Why did you have to go on the Web for this course? I asked.
“Universities here offer graphic design and computer science, but not Web design,” she explained. “It’s a whole new field, and universities have not caught up … The course I am taking [on Udacity] is Web design and programming. I am good at the design, but I needed to get more into the programming-development part. It complements my work.”
What kind of clients do you have in Australia? I asked.
“One is a publication about start-ups, one is a business-related blog, one is a new-moms-themed blog, and one is an Australian social media company,” said Sleiman, who marketed herself as Astraestic.com, a combination of “artistic” and her nickname, “Astra.” “At first my parents were surprised and asked, ‘How did you get to know them?’—but now they like the idea and believe in a great future for me because of this, because I can reach other people in other countries. There are not so many clients here as you can find globally.”
What advice would she give to other young people her age? I asked. “I would tell them that they should first of all develop their technical skills, but that is not enough. They also need to know how to market themselves. Marketing is not just for marketers—[it’s] a huge part of getting work. I would say work on yourself.”
Sleiman’s story underscores the new contract you need with yourself—more self-motivation to tap into the new global flows for work and learning—and the new contract that schools need with students. People thought that the advent of MOOCs heralded the revolution in education. It was a revolution, but it was just the tip of the iceberg, because it was still based on the old model: MOOCs essentially just used the Internet and video as a new delivery system for old-fashioned lectures. The supernova is enabling a deeper revolution that is just beginning, spurred by learning platforms such as Udacity, edX, and Coursera, that will change the very metabolism and shape of higher education and, one hopes, lift the adaptability line in the way that Astro Teller urged. When a company like Udacity can respond to a major technological leap forward, such as TensorFlow from Google, and offer a course online to teach it to anyone in the world within three months, the word is going to get out and the market will change. Who is going to wait until next year to take that course on the campus of a university—assuming that school can even change its curriculum that quickly?
Moreover, there are now game platforms such as Foldit, the crowdsourcing computer game, that enable anyone to contribute to important scientific research. These are becoming popular learning platforms. Foldit set up an online “game” where anyone could play and win a substantial cash prize by designing proteins. “Since proteins are part of so many diseases, they can also be part of the cure. Players can design brand new proteins that could help prevent or treat important diseases,” Foldit explains on its site. The game attracted thousands of contestants from all over the world, some with no formal education in biology at all, to compete for the prizes and, in so doing, win not a bachelor of science degree, but a reputational badge that may soon be more meaningful to the marketplace.
These new approaches to rapid learning are already filtering into the traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, with some radically new models popping up. Consider just one example: Olin College. In a speech, the school’s president, Richard K. Miller, explained that “in 1997, the F. W. Olin Foundation established Olin College [in Needham, Massachusetts] for the specific purpose of inventing a new paradigm for engineering education that prepares students to become exemplary engineering innovators” ready to take on the biggest problems. “The role of the engineer we envision is that of ‘systems architect’ of complex technical, social, economic, and political systems capable of addressing the global challenges we now face,” said Miller.
To produce such engineers, he said, Olin maintains a highly flexible structure that can move at Internet speed. Olin “is not internally organized into academic departments, and faculty members do not have tenure,” Miller explained. “Instead, faculty members are employed with renewable-term contracts with a range of term lengths.” I was the commencement speaker there in 2016, and could not help but notice that half the graduates were women—unprecedented in an engineering school.
“A particularly important aspect of Olin College,” added Miller, “is the precept requiring the college to devote itself to continuous improvement and innovation.” As a result, at Olin nearly everything has an “expiration date.” This includes the bylaws and the curriculum. “The Olin College curriculum is continually evolving—by design,” said Miller. “The current incarnation provides a snapshot of the best efforts of the Olin community to provide a new paradigm for engineering education. The curriculum currently expires every seven years and must be actively reviewed and either revised or reinstated.” To graduate, Miller added, all Olin students “must complete a yearlong engineering design project in small teams with a corporate sponsor that provides financial support for each project. The projects require a corporate liaison engineer and often involve nondisclosure agreements and new product development.”
Olin is small and young, but this engineering lab school demonstrates a lot of the revolutionary features that eventually will be incorporated at most schools—the end of tenure, close partnership with change agents in the working world, a constantly adapting curriculum and no departments, and a synthetic teaching approach that blends engineering and humanities—such as a course that combines biology and the history of pandemics. That’s intelligent assistance at its best. That is the real revolution in education, and it will be coming to a community near you, as more and more workers need and demand intelligent assistance. Miller calls it “expeditionary learning”—creating your own knowledge and inventing your own career.
“Improvisation is what you must do constantly,” he said. “It is well beyond problem-based learning or even project-based learning. You are literally marching into a forest that no one has explored in search of things you have never seen.” All that he can promise, said Miller, is that you’ll find jobs there that you can’t imagine today that will require rapid and continuous learning.
Intelligent Assistants
One of the most intriguing online intelligent assistants for the workplace that I came across in my research was LearnUp.com, cofounded by Alexis Ringwald, an adventurous young entrepreneur whom I first met in India, where she and a partner were highlighting that country’s grassroots renewable energy initiatives by touring around in a solar-powered car—with a solar-powered rock band!
After doing a start-up in the States in solar energy, Ringwald got interested in the employment sector and spent six months interviewing workers looking for jobs. She discovered something she did not expect—that a majority of jobs on offer today don’t require a four-year college degree, and nine out of the top ten jobs in America by volume don’t require more than a high school degree. But she also discovered that the widespread assumption in America that anyone can get these entry-level customer service jobs by just showing up and demonstrating a pulse was even more wrong: these jobs do require basic skills that way too many applicants actually lacked.
As she put it: “Even a clerk at the Gap, a hamburger flipper at McDonald’s, or a receptionist requires certain basic workplace skills,” but “most people who apply for them don’t have them—they just think, ‘Hey, I like clothes. I can work here’—and their high schools or community colleges don’t teach them.”
“My first epiphany was to realize that the whole system is designed to weed people out, not to get people in,” Ringwald explained. “The whole system is built for employers to fend off all the people flooding their career systems. And so people just throw themselves out there, applying to a hundred places at once; then they get rejected and don’t know why … I saw employers inundated with candidates who were not qualified for basic jobs, and employees who didn’t really know what they were applying for.”
She also learned that once people got the job, they o
ften faced huge challenges holding on to it—people would think that if they could not make it to work one day, because they were sick, or their car broke down, or they had to stay home with the kids, that meant they had to quit, not just try to explain it to their manager.
Ringwald thought all of these problems were fixable and cofounded LearnUp in 2012, to do just that: job seekers go to its website and find an online platform with a mini course they can use to learn about the actual requirements and skills needed for a job before they apply. It offers modules on how to prepare for an interview, as well as the specific skills needed for different open positions, including how to build a customer relationship at AT&T, how to sell clothing at Old Navy, and how to solve a customer problem at the Fresh Market—as well as how to help a customer find the right fit, how to make the store look good, and how to operate basic office equipment—copying machines, for instance, if you’re applying at a retailer such as Staples. The trainings are set up to take just one to two hours, but that is enough for job candidates to learn about the company, gain skills needed for the role, and become qualified to apply. For the companies it also identifies those who have the persistence to learn the basics and those who don’t. Once you complete the course, LearnUp actually sets up a job interview for you with the company of your choice.
“LearnUp is linked to a specific job opening with a real open interview slot,” explained Ringwald. “Job seekers who are about to apply online to a job at one of our partners—like Old Navy, the Fresh Market, AT&T—can access LearnUp by clicking a button on an employer’s career site that says ‘prepare before you apply.’” LearnUp does not screen candidates out—rather, it tries to train them and coach them in for a particular job opening. As they learn more about the job through LearnUp, candidates choose to go forward with the application or opt out by clicking a button that says: “I don’t want this job.”
Most important, in my view, LearnUp also provides an online “coach” who proactively gives you encouragement, interview reminders, and advice, and who will answer your questions. It is so easy to forget that many, many people in America don’t have a professional network, an alumni network, two parents, or in some cases anyone around them with a job, to consult about how to get one. Ringwald was surprised to learn how many people would ask their coach something as simple as: “What should I wear to my job interview? What do I do if I am going to be late?” Some candidates will text the coach with a photo of what they are wearing to a job interview and ask: “Is this OK?”
These questions may sound elementary to you, but, said Ringwald, you’d be amazed how many people need this kind of advice: “All the people we talk to are grateful for it.” She explained that the coach button was
inspired by the power of real human coaches we encountered at workforce development offices. Their enthusiasm and support make a huge difference in a job seeker’s success. That’s why we built the coach into the platform. There’s so much friction to getting a job—while trying to manage your life and your family’s lives in the meantime—from deciding where to apply, filling out an application, figuring out if you live close enough, making sure you’re qualified, preparing, getting yourself to the interview with transportation, wearing the right thing, saying the right thing, following up. And then imagine doing it a thousand times over in your search for a job. People suffer not just from decision fatigue, but also lack of hope and confusion. In a world with so many choices, it’s hard to know what to do. And it’s a thousand times harder when you don’t have anyone around you who has done it. For seventy percent of the workforce, in jobs without degrees, that is their world. There is no support. If you don’t have it in your family, in your community, then it’s tough … What’s powerful about the LearnUp coach is its accessibility and ease of use. Most of the nondegree demographic in America may not even think to reach out to an adviser or mentor. In fact, I would say there is even a stigma for people to go to the unemployment offices and ask for help. It’s really hard to do.
I asked Ringwald for examples of what their coaches offer in the hiring process. She sent back the following list:
• Tell you what to wear & provide the weather forecast for interview day
• Where to go with Google street map view of job location & public transit route to job location
• Send interview reminders about the time and how long you should prepare to get there
• Have you dial-in to a practice interview line, record your answers, then hear “best practices” answers
• Provide tips from previously hired job seekers or managers at each step
• Provide more transparency of what and why at each step of a job search so that the benefits are clear
• Show other previously hired job seekers at the job location
• Share interesting facts about the location and the manager with job seekers
• Provide more info about the hiring manager whom they will meet
• Ask job seekers to share interesting facts about themselves with the hiring managers
• Auto schedule a Lyft or Uber to take them to their interview
• Remind you to send a thank-you note to the interviewer
Concluded Ringwald: “Everyone needs someone who says, ‘I believe in you’ … There is not just a skills gap—there’s a confidence gap.”
And you can’t sustainably fill one without the other.
You Need Work on Fractions
Maybe the most popular intelligent assistant in the world today is Khan Academy, which was started in 2006 by the educator Salman “Sal” Khan and offers free, short YouTube video lessons in English on subjects ranging from math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine to finance, history, and more. Anyone anywhere can go there to learn or brush up on any subject. Not only has it become the most important intelligent assistant for generalized learning in the world, but in 2014 it formed a partnership with the College Board, which administers the SAT college entry exams and the PSAT practice exams. Together, they created an intelligent assistant for anyone who wants to improve their SAT scores to get into college. They not only offer free SAT prep—so you don’t have to pay a small fortune to some private test prep service to get your kid into college—but they also created an amazing practice platform to help students fill their knowledge gaps.
The system works like this, explained Stefanie Sanford of the College Board: In tenth or eleventh grade you take the practice SAT, known as the PSAT. And let’s say, for instance, you scored 1060 out of 1600 on English and math. Your results are fed into a computer, which, using AI and big data, then spits out a message: “Tom, you did really well, but you need some work on fractions. You have a real opportunity to grow here. Click here for customized lessons just for you on fractions.”
Suddenly, I not only know exactly what I need to work on but am also intelligently assisted into a practice program that addresses my exact weaknesses. I don’t need to practice everything and drown in review problems. I can focus precisely where the artificial intelligence of the College Board platform points out that I need help. So far more than 1.4 million kids have signed up to have free SAT prep from Khan Academy online. This represents four times the total population of students who use commercial test prep classes in a year. In fact, more kids now are using Khan Academy than paying for test preparation at every level of income. That tells you what a valuable intelligent assistant it has become. And 450,000 have linked their College Board results on the PSATs with Khan Academy to get tailored tutoring on the questions they missed, which they can then practice on their own time wherever they are—including through their cell phones.
This is one of the quietest but most important intelligent-assistant education tools being made available for free in America today. Practice for the SAT—and advice for getting into college—have long, rightly, been thought of as areas where privilege rather than merit matters, where the wealthy have special
access.
“We are trying to change that so that many more students have the tools of ownership,” explained David Coleman, president of the College Board. “We are providing personalized learning at a time when students need to take far greater command of the cultivation of their talents and their career trajectory. The College Board used to just give tests to measure and mark progress, now we are actually trying to provide the tools of practice and coaching to change trajectories.”
Doing so, though, requires some important attitude changes in line with where the world of work is going. “You have to own your own performance,” said Coleman, “and realize that it is not something that is given, but achieved through practice.” Coleman has worked to change all aspects of the SATs, to make clear that the test does not measure IQ or general aptitude, but a focused set of skills you use over and over again in high school and college. “That’s why we partnered with Khan Academy—to provide the best in test prep,” Coleman added. “Now all students can own their performance, because they have access to the best tools of practice.”
All of this, in turn, enables the College Board to create another form of IA—“intelligent advice”—tailored just for you and informed by AI. “With students’ and families’ permission, we share with advisers not only data on the student but also the patterns in the data the College Board can see, to make sure the adviser is fully informed,” said Coleman. And to make sure there are advisers and coaches for those who need them most, the College Board partnered with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America to guarantee that as many students as possible take advantage of its free practice tools around the country. It also partnered with the College Advising Corps to match free trained advisers to high-achieving, low- or moderate-income students to help guide them to their best college choices—and it built links to prospective college scholarship opportunities. The platform also identifies kids who could be successful in AP courses their junior or senior years in high school but may have been too intimidated to sign up or didn’t think they were good enough. This often applies to students of color, who often get shunted aside from these opportunities, which is why Stefanie Sanford likes to say, “People say tests are biased; well, tests are not nearly as biased as people are.” Intelligent assistants are color-blind.
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