Let's Scale Relationships

Not networks, skills, or credentials

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Last week, we learned about Sal Khan’s latest initiative, The Khan TED Institute. It’s always interesting to look at a new venture through a lens of reverse design thinking. A new product or service is always addressing a particular question or problem. More often than not, the question is not explicitly stated, but implicitly assumed. Instead of taking the frame for granted, you can learn a lot by asking the question, “To what problem is this the solution?”

As best I can tell, the answer to this question for Khan’s new venture is making some of the goods of higher education more accessible. But not all parts of higher ed are created equal. What parts of higher education are you making more accessible and why?

Luckily, we don’t have to do much guessing here; their mission statement is pretty forthright. Here’s a relevant snippet:

Great higher education institutions do more than deliver a curriculum. They cultivate talent through extraordinary networks and access to defining opportunities, while helping people become impactful contributors to society.

The Khan TED Institute brings that model to ambitious students everywhere — people who are motivated, curious, and ready to grow. Students advance by proving mastery while developing the durable skills employers value most and the world desperately needs.

Extraordinary Networks. Defining Opportunity. Impactful contributions. Proven Mastery. Durable skills.

If you look for the function that connects all of these data points, you find a definition of higher education as an institution that does three main things:

1. Connects students to the right people to advance their careers.

2. Gives them the skills they need to succeed as professionals.

3. Provides a high-quality credential as shorthand to signify that they’ve built those skills.

Perhaps it’s going too far to say that these are the most valuable parts of higher education, but at any rate, these are the ones they are arguing are worth democratizing.

The right answer to the wrong problem

Listen, I’m not against making good resources more accessible, nor do I have a particular gripe with these main aims. However, it is worth saying that successfully achieving these aims is not a very imaginative vision of what higher education could be. This model addresses the external goods of education without bolstering the internal formation of the student. The networks, skills, and credentials are a kind of fruit, but education is about cultivating the tree. Even if this initiative succeeds in making these goods cheaper, this won’t solve the bigger, more important challenges that lie beneath them.

It seems like the argument here is that creating a path for students to achieve these ends will help to connect students to a flourishing life. What exactly that life looks like is left for the reader to intuit, but we can assume that the goal would be a life where they can find meaning in their work, provide for themselves and their loved ones, and make meaningful contributions to society. But are networks, skills, opportunities, and credentials really enough to get us there? I would argue that the answer is no.

That said, the real challenge in education is in their marketing copy. If you look carefully, you can find it. Look again. It’s the thing that the new Khan TED Institute asks students to bring to the table. It’s in the definition of the audience they are serving.

The Khan TED Institute brings that model to ambitious students everywhere — people who are motivated, curious, and ready to grow. (emphasis mine)

We’ve been down this road before. This is a slightly revised version of the same flawed foundation that MOOCs and many other attempts to innovate in education have been based on. A thesis that suggests that if we build it, they will come, and that they will come with the motivation that they need to succeed. A thesis that posits that the real problem is content and curriculum. A thesis that the problems in education are fundamentally about access to knowledge and the systems that help to build skills on top of it.

Of course, content and curriculum are necessary pieces of an education, but they cannot singlehandedly open the door for a larger vision of flourishing.

We can (and should) make strides to make the networks, opportunities, training, and skills that higher education provides more accessible. It is good to do that. But let’s not pretend like this is swinging for the fences.

The real home-run cut is trying to tackle the motivation problem. And the motivation problem is a human problem.

It’s not hard to find evidence that points in this direction. In recent months, Khan Academy has shared that they feel the potential was missed because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.”

I’m sure there are many reasons why the students didn’t engage as much with Khanmigo, but I would like to suggest that a significant factor in the lack of engagement was due to the fact that Khanmigo is not another human. The big play in education is figuring out a structure and a business model that scales the human connection that is critical to motivating students. If you can figure out how to motivate students, then they can become the ambitious, curious, growth-mindset students who can actually benefit from the wealth of information that is accessible to them through a project like the Khan TED Institute.

The real challenges to solve in education are not about building networks, but relationships; not about building skills, but character; not about building credentials, but demonstrations of their growth and imagination.

Student are shaped by relationships

When you talk to students, the importance of human relationships often becomes obvious. When you ask them what has shaped them most in their academic journey, most of them don’t talk about a class or a subject. They talk about a person.

Sure, they might remember a particular skill they built or some knowledge they learned, but the stuff that matters most is relational. It was the time a mentor or coach helped them stick with something hard when they wanted to give up. It was the time a teacher spent encouraging them throughout a course, exuding infectious enthusiasm for a subject that rubbed off on them. The biggest inflection points in a student’s journey are downstream of a relationship, not a network, a set of skills, or a credential.

I realize that this is a challenging solution because the balance sheet quickly ends up in the red whenever we try to scale relationships. One-on-one human tutoring is economically unviable, or at least that’s the common wisdom.

Perhaps. But I’m not so sure. I think we have given up all too quickly, settling for the AI tutors.

An Alternative Vision

So what exactly might an alternative vision look like?

As I think about my own journey as a student and as a teacher, I think back to my experience as a Supplemental Instruction (SI) leader during my undergrad days at LeTourneau. The SI model gives some hints. It relies on peer mentoring and teaching, equipping students who are just a little ahead of their classmates to help those who are just a class or two behind them. Perhaps we can’t balance the budget if we try to provide a full-time teacher for each student, but what if we could supplement the effort of teachers with peer tutors like SI does?

Not only does the Supplemental Instruction model benefit the students in the course, but it also benefits the students doing the teaching. My experience as an SI during undergrad played a formative role in my own journey toward teaching. I took circuits my first semester and then served as the SI leader for the class for my last seven semesters. I loved it. As a secondary benefit, helping my peers to learn the material helped me to learn it better. It’s hard to find a better way to learn something than to teach it to someone else.

I say all of this to challenge us to think outside of the box. It’s not that technology cannot play a role in helping to make education more accessible. It’s not that initiatives like the Khan TED Institute are bad on their face. But technology can never replace the fundamental need for human relationship in education. Let’s point our imagination and creativity there instead of building the pieces that go downstream of it.

Got a thought? Leave a comment below.

Reading Recommendations

I enjoyed this piece from Hildegard College president Matthew James Smith on “The Quiet Surge of Alternative Micro-Colleges.” While the next several years promise to be challenging ones for higher education with declining enrollments, volatile funding environments, and disruption from AI, disruption almost always creates space for innovation and creativity.

A classic from Clay Shirky, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models.” (h/t Dave)

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change. Tainter doesn’t regard the sudden decoherence of these societies as either a tragedy or a mistake—”[U]nder a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”, to use his pitiless phrase. Furthermore, even when moderate adjustments could be made, they tend to be resisted, because any simplification discomfits elites.

When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.

And the last paragraph.

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

John Warner on why the idea of “infinitely patient tutors” is misguided.

Infinite Patience Is Not Good for Education

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The Book Nook

When it comes to thinking about motivation, whether in parenting or education, 10 to 25 by UT Austin Professor of Psychology David Yeager is at the top of my list of recommendations. David helps to clearly break down a model for how to build motivation. If you’re trying to figure out how to motivate the young people in your spheres of influence, I highly recommend you check it out.

If you’re looking for a quick synopsis of one of my main takeaways, I wrote a post about the mentor mindset a while back.

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The Professor Is In

If you’re still waiting to register for our AI conference at Mudd, today is the day! Early registration closes today, and registration prices will go up $50. If you’re planning to come, drop me a line to let me know! It would be great to meet some of you in person there.

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Leisure Line

Had a great time a few weeks ago at the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps vs. Pomona-Pitzer rivalry baseball game. Great weather and a good crowd!

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Still Life

A photo of what Friday night dinner looks like in the Brake household. Gotta love it. Pro tips are to get your fries well done and to try the Neopolitan milkshake.