This year, i embarked on a rethink school tour where we visited learning environments and institutions that are taking creative approaches to education for students of all ages. I continue to travel the country to see the great work thats being done, and i have been inspired by the innovative educators and administrators ive met thus far. But theres still not enough. We need more like them and like you. The reality is that there are a number of challenges and opportunities facing Higher Education, and washington, d. C. , does not have all the answers. Government is not the best at finding new solutions to tough problems. Government isnt the best thing at being isnt the best at being flexible or adaptable to a constantly changing environment. And government certainly isnt the best at questioning the status quo. But government can be good at bringing people together to highlight their creative thinking and new approaches. So today, weve brought education leaders and entrepreneurs from across the country to share how they are improving education for the students they serve. While you represent a Diverse Group of institutions and organizations from across the Higher Education sector, the common denominator is that each of you began by seeing a problem or a deficiency or an inefficiency. You questioned why it was that way, and then you developed a solution to fix it or make it better. Its that type of thinking that we need more of in American Education today. We need to question everything, to look for ways in which we can improve and embrace the imperative of change. Youve embraced that mindset and your students are reaping the awards, because at the end of the day, success shouldnt be measured by how much ivy is on the wall. It should be determined by how youre educating and preparing stuj students for todays and tomorrows challenges. So lets treat today as an opportunity to share what is working from your respective worlds and where the impediments at any level of government are preventing you from achieving your mission of serving students. Thank you again for being here today. And i am really looking forward to todays discussion. Thank you, madam secretary. Were excited to get under way. Were going to call up the first group, as you see on your agenda, it is beyond seat time. Our first speaker and forgive me if i get your name incorrectly, jeff from corcera, followed by annette, followed by ben nelson from the minerva project. Well have the presenters do their presentations. Well then join at the table and the secretary will lead us in a short discussion. Thank you so much. Good morning. Thank you to secretary devos and the department of education for convening this group and giving us a chance to talk about what the future of Higher Education might look like. My name is jeff. Im the ceo of cosara. And ive only been on the job for six months, but it is a remarkable company, i think, with a remarkable purpose. Coursera was started in 2012 by two professors at stanford who teach Computer Science, and they got the idea that maybe there would be additional interest in learning Computer Science from around the world, so they put their course on the internet and over 100,000 people came to take the course and they thought, wow, theres a real opportunity here to make what dwe do available to many more people. We now have 30 million learners from around the world who have registered to take courses on coursera. About 6. 5 million are from the united states. About 2. 5 million are from indian, 2 million from china, 1. 5 million from mexico. Those are our four largest countries, and theyre taking courses on Machine Learning, on bitcoin, on english for career development, on financial markets, on python for everyone, and many other courses. Weve teamed up with 150 universities who have published 2,400 courses on coursera. Ranging from anthropology to accounting to philosophy. We also have recently launched four degrees. One of our partners is the university of illinois. These are fully accredited masters degrees. And they are delivered to a global audience at a fraction of the price of what a traditional masters degree would cost. The diploma actually comes from the university of illinois. It is identical to an mba that you would get if you were on campus. I was at the university of illinois recently, and i was talking to students and professors who teach, and i do believe that this is a glimpse of what the future of Higher Education looks like. We have professors who have been teaching for 40 years who are on multi twoway video, teaching classes of 500 students around the world in realtime, face to face when i say face to face, i mean they see each others faces through the video conferencing. Theyre all networked together in chat communities, the whole team, the whole class, study groups, the teachers and tas and theyre having live sessions on a global basis. The study groups, when they break out, talk about these problems as they relate to all the Different Countries around the world. In addition to the 150 University Partners, we also have 18 Industry Partners. These are companies who are publishing content and courses on coursera, especially on topics that are very business oriented. Some of these Industry Partners include google, pwc, ibm, and sisco. Recently in the last year, coursera has been offering coursera to enterprises because fundamentally the need for Higher Education is being driven by a change in the world that is happening at an accelerating rate, through technology, new jobs are requiring new skills and many jobs are going to be replaced by software and robotics, and so theres a whole new class of skills that will be required in enterprises, and so companies are hiring coursera to put these types of courses and these types of competencies in the hands of everyday workers. Honeywell is one of our 25 of the fortune 500 companies who have hired financial coursera. At t is another one of those companies and theyre basically offering coursera to upscale their employees. We also are working with governments, including singapore and the philippines, to retrain their workforce, especially in topics like data science, technology, and business. And whats really fascinating is to see how these businesses who are hiring coursera are working with University Partners to deliver entirely new learning experiences and even entirely new credentials. So, google, for example, has created a certification called the google cloud developer, which teaches people how to actually develop software in the cloud. Recently, we announced, with google, the google i. T. Certification. This is a program thats designed for people who do not have a College Degree but would like to get into the field of i. T. And technology. And it will be delivered entirely online and qualify people to have Technology Jobs who dont have technology backgrounds. We also have a company in silicon valley, a technology company, who is mixing together content in very novel ways. So, they have taken a Machine Learning class from one of our University Partners. They have coupled that with a deep learning specialization from one of our Industry Partners. And they are actually offering content themselves as a business, and theyre putting all this content together so that from universities to Industry Partners to their own Custom Software courses, theyre putting together curricula for their employees, and theyre creating new credentials within their corporate work space so that when employees complete these courses, they get credentialed and recognized for the competencies that they have delivered. So were very excited to be here. Im very interested to hear what everyone has to say, and i hope that coursera can participate. Its a pleasure, and i think that what were looking at in the future of Higher Education is extremely exciting. Thank you. Good morning. It is really exciting to be here and join this many innovators and transformation folks in one room. Im delighted to talk about Digital Education transformation. And how were going about it. But before we do that, id like you to sort of put your minds, just calm down, go into yogic pose, and think about 2030. No thoughts. Just think about 2030. Im going to ask a simple question. What fraction of todays jobs do you think will be around in 2030 because of automation and technology and ai . Just yell out the answer. According to the International Education commission, 50 of todays jobs will be gone by 2030. Half. So each hands you shake hands with somebody, remember that by 2030, one of those hands will not be there. 50 jobs will go away because of these new technologies. What that means for education institutions, whether universities or other institutions, is that we have a planetscale reskilling challenge on our hands. This is not just to educate a few people. Its going to be planetscale. Half of todays jobs gone all around the world. And this is not just the one challenge facing universities. The question is, can universities play in that space . And the way universities are structured, students come in at age 18, study for four years and go away. Theres no concept at universities of lifelong education. And to me, this sounds very much like, you know, we are close to pentagon here, like missiles, fire and forget. The age of 18. But we need to move to a completely new model of education where universities and Education Systems can work with learners throughout their careers skpl aand not just the four years. Many other challenges facing the Education System. One is the costs are crazy. Second is that theres not been a lot of innovation in the education space in tens, maybe hundreds of years. And so, edx was founded in late 2011, founded by harvard and m. I. T. We are a nonprofit. The basic mission of edx is to reimagine education. Okay, were a nonprofit. And our thinking is, how do we work with University Partners and corporations, governments, and other nonprofits to really rethink education as a system . Its not just about us. Its rethink education as a system. Today, we are based in Kendall Square in massachusetts. In the technology hub. And we really think like a startup, even though we are a nonprofit. We have 14 Million Students from 196 countries. Over 2,000 courses being offered by 130 Institutional Partners like oxford, m. I. T. , harvard, georgetown, berkeley, columbia, penn. The list goes on and on. And a lot of corporations like microsoft and systems like Linux Foundation and others. We have 50 million courses enrolled so far in our roughly six years in existence. And weve also moved into credit bearing programs where the courses on edx convert into credit. Maybe some of our colleagues here will talk about it from asu, like Global Freshman Academy. Edx is a nonprofit and nonprofits give things away for free. So our content is available for free. The learners can come and learn for free. So today, virtually all courses on edx are free. There are moocs, massive open online courses. Its completely free, not just the videos, but videos and exercises are all free and we are pretty much the only mooc provider left today that offers all its content for free. Weve also made a platform available for free as open source. What does this mean . Just imagine if google were to say, im going to take our search algorithm and Search Software and put it out there so anybody can use it for whatever they want to do. Thats what weve done. Weve given away our software to anybody that times it as open edx and its been incredible. In addition to the 14 million learners on edx, theres at least 14 million learners that we know of on open edx platforms. Theres over 1,800 edx instances around the world today, including options by entire countries. So for example, you just see some of the countries here. Ministries of education in these countries have launched national infrastructures, countries like china, france, russia, hong kong. How cool is that . How cool is having russia adopt an open source platform created by the u. S. For educating their people . Companies have adopted edx like mckenzie for education and also universities, stanfords Online Platform is also based on open edx. So, you know, part of this meeting here is to think about innovation and the future of higher ed. And id like to, you know, think ahead to five, ten years, and i want to predict that education is going to look like this and then tell you what we are doing about it. The trends in education are that education in five to ten years will become modular, will become omnichannel, and will become lifelong. Im saying it will become, because we are going to make it so. Its not going to happen by itself. We are going to make it happen. Why is modular a good idea . Modular is good, because it can create new efficiencies and new scaling and unbundling of components that can create much better efficiencies. Just imagine phones in 1982, the boxy beige at t phone that now gets converted to this when the whole telecommunication industry got unbundled. So what are we doing about it . Weve launched a new credential along with our University Partners called the micromasters. The micromasters is about 25 of a masters degree. You can learn completely online and you can learn for free. You can do it completely for free. If you want the credential, its about 1,000. And if you get admission to the university, it offers a pathway to credit and accelerates your masters program. So, m. I. T. Is here. M. I. T. Launched a supply chain micromasters on edx. If you complete it, you get admission to m. I. T. , you can complete the 60,000 masters degree at m. I. T. In half the time, in one semester, and half the price. Similarly, we have micromasters in robotics from penn and a. I. From columbia. The list goes on and on. We have 45 micromasters, all that you can learn for free, all offering a pathway to credit. And enabling you to do clever things. Once its modular, you can get all the novel things happening. You can stack them up. Weve launched a fully stacked online masters degree with georgia tech. The campus degree costs 40,000 in data analytics. Once you make things modular, you can build things together like legos. Theres a micromasters for 1,500 and you can add more courses if you like and complete an online masters from a Top Ranked University for 9,000. Its a very novel stacking idea. You can share. A number of universities are now sharing the micromasters. So, as an example, in pakistan, the University Uses the micromasters in data science from ucsd, san diego, as a component of their masters degree and theyve taken 70 of the courses from cs degree, bolted on this component and now they offer a data science degree and the sharing is happening in the u. S. Rit is accepting credit from m. I. T. For supply chain. Many other universities are doing this sharing and we hope to keep expanding on that. At the end of the day, its about learners and what benefit theyre getting from it. So heres just one simple story of a student in cambridge. She had a job. She did the micromasters in supply chain, put that on a linkedin profile, got interviewed and got a job and doubled her income. Just one example of a learners story that benefitted from Something Like this. Corporates are buying into this. Charlie baker, massachusetts governor, a month ago announced that through a partnership with ge, ge would guarantee an interview to any candidate out of massachusetts that completed a micromasters in Cloud Computing from umuc, whos here, on edx, or a micromasters in ai from columbia or Cyber Security from rit. They guaranteed an interview. So were getting more and more corporates involved in similar jobrelated approaches. So, once we make education modular, omnichannel, in that universities begin to offer not just inperson courses but efficient online courses as well, we can move into life along learning where learners can take these kourgcourses throughout life. Here are some examples we can expect in five to ten years from universities if we do it right. One example. Why not create new modular programs like micromasters. We will launch microbachelors within the next year or two and do the same modularization of the bachelors degree. Already launched with asu, thats a precursor to the microbachelors. Another example. Imagine if the government could recognize micromasters for Financial Aid. Wouldnt that be cool . Employers are already recognizing it for jobs. Imagine if we could create a universal Credit Exchange where a micromasters and microbachelors got recognized for each other. And just imagine if every campus said, hey, look, im going to allow my students to take 20 to 50 of credit from somewhere else. You could halve the cost of education in a short amount of time, and this is already happening. Georgia tech and m. I. T. Are already allowing their students, so far, one course at m. I. T. , one course, a number of students took completely online, for credit on campus. So we could do a number of these things and really think what reimagining education, once we make things modular, omnichannel, and lifelong. Thank you. Hello. My name is ben nelson. Im the founder of minerva, and i wanted to take a little bit of a different perspective, which minerva anybody who knows about us always is different. But i wanted to go bac