together.
16:58 Speaker 03 Can I draw an analogy? So if you think about some of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley companies, almost all of them have relied on public infrastructure in some way. So there is no Uber without public roads that work and get people from point A to point B reliably. And that's an obvious point, but many, many countries that doesn't exist. There's not a tax base to fund roads where there aren't gigantic potholes in them. They need constant maintenance, et cetera. And there's many other examples like that. We need public infrastructure for private enterprise to succeed. And that's our physical infrastructure, but education is our human infrastructure. And every ed tech startup will succeed better when we have more self-directed learners as a baseline pool of people who are interested. And that's what public education does.
17:41 Speaker 03 And if we don't invest in it as a society, we're eating our seed corn.
17:45 Connie Chan? Yeah, no, I totally agree. And, and I know teachers are bearing a good chunk of the brunt. And, you know, I hear stories of a lot of teachers getting hired away for private education or for basically teaching small pods of children instead. So I do think the way our public school system and the resources they have today are going to look very different in a year.
18:09 Speaker 01 I mean, I think it's a good discussion to have. The reputation of ed tech amongst academics and within higher ed is not great. Professors don't feel that great about the ed tech industry.
18:23 Speaker 00 Why do you think that is?
18:24 Speaker 01 Well, what you often hear from the industry at large is that we're going to disrupt higher education. That you guys are bloated, you're expensive, you've been doing it the old way. You have to pivot, you have to evolve. And it really does not match the realities on the ground where most education is public. Forty percent of students go to community colleges. There's a real mismatch and I think often our communities are talking past each other.
18:51 Connie Chan? I do think we do have to acknowledge though, that there are people going to colleges, graduating, taking on a ton of debt, unable to find good jobs. And the also quality of teaching drastically, even within a university, varies by your professor. So it's really hard to say that education is fine as is. I would say there's still lots of low hanging fruit and ways to improve it. And it's not even just improving the status quo. It's also getting more students in the door. Again, that figuring out the access question, right? How do we incent more students to even go to community college? Is there a way that we can either drop the prices even further using technology? Or can we make the classes happen at the right schedule? So the kids can still have a full time daytime job to support his family,
19:36 Connie Chan? but still take classes at night?
19:39 Speaker 01 I think community colleges have been leading the fight into online education. The reality of that is no sector has had larger declines in public funding than community colleges.
19:49 Connie Chan? Certainly, that's a huge problem. But theoretically, if you had every community college course available online to any student at any community college in the country for every single quarter, then it's hard to argue that more students wouldn't be taking more classes. I'm also really curious what everyone thinks about. You start hearing these rumors of schools potentially doing away with some standardized testing in terms of admissions. And I'm curious if there will need to be new signals and will that need to require ed tech?
20:21 Speaker 01 I think it's great that we're getting rid of them. The SAT is somewhat predictive of first year success, not predictive of college success. And they're highly correlated with all sorts of other advantages. The more we move away from standardized tests, which really only benefit people decent privilege, the better we would be. And you know, I think part of that is schools, like the schools that David and I work at, we have to really ask ourselves, are there ways that we can expand opportunity? Is it morally defensible anymore to judge our success by our scarcity? What role can we actually play in creating opportunity by growing? But to answer your question, I'm also getting rid of those tests.
21:03 Connie Chan? Is there a tech potential solution to still provide some kind of unbiased way to evaluate students?
21:11 Speaker 03 I don't think it's possible to answer this question in a vacuum because it all depends on what replaces the test. Standardized tests are almost certainly biased, but are they more or less biased than what they replace is the question. And if you suddenly continue to do college admissions without a test, are people with privilege going to find other ways to signal that and to get ahead in the admissions game? Yes, they are. And so the question is, is this the most direct way to achieve the goal? To me, like getting rid of the SAT and the ACT. Is probably not by itself going to make a dent in this problem. My preferred solution would be if we just think college is out of you more diverse. They should just admit a more diverse class and set that as the final goal. Rather than this quite indirect solution of changing which criteria can and can't be used for admission.
21:56 Speaker 03 Right? In other words, if you have a goal, which is diversity, directly achieve that goal by deciding who you admit. And worry less about disparities in test scores and things like that.
22:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, we worry way too much about who we admit, but there's this enormous range of who can succeed at various institutions. It's less about who comes in at a pretty big range and more about the supports and resources that are provided. The fact is that wealthy institutions provide way more resources and support for learners. And they graduate at very high rates and public and non-flagship public institutions. They can just cannot provide those resources for the learners. And you see that in attrition rates that are very high.
22:36 Speaker 03 By the way, the scale of inequality in resource allocation in higher education is way, way higher than in K-12. Right? So like schools like Harvard and Dartmouth are spending about a hundred thousand dollars per student per year on education. And schools like Bunker Hill Community College down the street from me are spending about ten thousand dollars a year. So that's 10x at the most elite schools. And then many people don't go to college at all, so they're basically getting zero. Now compare that to K-12 education, the richest districts are maybe spending fifteen, twenty thousand dollars per student per year. And the poorest districts are maybe spending 12. Right? So there are gaps, but they're just way, way greater in higher.
23:16 Speaker 01 I do think it's a very interesting question. What is the tech community's role? Like if the real issue is this public disinvestment and inequalities in investment in higher education and class and racial lines. What is the role of the ed tech and the VC community in that? I don't know the answer.
23:33 Connie Chan? There are startups already trying to offer that kind of curriculum for very low cost or free. And there are also startups that are working on worker training. I mean, I know people go to higher and not just to get a job, but that is a big part of the incentive. And so there are startups that are helping people become better sales reps, marketing reps, computer scientists, you name it.
23:55 Speaker 03 There are also startups that are helping people apply to college, fill out their forms and get into college and then get support when they're there. And that's an important piece of the landscape too. So the way I think about it is, I think Josh is right that it's simplistic. To say that ed tech will disrupt higher education and just like leave it a wasteland. I don't think anybody really believes that, but that's often the caricature. But I do think that ed tech places very beneficial pressure on institutions of higher education to innovate. So to me, what I like about the ed tech space is that it shows us new ways to be better within traditional educational institutions. I don't think that higher ed is on the verge of being completely turned upside down. I mean, some colleges will go out of business in the next couple of years because of COVID.
24:38 Speaker 03 And some of those we're probably going to anyway, it's just going to accelerate the process. But I don't see a future where everyone's doing college online or through new startups and things like that. But I do think that many of us don't teach as well as we should. You know, sage on the stage, so to speak, is like mostly what happens at a lot of large colleges, lecture hall type. And that's just not a good way to learn and we sort of know that, but we don't face any pressure to change as 10 year faculty members. And maybe nothing can make 10 year faculty members change. But if anything can, it's this idea that other people are out there getting a different and better type of education. So to me, that's really the vision is that everything will be better because of a little bit of competitive pressure. And I think that's already happening.
25:12 Connie Chan? And I think ed tech also encompasses tools, right? It's not necessarily about replacing the teacher. It could even be just like the clicker you check so you can track student attendance, right? Or other ways to make sure that people are abiding by the honor policy. I'll give you an example. I was talking to a high school teacher and she was explaining how even just having Google Classroom show automatically when every student has submitted the homework, it's time stamped. That has saved her tremendously in terms of all the arguments she used to have with parents. Parents would argue that their kids' grades were not accurate. And now she can just open Google Classroom and show, hey, the kid didn't hand in this assignment. Hey, this assignment was handed in three days late.
25:57 Connie Chan? And so even something like that, it's just a small little tool, but has significantly helped her in managing her classroom. I feel like there are other ways that tech can be helpful and beneficial to the existing system.
26:10 Speaker 03 I totally agree. And I think the other reason why I'm optimistic about not just public higher education or traditional higher education, but education in general, is if you look at the history of technological change. One thing you learn is that there's some products that when we get more innovative at making them at less cost, we don't want more of them, like food, right? So, you know, 100 years ago, 40% of all jobs in the US were in agriculture. And now it's less than 2% because we got more productive in making food. We don't really need so much. So now we just devote fewer resources in the economy to making food. But education, healthcare and a few other things are not like that. When we get richer and more prosperous, we want more of it. So I don't think education as a sector is going anywhere. I think there's going to be more space for everybody.
26:54 Speaker 03 I think that a lot of these innovations in the ed tech space are going to exist on top of traditional institutions, not replace them.
27:00 Speaker 00 Many teachers on the ground do pocket this top-down infiltration of big tech into education without this baseline classroom experience. What should technologists in this space know from an educator's perspective? If you're addressing ed tech founders, technologists in this space, what should they know that they don't?
27:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, we like thoughtful in the ed tech world. We like people in the VC world because you guys are all about change. You have all these new ideas and we don't think that the status quo is what it should be. We are in this game because we believe that higher education should be an engine for mobility. But where I think the conversation often breaks down is that there's a mismatch in understanding of our time scales. So we're looking at very long time scales with our institutions. We believe in that. And also in higher education, we never start with the technology. But technology for us is just a tool.
28:01 Speaker 01 We don't even really talk about your online or blended or residential. You use the best methods for what's appropriate at the time. It's not actually reaching.
28:12 Speaker 01 Faculty in ways that they feel like it's supportive and helpful to them and not threatening.
28:19 Speaker 00 I agree with you. I feel like there's a real divide between the tech and the actual educators.
28:25 Speaker 01 I think that if our communities are going to come together in a more authentic way, we have to talk about where are the issues of access and costs and quality, find that common ground and then figure out together how we can create shared value with the expertise and the resources and the capital that we can all bring into this. And there's not really a space for that. If you look at the ed tech conferences like ASU, GSV or Southwest Southwest, it's all this is about disrupting higher education. And, you know, and we're sitting here saying, well, we don't really want to disrupt higher education. We want to invest in higher education. So I think our language just misses each other often.
29:06 Connie Chan? I agree. The language is very polarizing right now and it should change because I think ed tech's role should be to improve and everyone wants to improve education, but it doesn't necessarily mean to replace or to disrupt it in a negative sense.
29:20 Speaker 03 I have one thing I would like to communicate to the ed tech community. I would love to see folks focus more on curriculum and less on a delivery model. You know, everybody says things like, a lot of the things I do on the job, I never learned in school. Or I had to learn on the fly, things that I never learned in a classroom. And that's true for a lot of people. Why don't we have more education that is actually new content, new curriculum that the public school system is not covering? Just to give one example, for years and years, the standard for high school math that you take, if you're good at math, is calculus. And only a few people take probability and statistics. But probability and statistics is far, far, far more important for life success at this point in life,
30:03 Speaker 03 given the growth in data science, given the importance of data for making decisions for managers, that we should be teaching that in every high school in the country. And if we're not going to do that, we should have you have ed tech focusing on delivering good content to teach numerical reasoning, decision-making under uncertainty, probability statistics, to fill the void that is left in our public high school. I would love to see more talk of curriculum innovation.
30:28 Connie Chan? Which, by the way, I was really shocked that you said that, David, because I would have thought that focusing on the curriculum might feel even more threatening to the existing system and professors and teachers today.
30:39 Speaker 03 Well, I'll speak for myself. Maybe it is, but for me, that's not threatening. That's an opportunity for collaboration. Because there are faculty all across the country who have knowledge about content that isn't in a curriculum that is widely taught, that can be communicated. But, you know, we don't speak in the language that the public understands without a lot of practice. Most of us are not good communicators, or at least we could be better at it. Part of that is that we're just not trained to do it. You know, no one teaches us how to write a good op ed or how to communicate, how to do a podcast. We sort of have to learn on our own. But there's so much knowledge and expertise embedded in the university that needs to be drawn out. And that would require a tech to work closely with people. There's just so much interesting content that could be made more available. Like, if somebody were to work with me and say like, "Oh, you know, you teach this class about economic inequality.
31:24 Speaker 03 How can we make it speak and live to people?" Like, I don't have time to do that, but I would love to work with somebody to do that.
31:29 Connie Chan? But if we took that to the extreme and say we had the perfect curriculum for that particular course, and then we offered it to every university, doesn't that threaten the professor in some way? Because now every school has access to the same curriculum?
31:43 Speaker 03 Well, ultimately, the professor isn't the constituency that we should be interested in. It's the student.
31:48 Connie Chan? I agree with that.
31:49 Speaker 03 If the cost is making some tenured professors feel threatened, I think that's a cost that I'd be willing to pay in exchange for educating our nation's students and like spreading the knowledge that exists in institutions by our learning around more widely.
32:01 Speaker 01 I think the issue is that most academics don't work at the kind of places that David and I work at. I agree with David that I'm positive about the overall trajectory of higher education, but I'm very concerned about the individual institutions, particularly the smaller tuition-dependent private institutions. So, well, we have more students who attend public institutions. They actually have more private institutions. We have an amazing diversity of schools, and that kind of diversity has been a strength. I mean, in a world where everything is coming into one or two monopolistic providers, you know, you only have three cellphone providers and four airlines. One of the gifts of higher ed education
32:44 Speaker 01 is how diverse the ecosystem is. But right now, with COVID, it's very much accelerating the trends to put these schools at risk. We're seeing demographic headwinds. The costs are going up. And I think that if ed tech can come into this world to actually help out these institutions in some ways, you really should not be paying attention to the places where David and I teach and work. We're really not that important. You should really be thinking about the big flagship universities and this diversity of tuition dependent. If you can do that, the faculty will not be so threatened because you're actually helping to save their institutions that help keep their jobs.
33:24 Speaker 03 I mean, think about it, all those institutions, there are professors in departments all across the country who have developed a really thoughtful and interesting way of teaching certain material. And if you could combine it all into the perfect syllabus for teaching certain topics that are not widely taught, you could really supercharge the amount of learning that people can access. And if it's threatening, so be it.
33:45 Speaker 00 Right. So that could then potentially lead to this culling of teachers where if we have online courses taught by the quote unquote best instructors, that could make lesser lectures obsolete or redundant.
33:57 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, just to piggyback on that, I do think that you would have superstar lecturers, but I don't think that would make us all obsolete. I think what would happen is when you rather watch a lecture from somebody who's better at teaching economics than I am, my world transforms. I'm no longer the lecturer. Instead, my job is to basically guide people through the material and to meet them where they are in their learning and to form a human connection with them that makes them want to turn the assignment in because they come to my office hours and make a personal connection with me. I mean, if you think about teachers that have touched your lives, just imagine who are the teachers in your life that meant the most to you? It was a mix of the personal connection and the stuff they taught you in the classroom. It wasn't like, oh, my gosh, you know, Mrs. Hicks was the very best first grade teacher in terms of teaching phonics. You probably don't even remember what they taught you. You remember the human connection you had with them. And I don't think that's ever going to be replaced.
34:40 Connie Chan? I remember hearing an argument that everyone should pre-watch the lecture beforehand and then just do their homework in the classroom. And that guided time with the teacher would be far more valuable.
34:51 Speaker 00 Interesting. It's true that so much of what we get out of education is that personal connection, that mentorship. Though Connie, I know some startups are actually trying to tap into that mentorship model as well.
35:05 Connie Chan? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of startups right now that are trying to offer online tutoring. And peer groups even for learning different topics to help encourage each other or answer each other's questions. And in the online model, I think the value proposition is you are able to access people who don't just live a couple of miles from you. So if you lived in a place where you didn't have access to great tutors, you can now still hire a tutor from one of the best universities or one of the best schools who can still teach at a reasonable price.
35:39 Speaker 00 I do want to get more into the actual design of education. From a research perspective, what should educators know when they're delving into this world of online learning? Many educators are using Zoom by default. How much of the effectiveness of an online learning curriculum is impacted by that interface or what you might call the delivery method? Would students and educators benefit from some kind of custom platform that was designed from an education-first perspective versus a Zoom, which was not originally intended for this purpose?
36:12 Speaker 01 I mean, so the way we're using Zoom now in education is never how people who think about online education thought this should be or would be or could be. Basically, when you design a good online course, most of that work is asynchronous. You're building active learning, you're building discussions, you're building formative assessments, you're building peer learning. Mostly, it's asynchronous, and then you can combine some synchronous conversations, discussions. It never works well to lecture, but it's complementary and it's really for the relationship building. What we found in with the pivot to remote teaching and learning with COVID is schools didn't have time to develop these really well-thought-out asynchronous courses with everything you do with online.
36:57 Speaker 01 There is sometimes too much emphasis on Zoom classrooms that are not very good, and it burned people out. And so if you assume what we're seeing now is actually indicative of anything, you're getting a false negative.
37:11 Speaker 00 I mean, that's a point well taken, but if Zoom, as you say, is just not working, what will the improvement be? You mentioned we'll likely see improvement this fall in that you know a lot about the research of online ed and you've both done it.
37:22 Speaker 03 My answer is ask me in a couple of months because I'm teaching a first year master's in public policy curriculum at the Kennedy School Stats course. So I'm teaching it with some colleagues who've done it before and have already started to use blending tools. So it's a pretty successful model that I'm stepping into luckily. But this will be a challenge because you're trying to teach something that actually requires a lot of interactivity. You know, I can make some asynchronous content, but when you're working through problems and explaining concepts, part of the challenge is to intuit when you're in a classroom and you're with folks, when you need to slow down, when you need to speed up, when you need to step back and explain something differently. And a lot of good teaching is not about what you prepare ahead of time, it's how you react, at least in my experience, and like reading the room. And my observation from doing a lot of seminars is that the four of us right here,
38:06 Speaker 03 I don't find it to be meaningfully worse in terms of reading your reactions and talking with you. But when you get to above 10 or 12 or so, it's just very hard to read the room and read people's faces and get a sense for what's happening. You don't have any body language. You can't look at 15 faces at once. And I just find it frankly, very difficult to pace correctly. And I don't know if there's a technological solution to that. It's just something about when you're in a room with people sitting there, you can just pick up more information from scanning the crowd. And I think that's a real limitation of online teaching, at least for me. So I'd be really open to any technology that helps me do that better.
38:41 Speaker 01 The challenge of it, it doesn't scale very well. Having the real authentic education that is personal and transformative, where it's built on relationships, it's expensive to do because like David's time, he only has so much time in the day.
38:55 Speaker 03 And never sleep.
38:56 Speaker 01 And so it really doesn't scale very well. So it's figuring out how you can actually use the affordances of the technology and realize the limitation.
39:05 Speaker 00 That's a great point. I think it's one that you've both made, which is some of the inherent features of a great education. Are very difficult to scale up. Connie, how would you respond to that?
39:17 Connie Chan? As David was describing reading the room, I couldn't agree more when you're talking about, you know, say 30 students or less, just witnessing my daughter's kindergarten online experience through Zoom in the spring. It's hard for the teachers to control 35 year olds, really, really hard. But I can also see the flip argument, which is say, if you have a lecture hall of 500, 600 students, even being able to see the attendance and technologically, there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to use software to figure out if the student's paying attention or making eye contact. So theoretically, you should be able to read the room in very, very large class sizes, potentially better than even in person.
40:00 Connie Chan? So I think there's still an argument that tech can still even help you read the room more than what you see today.
40:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, I definitely think that's possible.
40:09 Speaker 01 I just wrote a book called Learning Innovation: The Future of Higher Education. So one of the things we talk a lot about in the book is how education is changing to become much more of a team sport. Like David and I, when we went to grad school, we sort of learned to teach the way we were taught by our professors, which means not at all learned or disciplined. I'm a sociologist and demographer, my training, I didn't learn anything about teaching. Now, certainly in schools with more resources, they've been able to bring in people who are learning designers, instructional designers, media experts, those kinds of things, which really teaching learning is becoming a team sport. I think that's a positive because education's getting much better. I also think, you know, one of the underlying issues that we have to think about when we're talking about higher education, the future and technology is we're seeing a growth in
40:54 Speaker 01 inequality. We're seeing that the schools with the most resources are really able to bear this COVID and the current trends. Schools that don't have the resources to bring in all these folks to work with faculty around designing online courses, low residency blended courses, you know, it's a much different type of thing. So it's a real question, well, how do you bring those resources to places that really don't have the money to pay these kind of folks? How education's changing? I don't know the answer to that. I think it's a really difficult problem, but I do think we've seen the inequalities grow and grow over the last five, six months.
41:31 Speaker 03 I agree with that, although I do think probably the solution to improvement is that Sort of complementarity between people who have content mastery and the tools, right? You still need a person to figure out the best way to reach people to teach a complex topic, like, let's say, economic inequality or something. So I'm an economist by training, and I never encountered economics until college. And there is an AP micro macroeconomics curriculum, but most people never realize until they take an economist's class that economics is not just money and finance, but it's actually the study of human behavior and choice under constraints, and economists have interesting things to say about all kinds of social issues. I started teaching a freshman seminar at Harvard about economic inequality, basically
42:14 Speaker 03 for the sole purpose to introduce to freshmen at Harvard, few at a time, this idea that economics can be the study of social problems and of human behavior, and that it's far more interesting than most people think. I would love to get some of that insight into the hands of high school students and middle school students. You can make that stuff accessible to people without it being technical. The core insights of economics are not about math and abstract probability, they're about human behavior and things like sunk costs, et cetera. In order for me to entrepreneurially go and create that content and like go take a road show around and talk, there's just no way that professors have the capability of doing that or the time to do it. But that's a place where innovation could, and maybe there's not enough money to make it, but it would just be an incredible benefit to society if we could like have innovative
42:56 Speaker 03 content creators pair with people who have content expertise and create stuff that really spoke to people, whatever, multimedia content that kids are interested in watching. And then you've got other tools that let you, you know, annotate slides on an iPad, or you've got these beautiful light boards where you can teach in reverse and look at the camera while you're teaching and write on them. And like, those are all tools that by themselves don't do anything, but if they're combined with people who have content knowledge, can be leveraged to teach more people at the same cost or to increase productivity.
43:25 Speaker 00 So we've talked about how tech should play a supporting role in in-person education. This is an interesting moment in time in that tech has to play a much greater role than I think many educators desire or are comfortable with. But as we come out of this and we go back to normal life, do you think this is an inflection point for ed tech? Is it just a temporary and comedian scramble that will eventually reset to the way that we were? Or do you think that there will be lasting changes?
43:57 Speaker 03 I think that people prefer to be educated in person. Many people do. And so I don't think the in-person market for education is going to disappear or go into a long-term decline. But I do think there are going to be a lot of people who understand that there are many more options available to them in the tech space. That if they can't be on campus for whatever reason, there's a much richer landscape out there than most people realize. So to be optimistic, I think what we'll see is more education happening in a lot more different ways, rather than the tech sector competing away in-person education. So that's my hope, and I actually do think that's what I'm hoping. But I could be wrong.
44:37 Connie Chan? K through 12, I think almost everyone universally prefers in-person. I think the kids prefer in-person. I think the teachers prefer in-person. And I think the parents very, very much prefer in-person.
44:49 Speaker 03 Second that.
44:50 Connie Chan? So I feel like K through 12, while we are all surviving in an online context, the preference will be to go back to school, especially all that social interaction for young kids is so critical to their development. And my hope is that a lot of this disruption, this moment in time, will result in better curriculum and allow for the best curriculum to get to all of the teachers. Because if you think about especially K through 12, the Common Core programs, and most schools are teaching the same topics, right? The same kindergartner is learning about how plants grow in one school and learning about it in a slightly different way in another school. But why aren't those teachers having better collaboration tools? So they can share tips and learnings and content
45:33 Connie Chan? and the best YouTube video on the topic that they found.
45:36 Speaker 00 Josh, I want to get your view as well. Is this temporary and we're going to go and reset? Or do you think we'll see lasting changes in the way that we learn?
45:44 Speaker 01 Yes. In terms of like how we're going to come out, I'll say something very positive in that over the last few months, what we've really seen are that professors and learners have had to have a different kind of relationship. Like we've all been at home. We've seen how complicated and crazy our lives are and how difficult it is. I'm hoping that as we come back and when we come back, that professors and students will kind of have a better understanding of each other as people and how just complicated and difficult our lives are. And we'll have more of an ethos towards care and caring for each other.
46:19 Connie Chan? Oh, I think parents appreciate teachers. Far more now than they did before.
46:25 Speaker 03 Totally agree.
46:25 Connie Chan? They're much more grateful to teachers now than before.
46:29 Speaker 00 Well, and the whole ed tech debate brings up that interesting dichotomy in that teachers are recognized as being largely underpaid. I say that being married to one, but also in the ed tech space, they're also expensive and there's ways that we can bring down those costs with online models.
46:46 Connie Chan? But if you take what David mentioned about teachers playing a different kind of role, the guided role, there's still always going to be a need for that, this smaller group or one-on-one interaction. It's undisputable that people do learn certain topics that are one-on-one.
47:01 Speaker 03 That's right. And I think that would be a really great development because, speaking for myself, that's really where I derive joy from teaching, is that moment when I see understanding in students' eyes and I make a connection with them. And that's something that, whether it's online or in person, is just the joy of teaching. And if we can immerse ourselves more fully in that, using the tools of technology, then I'm all for it.
47:25 Speaker 00 Can you have that same emotional connection through a Zoom screen as you can in-person classroom?
47:30 Speaker 03 I think you can. I mean, we'd prefer to be in person, but I've felt at times in the past few months, that connection with students or with colleagues. I mean, I think if nothing else, the one thing you don't get online is serendipity. Like, just think about when students file into the classroom, there's that five minutes before class starts and people connect and, you know, how was your weekend? And they talk about this and that. And then you have that at the end and they come after to talk to the professor. I mean, you can engineer that in the online space and be thoughtful about it. When you're in person, it just happens like magic.
47:56 Speaker 00 Josh, you seem slightly more skeptical about...
47:58 Speaker 01 I mean, I don't want my college kids having online. I want them on campus. I'm the director of online programs and strategy, but I know you can't replace what happens when people get together. It's such an important thing and it shouldn't just be a luxury for the few. I really do think there's a lot going on now with this nonprofit-for-profit partnerships, that we all need to work together because it's such a difficult challenge. We all have a stake in this. Like, this is not someone else's issue. This is what we have to do. And we're not going to be able to do it on our own. Nonprofit colleges and universities, we need to be part of a larger ecosystem and we need to be working together. Software is eating the world, but maybe education is eating the world also.
48:43 Speaker 00 Well, thank you all so much for joining us on the A16Z Podcast. It's been a pleasure.
48:47 Speaker 03 Thanks for having us. Great to meet all you guys. It was fun.
48:50 Speaker 01 It's great.
48:51 Speaker 00 Thank you, guys.
Previous On Vaccines and Vaccinology, in COVID and Beyond Next Reining in Complexity: Data Science & Future of AI/ML Businesses Page updated September 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
