EdUp Innovation: Episode 1, Ben Nelson - Minerva Project

[MUSIC] Good afternoon everybody. It's Brad Fuster, host of the Edub Innovation Podcast. And I am joined today by a friend and very special guest for episode one of Edub Innovation, Mr. Ben Nelson. Ben in 2012 founded the Minerva project after a career in tech as the CEO of Snapfish. And I remember Ben sitting in my kitchen in Buffalo, New York in 2012, reading about the Minerva project and thinking, I hope I get to meet this guy one day. And so it is just such an honor to have you on and to talk to you a little bit about Minerva project and Minerva University. For those of you who don't know, Minerva University is hailed as the number one most innovative university in the world. And it's really a great privilege to talk to Ben about what drove him to found Minerva and the work he's doing today. So Ben, let's dive right in. Let's hear, let's go back to 2012 and talk about the genesis of the Minerva project. Sure. Well, it's a, now a long time ago. I actually started working on it solo in 2010 before I kind of came out to the public and talked about it in 2012. And the impetus was really going back to my original thinking around for forming a high red from 16, 17 years beforehand when I was an undergraduate. And I realized that what universities were doing, which is that the time and certainly today really atomized education, professor coming into a class teaching whatever they want. Sometimes you've had a great professor, you could learn a thing or two other times, probably not. And what's worse is that even when a professor sparked an idea, sparked a way of thinking, you rarely had an opportunity to apply it in other classes. So unlike when you teach anybody anything that you want them to retain a sport, an instrument, a language, where it's all about space repetitive practice, it's all about recontextualization. University of Warrant set up for that. And what's worse is that universities really are the last line of defense for society. Pretty much anybody who is making decisions of consequence decisions that impact lives of others more than their own has a university degree. That is the thing that they have in common. And I realized that institutions needed to actually embrace that responsibility and fundamentally reform what they do. I tried to implement that when I was an undergraduate, they'll be really cared. And years later, I saw that the lack of university graduates who have systematic thinking, who have the space-deliberate recontextualized practice in applying a certain thinking methodologies to day-to-day life was really hurting the world. And that's where the idea of creating a prototype institution, showing the rest of the world what's possible within the confines of a traditional university accreditation system, etc. And then use that prototype institution to help reform and inspire other institutions to be created or to create new programs or form existing programs inside them. Yeah, thank you. And certainly you've done that. Can you, for those of those are the listeners that don't know, can you walk us through the maneuver model? Like, how's the sausage made and how are you getting to those outcomes? Yeah, so as I mentioned in a traditional university, the unit of measurement is really the course. Right? What happens in the course gives you a grade. What happens in the course is completely self-contained. You may show up to the course wildly prepared, you may show up to the course completely unprepared. And the idea is you cram in knowledge, you demonstrate usually at one point in time, the final exam or the final project or paper that you're able to apply that knowledge or regurgitate that knowledge, depending on the type of class it is, and at one time, and then you get your grade and you move on. And so the majority behavior of students of professors is to enable a cram pass, forget model, right? Where you get prepared for that one summit of assessment, you demonstrate that you can do it. And then afterwards, you really don't have an incentive to retain the information. And that's fundamentally problematic. And so what what I did at Minerva is I made the core unit of measurement much more granular yet the overarching assessment model much larger. And what does that mean? It meant that I broke down rather than into particular courses, particular learning objectives. What we initially referred to as habits of mind or foundational concepts, habits of mind, things that allow your brain to have great learning to visions and act automatically. foundational concepts ideas that are generative that you can build them up on top of and you can apply in various contexts as of course habits work across several contexts. And even though each of these learning objectives would be introduced at particular times and within particular courses, they would actually get reinforced throughout the entire curriculum, entire four year arc, no matter what it is that you chose to study. And so these core methodologies, these core thinking tools that didn't present to you a way of thinking, but really multiple ways of thinking, multiple ways of learning and understanding how does you make sense of the world were then measured across the entire curriculum. And the goal of the curriculum was not just to reinforce and recontextualize those types of tools, but to give you as many dimensions of application as possible. So, so that not only where you applying the same concept over and over and over again, you are applying them across subject in the University's case across culture, across certainly time, across modality, across type of work that you were engaging in. And all of those were different pathways in the brains, what psychologists refer to as far transfer. And as you measured student's ability to apply that particular tool consistently over the years and over these context, what happens is that they've developed those intuitions and then they could use them in their day to day life. Yeah, that's certainly a departure from the typical curriculum model, which is somewhat hajpaji and owned in different pockets or silos of the University, thinking of it holistically that students will be armed with these things across multiple classes, certainly sets them up for a deeper learning experience. Talk for a little bit if you would about the global immersion that Manurabha students experience and what was the impetus for that and you know, how did that come about? Well, between my third and fourth year in college, I was afforded by some fluke chance and opportunity to live in Singapore for three months and work for the Walt Disney company and to actually start a brand new division for the Walt Disney company and this very small team. And that summer, I realized that three months in Singapore, I learned more in those three months that I had learned in the previous three years at an Ivy League University. And the reality was that what I was doing day to day was truly experiential learning, I dreamed you from firehose. I've never set foot in Asia before in my life, at least East Asia. I've never had the opportunity to work in a giant corporation, but I've had many layers. I've never had the opportunity to actually start something, or be honest, on a team that started something brand new and it was a completely different industry. So culture, industry, type of work, everything was different. And at the end of that summer, I realized this is what college should be like. Philadelphia is lovely, but you know, there's the old WC fields joke where, you know, first prize at a competition is one week vacation Philadelphia. And the second prize is, or sorry, the second prize is one week in Philadelphia. The first prize is two weeks in Philadelphia. Or sorry, vice versa. So, so you don't really want to have a stasis of place. And that is fundamentally because you have an opportunity to see different realities and then see what it is that you've learned and how you can apply it. And so when I was forming Minerva, I was thinking about what, what should the student experience be like? I very much believe if it's feasible. And I was thinking about what, what should the student experience be like? I, I very much believe if it's feasible to have a residential experience where students lived together, they break friends together, they study and work together, socialize, I think that has tremendous amount of value. But where that would be, I realized that a static location would really not maximize student's opportunity to apply what it is that they've learned. And so the idea was you start them in one place, start them in the city I have to be based in San Francisco and San Francisco. So lovely place. So we spent the first two semesters in San Francisco, but then in the in suing three years, the idea was that the students would travel as a cohort and live in six other cities around the world. And experience different aspects of the world, continue their studies at the university as they travel, but be able to apply what it is that they've learned in every single class with local institutions, interacting with thought leaders, with the primary movers and shakers, if you will, of the society, but also to ensure that the location is incorporated into their work. And such such that in every course, we assign what we refer to as location-based assignments where the students could then apply what it is that they're learning in their class to the day to day. And it also made that connection such that they not only were applying what they learned that given week, but they may be applying stuff to learn two, three years before and be able to reinforce that again, that reconstruction. Can you give us some examples? So like Japan and World War II or like what are some of the location-based content that you're talking about? Sure. So one of the things that we did because in the first year, we knew our students were in San Francisco. And so we oftentimes did things that were specific to San Francisco. But in the second, third and fourth years, we really didn't know where the student would be when they would take a particular course. And so the courses themselves never said, "Hey, when you're in Berlin, go to this museum and then go and interrogate that piece of thing." What they would do is they would say, "Go and talk to a local legislator." And find out what it would take to implement this kind of public policy that you've been working on in that particular location. And so the assignments would be ones that would force the students to go out into the real world and figure out how it is that that society navigated. And that wasn't just true of the curriculum. It was also true of the day-to-day living. Sure. As the students were moving from country to country, they weren't moving from one university campus to another. They lived in residential buildings that had no cafeterias, no gyms, where they had to live as if they were resident in the city. And that was really crucial when it came to their ability to apply what they learned in their day-to-day lives, not just in professional or academic environments. Yeah, I love that. The social navigation piece that's inbuilt, co-curricular, really sets students up to be mature and ready to take on the world when they graduate. That's amazing. Let's shift gears for a minute if we could. So we both live in San Francisco and it's hard not to notice all the AI ill-words here and it's just top of mind. And higher ed's reaction to AI has been varied. Like in first traditional faculty wanted to turn it off and contain it and the genies out of the bottle. So thinking as disruptively as you do at Minerva Project and knowing what the capacity of AI is. What do you see as the future for higher ed writ large in the United States, in the world, as a result of AI? Where are we going? Yeah, I think part of understanding where we're going is understanding where we have been and what has happened to get us to where we are now. I remember 30 years ago, one of my mentors in college, John Schitt Gandhi told me, you know, and there's a devil's bargain between professor and student, which is that the less work they both do, the happier they both are. And that is sadly very true. And over the last 60 years, we've seen what happens without aligned incentive. Students at American institutions today spend less than two-thirds the amount of time that they spent 60 years ago on their studies. Yet the rate of awarding A's has gone up 5x. Sure. Yeah. And so massive grading inflation, massive lowering of standards. And that's not just true of higher education. That is true of our high schools or middle schools, even elementary schools in the United States. And it's true, by the way, all over the world. You look at attainment levels of A stars on British A levels up in order of magnitude over the decades, etc. And so what winds up happening is that again, because of that atomized approach to education, one teacher, one professor, one classroom, the professor can do whatever they want, they're incentive, maybe not do so much students, instead of certainly not to do so much. The pressure and especially as education becomes much more consumerized, right? The students that are full pay need to be coddled and and dealt with in that way. And what the natural erosion comes in standards and in demands of students. Now, if you were just to continue on that trend line, AI is a boon for all. Right? The student doesn't have to do half the amount of work they do. At least on assignments, the professor certainly can use AI to grade more efficiently, or at least with time, perhaps not. Fully today. And you can see a scenario where again, less and less is actually accelerated in student learning. What's more, even if you don't intend for that to happen, the reason that it is cram pass, forget as opposed to cram pass, remember is that when you don't struggle with material, you don't have that ability to go back to it again and again and again. You just don't retain it. Even in a quote unquote good use of AI, good as in not nefarious, not in trying to kind of offload work, the reality is is that it's almost irresistible for AI to help you cover the basics, to help you be presented with information that doesn't let you struggle with the material and really deeply process what it is that you need to know, especially you can learn something in the long run. And so many implementations of AI, whether they're effective or not today, they are certainly structured in such a way that they are lending themselves to significantly lower academic attainment. Now, what is the solution to that? Right? Well, some people say, well, ban at ban at, but that's not realistic. Students are going to be using that tool. They're going to be able to absorb it, etc. And I think some of the answers come from in some ways from the introduction of previous tools. I remember the one class that was useful in the working core curriculum 30 plus years ago was a course on how to use Excel. Massively important, I use it to this day, great financial modeling course. The rest of the core was frankly irrelevant, but that was a good class. And you would think about the kinds of assignments that they gave us in that class to help us learn Excel and build massively complex financial models. If you were to assign those same exact assignments 20 years before, if you were to assign those assignments 10 years before, they would be impossible. There would be no way for you to actually be able to execute them because the tool wasn't there to allow for it. And so the real question is, how do we up level? How do we actually go against the last 60 years? And how do we now introduce new levels of rigor, new levels of expectations among students and incorporate greater and greater demands of the students knowing that they have a very powerful yet flawed tool? And how do we ensure that tool, which is going to be used, will be used in such a way that will actually help them with their space deliberate practice, with the recontextualization, but that will require them to actually learn to be able to sanity check what it provides and to know how and where to deploy it. Yeah, I love that response. Let me just pull on a thread that's in there and reframe it if I may. So when you and I went to college, the faculty were the keepers of the content, right? Like they we would sit at their feet, they would profess, we would digest what they were saying. We would go to the library and take out books, we would read those books, we would then cite those books and write papers to the professor, who would then grade the paper, and somehow assess what we understand or don't understand the level to which we understand it. Now, I don't know if faculty are the keepers of the content anymore, right? There is this technology out there that really knows more than any professor, any single professor could possibly know, can answer questions in real time, and it's on their phones, it's on students' fingertips. So moving forward as this technology matures and develops and perfects, what is the role of faculty? And how does that technology change the role of faculty? Yeah, absolutely. The faculty, and I think humans role in the age of AI, is discernment, right? Because ultimately, the AI is not going to give you an answer. Of course, the new answer when you ask for one, but different AI's will give you different answers to the same question and the same prompts if it's sophisticated enough, not faculty. And sometimes even factual ones, but you do have to understand how to discern between one versus the other. And you can imagine questions which are truly have different perspectives. You don't have to go into esoterica to look at that, right? There are fundamentally different schools of thought and economics, right? You can have the Friedmanite School, you can have the Keynesian School, right? These are not, these have been around for decades, not settled. Right? There's no fact around which of these two economic systems is correct, so they're not a consensus in the economic circles. And so you could easily look at one question and have two dramatically different, potentially correct answers. Now, the AI may give you its most informed opinion, but it is generative, it is based on broad understandings of what is out there, the literature that is there. It is not free thinking. Sure. Not yet. Yeah. And professor needs to be able to equip the student with the tools to be able to look at that and say, how do I form my opinion on this? Not this is my opinion as a professor, and if you don't agree with me, then you're wrong. Although there are those faculty also. There are those faculty. Yeah, for sure. Right? But the idea is to equip the students with those tools. Sure. That by definition cannot happen for three hours a week over 15 weeks and be successful. Right. That has to be a cumulative effort. That has to be an opportunity to say, hey, I know the tools that you're coming into my class with. These are the tools I'm going to add to that. I'm going to be reinforcing a subset of those tools. And I'm going to show you how to use them in this context. I know when you leave my class, you're going to be using a subset of my tools and others to look at a different set of questions from a different perspective. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. I appreciate that. So look at across traditional higher ed. And you know, you with Minerva, to some extent, the work we're trying to do at San Francisco Bay University, we get to start a university from scratch, which the majority of higher ed does not, in some cases, institutions are hundreds and hundreds of years old. So what do you see as the main barriers to innovation? And I know the work you do with Minerva Project tries to insert pockets of innovation within existing institutions, like not everybody gets to start a university from scratch. And so what does that look like? What does that work look like with Minerva Project? And how are you overcoming some of the institution of the organic institutional resistance to change or innovation? So there are a number of barriers. Barrier number one, which is, I think, actually not well spoken of, is a budgetary problem. And it's not a budgetary problem in the sense that universities don't have money. Universities have a crazy amount of money. They spend it all, but they have a lot of it. Universities are usually large organizations with significant budgets, right? In the tens of not hundreds of millions of not billions of dollars a year that they spend. So that's quite a lot of money that's coming in and out of the system. It's just being allocated very, very rigidly. The problem is that there is an almost no institution, a bucket of money that is focused on true education. So if you look at the budget of universities, what is it allocated for? There's physical plant, right? There's, of course, professor salaries, there's staff salaries, there is money to go out and do enrollment and recruiting, things like that, your athletics departments or your extracurricular activities, your amenities, et cetera. But where is the academic R&D budget? Doesn't exist. At best, you'll have a teaching and learning center that's somewhere in campus, which is there is a resource for professors who would like to avail themselves of it. And the assumption again is, well, education really is the purview of the individual professor. So let's go and maybe we'll give them some time to create a course or things like that. But that really is the university's orientation. And when you think about a transformation of an approach to education, you actually have to expend resources towards that. And university do not have the budgetary mentality in order to allocate funds. And that's, in fact, I think one of the core problems. The second problem is this kind of fear of what are known as the faculty. Oh, the faculty are in transition. Oh, the faculty will not be happy with this. The faculty do not want change. And sure, I've met faculty members who like to be contenderists and they like the way that it's been done 50 years ago and all the rest. But the reality is, is that if you are implementing, if you're enacting a transformation that is empirically proven, that is inspirational, that gets faculty excited, and that produces a much better student learning outcome for them, meaning that not only, if they were to teach students what they see in this model, would they see that they're dramatically improving? But just, if they walked into their class, they would know, hey, all of my students have these tools in their fingers. They know the difference between correlation and causation. They understand Bayesian statistics. They understand how to tailor what it is that they say, depending on the audience they're talking to. What professor would not be excited about that? Right, right. What professor wanted to explain to a student what a fact is versus what a claim is, rather than having a guarantee that everyone walked into the classroom knows both the difference and how to interrogate information to understand that difference. And so there's a general reticence to engage faculty in a transformation process, because the assumption is, if I bring it to them, they will not like it, as opposed to actually engaging with them and seeing that indeed faculty are usually pretty open to things that will improve their lives, but also will do right by society. And so that's, I think, a second issue. And then a third is that it kind of goes against the devil's bargain in some way. That ultimately, real education is demanding. It's demanding of the student, it's demanding of the professor, it's demanding of the institution. Right, you cannot, it's very easy to say, yeah, what the professor do whatever they want. Sure, departmental puts in requirements and all the rest. They'll do a distribution requirement and everything will be straightforward. That's a very easy thing to do, right? And then everybody let the chips fall as they may. To actually coordinate, do coaching and mentoring, do professional development, without professors to get better and better and better at what they do, to provide students the demand of engagement and making sure that they're executing their work. And that if they don't, there are real consequences to deflate grades as opposed to inflate them, to ensure that students have to demonstrate cross-contextual mastery over and over and over again in order to prove their competence, that's hard work. Right. And it takes real institutional will to be able to implement that. There's tremendous institutional reward once you implement that, but the process of implementing of sticking to your guns and making that happen is not simple. And it's very easy to go towards is a path of least persistence and say, well, sure, my students aren't learning much, sure, they can't retain much information, but nobody else is either, and kind of throw your hands up in the air, rather than realizing, wait a second, that kind of attitude is collapsed public confidence in higher education, right? We're no longer in an issue where there's a marketing problem, as I've heard for decades from university leaders, our own graduates say, I didn't learn anything useful in college. - Right. - That is the majority opinion. It's no longer this fringe idea. I look at what I do day to day, what, how is that connected to the paper I wrote as an undergraduate? It's not. - Right. - And so, the core issue of budgetary issues, is fear of engagement and the implementation of going against the grain and raising standards and thinking about the long run, those are hard barriers to overcome. - And do you find when clients reach out to you and say, you know, "Manurve a project," we need help come in and do that. These are already people who have navigated at least two of the three challenges, be it budget, faculty or perception. - Yeah. - They're ready to innovate and they just want guidance or your structure to help them get to that level of innovation. - I would say they've at least crossed one of those casins. They've at least said, and usually it is the one, it is the third. It is the one that is just an understanding of what we're doing. I know I go out and raise money. I know I have to say that what we're doing is wonderful. I have to tell that to donors. I have to tell that to government leaders. I have to tell that to the creditors. I have to tell that to parents. I have to tell that to students, but I know I'm lying. I know that ultimately I'm highlighting things that those highlights are lovely and they're great, but the reality is I don't know that I'm causal. - Yeah. - I don't know that what I've done at my institution has directly been related to that. Sure, I was able to recruit a great student that wound up doing great things. Sure, I was able to find a great professor that managed to publish something wonderful or to put together a class that was really engaging that students raved about. But do I know that my system as a whole is optimized to do the very best, not just for my students, but for society at large and the decisions they're going to make when they're out there, I don't think I do. - Right. We're using a system that's sentry-sold. In an environment which it is probably no longer relevant. - Exactly. Yeah, that's great. Thank you for sharing that. Ben, I'm gonna end every episode by asking everybody what they're reading right now. So I'm sure it's more than one thing, but what has Ben Nelson reading? - It's funny. So we have a new organization that we've actually spun out of the Never Project called the Manurva Baccalaureate. It is a high school curriculum and we're all putting together our middle school. - Wow, wow. - So it's a very beginning of middle school curriculum, it's one course and it's anchored on scientific discoveries. And the point of scientific, it's not about scientific discoveries, it uses them to illustrate a set of thinking tools and how human beings make sense of the world. And so having said that, we still need to understand some of the great scientific discoveries I've been spending a bunch of time learning about the great more biological and chemistry oriented scientific discoveries and about to start my deep dive into the more physics oriented scientific discoveries just so I can be somewhat intelligible as I talk to my team about the curriculum. - So you're reading Feynman, what is that? - There's actually a, there was a very interesting book by a French scientist that explained the historical basis of scientific discoveries and their context at the time, et cetera, was translated into English and I forgot his name, but I could look it up and I can tell to you, but it's a very interesting approach of kind of the grand sweep of mostly Western scientific discoveries though he does have elements from the kind of pre-renessant Muslim world and some Chinese discoveries, et cetera, but very much kind of a Western tradition enlightenment type of approach for scientific discoveries. So that's cool. Yeah, cool to see Minerva Project moving into the K12 space. That makes perfect sense. Surprise, it took you this long. - We've been a little busy. - Yeah, of course. What about anything you're reading anything for fun or doing anything for fun? - Oh my gosh. Reading for fun is not been, not been, I've not had much time for, but certainly doing for fun. So one of the great privileges of being in my role is that I require to travel to various locations around the world. And so I try when I go various places to spend extra time and be able to see various things. So I was, had the great privilege of being in Mexico City a couple of weeks ago where one of our partners graduated their first set of students from one of the programs that we - Nice. - And struck them before that. Two weeks before that I was in Busan for the very first time in South Korea. - Korea, yeah. - Many times, but I've never been in Busan where we're building a brand new creative arts college that will take three existing creative arts colleges at our partner university and merge them into a brand new nervous design program. So that's been really exciting and it brings me to great places like Busan and Mexico City and other places and next month is London, Muscat, Riyad, back to Seoul and Dallas too. So like for what? - Dallas for good measure. - Yeah. - I've been in there for fun. - Well, your passport must have extra pages and I'm thinking that you are living life, the life of a Minerva student as an adult. You're getting some revenge travel in there for not having had Minerva. Yeah, that's awesome. - Well, Ben Nelson, thank you so much for joining us today on the Ed of Innovation Podcast. We certainly appreciate you, the work you're doing and it will be fun to continue to watch Minerva as you continue to innovate. Thanks very much. - Thank you, Bradbury, and appreciate it. (upbeat music)