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Can you teach creativity? And, if you can, can you teach it online to 44k people? Well,
I was crazy enough to try this. And I'm going to tell you about my experiences right now.
And I'm going to start out with a short video - it's forty seconds long - giving you a snap
shot of the first assignment I gave in this online class. Folks in the class had to design
the cover of their own auto-biography as a way to introduce themselves to the class.
And the reason I did this is that so A) they could stretch their immaginations - even in
the first assignment so they could share a little bit about themselves with other people.
But also for them to see that everything in the world is ripe for innovation and creativity.
So, how did this class work? It's actually pretty simple. It starts out - each class
- starts with a short lecture. A short lecture about five minutes long. Okay? But guess what?
To make that five minute lecture, it takes about five days - really highly produced,
really well thought out. The lecture might be on re-framing problems or challenging assumptions
or connecting and combining ideas or how to work on creative teams. Then, there are readings
to support it. There are discussion groups online. But most important, there's a challenge!
Every week there is a challenge. Sometimes there's a challenge for an individual, sometimes
for a team. And then the students upload the results of their work - just like the photos
you saw for the book covers. But the most important thing is that everybody evaluates
everybody else. It's essentially crowd sourced rating. Now, I create a rubric - essentially
a guidline - on how to evaluate these assignments and I do several of them so people can see
some examples. And guess what? The more you evaluate, the more feedback you get! The most
interesting and most valuable part about this is you get to see thousands of examples of
solutions to the same problem. In a class at Stanford where I might have forty students
- there are teams of four so there are ten projects, you get to see ten solutions - here
you get to see hundreds if not thousands of solutions to the same problem. So who's in
the class? It's folks from under eighteen to over eighty. From over 150 countries and
most of them - half of them women, half of them men - but most of them have college degrees.
And, in fact, quite a lot have advanced degrees. These are folks who want to keep learning
just like you showing up here to learn today. Folks who come to these online classes are
hungry to find ways to continue their education. But there are some interesting challenges.
There's a huge range of technical literacy. There are those folks who are digital natives,
who essentially show up and they exactly know to do, they know how to make videos, they
know how to collaborate online. But there are those people who are coming to this for
the first time. In fact, one of the most interesting things I found is that's actually one of the
most important things people learn in the class - is actually how to learn, how to use
these online tools. In addition, people are motivated to take this class for lots of different
reasons. Some people actually spend twenty or thirty hours a week working on this. It
becomes a key part of their life during the course. Whereas others are tourists - it's
quite interesting. They're really interested in finding out about this new world of online
education and they're there auditing. So what I've learned is that teaching in an online
class is quite different then teaching at Stanford. When I'm at Stanford teaching, I'm
on a surfboard. And I'm pretty experienced at teaching so those waves come in and I can
ride them. When things happen that are surprising, I can usually figure out how to deal with
it. But when you're teaching in an online class, you know what happens? You're on a
cruise ship. And when you see an iceberg, you will hit it! I got really used to hitting
icebergs and there are surprises every single time I've done it. For example, in the last
version of this class, I had the students form their own teams. Great! In my mind, a
team is three to seven people. Well, some people in the class thought that was three
hundred to seven hundred people. And so what happened is all of a sudden I realized that
some people had invited everybody in the class to join their team and so we ended up with
towns as opposed to teams. It became very difficult to unravel and now I know I have
to put that in as a guideline the next time I teach the class. I also learned that I need
to give individual assignments first. This is critical. Because the first time I talked
to the class, I did what I would do at Stanford and I instantly threw folks on teams. But
guess what? Because people have different levels of commitment and some people are just
auditing, you don't know who's there. So you need to do an individual assignment first
to see who is actively involved. And in fact, in my last online course, fifty percent of
those people who did the first assignment actually finished the course. But there were
quite a number of people who didn't do any of the work, even if they signed up. In addition,
you need to break the assignment into smaller pieces because it really gets rid of the ambiguity
and the places where people can have misunderstanding. But most important, I need to deputize the
entire class. Because I can't possibly as one person answer all the questions that are
coming my way. So I essentially say, "Listen, collectively all of you know much much more
than I do about a lot of different things. So if you see a question that's been post
and you know the answer - please answer it!" And here's what happens: a number of people
bubble up in the online class who are students but also become the de facto TA's! And so
you end up with a whole collection of folks who are helping each other. And it becomes
an amazing online learning community. So I find that my role and the way I think of myself
is "Chief Instigator" in this class. I get things going and then see what things happen.
So let me tell you about one of the assignments to give you a little taste of what happens.
In the last class - final team project - the theme was pets. And so what the folks in the
class had to do was pick a problem related to pets. Any problem they wanted. They had
to frame the problem, they had to brainstorm as a group, they had to come up with at least
one hundred solutions, they needed to pick their favorite solution, they needed to prototype
it, they needed to test it, and then they needed to create a creative story to communicate
what they had done. Here's one of them, as an example. So, one of the things that's so
fun about this is that there's so much room for experimentation here. And we're at the
beginning of a world where we can innovate incredibly about education. And I find that
the things I learned teaching this very extreme example of an online class has definitely
affected the way I think about teaching my class at Stanford. The wonderful thing is
that even though we are in the early days, students say that this is an incredible, meaningful
learning experience. Folks say this has brought meaning to their lives. They've gotten inspiration
from working with folks from all over the world. And really changing the way that they
think - education in general - and some people feel that this is the powerful learning experiences
they've had. So I want to invite you to my next experiment - okay? Starting this Spring
- in fact registration opened yesterday! - I'm doing a new online class. It's creativity
- music to my ears. We're partnering with Warner Brother Records and they're bringing
really big name artist and music executives to the table so that we can really use the
class as the focus of looking at creativity in music and how we look at music in all of
our lives. There's no necessity for any musical talent - I certainly don't have any - and
looking forward to something very exciting. The other thing we're going to do is we're
going to create a code so that anyone whose affiliated with Stanford in any way can sign
up with this code so that you can find other Stanford students and alumni who are participating
to join teams with them and also to see their work. I hope you'll join this adventure and,
remember, creativity rules! Thank you!