ExclusiveHow Hands-On Learning Could Change Education | Mike Williams

I started the first free university. I brought in all the courses from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Harvard, from around the world and put it into a learning management system like Blackboard or Moodle. How many universities you know could run on $250 a month for 36,000 students? I think what I'm working on might save the world, but it turned out to be a bigger task than I anticipated. Mike, it's great to have you on. Welcome. It's a pleasure being here. It's a lovely Southern California day, and I love Orange County. We want to talk to you about education. You have had a lot of innovation in the space of education, from creating potentially free college online education to now community schools in the community. First, how did you get into this? Well, in 2010, I heard this rumor that no matter how much money you make, you can't take it with you when you die. It's a rumor I heard. So, you know what? Instead of spending the rest of my life enriching the world, I myself want to enrich the world. So I said, well, what's it? I'm an engineer by training. And I said, what's the biggest problem that nobody's fixing? And at the time, it was $500 billion in student debt. And nobody was doing anything about it. So I started the first free university. I brought in all the courses from MIT, Stanford, UC, Berkeley, Harvard from around the world and put it into a learning management system like Blackboard and Moodle. Now, there's an interesting story about two years before COVID. I was at a hotel that let students work on their homework 24-7, even if they're not guests at the hotel. And it was midnight. And I see this very young girl walking away and I go, what are you doing here? She said, I'm an 18 year old graduate student. Wow, really? Tell me your story. 18 year old? 18 years old. Graduate. In her master's program. Tell me your story. She said, when I was a high school student in Tahonga, California at 15, I got the idea I want to join the Marine Corps as an officer. And the order she'll take you is 20. So I want to have my master's by the time I'm 20. So she did a little research and she found out about the APs and the CLEPs. She got her bachelor's at the University of Southern New Hampshire in a year. And she's at a Harvard Graduate School for a graduate degree. Now, normally when I ask people when I'm out and about what they do, they normally don't ask me back. They say, 18 year old? I said, so what do you do? Shocked. I said, well, 2010, I started the first free university. But in all the courses from MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and a learning management system like Blackboard and Moodle. Of the 900 courses, 200 courses prepare you to pass the APs, the CLEPs. Her mouth just dropped. She goes, oh, my God, I wish I had known about you, sweetheart. You graduate in a year. What do you want to graduate in six months? So anyway, when I first started, I thought I was a little bit slightly crazy, which I am. I was born in April Fools. Two years after I started, two Stanford professors with $210 million in venture capital became my next door neighbor, Coursera. So venture capital validated the space I was in. Then a year later, Harvard and MIT both gave $30 million from each of their endowments. And they started edX and they became my next door neighbor, pretty creatively. So now academics validate this space. So a year before COVID, I went to the conference for edX down in UC San Diego. And the founder gave his keynote. And I asked a simple statement. I made a statement disguised as a question because I hate questions or statements. I mean, they only want questions. I said in 2010, I started the first free university. So he knew I was an OG three years before him. They said of the 900 courses, 200 courses help you pass the APs, the CLEPs, the DSSTs. So currently, students can get their bachelors and over 60 majors from state universities regionally credited like MIT, but not MIT. In six months or 40 years, it's up to you. Do you see MOOCs, which is what edX and Coursera are? And we were doing that in the future. And he said, I absolutely agree with you. Seven months later, they added low cost bachelors to their platform. And the largest retail in the world, Walmart, sponsored it. And then a couple of other corporations as well. And then just like a domino, edX found the Coursera. Now Coursera offers low cost bachelors to their platform. Now, since Harvard's first started 400 years ago, over the period of 400 years, we've been building out our trade schools, our community colleges, our public and private schools, our beauty schools, our airframe, all these kind of schools. And we built a capacity of 19 million students. In eight years, the MOOC started with zero students. Eight years later, guess how many students edX and Coursera have? How many? 200 million. Ten times more in eight years. So it opened it globally in a sense. Again, we have international students in the United States as well, don't we? So the irony is, I don't believe in online distance remote learning. So when people do that, they do that in their bedroom at the library or coffee shop. With your phone, you go out to your garage, lift up your hood, find your make and model, and what you want to do to it, say, changing out the camshaft, find your favorite mechanic, and it's shop time. So picture this. I believe in mobile education. You take your laptop, put it on your bench, work on art, work on, you know, your editing from film, work on various different things. Go to the art museum, study art history, art appreciation at the Getty, not in a classroom, but at the Getty. So picture this. You're 17 years old and you're my son for two minutes. By the way, my son is pretty jealous because he got me for 37 years and you only have to put up with me for two minutes, son. You've been in school for 12 to 14 years. You're burned out. If you go to college, you're likely to get alcohol poisoning. I'm going to give you a bridge, your gap, your sabbatical. So you decide to go to Lyon, France, the French cooking capital of the world. You study under a three-star rated Michelin chef as a dishwasher. On your phone, we have the three-year culinary arts program. Instead of smoking in the alleyway on your break, you're doing julienne cuts and all the other nice skills. After a while, chef knows and goes, hey, more than me. You're in France, so guess what you might have to learn? French. You have six years of French on your phone. On your day off, you catch a train to go to Paris. You go to the Louvre. You study art history, art appreciation. You're not looking at the picture of the Molise. You're experiencing it. After two years abroad, you come back as a senior. Your friends brag about doing bong heads at maternity. You talk about parting ass off Mykonos, getting drunk in the vineyards of Italy and France, having a Parisian nightlife, being a sous chef, being fluent in French, international friends, and money saved up to pay for last year's cards. Drop the mic. So you can literally go into every single profession and learn by doing, which is a 50% learning modality. When you listen to a lecture, when you listen to this conversation we have here on Inside California, the people retain 5 to 10% lectures. That's why mom and dad repeat themselves seven, eight times. But if I put you into a project-based, design-based, or experiential, it jumps up to 50% learning by doing. And if you turn around and teach somebody what you're learning, it jumps up to 60% learning by teaching, or the Socratic method. So the education system right now is revolving. It's happening, and it's completely like nobody's aware that it's happening. Now how do we put this into our regular lives? There's room for the major schools, like Harvard and MIT, for certain research and things of that nature. There's also room for other types of things. Like, for instance, you might study archeology at an archeological dig, or you might be studying paleontology in Northern Dakota with a paleontologist digging out T-Rex. So the whole object is basically to make this incentivized learning experiential to drive up the learning modalities in college. So essentially learning it as you do the work. Exactly. And then getting credit for it. You could have a couple of interns here working on your set, paying intern fees. And in fact, I spoke- But they will have courses as they are taking them. Right, right, right, right, exactly. And then they will get credit for it. Right, they get a test, like an hour test, like AP, advanced- But they're essentially working full-time. Yes, getting paid. In fact, Luc Bresson, who's a famous French director- Would they get paid, too, or would they be just a program? Well, you know, California internships, they have to pay. Depends on the state law, right? So in France, Luc Bresson is a famous French director who I spoke to. And he did a $200 million, I went to his advanced screening of Valerian. It was over a $200 million worldwide release. Incredible. So much graphic and art. I watched the end- I don't normally watch the credits. And there was three rows of art houses from around the world. And then a big block of names pop up. And it says, Paris Film Students. What? Luc Bresson is having Paris Film Students working on a $200 million worldwide release? Does UCLA, UCLA have any of their students working on a budget more than $5,000 or $10,000 student film? Then I met Luc, and Luc, you started a free film school in Paris. So not only is it free, but you're working on live productions. And what do you think is the value of that? What's the difference between that and the traditional school where you go in and- Many times it's traditional, you're just doing things that go into a filing cabinet or a dropbox. When you're doing work and it goes out into the world, the rest of the world can see your product and see your services. Whether it be food, whether it be literature, whatever it is. Instead of just doing it for the class project, it gets stored, it does nothing. They actually have what we call work product as they're earning their degree. That's for universities, right? That's with higher ed, universities, trade schools, community college, all this stuff. You know, American education compared to the rest of the world, I come from the eastern side of the world, and it's more experiential than the rest of the world. I don't know about compared to Europe, but you think it's not experiential enough, that it's not real. Yeah, there's two different cultural norms comparing Asia to Europe. In Asia, for thousands of years, rice farmers spent 3,000 hours in the fields, so their life is full of hard labor. So when Asians approach education, they approach it with a real, an incredible amount of time, and they get PISA scores pretty good. But in Europe, the northern Baltic areas, they have no homework, but they get the same PISA scores. So many times, it's not how hard you work, it's how much you engage your creativity. It's not whether or not you got that number correct. In Europe, it's like, how can I get to that number through a variety of different ways? I was amazed when I was in college, I was amazed that Asian students would be there in the library the very first day of school. Americans don't do that. They wait until the very last time, and then they cram for it. Going back to the education cost, so your idea is that education should be free, or close to it, for universities need to be free. Right now, you have to spend $40,000, $50,000, or if you go to a more expensive one, $60,000, $70,000 a year to get the education, and then you end up being in debt, and then you have to pay that debt back. But your idea is education should be in the field, whatever field you're going into, you need to learn it, and then you can potentially get a job, and you'll have a real-life experience. What about people that haven't figured out what they want to do? Oh, that's interesting, because that's the second project that I'm working on. A lot of kids get into college, or big data robotics and automation displaces somebody in the workforce in their 20s and 30s. I learned that I want to be a student in elementary school. I want to be this, I want to be that. They get into middle school, and their friends say, so what do you want to be? I want to be an astronaut. Oh, you're not smart enough to be an astronaut. So the aspiration just disappears. Now, a young person's aspiration is like a spark on a campfire. You have to hold your hands around it so the wind doesn't blow it out. But once it catches, not even the wind and rain can blow it out. So I came up with an idea, and that is a media project called I Want to Be A. Like, I want to be an astronaut, I want to be a farmer, I want to be a fireman. So what I did is I went with my camera at Pasadena Media, which is a PEG station, and I went over to Caltech and I interviewed three astronauts at a seminar. They said, what could young kids get involved in for future space and technology? They said hydroponics and robotics. So I went out to an aquaponics farm and filmed all the fun things, which is basically fish. The manure goes in and it gets, you know, the bacteria churns it into the plant food, the plant food, then it's a whole cycle. And I interviewed that. Then I built a big database of all the community gardens, hydroponics, aquaponics in the United States. Everything about it. Kid-friendly, because you don't have the kids showing up at a pot farm. Kid-friendly, hours of operation, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, lay it in a layer on Google Maps. Kind of my third project. Young kids watching TikTok or YouTube, they get excited. I want to be an astronaut. At the end of the video, a button pops up and it says, find a garden next to you. They click on a button, a map opens up local to them in Tustin. Three blocks away on Thursday is a meetup day. They meet their parents, where they then go themselves, and they meet their mentors. Two years later, they get to middle school and their friends say, so what do you want to be? Oh, I want to be an astronaut. Oh, you're not smart enough to be an astronaut. The young person can say, well, for the past two years, I'm working on a variety of tomatoes. Let's be considerate for the Martian colony. I don't think you know what you're talking about. So when a child goes to school with an aspiration, like for instance, you never have to ask a child, have you done your dinosaur homework? Have you done your astronomy homework? Have you done your computer gaming homework? So when a child goes to school with a purpose, like sponges, the dinosaur wants to know how the body moves. So you learn body movement, maybe kinesiology. They want to learn what the dinosaur eats, so they learn about botany, photosynthesis, agriculture. They want to know about astronomy because a comet killed their dinosaurs. They want to learn about geology. Connected all these things, and it turns into a puzzle for a young person. So the object is basically to find out where they are. And then with my third project, and also we like to encourage teachers. Teachers in the K-12, or actually K-6, have what we call a genius hour. Now, what I would recommend is a birds of a feather hour, where young kids like, oh, you kids on Thursday, one hour. You go over there, everybody that's like Minecraft go play over here, and they fellowship together. Everybody that wants to be a veterinarian go over there. And then you have these elementary school kids for an hour sharing what they learned this week or what they've been doing at home and around. They get to middle school. Usually two or three elementary school fits into one middle school. They go to middle school, and somebody says, oh, you're not a, you want to be a vet? Oh, you'll never be a vet. Somebody else, one of the birds of the feather, said, no, no, remember you worked, you volunteered over at the vet clinic, or you did this or you did that. And so the young person's aspiration continued to grow without being put out. You are also doing some work on this in, in some areas in California on actually getting, creating this experiential learning for younger, younger. Yeah, that's the third project. It's called a smart city. You know how you have a smartphone and a smart car, right? So your car, if your car is smart, it'll do all the driving. And then eventually any of your ability to drive will atrophy. What if your phone or your car taught you how to be a better driver, like do Japanese drifting or be able to go on two, two wheels or be able to NASCAR driving, right? So you say, okay, car, let's do NASCAR. We're at one of the tracks with a bunch of other buddies and the, and the cars are doing their thing without any assistance. And then you put your hand on the wheel and you like a training wheel. It teaches you how to be like a, you know, an Indy driver, right? So in a smart city, it's the same kind of concept. Instead of big data robotics and sensors, which is what engineers used to go with. Your family goes out for dinner and your fourth grader is learning Spanish in school, orders a meal in Spanish. The family gets 10% off the menu. The child becomes a hero and gets a badge. And it's not a static badge, it's a digital badge. Dynamic badge. So wherever Spanish is spoken, Farsi, Korean, right? You will actually be able to practice. You incentivize your badge. A lot of kids will learn school languages like French and German, all these other languages at school, but they don't ever use them. So if you incentivize them so that they have some investment in that whole thing and you gave them a five. So let's say, for instance, in a smart city, you take out your kids on a walk through a forest. You give your phone to your first grader, says, how many different types of trees do you see? Take a picture. You give your tablet to your fourth grader, say, what animals are in this environment? And you go for a quarter mile walk and let the curiosity drive the learning experience. Pick up the phone from the first grader and click it. Oh, you found five of 10 trees. Very good. Yeah, you know, next time he doesn't walk, he wants to find the other five. The fourth grader is taking a photograph of a caterpillar. Next time she wants to see it in the chrysalis. Next time she wants to see what variety of butterfly or moth it is. You go to an art museum. Now, art museums are pretty boring to small children. You have a third and fourth grader or young child. You go to the Getty. Standing next to the Picasso painting, in augmented reality, is Pablo Picasso. Your child comes up and starts talking to Pablo, says, what's your name? Well, my name is Julie. What's your name? And they start talking back and forth. Now, if a child is under a certain age, that goes into the cache. And as soon as the child leaves that day, it gets removed from the database. But during her visit or his visit, all the artists will know that person's name. And they'll have a personal relationship with it. He said, would you like to know how it got to art? Picasso explains how it got to art. Would you like to know what I was thinking when I did this painting? Next one is Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and all the various different artists. And if you have a boy in tow, a dinosaur comes through the Getty. You go to a historical site. There's lots of them in California. But just pick on Gettysburg, because it's got a pretty cool place. You're at Gettysburg, and you're standing in a tree line with augmented reality. Standing next to is a Confederate soldier from Kentucky. It's from the hollers and stuff like that. There's no plantations. They're just south of the Mason-Dixon line. You start chatting him up, and he's talking about the war he was in previously, and how he lost his friend in a musket battle, and what it's like to eat the food. You look up and down the tree line, and you see the soldiers loading up their rifles, putting on their bannets. Then a cannon comes forward. Oh, this is getting real. Then this guy comes dressed differently than everybody, a big plume on his hat. OK, time to go, man! Charge, Rebel Yell! And you're running through the field. You feel the grass on your legs. You feel the wind bellow through your shirt. You feel the sun in your brow. And off to the right, a cannonball takes out a Confederate soldier. A little bit further, your guy that you were talking to gets gut shot, and he asks you to carry the colors. You pick up the flag, and you go through the Gettys picket's charge. Then you can set this at PG, or Saving Private Ryan. At the end of the conference, or the conflict, you go into the town square, and everybody's, augmented reality, missing arms, legs, all that stuff, pretty rough bunch, but they're in their Sunday best. And the guy gets up in a wagon, and he gives the Gettysburg address. So this can happen throughout our world. Now, and when we're talking about smart cities, augmented reality, virtual reality, virtual reality has been very popular. But when you're virtual reality, you're pretty much blind. In the virtual reality space, there is no viral titles. But if I asked you, what's the most popular augmented reality game? You probably are aware of it. Pokemon Go. Because it's connected to the environment. Yeah, because you're not blind, and it's in your environment. And so the multimedia has gotten to such a point that we will basically be experiencing science, history, languages, culture, faith, right in our current environment, and all of the technology is almost off the shelf. And how hard is it to implement this? Something like this for a community. Well, when I started my MOOC, I was the only one, my backstory. Now, my backstory is, when I decided to do my thing in 2010, I said, you know what, I'm going to do what my heroes did. I'm going to live like Buddha and Jesus. So for 12 years, up until my 65th birthday, when I started to get a small pension, I lived on $250 a month. I'd get up in the morning and develop all my courses, go to the conference. I got a sponsorship from edX to go, but I lived for $250 a month. So that's what the Orange County Registrar said, is that an individual with no resources and nobody else, and over 900 courses, win another MOOC of the same size course- And for free, right? Yeah. You were offering- I paid the hosting out of the $250. And I had 36,000 students worldwide. Now, how many universities you know could run on $250 a month for 36,000 students, like Long Beach State size? So when I shoved Harvard and MIT to do that, just a year before COVID, which was perfect, I had no idea that everybody's going to be, you know, an online student. That's when they blew up. But I couldn't afford to pay the hosting if it blew up. So I shut it down, knowing that I passed the baton on to edX and Coursera. I still have the course materials, have over 50 languages you can learn. And my courses were meant to be multilingual, meaning you don't have to speak English in order to take the physics course, biology courses, or any of the courses. You could speak in Farsi, and you could have with a male or female voice. You could, you know, right now we have, and YouTube, for instance, could do the AI in whatever language, closed caption. And then you could just flip a switch. And now instead of just having, you know, a male voice, you could have Christopher Walken doing physics, or Donald Duck, whatever, whatever language, right? And so it would actually have all of the things. And actually, Epoch Times could actually do courses about your faith. So that people understand it, about your editorial process. We can even develop a Wikipedia course on how to get it the correct story. Nobody likes to be slandered. So your thought moving forward is to come up with this concept and implement it, or others will come and implement it? The idea is to be in the community, going and learning. Right. So the MOOC, I have all the courses I can, what we call spin up an instance of Open edX, which is the same platform that edX runs on. And have the same code without having to main the cane the code, which is where the expense is. It's open software. So I can then incorporate all the different tricks that I have known in developing course material. But ideally, what I would like to do with Smart City, or what we call Badge Map, is break those lectures into small little bits. Like, you know, photosynthesis on that walk, or the trees. And so they'd be little quizzettes, or little puzzles. As you go and you're seeing, you're walking around. Right, right, right, right. And another thing that is interesting too, getting back to the cost of college. I believe that they did a white paper at MIT, where they took students in circuitry. They did the regular way they normally did it for hundreds of years. Then they did it where they took the students, did MOOC courses, and now the professor is our guide on the side, working in the labs, working on homework. And so he's no longer sage on the stage. He's actually actively engaged with the students on the project. So let's say, for instance, you were studying business. You'd be connected with a business professor and a couple of other people, you know, in business, connected to like a co-working space, like WeWorks, if they're still around. But those kind of things. And you'd be working with startups of all types. And so you'd actually be consultants for free. And you may not make money because you don't make money when you're a college student, do you? Going to a lecture, do you get paid for going to a lecture? No, you have to pay for it. Exactly, exactly. So if you're getting the lecture for free, why not give something out, pass it on, so to speak. Like, you know, do something, somebody does something kind to you, pass it on, help that business out. And then you can add that to your LinkedIn and your, you know, your resume and stuff like that. So the idea is going through the course as you're doing real-life work and real-life experience, and then the community needs to support you, especially if you are in the middle school model, or middle school and high school, the community needs to be set up for that, too. Now, the irony is, I don't believe in online or distance remote learning, but I also don't believe in public school, private school, or home school. I believe in community learning, where all these things are in that community. So you might learn something in your neighborhood as you're on your bike going around, and that's going to be part of your credit if you... Right, right, your badge. Now, let's say, for instance, you want to be a diplomat. You have a bunch of badges that align to support that kind of a thing. So I've interviewed over 90 famous people for I want to be a, and I have a hack. You know how difficult it is just to get me into this room and to get through the, if you want to have somebody famous, to get through their decision makers if you want to go? My hack is I'd go to the LA Book Festival, and I prearranged, found out all of, you know, everything about them, including their LinkedIn, their Facebook, their Twitter, and all that stuff. Find out who I want to interview, and I would go up and interview five, 10 minutes. Say, what, if you were a young person, if you were talking to a grandchild, how would you suggest they become a politician, an activist, a runner, whatever? And I get 12 in two days without any, going through anybody's TAs to kill the deal. And they do that for five years. So I had like 90 famous people. I talked, I interviewed a four-time Olympian. Eight months after I interviewed her, she won the New York Marathon, the first American woman in 40 years. I've interviewed Ed Asner. I've interviewed CIA agents. I've interviewed Sir Rockets. I've interviewed Barbara Boxer. I've interviewed Tom Haig before he died. I've interviewed all these different people. In fact, Joanne Reed, I've interviewed her. She's lovely. We don't agree politically, but she's lovely, lovely lady. About six or seven years ago, I said, Amber, my younger sister, and I'm the patriarch of the family. Everybody else younger than me has passed away. I said, Amber, I think what I'm working on might save the world. A look of horror crossed over her face. She goes, oh, Mike, don't tell these people you're saving the world. They'll think you're crazy. She's my younger sister. So about six months later, I came back to her and said, you know, Amber, I made a horrible mistake. When I told you I was saving the world, I gave you my goal, but I didn't give you my deadline. Amber, I'm saving the world by lunchtime, but it turned out to be a bigger task than I anticipated. Now, nobody's truly expecting me to do this, right? The only person being let down is myself, but I'm not too hard on myself. Michael Williams with Ward Mentoring Academy and BadgeMap. It was great to have you on California Insider. It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.