MARLYN MCGRATH: Welcome back to Sanders Theatre for this afternoon's show,

"Hold That Thought" show.

I'm Marlyn McGrath from the admissions office accompanied

by four stars on our faculty who volunteered

because they're eager to welcome you to Harvard and to entertain you.

Some of you-- students, anyway-- might know the wonderful Richard Scarry

book for toddlers, if you can remember that far back,

What Do People Do All Day?

This is a version of that.

It's also, by the way--

I should note-- a version of the thing that the admissions committee does.

We figure we spend a lot of weeks, months, fall, winter, trying

to figure out who you are.

Who is this person?

You get some chance to see who some of the other people at Harvard

are today-- the faculty who are responsible, really,

for the whole program that you would experience if you came.

You already know already, I hope, that no one here-- no one in my staff,

no one in our faculty, et cetera, is trying to-- "no one" is a strong word,

but anyway, no one is trying to pressure you into choosing Harvard.

You've got other great choices.

You're not going to make a mistake.

You never have.

You never told us you did.

[LAUGHTER]

This is gravy.

You're not going to make a mistake.

Harvard's a great place.

So are a lot of other wonderful places.

You would not be thinking about them if they were not.

But of course, we really, really want you to come.

And so our strategy for this is what we want

is for you to want to come to Harvard.

That's our-- we think-- much nicer segue into this.

And what we think that ought to mean is that you

would conclude, at the end of the weekend,

that Harvard would be a lot of fun.

And so much talent is represented in this room,

it's fairly daunting, actually, to stand up here

in front of all of the talented people in this room, who we all

hope you'll use those talents in new and unanticipated ways.

Things you have not yet thought about.

Things that won't have occurred to you.

Things that you might, along the way in college, think of.

And that means finding out what will give you fun, actually.

I can't say that loudly enough, so I won't try, but give you

fun, pleasure, and satisfaction.

Don't assume you know that now as you enter college, Harvard or otherwise.

But both to amuse you and to confuse you,

which is the very, very Harvard thing to do--

to amuse you and confuse you.

If you like that, Harvard is a great choice for you.

If you don't like amusement and confusion, think.

You still got time.

[CHUCKLING]

Our faculty colleagues will can you glimpses anyway

of what they do all day.

And some glimpses, I think, of who they are anyway.

And we hope you'll have fun watching them have fun.

So without further ado, I will introduce the first act,

which would be by Professor Robert Lue, whose

talk will be called "Solving Global Challenges Through Collective

Learning."

Well, who is he?

He is, among other things, professor of the practice

of molecular and cellular biology.

He's the faculty director of the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.

And he's the faculty director of the Harvard Allston Education Portal.

Hold that thought.

HarvardX.

Lots of online learning.

He went to high school--

I try to remember high school's for everybody, key thing here--

at St. George's College in Kingston, Jamaica.

His PhD is from Harvard, and he's taught our undergraduate courses since 1988.

He's very well-known also--

hold this idea too, because none of these people

has ever stayed in his or her lane intellectually--

he's also known for his passion for art, and merging that interest

with cellular biology.

So without further ado, having said I would not do this without further ado,

you can now hear from Professor Lue, "Solving Global

Challenges Through Collective Learning."

[APPLAUSE]

ROBERT LUE: Thanks, Marlyn.

So let me add my words of welcome.

I'm sure that you have been welcomed more times than you can count.

But I must welcome you to Harvard, and your thinking

and your experiencing of what a Harvard life might be like.

But what I'd like to do is perhaps help us think a little bit differently

about the kinds of learning experiences that

is possible in a setting like Harvard, and also, in any setting

that one might imagine.

So you've probably heard a lot already about Harvard courses, concentrations,

things that you will experience here.

But what I would argue is that, without question,

while what you experience here will be absolutely

critical to your own learning, we now live in a world where what you learn

can indeed be something that can be a major contribution to what someone

else learns thousands of miles away from you.

So I'm a cell biologist.

But for a number of years, I've been very interested in this challenge

of personalized learning at scale.

And what is the role of a university like Harvard in doing this?

And how can this sort of challenge really change

how you think about your own time here at an institution like Harvard?

So as some of you may know, in 2012, 2011,

there was a lot of discussion around what we called MOOCs--

massive open online courses.

I suspect that some of you have even taken

some massive open online courses, perhaps from Harvard

as well, from HarvardX.

But one of the critical aspects of this is that Harvard partnered with MIT

to develop a platform called edX.

The notion was that we really wanted to share broadly

with the world learning content from top universities around the world,

but to make it much more accessible.

But what did we do?

We made courses.

Things that were 10 weeks long.

12 weeks long.

8 weeks long.

6 weeks long.

So we started off with a traditional notion of how you learn,

which is through a course.

So fast forward to now.

After I founded and built HarvardX, what we now realize

is that, in fact, courses are incredibly important.

Don't get me wrong.

You will have amazing courses here.

But there are other ways in which you can learn that give you more agency--

the ability to personalize in ways that perhaps we didn't have before.

So if we want to make personalized learning more available,

how do we do this?

What platform do we have?

Well, one of the critical aspects of edX compared to any other course platform

online is that we're open-source.

We're free.

So what that means is that there's something called Open edX.

And you see a bunch of numbers and words there.

Open edX and edX together now accounts for roughly 60 million learners

have engaged with the platform around the world.

There are more than 1,300 organizations, ranging from universities like Harvard

to Amnesty International, the World Economic Forum, Microsoft, Google.

A whole variety of organizations use the platform.

All countries have been touched and have access to the platform.

And so what this means is that we are currently

the largest open-source learning platform in the world.

So you're probably thinking, well, I'm trying

to figure out how I feel about Harvard.

I'm looking inside.

Well, what I'm going to try to urge you to do

is to, at the same time that you're looking inside, look outside as well,

and what you might be able to do in that regard.

So what we have done is that we are now building the next generation of the edX

platform--

once again free, once again open-source--

in a project that I'm hearing called LabXchange.

And what makes it next generation is that if you

think about the amount of learning content out there--

and I know that you have seen a lot of things--

literally tens of millions of individual assets have been created.

Probably hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent.

And what you have are a multitude of courses

that have videos, that have text, infographics, simulations, animations,

all of those things.

But all of them are locked in courses.

And so you need to decide, OK, if this is what I want,

I need to jump in, somehow find it, take what I want, and then jump back out.

Or, do I have time to spend 12 weeks doing something online?

What LabXchange has done is completely re-architect the core of the edX

platform so that now everything is combined into a common repository where

the course is no longer the unit size, but any learning

asset can be searched for, found, and utilized for your own purposes.

So that imagine this remarkable library, and a library where you now

get to pick what you want from it.

From a course at Harvard, a course at MIT, a course at Stanford,

or some kind of open educational resource from Amnesty International,

you can now bring it all together and put it together

in a sequence of your own choosing.

You can then add your own stuff to it.

So let's say you're interested in studying the impact of changing water

quality on a particular organism that's important to you,

or that's local to you.

You can take your own research, your own data that you might have gathered,

and you can add this to what we call a pathway.

Now, just putting stuff together doesn't tell a story.

We all know that learning depends on narrative,

and being able to tell a story.

So what the Xchange does is allow you to add sort of interstitial material

that lets you tell that story.

So this allows you to personalize learning experiences for yourself.

But this also allows you to personalize learning experiences for others.

And this is where the collective learning at scale occurs.

We are accustomed to sharing the products of our learning at best.

We share the outcome of what we have learned.

You want to make something, you want to do something, you put things together,

you figure it out--

I know you've all done this--

and you end up with something at the end.

It might be a physical product, an intellectual idea, a proposal-- any

of those things.

And if you're lucky, maybe you can share that with the world.

But how often do we get to share how we got there?

Learning is not just the product.

Learning is also the process.

So for the first time, what we'll be able to do

is take what you have brought together, take the narrative

that you have created to do something, and now you can share that.

We all stand on the shoulders of others, and we all hope--

I think-- that others will stand on our shoulders

some day to do something great.

Now, there's an opportunity to stand on how

others have learned to do something.

So it's both the process as well as what the outcome might be.

So what this allows us to do now for the first time is give a platform where

individuals that are interested in doing something--

to make a difference, to build challenges,

to address challenges in some way--

can now figure out what materials they need, utilize them, and share

not just the outcome of their ideas, but what they learned.

And that these pathways, as we call them,

are something that an individual can share,

a high school teacher can share with her class,

a college professor can share with his or her class.

It is now a situation where we have opened up and cracked open

the process of getting to where we need to go.

So the world is a better place now in many ways