Moving towards collaborative learning: Education for the 21st century

Moving towards collaborative learning Education for the 21st century

Simone Buche-Pinsard Mastère spécialisé Innovation By Design – final dissertation Directed by Jacques-François Marchandise ENSCI-Les Ateliers 2013

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Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep gratitude to Jacques-François Marchandise for accepting to be my thesis director, reassuring me, and putting me back on the right path every time I needed it.

Special thanks go to Sylvie Lavaud and Olivier Hirt for creating this brilliant post-graduate program that enabled me to re-discover the joys of learning. Thank you Katie Cotellon for joining the dream team. Long live “Innovation by design”!

I thank Alain Cadix for accepting my participation in “Innovation by Design” and knowing that this was the perfect program for me even before I did.

I am grateful to Thomas Lommee and all the students of the studio expérimental: Élise Caron, Marianne Cardon, Pierre-Loup Dumas, Louise Mushet, Micaela Rava, Ayan Bihi, Céline Coq, Zoé Aegerter, Fanny Muller, Fanny Giampiccolo, Pierre-Benoît Pirlot, and Sanam Viseux. I had great pleasure working with you and I thank you for the Loos-en-Gohelle trip.

I learnt a lot from you.

I wish to acknowledge Clément Delangue, Charles Lefebvre du Prëy, and Marc-Arthur Gauthey for taking the time to share your start-up experiences with me. I wish you further success in all your endeavors. I extend my thanks to Christopher Santerre for introducing me to “Ouishare” and for nourishing my bibliography all throughout my research. Keep on spreading the collaborative word!

I would like to thank Liz Davis, Michèle Collange, Gilles Levavasseur, Noémie Lesartre and Emmanuelle Fontelaye from ENSCI-Les Ateliers for their advice, patience and support all throughout this journey. Special thanks go to Liz for passing her passion for student-centered pedagogy and creative thinking onto me and for being a wonderful teacher.

Many thanks go to my new friends from IBD 2: Paula Aitkenhead, Pierre-Julien Cazaux, Mickaël Desmoulins, Marie Guitton, Pierre-Emmanuel Lépicier, and Ginger Zvex. Thank you for the laughter, the solidarity, and all the discussions we shared. I will miss meeting you in the IBD war-room. Oh, don’t forget to look for the “kiss”…

This final dissertation would not exist if it weren’t for the help of Jion Sheibani, Christine Terrisse and my mother who helped me with proofreading and editing. It would certainly not look as nice as it does today without the great work accomplished by Solenn Marrel, graphic designer and friend. I thank you all for your generosity and support.

My gratitude goes to my family and friends: I thank my parents and my sister for their endless love. Thank you to Lysann, Sandra, Oliver and Jean-Christophe for lending me a helping hand with the kids, when I needed some time to work. I extend my gratitude to Emeline, Claire, Anne, and Daniel for being my friends.

Thanks forever to my husband Serge who was supportive, loving and VERY patient with me at all times. This dissertation is dedicated to my children Félix and Ava. May your education enhance your uniqueness and preserve your creativity. I love you all the way to the moon and back.

I extend my thanks to anyone who is not mentioned here and who offered me a smile, inspiration or encouragement.

Paris, March 7th, 2013, Simone Buche-Pinsard

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’.

They told me that I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them that they didn’t understand life.

John Lennon

Table of contents

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A/ Meeting the needs of the market: education at the service of the economy ������������������������������������������������� B/ Alternative models of education: student centered pedagogy ��������������������������������������������������������������� C/ N ew relationship in the classroom: how the Internet changes the role of the teacher �������������������������������������� D/ C onclusion of part one: the urgency to rethink education and learning today �����������������������������������������������

10 10 12 15 17

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations? �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� A/ Khan Academy: online-learning for free ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� B/ M OOCs: revolutionizing or preserving the traditional education model? ���������������������������������������������������� (i) what are moocs? how do they work? ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� (ii) welcome to the global classroom: improving access to learning ������������������������������������������������������������� C/ Hands-on experience: testing a MOOC ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� D/ Innovating with Khan Academy and MOOCs: the “flipped classroom” ������������������������������������������������������� E/ Criticizing MOOCs: automating education ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ (i) who wants moocs? ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� (ii) it’s not just about gaining knowledge: social aspects of education ����������������������������������������������������������� F/ Conclusion of part two: Incremental innovations in the field of education and learning �������������������������������������

19 19 20 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 26

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system �������������������������������������� 28 A/ Research methodology and presentation of the collaborative start-ups interviewed ���������������������������������������� 29 (i) unishared: linking the classroom to the outside world ������������������������������������������������������������������������ 30 (ii) learningshelter: humanizing online mentoring and promoting peer-to-peer teaching ���������������������������������������� 31 (iii) cupofteach: the peer-to-peer university ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 32 B/ Views on Education: connecting learners to real-world skills ����������������������������������������������������������������� 33 C/ Learning start-ups: participating in the collaborative groundswell ����������������������������������������������������������� 36 D/ Learning innovations: building on existing practices ������������������������������������������������������������������������� 37 E/ Conclusion of part three: paving the way to collaborative learning ���������������������������������������������������������� 39

Conclusion �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 41 Selected Bibliography ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 48 APPENDIX ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 51

Introduction

1. TED is a nonprofit initiative devoted to spreading interesting ideas. It exists since 1984 as a conference uniting people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Today, you can find “TED talks” on literally every subject. For more information and access to all TED videos, please visit their website: http://www.ted.com/.

2. Cambridge Dictionaries Online: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/.

H

ad I listened to my French teacher in High School, I would never have come to France.

She had assured me repeatedly, that I was hopeless in Baudelaire’s language, and indeed, I was quite incapable of learning the lists of French vocabulary without understanding why I was learning them.

I couldn’t see the sense of learning the language of a country that I had never visited and that I had no connection to whatsoever. Fortunately, I didn’t listen to my French teacher and decided to discover France.

My frustration at not being able to communicate was so great, that I managed to learn the grammar, the vocabulary and the pronunciation in record time and I stayed on to finish my studies. How is it that something that came so naturally to me under those circumstances, caused me so much worry and pain within the confinements of the classroom? This is probably one of the reasons explaining my interest in education and learning: understanding the conditions that help create a positive and supportive learning environment.

This experience was the first of several that showed me that there’s more to education than just conveying knowledge on a given subject. Education is not only about content; it is about learning how to think and how to ask the right questions. School and learning are very complex issues that encompass psychological, economic, ideological and political considerations. My objective is to treat their global context in order to understand how they can evolve to better meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s learners.

This research paper being personal, I allowed myself to follow my inclinations and initial intuitions. Furthermore, this paper is based on academic research on the various themes encountered, various TED talks1 given on the subject of education, learning and change, but I have also listened to the experience of different people I exchanged with during these past months, as well as by my own experience. As such, I approached the writing of this paper from a very large global overview and then followed my intuition while keeping in mind the big picture. My

6.

research was also an occasion to get a deeper understanding of the “collaborative economy” that is gaining in momentum. I am interested in understanding how this growing movement might influence the education and learning system. Last but not least, I am interested in innovation. By innovation in the field of education and learning, I am referring to new methods and ideas that transform the way people teach and acquire new knowledge in a lasting manner. These innovations can be linked to new technologies, but don’t necessarily need to be; they can be social innovations that help to meet these individual needs within the society. The realm of my paper being already very far-reaching, I will not cover the question of design in this field. However, my endeavor was to adopt a holistic viewpoint, approaching the question from a human-centered point of view. May this paper constitute a starting point for designers interested in the education and learning system in a collaborative context. We need to design tomorrow’s education and learning system!

In order to follow the arguments developed in this research paper, it seems seems essential to share the definition of the word “education” as it is used in this paper.

Education and Learning In the Cambridge online dictionary defines the word “education” as “The process of teaching or learning in a school, or the knowledge that you get from this.”2 Of course the social meaning of education is much wider, since it is linked to the idea of transmission and communication: we learn from everything that surrounds us. We receive our first education from our parents. Then the schooling system takes over part of our education from elementary school to high school, followed by vocational training or higher education in university for those who continue. Life is an endless learning process. We continue to learn through different personal and professional experiences.

However, chances are that the education we receive in an academic institution, as well as the ways we learn while we are in school, will greatly influence the way we perceive the world around us and our

Image: Calvin and Hobbes on Education for the 21st Century Source: http://www.macroeducation. org/educational-wisdom-of-calvinand-hobbes/

place in it. Ideally, our education should enable us to “learn how to learn”. Understanding how this becomes reality seems crucial, because it is the key to facilitate adaptations all throughout life. If learning is the active process that comes from within the person, I consider that education is an action that comes from outside the learner. Making education and learning walk handin-hand is therefore important, which can be difficult since the personal objectives of an individual do not always overlap perfectly with the society’s needs.

It is a question of balance between individual and collective demands.

In all education policies, there is a balance to be found between the needs of the individual and those of the society. The UNESCO Task Force on Education for the Twenty-first Century, led by Jacques Delors has established “four pillars of education”3, that should lay the foundations of tomorrow’s education system, responding to the needs of the individual and the society as a whole: • learning to know, i.e. developing the ability to think; • learning to do, i.e. acting appropriately in uncertain situations; • learning to live together, i.e. avoiding and resolving conflicts; • learning to be, i.e. preparing a person’s complete development of body and mind.

According to this special Task Force, these are the qualities needed by individuals to evolve in a rapidly changing and challenging world. In order to meet the uncertain future with confidence, tomorrow’s education system should therefore foster meta-skills such as creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, as well as communication and collaborative skills. The report also stresses the importance of learning throughout life, giving people the possibility to acquire new skills and knowledge at different phases of their life in order to advance towards a “learning society.”4

As I am very interested in the very idea of learning throughout life, which in my sense constitutes the natural corollary of longer life expectancy, the word “education” will be used in its broadest sense in this paper. It will refer to public schooling systems, although I will not be focusing on a specific moment in formal tuition, including anything taught within the confinements of a classroom, from elementary school to continuous education.

3. UNESCO Task Force on Education for the Twenty-first Century: http:// www.unesco.org/delors/utopia.htm.

4. Ibid.

Allow me to make a preliminary remark: I am very aware that there are many teachers and professors who initiate individual, innovative practices within the confinements of their classroom. Many achieve miracles and my critique of the system does not address these individual initiatives. However, I do not believe that their individual action will trigger the global revision of the system as a whole. My personal conviction is that the educational system needs to evolve as a whole. What is the sense in adapting the university system if nothing is changed in the elementary system leading to and preparing for higher education?

The subject of education is approached differently according to one’s cultural background. My research will focus on the western civilization, which is more familiar to me. To do this, I will take examples from North America and Western European countries indifferently in order to situate this paper on a more global level without diving into the specificities of the various national systems. This might not be the most academic way of processing, but it is the direct result of my own educational history: I went to a German-American bilingual school, which was known for its pedagogical project based on biculturalism from Kindergarten all the way to obtaining the American High School Diploma and the German Abitur. I then continued my graduate studies in a French University, worked for ten years before taking up this specialized Master-degree program at ENSCI-Les Ateliers, the school I now work for and which is known for provi.7

© Bisou.

Image: Poncin Boarding School, boys classroom.

Source: Bibliothèque Muncipale de Lyon.

5. If ENSCI-Les Ateliers has been considered to be a model for design education, my elementary and high school, John-F-Kennedy has been recognized to be a model for bilingual education, since the language isn’t treated separately from the cultural exchange it engenders.

When the school was first founded in 1960, during the Cold War, its pedagogical project was based on creating links between children from West Berlin and children from U.S. Armed Forces families with a focus of reconciliation between the two nations. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification, the school’s philosophy is still to use education as a means to teach children “to live together in tolerance and peace through better crosscultural understanding.” For more information: http://www.jfks.de.

ding student-centered study paths and project-based learning in design education. I will not focus on the ENSCI-project, since I lack the necessary distance to treat the question objectively. However, when I came to Les Ateliers, I did find something that I had been missing greatly ever since I left my own high school: curiosity and questioning are greatly encouraged.

These two establishments being exceptions5 (as well as exceptional), one of the reasons I was interested in working on this subject was to understand why the mainstream educational system is incapable of providing a learning environment that encourages creativity, curiosity and innovation in children and young adults and how this can be changed.

6. Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers.

What’s Mine is Yours, London (Collins, 2011), p. 70.

As a product of this education, I am therefore more interested in the global similarities rather than in the national specificities of today’s educational systems.

7. Ibid, p. 71.

I will now pursue with an overview of my understanding of the arising collaborative economy, whose guiding principles are based on sharing and cooperation.

The Collaborative Economy The “collaborative economy” as referred to in this paper, is a parallel economic system but also a new lifestyle that has been growing quietly but steadily over the past decade as a response to a hyperindividualized, truly unsustainable society. For many, it is a solution to the precariousness that many people are facing in the current economic system. One can decide to become a peer-provider or a peer-user in the sharing community for different reasons: “Some 8.

collaborative consumers are forward thinking and socially minded optimists, but others are individuals motivated by a practical urgency to find new and better ways of doing things. That practical urgency may be to save money or time, access a better service, be more sustainable, or allow closer relationships with people rather than brands.”6 This means that some are participating in the collaborative economy for political or idealistic reasons while others are in it for self-interest. Initially troubled by the latter, I am now convinced that this is one reason for the recent success of this more horizontal economy: It balances personal well-being and global interest: “Each individual could act in his or her own self-interest and at the same time produce a unified social sphere, in which we’re ‘all one’.”7 Summed up, the collaborative economy is currently revisiting our grandparents habits of sharing, mending, repairing and re-using with the help of the web 2.0.

The rise of the collaborative economy is directly linked to the development of new technologies linked to the Internet. What seems important to retain, is that these new tools fluidify exchanges and interactions in the professional and personal sphere.

During my research, I was greatly impressed by Jeremy Rifkin and his vision of a “Third Industrial Revolution”.

According to him, we are facing the end of our industrial history and the beginning of the collaborative era and with it a great shift of the values that govern us: “If the industrial era emphasized the values of discipline and hard work, the top-down flow of authority,

“Current systems of education were not designed to meet the challenges we now face. They were developed to meet the needs of a former age. Reform is not enough: they need to be transformed.”9 Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds.

the importance of financial capital, the workings of the marketplace, and private property relations, the collaborative era is more about creative play, peer-topeer interactivity, social capital, participation in open commons, and access to global networks.”8 As such, the collaborative economy promises more freedom, a more distributive society and a redefinition of the role of work and consumption.

Why am I interested in the relationship between the rising collaborative economy and our current education and learning system? I have based this research paper on the hypothesis that the institutions in which we learn and educate are the direct reflections of their era, reflecting the values and possibilities of the moment.

If we can accept the idea that society is changing rapidly with the end of an economic system run on petrol; if we can agree on the arisal of a new, more collaborative economy, run on alternative, “cleaner” energies; if we can admit that the latest information and communication technologies have a direct impact on the ways we live and work; then we can understand the importance of re-desiging the current education and learning system, founded on past premises, in order to meet the needs of a new epoch.

An era is also defined by its technological inventions that have influenced the ways we work and live. These past few months, Khan Academy and “Massive, Open, Online Courses”, also called MOOCs have been celebrated as innovations in the field of education. This research paper will provide the occasion to take a closer look at these phenomena and understand their contribution to education.

easier to become an entrepreneur. Every day new startups are created, some of which focus on learning and education. Inspired by the example of big companies that are applying start-up strategies, I am interested in seeing whether part of the solution can be found in these smaller, flexible structures that are not an official part of “the education system”.

8. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Third Industrial Revolution, New York City, New York (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 260.

9. Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011), p. 49.

This leads me to the core question that I hope to answer at least partially in this paper: How do recent innovations in the field of education and the emerging collaborative economy show the principles that will guide tomorrow’s educational system?

(I) The first part of this paper focuses on the context of the current education and learning system and shows how it still reflects the Industrial Revolution and is therefore no longer adapted to today’s needs. (II) In part two, I aim to describe and to analyze the latest phenomena in the field of learning and educating, Khan Academy and MOOCs, in order to understand whether we are in the presence of incremental or disruptive innovations. (III) The final part of this paper is dedicated to the collaborative movement represented by three collaborative start-ups in the field of learning: UniShared, LearningShelter and CupofTeach. In analyzing their activity, I hope to define the principles that should shape tomorrow’s education and learning system.

The latest communication technologies have also helped develop the collaborative economy, making it

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(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution 10. Rifkin. op.cit., p. 112-113.

11. Ibid, p. 112.

12. Did You Know 3.0: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_ aiE&feature=related 13. Quotation from an interview with Michel Serres in Keller, Thierry et Blaise Mao, « Dossier : La Revanche des Cancres », Usbek & Rica, n° 07, September-November 2012, p. 18-34.

“T

he schools became a microcosm of the factories. One-room schoolhouses gave way to giant, centralized schools that, in appearance, could easily have been mistaken for factories. Students learned never to challenge the teacher’s authority. They were given daily work assignments, along with detailed instructions on how to carry them out. Their tests were standardized and their performance measured by the speed and efficiency of their responses. They were isolated into autonomous units and informed that sharing information with fellow students was cheating and a punishable offense.” Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution.10 The system enabling mass education, as we know it today in Europe and North America, arose during the Industrial Revolution. Prior to this, very few people had access to education, it being primarily in the hands of the Church and initially focused on teaching Latin grammar. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452 accelerated the diffusion of knowledge, thus making universal education possible.

As the economic objective of schools during the 18th century was to give an “average education”, the system had to be organized in order to educate a large number of people in the most efficient way. It was based on the conviction that teaching is a one-way act of delivering, from the person who knows to the one who is ignorant: “Schools took on the dual task of creating a literate workforce and preparing them to serve authoritarian and centralized businesses, where they would take orders from the top and optimize their output at the bottom in the most efficient manner possible, while never questioning the authority under which they labored.”11 Today, we expect the same system to help develop each student’s highest possible potential in order to be well-prepared to meet future challenges in a highly complex world; therefore the current education system is no longer sufficient. Also, since the democratization of the Internet, students can no longer be considered to be ignorant; never before has information been so abundant and so readily accessible. It is estimated that a week’s worth 10.

of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.12 At the time of our great grandfathers, a teacher would instruct 95% of what he had learned to his students, whereas teachers nowadays will only convey 5% of what they have learned in school.13 I am interested in the question of what is happening with our educational systems and how we are adapting our ways of educating and learning in a world changing as rapidly as ours has in the past three decades. Hereafter, I would like to give a brief overview of different viewpoints from experts in economy, philosophy and on alternative educational models that have greatly influenced my perception of this question.

A/ Meeting the needs of the market: education at the service of the economy The history of modern education is closely linked to that of industrialization. The First Industrial Revolution was the conjunction of printing communication and steam-powered technology. A higher production of newspapers and books became possible with the arrival of the industrial process of printing, making educational material more readily accessible. During this period, the economic objective of education was to ensure the provision of a reading and counting labor-force for the factories. Students had to conform to the educational system the same way that workers had to adapt to the working processes in the factories; the needs of the modern capitalist economy forging the functioning of schools.

Subsequently, the Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, marked the twentieth century with the convergence of electrical communication and oil-powered technology. It gave birth to the assembly line and mass production but also to mass education: “The steam printing machine with rollers, and later the rotary press and linotype, greatly increased the speed of printing and significantly reduced

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

the cost. Print material, in the form of newspapers, magazines, and books, proliferated in America and Europe, encouraging mass literacy for the first time in history.”14 The instruction of greater numbers of people greatly accelerated the transition to industrialism. In turn, the rise of industrialism enabled greater access to literacy and basic education which would eventually lead to higher political participation and social progress. The school system responded to the needs of that period.

Many experts, like Sir Ken Robinson or Andreas Schleicher from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are convinced that today’s educational and learning systems, inherited from that period, still follow the basic rules that govern mass production: “Mass systems of public education were developed primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution.

They emphasize linearity, conformity and standardization.

One of the reasons they are not working now is that life is organic, adaptable and diverse.”15 In other words, the system needs to evolve in order to meet the needs of the current era and prepare for tomorrow’s challenges.

in the midst of a profound shift in the very way society is structured, away from hierarchical power and towards lateral power.”17 Rifkin is not the only one to announce a shift in paradigms. All over the world, individuals have ceased to wait for public policy-makers to save them and are inventing new ways of producing, consuming and interacting. They have engaged in the collaborative economy and in doing so are challenging the very notions of ownership and individual property, as defined

by John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the question of property is old-fashioned; the future is all about having access: “Swap trading, time banks, local exchange trading systems (LETS), bartering, social lending, peer-to-peer currencies, tool exchanges, land sharing, clothing swaps, toy sharing, shared workplaces, co-housing, co-working, couchsurfing, car sharing, crowdfunding, bike sharing, ride sharing, food co-ops, walking school buses, shared microcrèches, peer-to-peer rental - the list goes on - are all examples of Collaborative Consumption.”18 Just a couple of years ago, these terms did not exist. Today, they respond to new needs and reflect old values revisited by social media.

Jeremy Rifkin mentions these upcoming challenges in his latest book, The Third Industrial Revolution. He argues that we are on the brink of another deep changing process and asserts: “the conjoining of the Internet communication technology and renewable energy is giving rise to a Third Industrial Revolution”16. His theory is based on the understanding that the previous economic revolutions occurred when new communication technologies encountered new energy systems. According to Rifkin, the Third Industrial Revolution is the connection of Internet communication technology and renewable energies. His thesis is that the process of this current Industrial Revolution, that started in 2000, will continue for the next forty years, marking the end of a carbon-run economy and paving the way to a more collaborative economy: “The conventional top-down organization of society that characterized much of the economic, social, and political life of the fossil fuel-based industrial revolutions is giving way to distributed and collaborative relationships in the emerging green industrial era. We are

The collaborative economy is becoming viral with the help of the Internet. This media is lowering the barriers to entering the market and making it easier to become an entrepreneur. The new opportunities linked to the Internet and the new technologies have profoundly influenced the way we interact with others. The democratization of the Education System focused primarily on making school available for a greater number of students and creating a system that would function for the majority. The key words that can be used to describe this movement are “efficiency” and “massification”, since the objective was to create a system of standardized solutions. The promise of this period was that a degree would give access to a job. In this context, the needs of the individual, the deeper understanding of how people learn were considered to be fine adjustments that did not constitute a priority for the formal tuition system. Sir Ken Robinson underlines the strict, organizational character of school, much of which is still true today: “Students within the academic system are taught broadly the same material and they are assessed

14. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Third Industrial Revolution, New York City, New York (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 35.

15. Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011), p. 8.

16. Rifkin, op.cit. p. 36.

17. Ibid.

18. Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What’s Mine is Yours, London (Collins, 2011), p. 71.

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(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

Source: Unknown

19. Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011), p. 57.

21. “Education”, http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Education (consulted on February 4, 2013, last revised on February 1, 2013).

20. Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society, 1970 (Cuernavaca, Mexico) Full-text online, http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling. html#2 22. Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011), p. 67.

against common scales of achievement, with relatively few opportunities for choice and deviation. Typically, they move through the system in age groups: all the five-year-olds together, all the six-year-olds together and so on, as if the most important thing that children have in common is their date of manufacture.(…) Teaching is based on the division of labor. Like an assembly line, students progress from room to room to be taught by different teachers specializing in separate disciplines.”19 The principles of conformity and linearity inherited from the Industrial Revolution still define today’s formal education system. In most cases, the pupil is required to adapt his behavior to the system; the selective process decides which student will become a future manual worker, administrative or intellectual employee. In the 1970s, Ivan Illich openly criticized the role that school plays in perpetuating social injustice in his book, Deschooling Society. He speaks of the “hidden curriculum of schooling”20 that is to define “standards of what is valuable and what is feasible,” thus making critical thinking difficult. His book is still much quoted today in texts criticizing the current education system as serving politics and the needs of the market instead of focusing on those of the individual. However, at the margin of the public education system, there have always been educational philosophers and pedagogues interested in understanding how education could help people develop their natural abilities in the best possible way.

In the following paragraphs, I would like to take a look at some alternative educational methods, that are focused on the needs of the individual rather than on those of the market.

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B/ Alternative models of education: student centered pedagogy “The authentic education, let’s say it again, does not happen from ‘A’ to ‘B’, or from ‘A’ over ‘B’, but from ‘A’ with ‘B’, mediated by the world.” Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Education is never neutral, since it vehicles values, ideals, rules and a certain perception of the world. Etymologically, the word “education” is derived from the latin word “éducàtiò”, which means “A breeding, a bringing up, a rearing».21 What are the dispositions that education tries to foster? According to Sir Ken Robinson, the three roles of education are the personal, the cultural and the economic. Of course one cannot separate the three roles from one another, and it is essential to keep a good balance between them: “Understanding how they interconnect is the key to transforming the education system into a 21st-century process that has creativity and innovation at its center.”22 In the formal education model, the economic and the cultural roles are predominant. However, throughout the construction of the standard education system, various alternative education models originated, putting greater emphasis on the personal development of the child. For a long time, these educational alternatives were marginal, oftentimes integrating children excluded by traditional schooling institutions and children with learning disabilities; therefore they only constituted a real choice for a small minority.

At present, the current system is increasingly showing its limits with a growing number of young people dropping out of school before obtaining a degree. In France alone, the number of students that leave school without a diploma is estimated at 17% -18% per year, which

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

Source : http://educationofours. blogspot.fr/2011/08/funny-cartoon-ibelieve-thats.html

means that each year 150 000 young French people leave the education system without a degree.23 It is now known that 40% of these young people will be facing unemployment, not only because they do not have a degree or have acquired fewer competencies than their peers, but primarily because they lack self-confidence since the system has conveyed them the message that they have failed. In this formal schooling model, the student is required to adapt to the system instead of the system finding solutions to reply to the student’s individual needs. In this context, many parents, worried about their children’s future, are discovering alternative education philosophies that were established over a hundred years ago.

As a reaction to the uniformed instruction system, the 20th century witnessed the appearance of a certain number of alternative models of schooling and learning that question the mainstream model. Each of the following educational philosophers deserves a detailed account of his life’s work. However, I will summarize their specificities briefly, for it is the similarities of their theories and not their differences that I am interested in.

Although their theories vary, they all agree that school should not be based on selection and competition, but rather be a place where curiosity, experimentations based on independence, freedom and the natural quest to learn are enhanced. In Germany, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is known to have developed the Waldorf schools that have the overall goal to make the child’s development coincide with the learning of skills such as critical thinking and creativity in order to foster free and morally responsible individuals. In Italy, and less politically oriented, Dr. Maria Montessori (1870-1952) focused on establishing a pedagogy that respected the child’s natural psychological development, creating a learning environment that would facilitate the acquisition of knowledge through discovery.

During the same period, Ovide Decroly (1871-1932) worked in Belgium, where he established a pedagogy in which the child would be the actor of his own education.

He wanted education to respond to the social needs of the child. In France at the same period, Célestin Freinet (1896-1966) developed a pedagogy that was based on learning by doing and the freedom to experiment and to express. He hoped that this “éducation nouvelle” would help prepare youth for society. All of them are considered to be pioneers in the field of alternative pedagogy. Their primary concern were the students, which was avantgarde at that period of time. Their attention was directed towards student-centered pedagogy, treating the body and the mind as a whole. The well-being of the student seemed central to all of them and the role of the teacher was to accompany, rather than impose, the learning path.

23. Statistics quoted by Michel Quéré, Directeur de l’Evaluation, de la Prospective et de la Performance du Ministère de l’Education Nationale, during the conference organised by Institute Aspen France: “Comment redresser la position de la France dans le classement Pisa?”, Paris, December 13, 2012.

24. Verdiani, Antonella. Ces Écoles qui Rendent Nos Enfants Heureux, 2012, Lonrai (Éditions Actes Sud).

When reading their founding philosophies, it becomes clear that they all pursued the development of autonomous and responsible human beings, as well as active learners, who participate in their own education. This passage from the passive student to the active learner seems to be the biggest difference between these alternative education models and the ruling mainstream system that regards the student as an empty receptacle to be filled to the brim with content. Instead of deciding on behalf of the learner, these non-traditional models aim at helping the learner decide for himself. Thus, their shared objective is to teach children how to think, to develop their individual capacities, which in turn enables them to learn how to learn.

Today, these reflections on developing autonomy of the individual are gaining in importance. Over 100 years after the development of these theories, the number of alternative schools in the world is still steadily growing24, thus questioning the role of more traditional schools .13

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

26. Today, there are over 20,000 Montessori schools in the world, over 2,500 Waldorf-Steiner Schools, the “Mouvement d’école moderne” initiated by Célestin Freinet is still perpetuated by the Cooperative Institute of the Modern School (ICEM) in several countries.

27. Verdiani, op.cit., p. 28.

28. Unfortunately, most of these initiatives are private and therefore not accessible to all. This paper will focus on the public education and learning system.

25. UNESCO Task Force on Education for the Twenty-first Century, http://www.unesco.org/ delors/utopia.htm.

today. The reasons for this are numerous: If the way from school to the job market seemed clearly paved before, it has become very rocky today. The economical and ecological crisis has created a world marked by uncertainty. In this context, feeling good about oneself, having a solid and healthy self-esteem that enables one to think and act independently have become crucial. Also, these pedagogy prove that success must not necessarily rhyme with competition. Last but not least, our western civilizations today attribute a greater importance to the rights and needs of the individual and therefore to the development of a child’s personal talents. The UNESCO Task Force on Education underlines this need for greater differentiation: “In a highly unstable world where one of the main driving forces seems to be economic and social innovation, imagination and creativity must undoubtedly be accorded a special place. As the clearest expression of human freedom, they may be threatened by the establishment of a certain degree of uniformity in individual behavior.”25 These alternative pedagogical models redefine many aspects of the mainstream model. For example, grades and evaluations are no longer an end in themselves and an emphasis is laid on self-assessment. There is no standardized curriculum, because children are allowed to learn at their personal pace in order to fulfill their own individual destiny. The focus is put on helping children develop their full potential as human beings rather than educating children to meet the needs of the society.

This means that the emphasis is put on the personal development of the child rather than the child’s future contributions to the economic and political system in place. Although these alternative schools are still growing in the world26 and have been joined by other individual initiatives, they have never been generalized. According to Antonella Verdiani, former expert from UNESCO’s Section of Education for Universal Values, who has written a thesis and a book on education and happiness, there are several reasons that explain why these alternative models were never upscaled and adopted by any national education system: The first is that they lacked a public movement that was important enough to convince

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the governments of different countries to accept these pedagogical methods. The second reason is that these schools and methods were not very well communicated and therefore not very widely known. They seem awkward for the general public and public policy makers; more acquainted in seeing the education system serve the society rather than serving the individual. But the third reason is political: these schools strongly encourage critical and autonomous thinking as well as individual and collective responsibility. Their aim is clearly to educate future citizens that are capable of contesting the political system and the hierarchical model of the society. This is probably the main reason no government has ever felt the need to generalize these models until today.27 Much can be learned from these alternative teaching methods that are based on respecting the learner and fostering a curiosity and naturally present abilities. They put a lot of emphasis on the role schools play in developing democracy: children learn to take responsibility for their own work and for their community. They learn how to think autonomously and critically. I would argue that the challenges of the coming decade will consist in adopting these alternative pedagogical methods to help them include technologies that did not exist at the times of their founders. The fact that more and more of these alternative schools are opening up every year28 proves that this student-centered philosophy is attracting a rising number of parents, many of whom fear that the regular school system no longer responds to the personal needs of their children.

Intuitively, many of these parents have realized that the world their children are growing up in a world that has changed drastically since their own childhood. They hope that this alternative education will prepare their children to face the complexity of an interconnected world, enabling them to adjust to change throughout their lives.

While parents are turning to alternative schools in the hope of preparing their children for an uncertain future, more and more teachers realize that their relationship

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

Image: “Learning Revolution”, Extract from Sir Ken Robinsons Ted Talk.

Source: http://karmajello.com/ universe/knowledge/bring-on-thelearning-revolution-sir-ken-robinsonted-talk-video.html

with their students is changing and that the arrival of new technologies like the Internet have a direct effect on what is happening in the classroom.

C/ New relationship in the classroom: how the Internet changes the role of the teacher “We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”29 Did you know? 2006.

The world has changed so profoundly in the past decades turning the current educational system into an anachronism that needs more than a superficial revision. Most institutions have not succeeded in making the transition from the book to the world wide web or have even integrated the fact that these technologies have changed the way our cognitive system functions and therefore the very way we learn.

Sandra Enlart, a French expert in education sciences, stresses the fact that today’s generational gap is not just one defined by disparate values and tastes, but might actually be linked to more structural mental differences.30 This means that the brains of people who have grown up with the Internet and virtual reality function differently than those of people who were primarily shaped by the printed word.

This structural gap becomes very clear in a recorded exchange between the French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut and Michel Serres31. The 82-year-old French philosopher Michel Serres believes that the transition

from the book to the Internet has an impact on humanity today that is as dramatic as the passage from the oral to the written culture. To explain this, he draws an analogy with the “revolution” that took place in Ancient Greece with the invention of writing. Plato’s work seemed to be clearly influenced by the “tool” he used to express himself, the written word, instead of the oral rhetoric used by his professor, Socrates. Instead of seeing the discovery of writing as an aide for the memory, the fear expressed by Socrates is that writing will only be “a remedy for reminding, not remembering, with the appearance but not the reality of wisdom. Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with.”32 Michel Serres underlines that Socrates is judging “writing” (seen to be a new technology in this case), through the eyes of someone who has never experienced it and whose whole structure of thought is founded on oral communication.

Having never practiced writing himself, he is not capable of understanding its real contribution to thought as well as the new possibilities the written word offers.

This analogy helps understand the underlying structural changes that the digital revolution is bringing about.

How can someone who has grown up with books, and who has gained a certain prestige reading books, suddenly understand the opportunities offered by the Internet and the new technologies? It seems natural to focus on what is lost instead of imagining what can be gained. I am not arguing that all new technologies are positive, but only that one cannot underestimate the change they bring about. They vehicle different ways of thinking that still need to be explored to understand the way they will influence our manners of thinking and working.

29. In order to spread consciousness on the shifts occurring in the world and their implications on education from Kindergarten up to higher education, a small group of American educators prepared a presentation entitled “Did you know?” in 2006, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_ aiE&feature=related 30. Enlart, Sandra, and Olivier Charbonnier. Faut-il encore apprendre?, Paris (Dunod, 2010), p. 24.

31. Radio France Culture : “L’école dans le monde qui vient”, interview with Michel Serres by Alain Finkielkraut in Répliques, Dec. 8, 2012.

32. Legend of Theuth related in Plato’s Phaedrus 274e-275b (dialogue), http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#cite_noteplato57-51 (consulted on Jan. 3, 2013, date of last revision Dec. 12, 2012).

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(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

Image: Calvin and Hobbes on Academia.

Source: http://www. cooperativeindividualism. org/political-economy-ofcalvin-and-hobbes-1.html

33. The exact term used is “rééquilibration de la relation pédagogique” in Radio France Culture: “L’école dans le monde qui vient”, interview with Michel Serres by Alain Finkelkraut in Répliques, Dec. 8, 2012.

34. Serres, Michel. Petite Poucette, Paris (Editions Le Pommier, 2012), p. 64.

35. The word Michel Serres uses is “augmenter” I must admit that translating Michel Serres into English is a hazardous challenge; which is why I prefer to note his original phrasing in French.

36. The contesting of the power of the expert not only applies to professors but also to doctors and lawyers and other professions highly regarded for their expertise. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need experts anymore, but that people are no longer solely respected for their “savoir-faire” but also for their “savoir-être”.

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In his book Petite Poucette, Michel Serres develops his perception of the new generation of young, technology-literate individuals, their perception of society and their place in it. He explains that the digital revolution has changed our ways of learning and therefore of teaching in a dramatic way. To illustrate this, he refers to his own experience as a professor and the profound changes he has observed within classes he teaches at Stanford and in other universities. Before the Internet became widely available, students would come into his class with no prior knowledge on a subject. He would then embody the unique expert, recognized for his mastery in a given subject, who would teach them a lesson. The students listened passively, took notes and did not question his authority on the subject. With the arrival of the Internet, his role as a professor has changed dramatically, information now being readily available for a greater number. When he now enters a classroom to teach, chances are that a majority of the class has already looked up his subject to acquire a basic understanding prior to the course. Thus, expectations are higher and different. Besides, they might compare his lesson to what other people have to say on the subject.

Michel Serres regards this to be a positive development that establishes equality between the teacher and his student. Instead of being in a top-down, hierarchical relationship, students and teachers find themselves in a more symmetrical, pedagogical relationship33. According to Serres, the “Millennials”, who have grown up with the Internet, are challenging the old system in which professors rule because of their expertise in a discipline acquired through hard work over the years. For them, knowledge seems to be a mere commodity, instantly available at the tip of their fingers. They are more critical and expect more from their professors than what they can find by themselves on the web. According to Michel Serres, the readily accessibility of information creates a “renversement de la présomption d’incompétences”34, which, if translated into English means “reversing the basic assumption of ignorance”. In other words, with the Internet, anyone can have access to expert knowledge, which clearly undermines the power of the experts. One is no longer respected for one’s sole expertise; teachers

need to earn respect for their savoir-être, the way they interact and their aptitude to personalize and to adapt information to the specific needs of the class as well as for their experience. Michel Serres also speaks of the ability to “enhance”35 the student. Obviously, this is a very painful development for teachers and professors who are used to being respected for the position they hold36 and are not used to being questioned by the students.

This might also explain the fear and the rejection of the new communication tools by these same people; it undermines their power.

Obviously, the education system is made up of teachers, parents and students who all need to accept the changes the education system is facing as a whole. Future reforms will need to reassess not only the the content to be taught, but also the ways the introduction of laptops, tablets and other technological devices will change the relationship between students and teachers. Michel Serres shows us how important it is to question the ways these tools influence our teaching and learning modalities.

It seems that only a minority are willing to question whether today’s ways of educating are adapted to convey the skills needed by the next generations to survive in the future. As John Thackara points out, we learn through interaction. When it comes to interaction in the classroom, it is the teacher’s responsibility to help the students develop the skills that will enable their students to think and act in a complex environment: “Metacognitive skills - judgement, understanding, the capacity to reflect - do not lend themselves to being taught by rote. Nor are they

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

Image: Calvin and Hobbes on Teaching.

Source: http://larrycuban. wordpress.com/2012/03/23/ students-and-teachers-cartoons

easy to download from a website. Active learning happens when we participate in projects that are meaningful to us and engage with the real world.”37 The greater meaning, the values linked to the content are oftentimes lost in the formal education system that keeps on adding more content without keeping an eye on the big picture.

D/ Conclusion of part one: the urgency to rethink education and learning today “To tell the truth, the educational system in America and around the world is a relic of a bygone era. The curriculum is out of date and out of touch with the realities of the current economic and environmental crisis. The very methodological and pedagogical assumptions that have guided education for the better part of 150 years - since the beginning of compulsory public education - are a big part of the reason the human race is heading to the edge of the abyss.”38 Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution.

How can we take into account the needs of the individual and help everyone develop their full potential with a schooling system that in many ways still reflects the principles of a past era? Analyzing the current system from a historical, economical and philosophical viewpoint convinced me that the traditional education and learning systems in the western world has reached its limits. Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally renowned leader in the development of creativity and innovation, well known for his TED talks on education and learning, sums it up when he says the following: “Education is not an impartial process of developing people’s natural abilities and it never was. Systems of mass education are built on two pillars.

The first is economic: they have been shaped by specific assumptions about labor markets, many of which are now hopelessly out of date. The second is intellectual: they have also been shaped by particular ideas about academic

intelligence, which disregard other abilities that are just as important, especially for creativity and innovation.”39 Formal tuition places the interest of the society before that of the individual, thus thinking in the place of the student rather than teaching the student to think for himself. Also, the traditional education model largely ignores the impact of new technologies on students who can no longer be regarded as being ignorant and passive.

Their needs have evolved over the past decennies, and they search for a teacher who will guide them using his “savoir-être” as much as his “savoir-faire” to do this. On the contrary, we have seen how the alternative education philosophies, founded over one hundred years ago, focus on developing each student’s natural abilities, while building on innate curiosity and fostering self-paced learning through trial and error.

37. Thackara, John. In the Bubble, 2005, Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), p. 148.

38. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Third Industrial Revolution, New York City, New York (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 229.

39. Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011), p. 50.

40. Conference organised by Institute Aspen France: “Comment redresser la position de la France dans le classement Pisa?”, Paris, Dec. 13, 2012.

Andreas Schleier, Director of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Brussels explains the difficulty: “The challenge is to make learning an activity that students accept as being important in their life.”40 How did we arrive to the point where “learning”, a natural ability, must be made attractive again? School is meant to prepare young people for life, to give them the tools to become autonomous. It is still seen as the key to a better future and many still believe that education is the only means to overcome social heritage and to hope for a better life. At the same time, while low-skilled jobs are being off-shored, a growing number of young people experience that a degree no longer protects against unemployment. One might assume that these arguments would be enough to encourage a deep reform of the educational systems throughout the world. However, the question is more complex and not simply a question of good will.

Reforms of the schooling system have been discussed in most western countries over the past decades, although minor differences can be noted from country to country .17

(I) Contextualization of the Current Education and Learning System: an inheritance of the Industrial Revolution

Source: www.facebook.com 41. At different occasions, the British Education Secretary Michael Gove repeatedly urged to “pace” and to “accelerate” England’s school reform.

This was felt to be counterproductive by the main protagonists.

42. Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011), p. 25-26.

43. This is a theory developed in Serres, Michel. Petite Poucette, 2012, Paris (Éditions Le Pommier).

and alternative models have appeared over the years without influencing the mainstream system. Germany started a major reform ten years ago. Finland, now cited as an example for its equitable learning outcomes, used to be known for its very elitist schooling system; Great Britain and France are currently discussing major reforms.

There are numerous discussions on the necessity to adapt the curriculum, to add new subjects and to discard other ones, in order to ensure high academic standards. Many of the political reforms announced seem to be guided by short-term political motivations41 although they advance the need for fundamental changes. It takes a long of time to see the results of a reform of the education system, since it is only once the student has left the education system, that one can determine its success or failure. Although minor adjustments are being made in current educational systems around the world, there is no consensus, even on a national level, as to how to create radically different schooling systems that respond to the needs of the future.

Why is there no shared vision on 21st-century education?

In my opinion, there are two principal reasons for this: it is difficult for the people who have the power and who have succeeded in their professional and personal lives to admit that the same system that worked for

18.

them is radically incapable of meeting today’s needs.

Furthermore, changes in the world are taking place too rapidly. While the term ‘Internet’ was first used in 1974, the global number of Internet users was close to 2 billion in 2010 and is still growing.42 The pyramidal decision-making process is lengthy and reform proposals are often out-of-date before their adoption. If innovation consists in questioning things we take for granted, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to change the education and learning systems using yesterday’s mental structures. If we believe Michel Serres, the first generation that grew up with new technologies is greatly influenced by the fact that they did not experience the period before the Internet. These young adults, in their thirties today, will be taking over the reins of power in the next twenty years.43 After showing the necessity to reform the mainstream education and learning system, I will focus the next part of this research paper on the latest innovations in the field of education. I will take a closer look at initiatives like Khan Academy and MOOCs that have received a lot of attention these past few months, in order to understand the excitement they have triggered in many people around the world. Do they truly innovate the education system and if so, how?

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

“We will not succeed in navigating the complex environment of the future by peering relentlessly into the rear view window. To do so, we would be out of our minds.”44 Sir Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds.

I

n an ideal world, knowledge would be accessible for everyone, even in remote places where schools and teachers are still rare. People would access top-quality education without having to pay outrageous school fees.

This is the promise made by Khan Academy and by “Massive Open Online Courses” (MOOCs): making high quality content available to everyone with an Internet connection.

Are these new online classes announcing the end of the physical classroom or just their virtual extension to those who have been deprived of education until now? Do they really represent a pedagogical innovation? These are some of the questions I will try to answer in the following paragraphs. I will begin with a description and analysis of the Khan Academy before concentrating on MOOCs.

A/ Khan Academy: online-learning for free In 2006, Salman Khan filmed video-tutorials to help his younger cousins understand algebra problems. His videos were simple and to the point. It turned out that his cousins preferred the automated version of him to the real-life person. There are several reasons for this: they could pause, replay as much as they liked or fast-forward sequences they already knew. In other words, they could learn at their own pace. More important, they did not have the pressure of someone asking them constantly if they had understood the lesson. Khan calls this “self-paced learning”. The question of “pace” is important in a class of thirty children, for no two students learn at the same rate. Fast learners and students that need more time to understand are punished alike when their personal learning rhythm is not respected.

Having put these instructional videos onto youtube, more out of convenience than for philanthropic reasons, Khan started to receive positive feedback from Internet users.

This is when he realized the potential of these videos. He quit his job and created Khan Academy45.

In addition to the tutorials, Khan added different exercises online. These exercises are classified at various levels of difficulty. It is only when you master one level that you are allowed to continue onto the next, more complex level. When used in class, teachers can clearly see what problems the student is having trouble with and can individualize their help. Teachers and parents can log onto the Khan website as “coaches” in order to get a better understanding of the problems encountered. This prevents pupils from continuing to build on knowledge foundations that have not yet been perfectly acquired.

For Salman Khan this is a question of common sense: “If a kid learns how to ride a bike, and keeps on falling off his bike, you won’t give him a ‘C’ and then hand him a unicycle”.46 Again, we are in the realm of self-paced learning.

44. Robinson, op.cit. p. 6.

45. Khan Academy: http://www. khanacademy.org/ 46. Salman Khan TED talk in 2011, http://www.youtube. com/watch?feature=player_ embedded&v=gM95HHI4gLk 47. In his TED talks, Sugata Mitra shows experiments in which children that are given self-supervised access to the web, learn by themselves. For him it is a solution for children who live in poor regions of the world in which teachers and schools are not available. It is an entirely different context than the one treated in this paper, even if his real-life experiments show that learning is a natural activity for children. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_ mitra_the_child_driven_education. html

According to Salman Khan, his academy makes crossglobal tutoring possible. His dream clearly is a “one-world classroom”, with a kid in Calcutta helping another kid in California learn algebra. I am largely in favor of promoting cross-cultural communication. However, I do not think that one should overestimate the implications of these across-the-screen interactions. I agree that this is a lot more enticing than the class pen pals that I remember from elementary school but this does not replace real-life contact and physical interaction. These online tutorials are especially interesting for children who live in remote or poor places in which schools are still rare but who can connect with the rest of the world through the Internet, like in the “Hole in the wall” and other child-driven education experiments led by the education scientist, Sugata Mitra.47 The idea of “education-for-all” is enticing. The Khan Academy website proposes 3,500 instructional videos in subjects such as mathematics, science, computer sciences, history but also on more controversial topics like “Obamacare” or “Why Europe is worried about Greece”. My initial enthusiasm faltered quickly when I started thinking about the risks. Not all disciplines can be taught using this mode. It might be easily applicable to basic mathematics, but it seems difficult to imagine social science, history, languages to be taught without human interaction, the

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(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

Image: Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy.

Source: http://edudemic. com/2011/10/khan-academy

48. Harvard, the MIT and Berkeley have set up edX, Stanford is sharing Coursera with thirty-three other colleges, Udacity works with individual professors rather than with Institutions.

risk being indoctrination. Subjects like history are naturally biased and often written from a national viewpoint. If a student cannot question the teacher while he is in class, the risks of falling into propaganda are real. We are still in a very top-down pedagogy. Khan Academy might revolutionize tutorials but they do not constitute a pedagogical innovation in itself. It would be interesting to see other similar initiatives arrive on the market, thus making it possible to choose between different instructional videos. In the field of mathematics or grammar, the need of receiving diverging interpretations might not be so great, but if we want to develop critical thinking among the younger generations, it is important to be able to choose between different viewpoints on the same subject. Comparing diverging opinions could be an interesting activity to pursue in the classroom. Again, tomorrow’s generation might not need to memorize so much, since information is more readily available. The real challenge consists in learning to ask the right questions; to start thinking. In order to learn to think, you need to learn how to interact, exchange, discuss, agree and disagree with other people.

So far, Khan Academy does not have any competitors.

The initiative is heavily funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which might be a case of strategic philanthropy, meaning that the funding could be linked to the evident potential for developing new markets. These online lessons seem valuable when they are linked to human interactions within a classroom. The risk of using these new techniques is believing that online tutorials such as the ones offered by Khan Academy can replace teachers. Be it for financial reasons or out of commodity.

The Khan Academy experience directly inspired “Massive Open Online Courses” or MOOCs, that are currently overturning the American higher education system.

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B/ MOOCs: revolutionizing or preserving the traditional education model?

The digital revolution is well underway and the virtual classroom is already being experimented with by some of the most prestigious universities in the United States of America. While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and Harvard are all investing a lot in online education, Europe is still lagging behind. The old continent is not swept away by MOOCs, the horrible sounding acronym for “massive open online courses”. It is interesting to see how MOOCs are taking a long time to come to Europe when one sees the excitement they have generated in the United States of America. The reason for this is partly due to the lack of flexibility of the Old Continent but also to its sagacity. At present, it is hard to imagine the long-term impacts of MOOCs on learning and higher education. One thing seems clear: if highly specialized classes are available online anywhere, at anytime, then knowledge is really on its best way of becoming accessible to the largest number of people. It is the beginning of the virtual classroom. (i) what are moocs? how do they work?

MOOCs are 15-20 minute interactive online tutorials that are often accessible free-of-charge after inscription on one of the MOOC platforms48. Instead of enrolling for a regular university course, you can now sign up for an 8-12 week course on artificial intelligence, management or American poetry on one of the pioneer online platforms created these past months. Most of these courses are taught for free. In all cases, students around the world for whom these prestigious universities were out of reach, are now receiving online tuition by some very renowned experts in the subjects of their choice.

MOOCs are not simple videos taken from the back of the classroom while the professor is teaching. They are entertaining, interactive, online tutorials especially designed for the purpose. One can upload assignments and exercises at given dates before passing a proctored final exam. Those who complete the entire course do not get a degree, but a certificate. For the time being, the validation

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

of the course is part of the questions that have not been completely resolved yet, since the student doesn’t receive a university degree upon completion of the course.

The success of MOOCs has been immediate. Professors who previously had 20 to 200 students in their classroom suddenly find themselves teaching as many as 180,000 students in a go. An average online class has around 50,000 to 60,000 students registered. The numbers are dazzling but it seems too soon to tell whether MOOCs are just a momentary fad or a serious achievement in online learning. In the following paragraphs, I will take a closer look at who is interested in seeing massive open online courses succeed. Also, I will study the new challenges that we face with MOOCs and determine whether online-learning can replace the physical classroom. Last but not least, we will see whether MOOCs constitute a pedagogical innovation. (ii) welcome to the global classroom: improving access to learning Online education is accessible to anyone in the world with a high-speed Internet connection. It therefore gives access to high-level education to a very wide population that doesn’t constitute the traditional target of these prestigious higher education institutions. The learning platform Coursera has over 1,5 millions students from 196 countries. People who sign up on these online platforms either lack the financial resources or the time for traditional on-the-campus studies.

Some are adult learners who would like to update their knowledge on a given subject, while continuing their work.

Others are brilliant students from other parts of the world who want to acquire knowledge that is not accessible in their country or that is taught in a different manner. For example, Shelly Kagan, a philosopher at Yale University is famous amongst Chinese students for his course on “death”. His videos on the Open Yale Courses Web49 are viewed around 3,000 times a week in China, the actual number of viewers might actually be much higher since these are also available on third-party sites, thanks to a creative commons licence. When looking up his introductory course on the internet, I came upon several of his tutorials with Mandarin (and Russian) subtitles. Many Chinese students are intrigued by the American approach to critical

thinking and the manner in which these philosophical questions are dealt with differs a lot from the standard Chinese curriculum. The geographical, financial, or temporal distances are no longer an obstacle for them.

Image: The Day of the MOOC by Michael Branson.

Source: http://www.internetactu. net/2013/02/20/mooc-la-standardisation-ou-linnovation

Some institutions use MOOCs as a reply to the high demand they would not be able to treat otherwise, a sort of virtual extension of the physical classroom. For Daphne Koller, co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, these online platforms do not substitute on-the-campus learning and face-to-face mentoring, but they greatly improve access to learning. Again, with MOOCs, knowledge is on its way to becoming a commodity that can be gained outside of the classroom. Schools and universities need to question the reasons for their existence and understand where their added-value lies. This again relates to Michel Serres’ observation concerning the role of the teacher. If the role of the teacher is evolving, so is that of school and universities. What is the primary role of the schooling system in today’s complex environment? If it is not limited to conveying knowledge that can be easily acquired elsewhere, these institutions could truly become the place to teach collaborative skills, transdisciplinary, critical thinking, ethics, communication techniques and other competencies needed in a complex, interconnected world.

As François Taddei puts it: “They should train learners to make the best use of both digital and face-to-face interactions during their university years and throughout their lives, as well as to become creative, co-operative knowledge-builders.”50 The difficulty is to determine the perfect balance between on and offline education.

49. Lecture on “death” by Shelly Kagan on Open Yale Courses Web, http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil176/lecture-1

MOOCs are arriving hesitantly in France. When looking at the first French initiatives, I could not help but find them less exciting than their American counterparts. In some cases, a camera is posed at the back of the class. The sound is terrible and nobody has taken the trouble of editing the content before putting it online. Other universities still

50. Taddei, François, Universities X.0: integrating new educational and research tools to build networks of ideas, collaborative knowledgebuilders, and learning spaces to transform the world into an evolving global campus open to all, Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity, 2010, Paris, p. 1. http://www. cri-paris.org/docs/UniversitiesX.0-16.08.2010.pdf

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(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

51. Examples of what should not be done : http://www.universites-numeriques.fr/ressources 52. Coursera website: https://www. coursera.org 53. “Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society” by professor Karl T. Ulrich, https://class.coursera.org/ design-2012-001 54. Coursera’s Terms of Use: https:// www.coursera.org/about/terms

believe that putting a pdf-document with the course online is taking advantage of the digital revolution. Not only will this not attract students from around the world, but also it is probable that the French students enrolled in the class will not see the sense of watching these amateur videos.51 Digital here rhymes with cheap.

Faced by these diverging opinions on massive open online courses, I decided to enroll in a MOOC in order to form my own opinion on the subject.

C/ Hands-on experience: testing a MOOC In order to have an informed opinion about MOOCs, I decided to enroll in a course given on the platform Coursera52, a for-profit company created by two computer-science professors from Stanford, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. I am conscious of the fact that this does not replace collecting feedback from users, enrolled for the sake of the class. Nevertheless, I thought that it would be good to gain personal insight through more empirical understanding.

I signed up for an 8-week-course called “Design: creating artifacts for the society”53 with 5-10 hours of work per week. I cannot say how many students signed up for this course. As soon as I signed up, I received a welcome email, telling me that I’m now a Courserian. The will of building a social community is obvious, however I will never have the possibility to meet my fellow students, who are scattered all over the world.

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The classes are divided into short 10-20 minute long tutorials. Just as with the tutorials at Khan Academy, one can replay a sequence that was not understood or change the pace at which the professor is giving his lecture. My first impression is that the teacher has put a lot of effort into the preparation of his lecture. Also, instead of just filming a normal lecture given in a classroom, he has filmed his course in a work studio, giving it a more personal touch.

Close-ups of the items he speaks about are inserted into the video. I am not sure I will be able to follow the entire

8-week course since this class demands 5-10 hours of work and I am already lagging behind.

The online-tutorial is convincing and the fact that I can choose when to listen to it is comfortable. What’s more, I feel like I am sitting in the front row. However, there is no real-life interaction, nor is there a hands-on experience and it’s a very solitary experience. If I want to ask questions, I need to go onto the blog. If I want to interact with other students, I need to go to the blog.

Learning beyond the acquisition of knowledge is also a social experience. How can one share a coffee with another student and make friends? I cannot criticize the quality of the course, but somehow it just feels like TED talk tailor made for university purposes.

Among the questions frequently asked by fellow Courserians is the one concerning intellectual property rights. In exchange for free online education, users grant Coursera “a fully transferable, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use, distribute, sublicense, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display (such) User Content”.54 Coursera is like Facebook; everything I put online no longer belongs to me. The absence of a financial transaction does not mean that classes are for free. In exchange for classes, Coursera gets to use my ideas and pick my brain. Furthermore, since the business model of MOOCs is not very clear, there is no guarantee that they will stay free of charge.

One single teacher cannot possibly correct the homework handed in by thousands of students. A calendar with the different assignments and explanations as to how to upload your homework is available online. The solution that has been adopted consists of “peer assessments”.

Every student is required to grade five peer assignments every week. Students who do not participate in the peer review will not receive a certificate for the course. In order to help the peer reviewers, the different aspects to be evaluated and the number of points that can be awarded are presented on the same page as the homework, which means more online reading. By now, I’m really missing real-time interaction. There’s something tedious about doing this all by myself without being able to interact with

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

others. One can only evaluate someone else’s work after submitting one’s homework, which is a moral guarantee for fair assessment. I gave up following the course with my first homework assignment.

The biggest innovation that I can see in MOOCs, as well as with the tutorials given by Khan Academy, is the possibility to create a “flipped classroom”.

Despite my failure to sit through the entire course, Coursera seems to be an interesting initiative. It is the first step towards rethinking, and I mean really rethinking what access to education means today. However, in my opinion, it definitely does not replace the physical classroom. As mentioned before, I “dropped out of class” rather quickly.

Part of this is because I had not enrolled in the course for the right reasons but more out of curiosity. However, others have had similar experiences to mine, experiencing the limits of the “M” (=massive) of MOOCs: “The biggest problem was breaking our class of more than 41,000 students into discussion groups. Dr. Wirth (the professor) asked us to sign up using a Google spreadsheet. The only problem was Google’s own support pages clearly states that only 50 people can edit and view a document simultaneously. I was one of the thousands who kept clicking, but was locked out. When I finally got in, it was a mess. Classmates had erased names, substituted their own and added oodles of blank spaces.”55 The journalist ends her article by saying that not every professor is good in giving online courses, since this requires different skills than those needed in a physical classroom.

D/ Innovating with Khan Academy and MOOCs: the “flipped classroom”

All the same, following a MOOC also requires a lot of discipline and self-motivation. If one does not watch the tutorial, nothing will happen: no friend will call to see whether everything is alright. If one forgets to upload the homework, it is the same. As I am currently following a traditional, residential course, I can see just how important peer support and real-life interactions are. Finally, the same problems exist with MOOCs that one would encounter with other distance learning courses, be it the Open University in Great Britain or the CNED56 in France.

It requires a lot of discipline to follow the entire course.

They definitely constitute an improvement for people who cannot go to class or who do not have access to university. However, most people, if given the choice, would prefer their physical counterpart.

Real innovation comes in when online classes are mixed with face-to-face learning: one can call it “blended learning”, “hybrid teaching” or the “flipped classroom”, to use some of the terms used in The Chronicle of Higher Education dedicated to the “MOOC Madness”.

55. Strauss, Valerie, “How online class about online learning failed miserably”, posted on February 5, 2013 on the online blog of The Washington Post, consulted on February 10, 2013, http://www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/answersheet/wp/2013/02/05/how-onlineclass-about-online-learning-failedmiserably/.

56. The CNED is the French public service for distance-learning.

57. Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be, 1976 (Continuum, 1997), p. 25.

The idea is simple: students watch the online course at home and then come to class to solve problems or to review material in the presence of the teacher or professor. The time spent in the classroom is therefore used for one-to-one discussions, individual questions and hands-on experiments. In other words, it is quality time that focuses on “teaching” rather than in conveying knowledge and the student becomes an active participant of his own education. As Erich Fromm already pointed out in 1976, “The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode of relatedness to the world. To begin with, they do not go to the course lectures, even to the first one in a course, as tabulae rasae.

They have thought beforehand about the problems the lectures will be dealing with and have in mind certain questions and problems of their own.”57 MOOCs can be used to help students gain knowledge on a subject before coming to class, thus enabling a more interactive pedagogy. Hybrid teaching actually builds upon the changed relationship within the classroom that Michel Serres observed: Students are no longer passive receptacles that come to class to take notes and ingurgitate knowledge from a single resource, the professor, but rather active learners that will use the Internet to find dissenting opinions, additional information and personal experiences.

The idea is to listen and to watch the lecture at home in order to use class time for discussions, questions and other interactions. .23

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

Image by Till Hafenbrak.

Source: http://www.nytimes. com/2013/01/27/opinion/sunday/ friedman-revolution-hits-the-universities.html?_r=1&

58. Boullier, Dominique, “The MOOCs fad and bubble: please tell us another story!” in Inside Higher Education, http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/ moocs-fad-and-bubble-pleasetell-us-another-story, consulted on January 18, 2013.

59. Thackara, John. In the Bubble, 2005, Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), p. 135.

The same movement can be observed with Khan Academy; more and more teachers are getting in touch with Salman Khan in order to use the online tutorials to change their ways of teaching. The kids watch the lesson at home on the Khan Academy website. This is considered to be their “homework”. They then come to class in order to do exercises and interact with the teacher in order to work on what they have not understood. Each child can learn at their own pace i.e. a student who has not fully understood the lesson, can go through it again and again instead of jumping to the next level. The online-tutorials thus offer more quality time with the teacher in the classroom. In this case, technology is used to humanize the classroom.

The condition being to use it to enhance the physical classroom instead of replacing it, thus referring to the word that Michel Serres uses when speaking of the new role of teachers.

I find the “flipped classroom” initiatives very interesting since it balances on- and offline learning strategies. I can see how it liberates the professor, giving him extra time for interactions within the class and taking off the burden of giving frontal lectures, albeit, I’m not convinced that MOOCs constitute an innovation if they are not completed by real-life, face-to-face interaction. With MOOCs, the emphasis seems to be on technology, rather than on humans.

E/ Criticizing MOOCs: automating education

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The real challenge of MOOCs is to use them efficiently.

Classes resemble television series; one can choose whether one wants to see one episode or more at a time.

All messy, interpersonal conflicts that are present when

humans come together are avoided, in order to focus on the content of the course. Professors in favor of online teaching insist that they have gained in efficiency. In their perspective, this makes them gain time for interaction. This is acceptable if one believes that education is just about efficiency and the transmission of content, which is not my personal conviction. As Dominique Boullier, French professor and expert information and communications technologies points out: “This massive online tactics do not solve any of the training issues of our times. Students will not be more active, they will not leave the tracks of guaranteed knowledge divided into fields, they will not combine them with the huge amount of information they crawl during their connected and mediated lives, they will not learn any of the contextualization expertise which is required for a relevant use of their knowledge, they will not have the opportunity to use their tremendous immersion in visual information…”58 In other words, they will not be taught to select, to sort out, to verify, and to apply relevant knowledge, which means that they will not be taught to think. Again, the risk is to limit education to the communication of knowledge. The designer John Thackara reminds us of the dangers of a too utilitarian approach of education. His comment is not directed at MOOCs but to the British policy that wants to connect all schools to the Internet, but it underlines the risks of replacing human face-to-face exchanges through technological solutions: “Pipe-and-bucket thinking pervades policy that has to do with learning and education.(…) It’s a great political metaphor - knowledge for all, just like water and electricity. But it’s an outdated model for learning. Learning is a complex, social and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe - for example a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom - or “content,” if you must - are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent.”59 How can professors interact with 100,000 students? With online courses, they have the possibility to improve parts of their course and keep the rest and in the future, every

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

student will be able to receive personal recommendations to accompany his or her learning experience. Personally, this makes me think of a Brave New World scenario of education in which data mining becomes acceptable to “maximize the likelihood a student will obtain her learning objectives by providing the right instruction, at the right time, about the right thing”60. Some might find this exciting as this opens the door to possibilities that are literally infinite. Needless to say, these technologies can also be used to control and to select, to choose and to discriminate people. The technology is the same, it is the intention that differs. There is a thin line that separates the positive utopia from the negative one and it is important to be conscious of the risks.

People are interested in MOOCs for different reasons, some for philanthropic reasons, others for economic reasons or business. It is important to understand these motivations in order to determine who is interested in seeing this practice generalized. (i) who wants moocs?

MOOCs are arriving in the United States at a period where more and more American students are indebting themselves or their families in order to pay for their higher education. These online courses are shifting costs away from students and are making online classes more acceptable. At the same time, many universities are struggling to find a path between the globalized competition and financial cut backs on education expenditure. Using the potential provided by new technology to reduce the cost of education seems like an easy solution. Some professors, under the pressure of obtaining yet another tenure, see the possibility in these online platforms of concentrating on their classes and gaining independence from their former university. Others have so many followers in the world, that they cannot imagine returning to traditional one-to-one teaching. Sebastian Thrun is one of them.

He has given up his tenure at Stanford University to dedicate his time to the 160,000 students who have signed up for his free online course, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”. He has also launched the private online platform ‘Udacity’. For him, there is no way back: “You can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom

and lecture to your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.”61 Is Thrun on an ego-trip or is he being visionary? Can one stay objective with regard to a new technology that has turned you into some educational guru with followers all over the world? We’re on a slippery slope and the risk of confusing quantity and quality is great.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft and Eriksson are actively supporting these initiatives that will unlock new market potentials for them. It is no longer about bringing the computer into the classroom; the computer might be your future classroom. Just like with Khan Academy, the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation actively supports the MOOCs movement. In the future, business will be competing with altruistic educational ventures. The business models of these new learning platforms are still evolving. A website like Coursera offers free access to education. They have no revenue so far, but plan to sell certificates and badges attesting competencies to students who have completed the course. They would also like to help match top students with companies looking for employees. It does not take much imagination to picture a digital badge next to your picture on Facebook and other social networks.

60. Knewton describes itself as being “the world’s most powerful recommendation engine for education”. In order to do this, Knewton has set-up an infrastructure that enables the platform to process tremendous amounts of student data. It is easy to imagine that MOOCs will be equipped with similar data mining platforms in the future, http://www.knewton.com 61. Mooney Carolyn, “Online Learning : MOOC Madness an Inside Look”, supplement of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 5, 2012.

62. “What You Need to Know About MOOC’s” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle. com/article/What-You-Need-toKnow-About/133475/, consulted on Nov.1, 2012.

Smaller, less prestigious universities are afraid that they will not be able to keep up with this movement. The technology can only be as good as the infrastructure presenting it. The elite universities are the first to be on the market. How can a professor from a no-name, average university compete with a professor from Princeton?

MOOCs might be an exciting innovation to unlock the potential of advanced students, but the risks of average students dropping out before completing the course is high. Only an average of 10-15% make it through the entire course62. For those who have not yet learned how to learn, autonomous online learning might be challenging.

They might be missing the occasional encouragement and give up at the first difficulty encountered.

MOOCs should be seen for what they are: first steps towards using the new technology to redefine education.

It is still “work in progress” that uses the possibilities offered

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(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

Source: http://outwithlanterns. wordpress.com/2013/02/08/ the-once-and-future-mooc-edcmooc

63. Skillshare Team Blog, http:// product.skillshare.com/2012/07/skillshare-introduces-the-classroom 64. Thackara, John. In the Bubble, 2005, Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), p. 146.

65. Boullier, Dominique, “The MOOCs fad and bubble: please tell us another story!” in Inside Higher Education, http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/globalhighered/ moocs-fad-and-bubble-pleasetell-us-another-story, consulted on January 18, 2013.

by new technology, without questioning the traditional, vertical way of teaching. Besides, MOOCs cannot replace the social experience that learning constitutes. (ii) it’s not just about gaining knowledge: social aspects of education Thinking back to my university years, I realize that there was so much more to education than just the knowledge conveyed. I met my best friends, who are still my friends today but who have also been of invaluable help during my professional career. I remember many heated discussions in class and around the coffee machine with peer students. Of course, I also had annoying classmates, but part of life is to learn to deal with complicated, human relationships. My question is: Aren’t MOOCs too perfect?

I doubt that professors can show their true humanity, wisdom and experience in a carefully staged, edited, and augmented version of themselves. A dose of unpredictability is necessary to remind us that we are human and that life is not linear but organic. Sometimes classes do not really go the way they should, because some piece of news needs to be discussed. I remember several of my high school teachers not giving class, preferring to engage in a very emotional discussion with us when the Berlin Wall came down. Although such events do not happen everyday, it is also through experiences like these that we learn empathy and solidarity, just as it is through trial and error that we sometimes find the biggest discoveries and innovations. Michael Karnjanaprakorn, CEO and cofounder of Skillshare sums this up: “Learning is meant to be social. That’s why we’ve been so focused on facilitating in-person classes; something magical happens when students and teachers are able to meet face-to-face, work through problems together, and share their passions and experiences with each other.”63 Is it possible to create that same feeling of belonging with an online community that one will never meet? The challenges faced by MOOCs are huge but we can only go

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as far as technology will let us; the medium influences the perception of the message. No, this new technology is not neutral and online education cannot be compared to in-the-class teaching. It is important to remember that it is something different.

F/ Conclusion of part two: Incremental innovations in the field of education and learning “The concept of a ‘death of distance’ made great headlines when Internet rhetoric was at its height. Its grandchild is the concept of ‘anytime, anywhere learning.’

This idea sounds attractive and uncontroversial - until one realizes that it describes a point-to-mass distribution model of learning that overlooks the significance of place and localization of knowledge. Learning depends on place, time and context. An exclusive focus on schools and colleges as sites of learning and the distribute-thenlearn model of e-learning both fail to exploit these more complex geographies of learning.”64 John Thackara, In The Bubble.

I am very aware that I am looking at MOOCs from my experience that has been largely formed by my past experiences gained in a traditional classroom. Seen from this perspective, I cannot consider MOOCs to be a pedagogical innovation, but a step towards an even greater massification of education. It is a digital version of the top-down educational system. As such, MOOCs represent excellent examples of incremental innovation, but they do not constitute disruptive innovations since they transpose the classical, top-down, university system online. Again, I can only agree with Professor Dominique Boullier when he writes on MOOCs: “Watching, listening, obeying, memorizing were the key methods of old times education: putting them online will not change anything to the tremendous weakness of responsibility skills that today(‘s) leaders are demonstrating and that we, as educators, are supposed to enhance”.65 In other words it seems utopian to believe that impersonal, online learning can help develop the soft skills needed so desperately

(II) New phenomena in education: Khan Academy and MOOCs. Incremental or disruptive innovations?

by tomorrow’s leaders: increased sense of responsibility, emotional intelligence, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.

Online education is becoming a reality with MOOCs; it is the beta version of ubiquitous learning. Its arrival on the market is accompanied by a whole set of new challenges requiring new answers, new adaptations.

Amongst the new problems that will need to be tackled, is the fact that not everyone with an Internet connection is in a good learning environment. We will probably be seeing co-learning places develop for nomad students in need of a physical community, the same way that co-working places have accompanied the development of nomad workers. Today, some learning communities meet up in cafés, but better solutions can be found to create a social environment to unite online learners and to create real learning communities.

With new technologies, new issues arise that must be dealt with. Fake student avatars have been appearing online. Some students are paying people to do their homework and to sit in during their online tests. Cheating is an old problem that requires new solutions to be found. We’ve only discovered the tip of the iceberg so far. It will take time to understand how these new technologies truly impact the ways we learn and teach.

More difficult issues concern the disappointment regarding discussions and exchanges. Blogs just cannot compete with in-the-classroom exchanges. This leads us to the question of how one can create immersive learning communities. Again, co-learning places might be the first step towards a solution. In time, there might be annual meet-ups organized at the same time in different countries, enabling real-life encounters between students. The movement is basically an American one, so cultural adaptations will be made when MOOCs arrive to countries like France.

Khan Academy and MOOCs are interesting when considering the question of greater access to knowledge.

However, I found them disappointing in the sense that they do not question the vertical education model. At the wake of a more distributive society, there are a growing number of initiatives built on more collaborative, horizontal interactions. One of the reasons that makes the sharing economy so attractive is that it aims at balancing personal and global interests. For this reason, I would now like to concentrate on the values of the emerging collaborative economy and more precisely on three smaller initiatives in the field of learning and education.

“We learned that there’s a major difference between education and learning. Education is what someone tells you to do. Learning is what you do for yourself. The traditional way of education forces square pegs into round holes. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution that forces people down a predetermined path.” Extract from the Skillshare blog.66

66. Skillshare Team Blog, http:// product.skillshare.com/2012/08/introducing-hybrid-classes/, (consulted January 12, 2013).

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(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system 67. Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be, 1976 (Continuum, 1997), p. 16-17.

68. Blablacar is a car-sharing company; Zilok enables you to rent things directly from individuals and Airbnb to rent accommodations all over the world. All these services are online, based on access rather than ownership and are centered on peer-to-peer interaction.

69. Stephens, Dale J.; “The UnCollege Manifesto - your guide to academic deviance”, 2011, http://www. uncollege.org/academicdeviance.pdf, (consulted on Feb. 8, 2013).

70. “Let’s do it 2008” - Estonia clean-up (posted on 17 Feb. 2009), http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=A5GryIDl0qY. 71. Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What’s Mine is Yours, London (Collins, 2011), p. 53.

I

t seems as if we’ve arrived at the limit of our current system that was built on the myth that unlimited production could lead to never ending economic consumption and endless progress. The alarm signals calling for an immediate change are numerous. Everyday we see pictures or articles in the press that illustrate the dramatic result of years of unsustainable consumption and use of non-biodegradable materials. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, the financial crisis that has plunged millions of people into despair and precariousness since 2008, or the various conflicts around the world related to oil, the black gold that nurtures virtually every part of today’s economic system. All these show us that something is terribly wrong. Humanity is on the verge of organizing its own extinction.

Our economic model, derived from the industrial revolution, is based on possession. The world is divided between the Haves and the Have-Nots. Already in 1976, Erich Fromm focused on the importance of ownership in our society in his book To Have or to Be?: “The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West.

The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things. The having orientation is characteristic of Western industrial society, in which greed for money, fame, and power has become the dominant theme of life.”67 Most people define themselves by what they own, by the things they possess. However, this is slowly changing. More and more people are feeling the necessity to focus on people rather than things. The fact that more wealth doesn’t make us any happier makes many people question their personal objectives. But this switch from individualized hyper consumption to a more collaborative era did not happen overnight. Over the past years, we have progressively moved from sharing files, information, music, photographs and videos via Dropbox, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, and other online utilities to sharing our cars, tools, clothing and homes via Blablacar, Zilok, or Airbnb.68 New potentials and innovations are yet to be created. We have not yet attained the limits of sharing and collaborating, their social acceptability growing with each new initiative.

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In many cases, but not exclusively, the protagonists behind these changes are the young generation of digital natives, also called «Millennials». They know that they will not be living the way their parents did. The future they face is one marked by uncertainty, unemployment, constant change, and a deep economic crisis linked to an ecological one. In addition, many of them feel that school is not necessarily preparing them to face the challenges of the future.69 If the recent failure of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) in 2012 shows us the difficulties of the worlds leading nations to prioritize sustainability issues, smaller initiatives around the world prove that change is possible. The Internet helps create communities giving rise to collective intelligence. The 2008 “Let’s do it”70 cleaning up campaign in Estonia is one of these examples. With a budget of 0,5 million euros and in just five hours 4% of the Estonian population managed to clean up illegal rubbish littering the entire country. This national clean-up session was possible because some 720 volunteers used their mobile phones to locate 10,500 illegal waste deposits in the country. The same operation would have cost the Estonian government an estimated 22,5 million euros and would have taken at least three years. “‘Let’s Do It’ is just one example of thousands that show the power of the ‘we mind-set’ combined with technology to produce collective action.”71 I am greatly fascinated to see that the impossible can become reality when people work together. I am very aware of the possibility of a “Big Brother” scenario and the risks of new information technologies that are far from being neutral. However, I prefer to focus on these more optimistic possibilities and take a look at how these new technological opportunities can enhance social innovation.

My hypothesis since the beginning of this paper is that the appearance of collaborative start-ups providing learning solutions is symptomatic of the anachronistical education system. The mere existence of these companies challenges the existing educational institutions, since their business ideas are a response to new needs of learners, unmet by the traditional system. In order to prove this hypothesis and to unveil the pedagogical requisites of tomorrow’s schools and universities, I interviewed three young companies that constitute alternative or

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

Image: “Today’s the day” by Skillshare Source: http://blog.skillshare. com/post/43733420550/ todays-the-day-just-do

complementary solutions to the existing educational institutions. First, I will detail my research protocol and the questions I asked, then I will pursue with a brief presentation of each start-up before proceeding with an analysis of the interviews.

A/ Research methodology and presentation of the collaborative start-ups interviewed I found it important for this research paper; to not only base my analysis and ideas on academic material but also on exchanges and experiences. This seemed particularly necessary when speaking of collaborative education.

Indeed, this development is so recent, that there are only few articles and publications analyzing this phenomenon. I therefore decided to interview UniShared, LearningShelter and CupofTeach, three companies founded in 2012, that I had identified with the help of Ouishare. OuiShare is an open global community of people from various horizons working on accelerating the shift towards a more collaborative economy. OuiShare is a non profit organization founded in January 2012. Its activities are organized in different subgroups and the Facebook Ouishare Education group was founded only a couple of months ago to connect different initiatives and stakeholders within Europe on this subject. Clément Delangue from UniShared and MarcArthur Gauthey from CupofTeach both participated in the last OuiShare Remix, an event during which different collaborative start-ups were presented. Clément then introduced me to Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ from LearningShelter at Blue Factory, the ESCP Europe Business School start-up incubator that helps 10 start-ups every year to develop their project. All entrepreneurial projects that are selected are required to prove that they contribute to innovation, to European development, in addition to showing their added value for the society.

My questionnaire was divided into four parts: a general presentation of the structure, followed by questions aimed at getting a better understanding of the companies contribution to education and learning, their relation to the collaborative economy and last but not least their contribution to innovation.

Questionnaire used during the semi-directed interviews with Unishared, LearningShelter and CupofTeach: 1) Could you please describe your structure?

2) Why did you create this company? What were your motivations?

3) What is your business model?

4) How many users do you have today?

5) Do you work with universities/schools/companies?

If yes, how?

6) Do you think that your company will have an impact on the way people learn? How? 7) You describe your company as being collaborative?

Could you please explain how your start-up contributes to the collaborative economy?

8) Do you find your service innovative? If yes why?

9) Next steps? (internationalisation, further developments, new services…)

The first questions enabled me to get a general under­ standing of the start-up’s activity, the next few ones aimed at determining the link between the business and the learning and education system. The questions that follow help to ascertain the connection with the collaborative economy and the contribution to innovation.

I will proceed with a brief description of three startups in the field of learning and education that have a collaborative approach: UniShared, Learning Shelter and CupofTeach. This will be followed by a more extensive analysis based on interviews with these three French companies. These interviews were conducted in French, the mother tongue of the speakers and can be found in the annex of this paper.

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Image: UniShared Source:http://www.presse-citron.net/ exclu-la-start-up-francaise-unisharedrejoint-le-y-combinator-de-leducation

(i) unishared: linking the classroom to the outside world 72. TEDxParisUniversités, Clément Delangue - “Students will change Education” (6 August 2012), http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BWRn3W8QI_0 73. UniShared website: http:// www.unishared.com 74. Ibid.

75. Ibid.

“Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hearing the words and understanding their logical structure and their meaning and, as best as they can, will write down every word in their looseleaf notebooks - so that, later on, they can memorize their notes and thus pass an examination. But the content does not become part of their own individual system of thought, enriching and widening it.” Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be. In this quotation, Erich Fromm sums up the action of note-taking in the traditional, vertical schooling system.

It is a model based on passivity. This “having mode” is not adapted to the collaborative economy that is built on the principle that collaboration and sharing are the best solution to the complex challenges we are faced with today. How can one teach students to work together in teams if they are accustomed to competing against one another in school? The content learned in school is not an end by itself and if the sole motivation for going to class and taking notes is to pass an exam in order to apply for another school, then the educational system becomes a self-serving system. How can we open this “bubble” and connect school and university to real life?

This seems to be the starting point for the UniShared project based on collaborative note-taking.

“Students can, must and will change education”72 is the conviction of Clément Delangue, the 24-year old social entrepreneur and co-founder of UniShared73. He believes that students should help change the educational system, since they are the main protagonists concerned.

UniShared, the start-up he founded while he was still a student at ESCP Business School, seeks to connect the classroom to the outside world.

UniShared enables collaborative note-taking in realtime. Different pupils attending the same course in the same classroom can share the burden of taking notes in class. The technology used is GoogleDocs: the notes are

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visible to everyone in real-time and can be co-edited. But UniShared takes it one step further, making the course available to everyone online, sharing the knowledge with any person interested in the subject with an Internet connection. Also, connected readers can comment on the online document and thus interact with the UniShared community at the origin of the work. UniShared describes itself as “an open learning platform which is connecting learners together”74 and the act of taking and sharing notes online as “social note-taking”. But the overall ambition of Unishared is more global, as one can read in one of the earlier versions of their website: “It’s time to change the way we’re learning in class”.75 One of the insights that Clément Delangue has gained since the creation of UniShared is that students do not take notes in the same way when they know that others will be reading them as well; it gives them a sense of responsibility. Furthermore, when several students are participating in the same class, alternating in taking notes, everyone gains time and intellectual readiness, making it easier to ask pertinent questions, interact with the teacher and with the world beyond the classroom.

It is interesting to observe that many people are experimenting with UniShared to understand how collaborative online note-taking can change the way we learn. For in­ stance, there are examples of students following MOOCs who are now using UniShared to improve a peer-to-peer interaction. Others use UniShared to take notes during conferences, thus creating collaborative minutes!

UniShared is free for its users that count students in high school and university as well as lifelong learners, blurring the lines between in-the-class learners and online-learners, creating connections between the classroom and the rest of the world.

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

Image : LearningShelter Source : <http://www.pressmyweb. com/startup/interview-learning-shelter-elearning-video-bulle/>

(ii) learningshelter: humanizing online mentoring and promoting peer-to-peer teaching LearningShelter is an online platform76 that connects people who want to teach a subject with people who want to learn. The learning takes place online, but unlike MOOCs, LearningShelter proposes one-to-one interaction and personalized content. The start-up seeks to use the possibilities offered by the technology to bridge the physical distance between those interested in a course and the “mentors”, which is how the people giving the class are called.

Speaking of “mentors” is a way to remind everyone that the objective is not just about sharing knowledge; the mentors are asked to take it one step further and to give individualized help and advice. To become a mentor, you add the name of the course you want to give, you explain how you have developed an expertise in the subject taught, with a description of the course content as well as the prerequisites for the class. You then indicate your availabilities and say how many courses you are willing to give. Prices are fairly democratic, ranging from 10-50 euros for a one-hour course from which LearningShelter receives a commission of 10%.

Students can contact their mentor prior to the course to ask questions on the preparation needed. The website facilitates the organizational aspects by letting the mentor fill in an online schedule with his available time slots from which interested people can choose from. Classes are given using a video conference facility available on GoogleDocs, called “Google hang-out”.

This technology basically adds the possibility to “skype” while sharing a document. LearningShelter’s objective is to make the mentor and the learner feel as connected and as close as possible across the screen.

Classes are given in real-time and the function “screen share” enables both the learner and the teacher to see each other and share the same document during the session. Also, during a learning session, the mentor can work together with the student on the same document, for example to solve an equation. As with UniShared, the shared document that people can collaborate on in real-time is central. The aim is to attain the learning objectives, for unlike schools and universities, LearningShelter cannot give any credentials or degrees.

76. LearningShelter website, http://www. learningshelter.com

If MOOCs are still top-down and do not enable interactivity, LearningShelter distinguishes itself by making interactivity its central feature and by allowing the mentor to personalize his course to meet the learner’s individual needs.

LearningShelter shows that it is possible to use online sessions for customized peer-to-peer teaching.

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Image: CupofTeach by Laetitia Chausson Source: http://laetitia-chausson. deviantart.com/gallery/

(iii) cupofteach: the peer-to-peer university 77. CupofTeach website, www. cupofteach.com.

The mission of CupofTeach is to connect people so that they can learn from one another.77 The company was launched on June 4th 2012, by two young entrepreneurs, Marc-Arthur Gauthey and Mathieu Seguin and is based on the idea that everybody has something they know that they can share with others. The website is only used to connect teachers and students, since classes take place offline in small groups of eight learners for each teacher.

to learn without using the notions of success nor failure, since these are very subjective notion. This enables to reconcile many people who had problems in school with the idea of learning. CupofTeach reintroduces the idea of learning with pleasure and uniqueness, thus showing the value of real-life skills as opposed to academic recognition. In doing so it takes a stand against the traditional university system.

The teachers are not professional teachers but people who have developed an expertise in a given field, can add a class on a subject of their choice. Each teacher defines the date, the place to meet and a price. Anyone who is interested can sign up for the course. Courses cost an average of 50 euros for a two-hour class, with a 20% commission for CupofTeach. The start-up considers itself to be a trustworthy intermediary between the teacher and the student, guaranteeing the quality and security. To do this, they control the selection of the classes, check the teacher’s credentials and animate the website.

After this brief presentation of these educational, collaborative start-ups, I will now focus on understanding the contribution of these companies to education, the collaborative economy and to innovation. My objective is to determine whether these initiatives show the principles that should guide education and learning tomorrow.

CupofTeach mixes the pleasures of learning, socializing and sharing. In doing so, it reflects the collaborative economy. It is based on the postulate that everyone has a passion or skill to share; everybody also has something they would still like to learn. The service is based on the observation that in a fast-evolving world that requires flexibility and adaptability, one has never finished to learn. There are constantly new programmes, tools and competencies that need to be acquired today. CupofTeach is an education marketplace that helps people gain these skills easily.

In the initial version, there was no hierarchy between the different subjects taught, but today the website focuses on professional skills.

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CupofTeach shows that lifelong learning can at last become a reality and that it is no longer necessary to go to university in order to learn or to teach. It is more than just a website connecting learners and teachers. It is a reaction against standardized learning. The idea is

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

B/ Views on Education: connecting learners to real-world skills “The world’s most abundant human resources are knowledge and skills. They just need to be shared and made accessible to every single person on this planet.” Michael Karnjanaprakorn, CEO and cofounder of Skillshare.78 This quotation sums up the global vision of all three start-ups I interviewed. All co-founders I encountered are under thirty years old. Two of them finished their studies in 2012 while the two co-founders of LearningShelter are currently taking a gap year from their business studies to develop their idea. When asked about their motivations for launching a start-up in the field of learning, they all relate to their personal learning experience. For Clément Delangue, co-founder of UniShared, this was definitely the starting point. As he says, “University is like a bubble…

I’ve never found myself more disconnected from the world than sitting in a classroom”.79 Delangue is referring to the lack of interaction while sitting in class. Students are shut off from the outside world, and if one speaks with another classmate, chances are that the teacher will become annoyed with the student for disturbing the class. Frustrated and sometimes bored in class, Clément Delangue started to tweet while sitting in class and soon found himself with a certain number of followers, asking him questions on his course and exchanging with him.

“They would say, ‘Hey, that’s great, I’m learning with you.’ but sometimes they would also question what I was learning in class, and say things like ‘On that point, you should take a look at this source of information.’”80 It was then that he realized that there was a huge potential in live sharing of classes and that current online learning platforms were neither interactive nor collaborative, since they did not enable any peer-to-peer exchanges. They are built on a vertical model. His classmates soon wanted to join him in taking notes together and sharing them with the outside world. He knew then, that he was responding to a real need: “In the end, things were working really well, we were changing the way we were learning.

We said to ourselves that this should be more than an experiment, something had to be done. So, we started

creating the platform step by step… that’s how we got to where we are now.”81 These were the reasons that led to the creation of UniShared.

For Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ from LearningShelter, the motivations were two-fold: “Alexandre82 and I were giving a lot of classes at that time, and we started giving classes using skype to students living in Annecy.

We were living in Paris, so it was complicated. So, we started giving our classes over skype and we realized that something had to be done (…) Also, we were a bit frustrated ourselves, studying in a business school, we weren’t learning things like computer coding (…) We couldn’t learn a lot of the things we were interested in, we didn’t have a choice in our education, we couldn’t choose what we wanted to learn. That’s where the idea to create a website came from. It responded to our experience in giving one-to-one online classes, but it was also about opening education, giving people the possibility to choose what they want to learn.”83 Giving people the possibility to choose what they want to learn seemed to be important to these students who were frustrated with having a standardized curriculum. Why shouldn’t someone studying business be allowed to learn how to code? That why-question was the starting point for creating LearningShelter.

Marc-Arthur Gauthey has always wanted to become a professor. After obtaining his Baccalauréat, he followed a two-year Khâgne and Hypokhâgne preparatory course, then studied history at the Sorbonne university and started going into research after completion of his Master’s degree. He then decided to go to the HEC, School of Management, where he obtained a Master’s degree in Management and Marketing. He observed that the teaching methods varied a lot from one institution to another and together with Mathieu Séguin, decided to create “CupofTeach” because “We realized that ultimately, all the world’s knowledge is present around us and if we were able to share it, we could create something that would be bigger than any university.”84 He also wanted to combine the best from the different education and learning models that he had experienced: “In preparatory class, things were very intense; we had

78. Skillshare website, http://blog. skillshare.com.

79. TEDxParisUniversités, Clément Delangue - “Students will change Education”, http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=BWRn3W8QI_0.

80. Extract from the interview with Clément Delangue (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

81. Ibid.

82. Alexandre Dana is one of the co-founders of LearningShelter.

83. Extract from the interview with Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

84. Extract from the interview with Marc-Arthur Gauthey (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

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(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid.

87. Extract from the interview with Clément Delangue (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

88. Extract from the interview with Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

small classes, we worked a lot, we were plunged in a universe of ideas, books, etc. I loved it, so I continued my studies at university, studying history. I started to go into research, but I grew weary of the system, it was too vertical. It’s always one professor, one class and in the end, you have to regurgitate what you have learned from that. Then, if you decide to go into research, it becomes very solitary. Personally, I needed something more social, I needed to be connected to other people, to work in teams…When I arrived at HEC, I saw that they were learning in a completely different manner. We were always working in groups. However, intellectually wise, it was not as rich and stimulating. So there are things to take and to leave in both systems. I found the contrast huge and I thought that there had to be an intermediary way to be found, something that is stimulating intellectually, but also beneficial for the personal development, while being dynamic and user-friendly. These are all things that are not really considered to be values present in education today.”85 He hopes that CupofTeach will become a viable alternative to the current system: “The objective of CupofTeach is to enable everyone to learn anything, anytime. That’s the first point. The second point, is to make it interactive, but also practical, cheap and enjoyable.”86 The three young co-founders are definitely stressing the importance of linking learning to pleasure, opening up the classroom and reintroducing the notion of choice into education to enable an individualized learning path. They are showing their desire for a more horizontal system that enables the learner to become more active and to participate in his education. Their services address people who want to decide what they want to learn.

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When asked whether their companies have an impact on the way people learn, all three are affirmative. According to Clément Delangue, from UniShared, his service enables students to question what they are learning in the classroom: “(UniShared) enables students today to challenge what they’re learning in the classroom with opinions that come from outside their classroom. It allows them to learn from their network. This means that they’re not learning from a single resource, the professor. They’re now learning from the community formed by people that

are all interested in the same subject. We’ve seen a lot of interactions appearing between people passionate about the same subject, eager to learn about the same thing. Before, it was difficult for them to get in touch with one another. With our system they can find one another. In the end, they are sharing the same objective, even if some are students while others are working or retired. They share the same goal, the same passion.

Why shouldn’t we bring them together so that they can nourish each other intellectually? We should let each of them share their experience, which is different, their point of view, in order to get a more collaborative learning experience. That’s closer to real life. I mean that is real life! We learn a lot from other people who have a different viewpoint and a different experience. That’s what makes our service so valuable.”87 This leads us to notions that are increasingly important today: learning communities, collective intelligence and peer-to-peer learning. All these words did not exist before the arrival of the Internet; they are words of our era, even if the concepts might have existed before.

Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ from LearningShelter sees the service they offer as a solution to move away from a very standardized model by providing a more personalized solution: “The idea of LearningShelter, is not to educate by using the fear of grades, but by exploiting curiosity and by opening up the system (…) We clearly provide a more personalized approach to education. There are people who need to go over concepts more than once, they might not understand everything immediately (…)

All students in the same class only have one thing in common, their age. That means, that you might have someone who has problems in math, although he has the capacity to understand. He’s not less intelligent than the others. Sometimes, it’s enough to explain things a second time, to explain things differently, to spend some time with the student.”88 Again, it becomes obvious that these young entrepreneurs are reacting to the dominating school system that continues to build on standardized curricula, grades based on standard evaluation systems and classes composed of students born the same year… as if our date of birth were our biggest characteristic.

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

For Marc-Arthur Gauthey, it is clear that CupofTeach might constitute an alternative to mainstream educational institutions: “We are not working with schools and universities, because it is hard to make them understand what we are doing, but also because we have set up our service like an alternative to the traditional learning and education system. Tomorrow, with CupofTeach, anyone can construct their own, personalized learning program for one tenth of the market price.”89 He is more cautious about the impact that this service might have on the way people learn. It seems obvious that he is wondering whether the society is ready to change the current system. It is a question of time, but eventually, services like CupofTeach will bring about change in our ways of educating and learning: “We’re still at the fringe of the system. The dominant culture is one marked by degrees and diplomas and we don’t provide that. We don’t want to go into that direction and so it will take some time. I don’t know how long it will take, but eventually, people will be more interested in skills. Nobody will look at the study track or the degree. In companies, one will look at the position that is available and the skills that are needed. There will be new methods to test candidates during job interviews, to see what they know how to do and what not. We’ve had an impact, but despite this, we’re still very marginal. We’re like a mosquito in the middle of all of this.”90 If Marc-Arthur is so restrained, it is because he is conscious that this is probably touching one of the most delicate points of the future of education. Everybody would agree to make learning more collaborative. However, elevating real world skills to the same level of recognition as academic knowledge would clearly revolutionize the current education system… and shake the foundations of the society. If this becomes conceivable, it is also because knowledge is changing so rapidly, and chances are that people who are curious, creative and capable of adapting to new situations will have better perspectives in this shifting environment. We are far away from the academic conception of the expert.

What seems important here is the personal wish to share.

Everybody can become a teacher again… or a learner.

Clément Delangue, Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ and MarcArthur Gauthey all have an intuition that their services

are contributing to changing the face of education. Their businesses question the existence of the unique expert and introduce horizontality into the system. By doing this, they are setting up learning solutions built on peer-to-peer learning. They are creating a very distributive system, where individuals who have gained an expertise from their passion or practice will teach something to other individuals, where learning communities can be fostered.

In a fast-evolving world in which knowledge is constantly evolving, services like UniShared, LearningShelter and CupofTeach seem to indicate the direction that education should take. It is all about opening up education to real life.

Both LearningShelter and CupofTeach were inspired by an American initiative called “Skillshare” that offers online and offline learning. Their motto is: “Learn Differently.

Skillshare is a global learning community where you can learn real-world skills from real people.”91 Again, it is interesting to see how the Internet is used to connect learners. Skillshare is interested in helping design collaborative learning tools to make the dream of ubiquitous lifelong learning become reality. In doing so, they are contributing to an education philosophy that they call “collaborative learning”, which enables people to learn from and with others. Instead of learning by listening to lectures, it is learning by doing. This approach to learning shows that the idea of a very dense initial education into which we try to cram everything we need to learn for the rest of our lives is clearly outdated. Considering longer life expectancy, associated with a fast-evolving and increasingly complex world, it is very likely that the objectives of the initial education should be to teach the tools to help people to learn how to learn giving them the keys to lifelong learning. The teacher thus becomes a mentor and facilitator, who interacts with the learner while treating him as his equal. In any case, competition is replaced by collaboration. We are still at the beginning of this journey. Nobody really knows how long it will take, but things are moving fast in the field of education. All these initiatives were launched in 2012, shortly after the creation of MOOCs and the Khan Academy. We might be at the stage of the “early adopters”, but the stone is rolling and the movement transforming the education

89. Extract from the interview with Marc-Arthur Gauthey (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

90. Ibid.

91. Skillshare, http://www.skillshare. com/.

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(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

92. Gauthey, op.cit.

93. MakeSense is an open project which challenges people for open business, http://we.makesense.org 94. Extract from the interview with Clément Delangue (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

95. Ibid.

96. Charles is making a direct allusion here to MOOCs, in which professors of highly renowned universities are famous and start having followers around the world.

97. Extract from the interview with Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

and learning system will continue: “What’s for sure, is that we won’t be learning how we’re learning today, 10 years from now.”92 If the path is the way, then the manner in which these companies try to provide a different view on education while earning a living is of importance. How do these start-ups contribute to the rising collaborative economy?

C/ Learning start-ups: participating in the collaborative groundswell The views of the three interviewees differ when it comes to their participation in the collaborative economy. For Clément Delangue, the social aspects of his business are vital for UniShared’s success. Charles Lefebvre de Preÿ considers that it is the peer-to-peer interaction that makes LearningShelter a collaborative business.

As to Marc-Arthur Gauthey, he was not aware of the emerging collaborative economy when he started his business. However, if we take a closer look, it becomes clear that all three are interested in proposing decentralized, distributed solutions. All three companies are based on peer-to-peer exchanges rather than top-down, hierarchical relations.

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Delangue has a lot to say on the collaborative groundswell. He actively participates in MakeSense93, raises funds for his projects using crowdfunding platforms like KissKissBankBank, and he is often to be seen in the events organized by Ouishare. He is convinced that innovation today must be collaborative and social in order to be accepted: “The collaborative aspect, and in a wider sense, the social aspect, are important. I am a member of an organisation called “MakeSense” that supports social entrepreneurship. I am convinced that innovation today needs to be social. It simply needs to be social in order to become acceptable for people. We have the impression that we are in a society in which everything is changing, and it is hard to accept change.

Personally, I believe that the only way to make change acceptable for a greater number of people is to prove

them that this change makes sense. That this change is bearing a vision, that it’s about social or environmental improvement and not simply about material or economic wealth.”94 Delangue believes that it is important to make the individual interests coincide with the collective ones.

In the case of UniShared, it is clear that the students are trying to have good notes for themselves, but they can also contribute to making knowledge accessible to a greater number. Small streams make big rivers: “That’s what I like about the collaborative movement. It’s starting from a uniquely individual perspective to attain a more collective vision. We mustn’t think of the individual as a lonely worker but like a potential contributor to the entire group, to the community, to a country. That’s where I see the connection between innovation and the collaborative movement. There will only be innovation when it’s collaborative. The economy and the community at large will only become collaborative if we use new tools and innovations, like the platform we’re trying to set up. Both walk together and help each other.”95 Delangue continues to explain how many students participate because they know that they are contributing to a larger vision. It makes them feel good about themselves to share their education with others, who do not necessarily have the chance to receive the instruction they are currently receiving.

As for Charles Lefebvre de Preÿ, he underlines that the collaborative economy encompasses a whole range of different realities, but he believes that it is the deepseated trend towards a more distributed system that is important: “What I like about the collaborative economy, is that it decentralizes the economy. People organize themselves and exchange, buy, do everything we’re used to doing in an economic system. It is becoming easier thanks to the new communication technologies. Our service is a participatory one; it is based on peer-to-peer education. We’re enabling people, who aren’t especially famous, to give classes. People are interested in these classes because they are being followed. They’re not necessarily interested in taking a class given by a star96.”97 The emphasis is clearly on the peer-to-peer aspect, the mentors not being professional teachers but just individuals who are trying to help other individuals and who are able to earn some money doing so.

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

Last but not least, Marc-Arthur Gauthey acknowledges that he did not know anything about the collaborative movement before creating CupofTeach: “I didn’t do all of this in order to be collaborative; not at all. I think it’s a global trend, a deep-seated trend. I didn’t say to myself: ‘Hey, there’s the collaborative economy, I need to participate.’ No, I was doing my own thing, and when analyzing it, I realized that it was within the scope of the collaborative economy. The framework is not really defined yet. It’s collaborative because we’re enabling individuals to engage in order to do things together. They are emancipating from the existing systems in order to work together; it is as simple as that.”98 These collaborative learning services see themselves as an alternative to the current model, but also as complementary to the traditional educational system. They are opening up education to real-life experts, which is great news, since all experts are not necessarily good teachers.

Rafael Reif, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees with this: “We have spectacular researchers who are lousy teachers. That’s sad. A teacher in the future will become more like a mentor. The model of on campus education will be more about mentorship and guidance with research as an important factor.”99 This echoes Michel Serres’ observation that a teacher’s savoirêtre, his emotional intelligence, and ability to connect with his students, is just as important as his expertise.

Clément Delangue hopes that services like UniShared will eventually help change the traditional education system, helping it shift from an individual, competitive approach to a more collective, participatory one: “One of my dreams is that evaluation in university will no longer be uniquely based on individual performance, but also on the ability of the students to participate in collective learning. Once again, I am convinced that this is important for companies too. When they employ, their objective is not only to have someone who is good individually, but also to have someone who contributes to the development of the company as a whole. For the society or a community, it is the same. It is interesting to see how an individual can help others grow, how he can teach others, help them make the community, the

company or the society progress as a whole. I believe that collaborative note-taking contributes to raising the value of collaboration and participation. Wouldn’t it be possible to imagine an evaluation system that would no longer be based on individual performance but that would also take the help provided to the class, to learn, to progress collectively, to identify the right debate into account?”100 The collaborative message is one of trust in collective intelligence.

Does collaborative learning contribute to innovation in the field of education? The following paragraphs will focus on how these start-ups participate in modernizing the ways we learn and educate.

98. Extract from the interview with Marc-Arthur Gauthey (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

99. Hellweg, Eric, “Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education”, posted on January 29, 2013 in the online version of the Harvard Business Review Blog, http://blogs. hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/01/ eight_brilliant_minds_on_the_f. html, consulted on February 9, 2013.

100. Extract from the interview with Clément Delangue (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

101. Google Hangout is a free alternative to Skype with extra features.

D/ Learning innovations: building on existing practices All three entrepreneurs believe that their business ideas are innovating long-existing practices, modernizing them by making them go online. The idea of UniShared is based on the activity of note-taking that has existed since we passed from the oral tradition to the written word. The platform is based on Google Doc. that enables several people to share the same page in real-time. On the other hand, LearningShelter is using online facilities like Google Hangout101 to enhance one-to-one tuition, using the Internet for personalization instead of massification. CupofTeach is an online education marketplace that helps learners connect with people who can teach them the needed skill. Their website replaces the paper adds offering tuition that we might stumble upon at the local bakery. All three companies are not interested in incremental innovation, nor are they interested in technological innovations. It seems as if they are employing existing technological innovations to define new uses and to add value on a social scale.

Delangue considers that UniShared contributes to social innovation: “We are already employing existing technologies that aren’t used very much for the time being, in order to help spread them. We are probably more in the field of social innovation because we’re

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(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

possible because innovations like Wikipedia have prepared the ground. As Jimmy Wales, points out, Wikipedia has also had a great impact on developing informal ways of learning: “The overall quantity and quality of formal education hasn’t changed whereas the informal education has skyrocketed in the last 30 years. People used to go to library and now go to Wikipedia. We haven’t really begun to understand the impact on that.”104 The collaborative movement is well underway and is slowly but surely preparing for yet more activities based on sharing. Today, many still believe that putting tablets and bringing Internet into the class is already considered to be an innovation. But isn’t this comparable to what Encarta did when putting the traditional encyclopedia online? There is definitely a need to take it one step further, to change the top-down pedagogy, to open the classroom to the rest of the world, to accept real-world skills as a complement to academic skills. It is essential to understand how the presence of new technologies in the classroom change the very pedagogy used to teach.

The existence of these three start-ups and other similar initiatives show that a global movement is underway and that innovation rhymes with sharing and participating.

102. Delangue, op.cit.

103. Ibid.

104. Hellweg, Eric, “Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education”, posted on Jan. 29, 2013 in the online version of the Harvard Business Review Blog, http://blogs. hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/01/ eight_brilliant_minds_on_the_f. html, consulted on Feb. 9, 2013.

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helping to simplify collaborative note-taking. We have specialized in one specific use of it. We are trying to create the social, learning framework around an already existing technology.”102 He then mentions that one of his inspirations was Wikipedia, the free, collaborative encyclopedia and proceeds to tell the story of how Wikipedia won the competition against Microsoft’s Encarta, a digital version of the traditional encyclopedia, available online upon subscription. When Encarta appeared in the 1980’s, it was still the pre-Internet era, and Encarta seemed to be revolutionary compared to the classical book-version of the encyclopedia. Nobody would have thought that Jimmy Wales would succeed with his free, peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia. “It’s fun to imagine what would have happened if Wikipedia and Encarta would have competed to receive the support of financial investors. There would have been a massacre…

But today, Encarta doesn’t exist anymore and Wikipedia has billions of pages viewed every day.”103 What I find important about this last comment is that UniShared is

Clément Delangue continues to explain how he would like to transform the recent MOOC movement, into what he calls “MOCC’s”. He got the idea when he observed that people enrolled in MOOCs were using UniShared to interact with other MOOC-users. He too is convinced that online and offline learning must walk together: “We were having fun trying to invent a new concept, starting from MOOCs, that refer to ‘massive, open, online courses’. We kept the ‘massive’, since we’re convinced that there is a great need for education for a greater number of people.

It’s still ‘open’, since we’re into democratization. There are still too many people that don’t have access to education.

We need to open the system, to give them access. But it’s no longer ‘online’ because we believe that the system needs to be hybrid, by which we mean that it needs to be offline as well as online. The second ‘O’ becomes a ‘C’ that stands for ‘collaborative’… that’s how we get ‘MOCC’s’ that refer to ‘massive, open, collaborative courses’. That makes the whole difference and many structures are heading that way…They’re realizing that collaboration

(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

and interaction are important.”105 Delangue doesn’t give any details as to how these MOCC’s might be organized, but what seems important to retain is that a hybrid model might make greater individualization and massification compatible and that it is important to combine online and offline interactions. I also find it interesting to note that he got this idea when observing how and why people were using UniShared; it is a user-guided experience.

Clément Delangue is the most eloquent of the three interviewees on the subject of innovation. But Charles Lefebvre de Preÿ, LearningShelter, sees innovation as a step towards ubiquitous learning, connecting people who are normally separated by geographical distance: “The real innovation consists in enabling someone who lives in Caen to engage with a student in Paris, or a mentor in Toulouse to help someone living in New York.”106 It’s all about helping the individual benefit from globalization.

Marc-Arthur Gauthey shares this viewpoint: “In the end, we’re just putting a website on something that already existed before, informally (…) Since the beginning of time, even before the invention of schools, the transmission of knowledge has been the most natural thing in the world.

All we did, was to create a website to do something that has always existed. It is not revolutionary in itself.

It makes interacting smoother, it makes it easier. But asking someone, who is more qualified than oneself, to teach you something, is the story of human evolution, it is about transmitting knowledge. The cornerstone of humanity is to learn and to transmit.”107 The best ideas are often the simplest ones. The technology is used to create more human interaction and not to replace it.

E/ Conclusion of part three: paving the way to collaborative learning I find these examples interesting, because they adapt existing activities to today’s environment. They are reviewing the use of note-taking, individual mentoring and the transmission of skills and knowledge to make them become part of the Web 3.0. These initiatives constitute a contribution to social innovation since they open up education, help democratize access to knowle-

dge, enable people to participate in creating their own, personal learning path. They blur the limits between the classroom and the rest of the world; they facilitate interaction between people who are separated by great geographical distance; they help connect individuals who want to learn with individuals who are willing to share their skills and knowledge. They blur the boundaries between the learner and the teacher, because today’s learner can be tomorrow’s teacher. They help forge the notion of learning communities and show how real-life skills can be as valuable as academic knowledge.

105. Delangue, op.cit.

106. Extract from the interview with Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

107. Extract from the interview with Marc-Arthur Gauthey (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

Nobody knows whether these companies will still exist in a couple of years. Their innovations are “quick and dirty”, their activity evolving constantly to make them viable. However, this doesn’t weaken the their message, since it is their mere existence that questions the current education system. They are signs of change.

To conclude this part, I would like to restate my initial hypothesis: Are these collaborative start-ups symptomatic of an anachronistic education system? I would argue that the answer is yes, they are. All three companies provide horizontal, collaborative help to people who either are not succeeding in the current, standardized, learning system or who do not have access to traditional learning institutions. All three companies use recent technological innovations to share and individualize knowledge without letting these technologies be in the foreground. All three initiatives contribute to value real-world skills and knowledge acquired in practice, thus placing them on the same level as academic knowledge. All three enterprises are convinced that accreditation is not an end in itself and that learning can be pleasurable. They celebrate lifelong learning and connect people of different ages and places that are all interested in the same topic. This is not necessarily the end of the classroom, but it is a step towards opening the class to the rest of the world.

I would like to quote Clément Delangue who says that we are only at the beginning of this movement: “You can collaborate with people next to you or at the other end of the world in real-time. That’s an incredible lesson.

It helps to pinpoint the full potential of collaboration in the world. I think that we’re probably exploiting 0,2%

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(III) The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system

108. Extract from the interview with Clément Delangue (translated from French), cf. Appendix.

109. Trade School is an alternative, people-organized school that is run on barter, http://tradeschool.coop/ paris/class.

110. Leeaarn basically offers the same service as CupofTeach of Skillshare, http://www.leeaarn.com/.

111. The Public School is a school without a curriculum and without degrees that supports autodidactic activities, http://thepublicschool. org/berlin.

112. Open Tech School offers free programming workshops for experts and non-experts, http://www. opentechschool.org/.

113. Thackara, John. In the Bubble, 2005, Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), p.158.

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of its full potential today, things will be developing at a higher rate in the years to come.”108 This message starkly contrasts with the current negative mindset.

UniShared, LearningShelter and CupofTeach are not the only start-ups interested in collaborative learning. I have already quoted Skillshare, but I would also like to mention initiatives such as Trade School109, LEEAARRN+110, The Public School111, Open Tech School112 to show that the movement is a growing movement and that their existence shows the magnitude of the change we can expect.

These structures constitute weak signals that may herald breakthroughs in the realm of education and learning.

“Technology fixes for education are an old and discredited story. The delivery of precooked content, by whatever means, is not teaching. Radio, film, television, the videocassette recorder, fax machines, the personal computer, the Internet, and now the mobile phone: It was promised of each of these, in turn, that here was a wonder cure that would transform education for the better. And yet, here we are, hundreds of years after the first books were printed, and teachers are still giving lectures, and students still line up to hear them. Why? They do this because the best learning involves embodiment - live experiences and conversation between people. Most people prefer talking to one another to talking to themselves. Educational institutions change slowly and social interaction remains their core activity. This is not to deny that our learning infrastructures need to evolve.”113 John Thackara, In the Bubble.

Conclusion

Conclusion

W

hen I started writing this research paper, my principal objective consisted in identifying the values and principles that should guide tomorrow’s educational system. I discovered how much the Industrial Revolution influenced the way people learn today. This period contributed in generalizing access to instruction and organizing the public educational systems of the western world. I based my further research on the views of various contemporary philosophers and economists, who all announce that the way we learn, live or work is changing and will evolve even more drastically in the coming years. Indeed, the economical and ecological crises combined with the interconnectivity of the Internet and social media lay the foundations for a more collaborative economy. Based on peer-to-peer interaction and sustainability, this movement is a more horizontal, distributive one. These latest evolutions call for greater permeability between schools and universities and the rest of the world; abolishing all frontiers between real-life skills and hands-on expertise on the one hand and academic knowledge and professors on the other. At present, degrees are no longer considered a guarantee for professional insertion or employability; thus life skills and proficiency might become as important as expert, academic knowledge. Tomorrow’s teachers will be asked to teach their students meta-skills enabling them to understand, arrange, sum-up, discard, and classify the exponential amount of information available today. Also, is seems that lifelong learning will become the standard response to growing complexity and longevity, which signifies that the period from kindergarten to university should become a time to acquire the ability to learn how to learn.

This primary learning period in life should be dedicated to laying the foundations for autonomous learning, preserving the joy of discovery, and promoting skills such as creativity, teamwork, problem-solving, understanding complexity and transdisciplinarity. Teaching these skills is not compatible with rote learning and siloed thinking and requires interactions with teachers or mentors. The curriculum should be renewed to focus on giving students the capacity to become autonomous, independent and critical thinkers. In this field, the theories derived from

the alternative education models have proven themselves efficient and could be of great inspiration for tomorrow’s educational system. One of my regrets is not having had the time to focus on how these former models of active pedagogy can integrate digital tools that didn’t exist a hundred years ago.

The question of integrating digital tools into the current education and learning system could be the starting point of a research paper in itself. Online learning is still an infant and inventions such as MOOCs need to further evolve to meet the needs of education today. In my opinion, the current version of MOOCs consists in putting an outdated model online. Furthermore, in order to integrate these new technologies into the education system effectively, we need to ask ourselves how their very existence transforms the way we live and work today, be it on a cognitive level or on a more practical one. One way to proceed would be to focus on the activities that humans are good at and computers are not. For example, the memorization of huge quantities of information is no longer necessary at an age where personal computers can easily be regarded as the “external human brain”114, thus liberating the brain to concentrate on the activities that humans do better than computers, like feeling, experiencing, experimenting, thinking critically, taking initiatives, inventing, creating, and innovating. I draw an analogy between Michel Serres’ theory that the computer can liberate the human brain and Walter Benjamin’s thesis that the invention of photography emancipated painters from the burden of accurate reproduction, opening the arts to new possibilities, unexplored until then.115Today we know that the invention of photography did not announce the end of fine arts, but was actually synonymous of the development of the aura and uniqueness of art. The evolution of education should be a similar one, concentrating less on standardized curricula and more on teaching how to apply this knowledge in a creative manner. Developing an educational system that integrates today’s technological possibilities is greatly advocated by people like Conrad Wolfram, the mathematician who tries to reason educators to stop teaching mathematics in school as if computers didn’t exist: “Math has been liberated from calculating - but that math liberation didn’t

114. The idea of computers being man’s “external brain” is largely developed by Michel Serres.

115. “For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.” Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, 1936, http://evans-experientialism. freewebspace.com/benjamin.htm

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Image: “IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success.”

Source : http://www-03.ibm.com/press/ us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss 116. TED talk: Conrad Wolfram - “Teaching kids real math with computers” (15 nov. 2010), http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg 117. “peruskoulu” means “primary school” in Finnish, from OECD (2010), “Finland: Slow and Steady Reform for Consistently High Results.”, http://www.oecd.org/pisa/ pisaproducts/46581035.pdf 118. “IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success”: http:// www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss 119. Thackara, John. In the Bubble, 2005, Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), p. 144-145.

120. OECD (2010), Finland: Slow and Steady Reform for Consistently High Results, http://www.oecd.org/ pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdf

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go into education yet.”116 His recommendation is to show students the relation between mathematics and everyday life to help them ask the right questions and transform real world problems into math formulas. According to him, current math education focuses on calculation, the one activity in mathematics that computers do better than men. Yes, it is time to transform the education and learning system to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Here is a statement from one of Nokia’s senior managers addressed to the Finnish schools, showing the important role of schools in encouraging skills like creativity: “If I hire a youngster who doesn’t know all the mathematics or physics that is needed to work here, I have colleagues here who can easily teach those things. But if I get somebody who doesn’t know how to work with other people, how to think differently or how to create original ideas and somebody who is afraid of making a mistake, there is nothing we can do here. Do what you have to keep our education system up-to-date but don’t take away (the) creativity and open-mindedness that we now have in our fine peruskoulu.”117 More and more companies are looking for people who can “think outside the box” in order to adapt to a fastevolving, highly interconnected and complex world. In a survey conducted by IBM among 1,500 CEO’s, “creativity” was recognized as the n°1 “leadership competency” of the future118, as can be seen in the diagram that illustrates this study: In order to liberate this creativity, the school system will need to sustain the joy in learning and open the educational system to the rest of the outside world.

Based on my research, I have come to the conclusion that one way to do that, is to design innovative ways of combining online and offline learning. Another option consists in creating open learning infrastructures that can enhance the organization of learning communities and co-learning places. Finding an intermediary way that builds on the strengths of the current educational model

whilst integrating the “quick and dirty” innovations of young learning start-ups could also be an option, thereby putting an end to the education monopoly and moving towards a more organic learning ecosystem; a solution that has also been suggested by Tom Bentley, a policy analyst specialized in Education: “We should think of learning as an ecology of people and groups, projects, tools and infrastructures - and allow stakeholders in each situation to take care of content issues. We need to reconceptualize education (…) as an open living system, whose intelligence is distributed and shared among all its participants. Schools and colleges need to become network organisations, to establish themselves as hubs at the center of diverse, overlapping networks of learning which reach out to the fullest possible range of institutions, sources of information, social groups, and physical facilities.”119 This is basically one of the reasons of the success of the Finnish education system; the schools are connected to one-another, enabling innovations in one school to be easily taken over by the rest of the system.120 The Finnish success is also due to a political consensus that supported a comprehensive education reform over a period of thirty years. During my research, the impact of politics on the public education system became evident to me. In the past, many reform tentatives have failed because of partisan politics and changes in the government. There is no easy solution to avoid education reforms from becoming victims of politics and of the electoral calendar. The development of private education initiatives is a solution for those that have the means but it also sounds the death knell of free, public education. Good reasons for hope might be found when looking at the emerging collaborative economy that hasn’t developed its full potential yet.

I would like to conclude with a quotation from Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize Winner and Founder of Grameen Bank who reminds us that creative solutions

Conclusion

to the education problem might be found by people who have the capacity to look at the education and learning system with a fresh pair of eyes. He reminds us that the challenge lies in combining greater access to education while offering individualized solutions to each student:

121. Hellweg, Eric, “Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education”, posted on January 29, 2013 in the online version of the Harvard Business Review Blog, http://blogs. hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/01/ eight_brilliant_minds_on_the_f.html, consulted on February 9, 2013.

“What does this all mean? The technology gives us tremendous power to solve this stark problem all around us. We need to design these so no child is left out of this.

What need to ask, what is education after all? We need to resolve that. What are we getting our young people ready for? It’s for the purpose of our life. And we need to make sure we give people a purpose to their life. It won’t be done by the current system. It will be done by people who have nothing to do with current system.»121 May designers see this as an invitation to seize the issue and design tomorrow’s education and learning system.

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Epilog

122. Quotation from Thomas Lommee’s website, http://www. intrastructures.net/Intrastructures/ About_-_what_were_up_to..html.

123. For more information on Thomas Lommee, http://www. openstructures.net and http:// www.intrastructures.net 124. “DESIS” stands for “Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability”.

125. DESIS network, www.desisnetwork.org/desis 126. Official MoviLab website: http:// movilab.eu 127. http://openstructures.net/ pages/9#deel2a

“The industrial revolution was a revolution for engineers. Now designers are at the forefront of a new revolution. They are part of networks that enable them to develop new materials and systems, build their own machines, and seek new tools for production and distribution. These developments offer an alternative to mass production and open paths to a new economy and society.” Jan Boelen, Ghent, Belgium, June - October 2012122

I

n parallel to this research paper, I worked closely with Thomas Lommee,123 a young Belgian designer, in the conception and conduction of a “studio expérimental”, a forty-hour design project with students from ENSCI-Les Ateliers. The following pages are a brief summary of this teaching project that aimed at getting design-students interested in the collaborative economy and making them question their future profession at the wake of the post-industrial era. If I evicted design from my research paper, I was able to concentrate all the more on the changes faced by designers tomorrow in the course of this project. Our starting point was a simple question that we shared: “What could we possibly design within the school to create awareness amongst the students of the economic situation in order to change their behavior to a more solidary, responsible one?

This “studio expérimental” was organized under the auspice of the DESIS network124 that unites different design schools at an international level in order to discuss, create and communicate the role of design and designers in social innovation and sustainable development.

Its overall objective is to develop design tools, design thinking and design education as well as research for social innovation, making small interesting initiatives replicable to engender change at a more global level: “In the complexity of contemporary society, social innovation is spreading and its potential, as a driver of sustainable change, is increasing. To facilitate this process, the design community, in general, and design schools, in particular, can play a pivotal role.”125 Its higher ambition is to create an Open Design Programme for Social Innovation.

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While discussing the studio expérimental, we were also thinking about working with Thanh Nghiem, the founder of the MoviLab Initiative126, a movement that basically pursues the similar idea of spreading and upscaling open, sustainable initiatives in France, with the help of social media. The studio expérimental presented an occasion to work on the collaborative economy, with the support of the MoviLab network.

With Thomas Lommee, we decided on 5 projects to be accomplished within the studio: • elaborating a trolley using the modular OS structure to facilitate open design;127 • designing an interactive, open map that could indicate different structures working in the field of the collaborative economy; • designing a digital platform where citizens and smaller organizations could initiate projects that could then be chosen and conducted by ENSCI-students, in order to make the school more permeable to the needs of the community; • letting the students organize and crowd fund a trip to Loos-en-Gohelle, a former coal-mining town that has become a pilot town for sustainable development; • interviewing several actors of the Parisian collaborative economy ecosystem (this project was set aside for lack of time.)

The first three projects were largely Thomas Lommee’s initiative and I assisted him as well as I could in their realization. The trip to Loos-en-Gohelle was primarily my idea because I wanted the students to experience the sharing economy in the “learning by doing” experience.

During the course of the semester, we also pondered on

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Image: “Mass communication” Source: Intrastructures 2012, with the courtesy of Thomas Lommee.

how this studio expérimental could become a valuable asset for ENSCI, in raising greater awareness on the emerging collaborative economy. In the following paragraphs, I would like to focus very briefly on a learning-by-doing experience that consisted in letting the students organize a trip to Loos-en-Gohelle with the help of collaborative tools.

Three students128 of the studio were asked to manage the organization and the financing of the trip to Loosen-Gohelle, but all twelve students had to contribute to this project. My hope was that this experience would empower them; making them active participants instead of passive consumers of their education and also help them grasp the new opportunities linked to the collaborative economy. The visit to Loos-en-Gohelle was supposed

Image: “Peer-to-Peer Communication” Source: Intrastructures 2012, with the courtesy of Thomas Lommee.

to raise their awareness of the stark transformation of this former mining site, relic of the Industrial Revolution and symbol of a very top-down, paternalistic society.

For the past decade, the major, Jean-François Caron had contributed to transforming this former industrial site into a model of sustainable development, accompanying its inhabitants towards higher autonomy and greater initiative.

The students organized themselves to set up a crowdfunding campaign129 on the KissKissBankBank website.

The first step consisted in designing their communication strategy and setting up the budget for the trip and the documentary they wanted to do of Loos-en-Gohelle. They decided on calling their project “Loos in Translation”130 with the aim of raising 1 200 euros within 25 days to

128. Marianne Cardon, Elise Caron and Pierre-Loup Dumas did a great job in managing this project.

129. The principle of crowdfunding is that many people can give a little money to make a project possible.

An “All or Nothing rule” is applied in crowdfunding, meaning that the creator of the project will only receive financial support if he succeeds in raising 100% of the target.

130. You can see the whole “Loos in Translation” campaign here, http:// www.kisskissbankbank.com/ensciloos?ref=search

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Conclusion

Image: Collaborative Cities Campaign.

Source: http://www.kisskissbankbank. com/collaborative-cities?ref=search

Image: “Loos in Translation” crowdfunding campaign, done by students from ENSCI-Les Ateliers.

Source: http://www.kisskissbankbank. com/ensci-loos?ref=search

131. Collaborative Cities is a project to make a web documentary of interesting initiatives of the collaborative economy all over the world. Maxime Leroy, a young service designer, financed this project through crowdfunding and raised over 14 000 euros. His hands-on experience was therefore very valuable to the students. To see his campaign, http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/ collaborative-cities?ref=search

132. Airbnb website: https://www. airbnb.com/ and BedyCasa website: http://www.bedycasa.com

take the whole group to Loos-en-Gohelle. Adrien Aumont, co-founder of KissKissBankBank and Maxime Leroy, cofounder of Collaborative Cities131 mentored the students to help make the campaign a success.

The second step consisted in designing the gifts that each donor would receive in return for their contribution. The objective was to find the perfect balance between a gift that would symbolically represent the project with respect to the financial constraints.

Next, the students sent the link to the crowdfunding campaign to their friends and family. Contrary to what most people believe, crowdfunding is not viral, which means that to help the campaign succeed, the project creator needs to make his social network aware of the support needed. For the students, this was a difficult step, since it basically consisted in asking friends and family to give money. Normally, in school projects, students are not aware of the financial aspects involved.

This was also the moment they realized that the project had to be good; it created a moral contract between them and the donors.

The campaign was a great success. Within 25 days, 71 people supported the project with a total of 1 429 euros, surpassing the initial target. The students then carried on in organizing the trip to Loos-en-Gohelle: they reserved the school’s van, organized car sharing trips and reserved train tickets for the others. They then booked two apartments in nearby Lille using housesharing websites.132 All in all, they organized the entire trip using collaborative tools.

The trip took place on the 7-8 of December 2012, and was a success. Its entire organization had been perfectly arranged by the students. They filmed, interviewed and visited Loos-en-Gohelle, its slag heaps that are the highest in Europe, the 11-19 base showing the remains of coal extraction, symbol of the Industrial Revolution.

46.

Once returned from the trip, two students edited the Loos-en-Gohelle documentary while the group in charge of the trip made the contributions for the people who had supported the project via KissKissBankBank. On January 18, 2013, the students presented the results of this studio in a final presentation and distributed the gifts to the donors present.

From my point of view, this project was a success since it enabled them to get a hands-on experience of the potentials that the collaborative economy present for citizens but also for designers. It showed them how easy it has become to go from a simple idea to its realization with the help of collaborative tools.

My role during this project was that of a facilitator, putting the students in touch with professionals who would be able to accompany them, breaking down the project into steps they could manage, asking the questions to push them a step further and helping every time asked.

It was also a “learning by teaching” experience since I had only just grasped the functioning and the potentials of the collaborative economy myself; so explaining it to the students helped me understand the essentials.

The biggest difficulty I encountered was to refrain from intervening too much and leaving the responsibility of the project with the students. Thereby taking the risk that the trip and the documentary would not take place. After

Conclusion

all, “learning by doing” also means learning from one’s mistakes and errors. I remember how one week before the end of the crowdfunding campaign, more than one third of the funds were still missing. Thomas Lommee and I told the students that the trip would not take place if they didn’t succeed the crowdfunding campaign. In the following days and over the weekend, the students launched a communication campaign within the school and sent new requests and reminders for support to their friends and family. The results were immediate. It is rare to see the immediate impact of our own action; this was one of those moments. The greatest gift was to see the students gain in autonomy, take over the responsibility of the project and realize what they were capable of.

They worked a lot more than they had expected, but all were proud of what they had accomplished and learned.

Thomas Lommee and I both agreed that the studio expérimental shouldn’t stop here. We are currently working at preparing the continuation of the project. The idea is to create a platform for collaborative projects that will give students the possibility to conduct projects outside of the school while making the most of the resources and advice provided within the school. The students would be in charge of all phases of the project: the relations with the partners, understanding the needs and transforming them into a design brief, designing a crowdfunding campaign to lever the funds necessary for the realization of the project and conducting the design project from its idea to the finished object. Our greater aim is to further explore the possibilities of the collaborative economy and give the students the keys to understanding how these new tools can empower them.

Image: “We the market” Source: Intrastructures 2012, with the courtesy of Thomas Lommee.

Designers now have the influence in shaping projects that not only make sense but also have a positive impact on the society. In the light of the challenges we face today, it is the responsibility of Design schools to teach the next generations of designers to ask the right questions and to give them the necessary tools for creating a better future. .47

Selected Bibliography

Selected Bibliography Websites

• CupofTeach: https://www.cupofteach.com • Ecole Decroly: http://www.ecoledecroly.be • Education à la Joie: http://www.educationalajoie.com • Infrastructures: http://www.intrastructures.net • La FING: http://www.fing.org • Good Reads: http://www.goodreads.com • Khan Academy: http://www.khanacademy.org • Knewton: http://www.knewton.com • LearningShelter: http://www.learningshelter.com • Mission Fourgous pour les TICE: http://www.missionfourgous-tice.fr • Le portail des universities numériques thématiques: http://www.universitesnumeriques.fr/ressources • Openstructures: http://www.openstructures.net • Ouishare website: http://ouishare.net/fr • Udacity: http://www.udacity.com • UniShared http://www.unishared.com • Skillshare: http://www.skillshare.com • Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com • Wikipedia: http://wikipedia.org

Blogs & Facebook groups

• Coursera blog, http://blog.coursera.org • Educpro blog: MOOC: le big bang, posted on Oct. 18, 2012, consulted on Nov.3, 2012. http://blog.educpros.fr/christine-vaufrey/2012/10/11/ mooc-le-big-bang • Facebook group: Peter Gumbel /On achète bien les écoliers • Facebook group: Ouishare edu • Facebook group: UnCollege • Henri Verdier blog: http://www.henriverdier.com/search/label/Education • NoDesign blog: Fréchin, Jean-Louis, “Pédagogies actives, fablabs, projets et innovations », posted on Oct. 22,2012, http://www.nodesign.net/blog/pedagogies-actives-fablabs-projets-et-innovations, consulted on Oct. 29, 2012.

• Skillshare blog: http://blog.skillshare.com

48.

Articles on the web

• Adourian, Gayané, “Learning Shelter & Leeaarn: la « french touch » de l’apprentissage numérique” posted on Oct. 12, 2012, http://www.knowtex. com/blog/learning-shelter-leeaarn-la-french-touch-de-lapprentissage-numerique, consulted on Dec. 21, 2012.

• Boullier, Dominique, “The MOOCs fad and bubble: please tell us another story!” in Inside Higher Education, http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/ globalhighered/moocs-fad-and-bubble-please-tell-us-another-story, consulted on Jan. 18, 2013.

• Coughlan, Sean, “China: The world’s cleverest country?” posted on May 8, 2012, in BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17585201, consulted on Dec. 14, 2012.

• La FING, “Education, de l’implosion à la reconstruction” in Questions numériques 2012-2013, http://fing.org/?Education-de-l-implosion-a-la, consulted on Oct. 27, 2012 (no author mentioned).

• Hellweg, Eric, “Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education”, posted on Jan. 29, 2013 in the online version of the Harvard Business Review Blog, http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/01/eight_brilliant_minds_on_the_f. html, consulted on Feb. 9, 2013.

• King Head, Sarah, “MOOCs – The revolution has begun, says Moody’s”, posted on Sept. 23, 2012 in University World News, issue n° 240, http://www. universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120920124146236, consulted on Nov. 2, 2012.

• Levine, Mark, “Share My Ride” posted on March 5, 2009, in the online version of The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/ magazine/08Zipcar-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, consulted on Nov.1, 2012.

• Mangan, Katherine, “Minnesota Gives Coursera the Boot, Citing a Decades-Old Law” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, posted on Oct. 18 2012, http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/minnesota-gives-coursera-the-bootciting-a-decades-old-law/40542, consulted on Oct. 31, 2012.

• “What You Need to Know About MOOC’s” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/What-You-Need-to-Know-About/133475, consulted on Nov.1, 2012.

• Oremos, Will, “Free online education is now illegal in Minnesota”, posted on the online version of Slate, Oct. 18, 2012, http://www.slate.com/blogs/ future_tense/2012/10/18/minnesota_bans_coursera_state_takes_bold_ stand_against_free_education.html, consulted on Oct. 30, 2012.

• Leckart, Steven, “The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever”, posted on March 20, 2012, in Wired, http://www.wired. com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass, consulted on Nov. 2, 2012.

• Stephens, Dale J.; “The UnCollege Manifesto - your guide to academic deviance”, 2011 http://www.uncollege.org/academicdeviance.pdf, consulted on Feb. 8, 2013.

• Strauss, Valerie, “How online class about online learning failed miserably”, posted on Feb. 5, 2013 on the online blog of The Washington Post: http:// www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/05/how-onlineclass-about-online-learning-failed-miserably, consulted on Feb.10, 2013.

Selected Bibliography

Press

• Brafman, Nathalie, “La mort programmée des cours en ‘amphi’”, Le Monde, supplément les nouveaux enjeux de la croissance, n° 21065, Oct. 11, 2012, pg. 13.

• Destombes, Christelle, “Quelle école pour le XXIe siècle?”, Interdépendances, n°85, Avril-Mai-Juin 2012, pg. 24-36.

• Dion, Cyril, and Muriel Fifils, “L’École ça sert à quoi?”, Kaizen, n°3, Juillet-Août 2012, pg. 23-36.

• Keller, Thierry et Blaise Mao, “Dossier: La Revanche des Cancres”, Usbek & Rica, n° 07, September-November 2012, pg. 18-34.

• Lommee, Thomas, “On design education”, Abitare, n° 527, February 2013.

• Mooney Carolyn, “Online Learning: MOOC Madness an Inside Look”, supplement of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 5, 2012.

Books

• Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What’s Mine is Yours, London (Collins, 2011).

• Enlart, Sandra, and Olivier Charbonnier. Faut-il encore apprendre?, Paris (Dunod, 2010).

• Fromm, Erich. To Have or to Be, 1976 (Continuum, 1997).

• Ilich, Ivan. Deschooling Society, 1970 (Cuernavaca, Mexico). Full-text online: http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html#2 • Martin, Roger. The Opposable Mind (Harvard Business Press, 2009).

• Novel, Anne-Sophie and Stéphane Riot. Vive la co-révolution (Éditions Alternatives, 2012).

• Rifkin, Jeremy. The Third Industrial Revolution, New York City, New York (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

• Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds, 2001, Chichester, West Sussex (Capstone Publishing Ltd, revised and updated edition published in 2011).

• Serres, Michel. Petite Poucette, 2012, Paris (Editions Le Pommier).

• Thackara, John. In the Bubble, 2005, Cambridge (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

• Verdiani, Antonella. Ces Écoles qui Rendent Nos Enfants Heureux, 2012, Lonrai (Editions Actes Sud).

Reports and Academic Papers, Institutional websites

• OECD (2010), PISA 2009 Results: What Makes a School Successful? – Resources, Policies and Practices (Volume IV), http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264091559-en • OECD (2010), Finland: Slow and Steady Reform for Consistently High Results http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdf • Taddei, François, Universities X.0: integrating new educational and research tools to build networks of ideas, collaborative knowledge- builders, and learning spaces to transform the world into an evolving global campus open to all, Centre for Research and Interdisciplinarity, 2010, Paris; http://www.cri-paris. org/docs/Universities-X.0-16.08.2010.pdf • UNESCO Task Force on Education for the Twenty-first Century: http://www.unesco.org/delors/utopia.htm • IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss

Dissertations

• Pagis, Stéphanie (sous la direction de Jacques-François Marchandise).

Alphabétisation et Développement de l’Autonomie de l’Enfant - Le Design au Service de la Pédagogie Active, Paris, 2007 (ENSCI-Les Ateliers).

Videos

• Salman Khan TED talk in 2011: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gM95HHI4gLk • The Future of Learning, Networked Society by Ericsson: http://www.fastcoexist.com /1680776/watch-a-great-short-film-on-the-future-of-technology-and-education • “Let’s do it 2008” - Estonia clean-up (posted on Feb. 17, 2009). http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=A5GryIDl0qY • “Did You Know 3.0” (version posted on Feb. 28, 2012) http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE&feature=related • TEDxParisUniversités: Clément Delangue – “Students will change Education” (Aug. 6, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWRn3W8QI_0 • KissKissBankBank Campaign: “The 25 Best Classes in the world”, Clément Delangue (november 2012) http://www.kisskissbankbank.com/ open-the-25-best-classes-of-the-world?ref=search • TED talk: Conrad Wolfram – “Teaching kids real math with computers” (Nov. 15, 2010): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60OVlfAUPJg • TED talk: Sir Ken Robinson – “Do schools kill creativity?” (posted in Jan. 2006) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY • TED talk: Sir Ken Robinson – “Bring on the learning revolution” (filmed Feb. 2010, posted May 2010) http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_ on_the_revolution.html • RSA Animate – “Changing Education Paradigms” (posted Oct. 2010) http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U • Presentation of LearningShelter: http://vimeo.com/48192396 • TED talk: Sugata Mitra – “How kids teach themselves” (filmed Feb. 2007, posted Aug. 2008) http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_ kids_teach_themselves.html • TED talk: Sugata Mitra – “The child-driven education” (filmed July 2010, posted Oct. 2010) http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html • Interview with Sir Ken Robison – “Why is creativity important in education?” (posted Dec. 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywIhJ2goiGE&feature =youtu.be • Daily Motion video - Bassin minier du Nord Pas-de-Calais: un dossier à l’UNESCO: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrvcaq_bassin-minier-du-nordpas-de-calais-un-dossier-a-l-unesco_news#.URoHblrm4gE

Articles on Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

• “Education”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education (consulted on Feb. 4, 2013, last revised on Feb. 1, 2013).

• “Elementary Education Act”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Act_1870 (consulted on Dec. 14, 2012, last revised on Oct. 21, 2012).

• “Phaedrus (dialogue)”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#cite_ note-plato57-51 (consulted on Jan. 3, 2013, date of last revision Dec. 12, 2012).

.49

APPENDIX

MOOCs

• “Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society” by professor Karl T. Ulrich on the Coursera website: https://class.coursera.org/design-2012-001 • “Death” – introductory lecture by professor Shelly Kagan on Open Yale Courses Web: http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176/lecture-1

Conferences

• Conference organised by Institut Aspen France: “Comment redresser la position de la France dans le classement Pisa?”, Paris, December 13, 2012.

Interviews

• Interview with Clément Delangue, co-founder of Unishared, Paris, Dec. 12, 2012.

• Interview with Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ, co-founder of LearningShelter, Paris, Dec. 21, 2012.

• Interview with Marc-Arthur Gauthey, co-founder of CupofTeach, Paris, Jan. 7, 2013.

Radio

• Radio France Culture: “L’école dans le monde qui vient”, interview with Michel Serres by Alain Finkielkraut in Répliques, Dec. 8, 2012. http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-repliques-l-ecole-dans-le-monde-qui-vient-2012-12-08 • Radio France Culture: “D’où vient le désir d’apprendre ?”, interview with Martine Menès and Arnaud Houte, by Louise Tourret in Rue des écoles, Dec. 1, 2012. http://www.franceculture.fr/ emission-rue-des-ecoles-d-ou-vient-le-desir-d-apprendre-2012-12-01 • Radio France Culture: “L’école aux Etats-Unis”, interview with Régis Malet and Peter Gumbel, by Louise Tourret in Rue des écoles, Nov. 3, 2012. http://www. franceculture.fr/emission-rue-des-ecoles-l-ecole-aux-etats-unis-2012-11-03 • Radio France Culture: “Le bonheur, un projet pour l’école ?”, interview with Antonella Verdiani and François Meroth, by Louise Tourret in Rue des écoles, Oct. 13, 2012. http://www.franceculture.fr/ emission-rue-des-ecoles-le-bonheur-un-projet-pour-l-ecole-2012-10-13

Linguistic tools

• http://dict.leo.org/fr: German/French and English/French translations • http://www.linguee.fr/francais-anglais/: French/English translations • http://dico.isc.cnrs.fr/fr/index_tr.html: the French/English online dictionary by the CNRS • http://www.visualthesaurus.com/trialover/: visual thesaurus • http://dictionary.cambridge.org/: Cambridge dictionary online

50.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

T

hese are the complete verbatim transcripts of the interviews I conducted with Unishared, LearningShelter and CupofTeach between December 2012 and January 2013.

These research interviews were my foundation for part III “The collaborative movement and examples of start-ups in the field of learning: highlighting the principles that should influence tomorrow’s education system”. The mother tongue of Clément Delangue, Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ and Marc-Arthur Gauthey being French, I found it preferable to do the interviews in French and to translate certain excerpts into English for citation purposes.

Entretien avec Clément Delangue, co-fondateur de Unishared (12 décembre 2012)

Pourrais-tu m’expliquer, ce qu’est Unishared ?

Oui, Unishared est une plateforme de prise de notes collaborative, qui permet, par exemple, aux étudiants, quand ils sont en cours, au lieu de prendre leurs notes individuellement sur papier ou de prendre leurs notes individuellement sur leurs ordis, de mutualiser la prise de notes entre toutes les personnes qui sont dans la salle de classe. Ils sont en ligne, tous sur le même document qui s’affiche en temps réel, caractère par caractère.

Chaque fois que quelqu’un écrit une lettre, cette lettre se retranscrit sur tous les écrans de toutes les personnes qui sont connectées. Et en plus de faire cette mutualisation de prise de notes, les étudiants l’ouvrent à tous ceux que le sujet du cours peut intéresser.

Typiquement, toi par exemple, si le design t’intéresse, l’idée c’est que tu puisses retrouver, que tu puisses rejoindre des étudiants en design un peu partout dans le monde, pour apprendre un peu grâce à eux, et pourquoi pas d’apprendre sur des sujets un peu plus actuels mais aussi de contribuer. Tu pourras dire, par exemple, si ce sont des étudiants aux Etats-Unis, que cela se passe un peu différemment en France, ou leur dire d’aller lire cet article, ce bouquin et apprendre avec eux, plutôt que tu apprennes de ton côté et qu’eux apprennent de leur côté.

Derrière chaque création d’entreprise se trouve souvent une histoire. Comment l’idée de créer Unishared est-elle venue ?

C’est particulièrement vrai sur Unishared, parce que c’est vraiment parti d’une expérience, en l’occurrence la mienne, qui était en salle de classe. À l’époque j’étais à Dublin, cela faisait huit mois, et j’avais tendance à m’ennuyer un petit peu en cours. Et j’étais un frustré, parce que je savais que j’avais de la chance de pouvoir aller dans une grande école et qu’il y avait énormément de monde qui était exclu de ce système éducatif.

Alors, ce que j’ai commencé à faire c’était de twitter le cours au lieu de prendre des notes. Donc à partager sur ce réseau social, Twitter, ouvert à n’importe qui. Et les gens, un peu partout dans le monde, ont commencé à me suivre et à participer avec moi et à me dire « merci, c’est sympa, j’apprends avec toi » mais aussi à remettre en cause parfois ce que j’apprenais, à me dire : « justement, va regarder cette ressource » ou « tiens, chez nous cela se passe plutôt comme ça ».

Et c’est à ce moment-là que j’ai découvert qu’on peut casser cette frontière entre la salle de classe physique et le reste des apprenants qui sont un peu partout dans le monde. J’ai fait ça pendant deux mois. À partir d’un moment, les gens qui étaient dans ma classe, ont découvert le système et m’ont dit : « cela serait sympa qu’on puisse faire la même chose ».

On s’est rendu compte que s’ils commençaient à twitter, comme moi, on twitterait quasiment la même chose et que cela n’avait aucun sens qu’on fasse tous le même boulot. On a donc commencé à utiliser Google Docs pour ouvrir le savoir et mutualiser la prise de notes. On a fait ça pendant six mois à l’ESCP Europe, ici à Paris, dans la spécialisation « Innovation ». À la fin, cela avait tellement bien marché, cela avait tellement changé la manière avec laquelle on apprenait qu’on s’est dit que cela ne pouvait pas juste rester une expérimentation, qu’il fallait faire quelque chose. Donc, progressivement, on a construit une plateforme, j’ai rencontré mon co-fondateur, Arnaud Breton, et on a avancé comme ça, on a mis un pied après l’autre. C’est comme ça qu’on est arrivé jusqu’ici, aujourd’hui. Unishared c’est la plateforme comme elle l’est actuellement. .51

APPENDIX

Combien d’utilisateurs avez-vous actuellement ?

On en a bientôt 3 000, un peu partout dans le monde. On fait plus 6% chaque semaine en ce moment ; donc, cela commence à croître assez rapidement. On a été utilisé dans plus de mille salles de classe déjà, en cinq mois.

Cela a été assez vite. En effet, le fait qu’on se calque sur une pratique déjà existante - la prise de notes - pour l’améliorer, en la rendant plus collaborative et ouverte, fait que cela se diffuse plus rapidement, que cela a été très vite adopté un peu partout. C’est cela qui est intéressant.

Depuis le départ, on a construit un produit global, qui voulait améliorer la manière dont apprennent les communautés locales. On a eu des petites communautés qui se sont créées un peu partout : on a des gens à Stanford qui utilisent notre outil, à Copenhague, à Munich, à Paris… un peu partout dans le monde.

Ce service est-il gratuit ? Quel est votre modèle économique ?

Oui, il est gratuit pour les utilisateurs. On s’est rendu compte dès le départ que lorsqu’on agrégeait des étudiants d’une une même école, d’une même organisation, qui partageaient leurs notes, et qu’on les regroupait sur une page, cela créait une plateforme d’apprentissage en ligne pour cette organisation. C’est comme cela qu’on gagne de l’argent. Au départ, on se disait que les écoles allaient refuser ce système, que les professeurs allaient le refuser. Aujourd’hui, ce sont les écoles et les professeurs qui nous paient ; tout simplement parce qu’ils ont compris leur besoin d’aller en ligne.

C’est un peu comme dans le commerce classique. Au départ, on disait : « Ne faites surtout pas un site web, cela va cannibaliser vos ventes, vous n’allez plus faire de vente ». Mais finalement, ils l’ont fait progressivement parce que les gens sont en ligne, donc le commerce doit aller en ligne. C’est pareil pour l’éducation : les gens sont en ligne, l’éducation doit aller en ligne. C’est ce qu’on permet, grâce à la prise de notes collaborative.

Finalement vous travaillez main dans la main avec certaines écoles, certaines universités ?

Oui, notamment avec l’ESCP Europe avec qui on avance vraiment bien ; elle nous soutient et achète nos services.

C’est vraiment notre philosophie d’intégrer des acteurs existants. On peut leur prouver que le changement a du bon.

52.

Il y a des capacités à faire des choses facilement, puisque la prise de notes collaborative s’appuie sur des outils déjà existants, sur un usage déjà existant. Cela peut avoir

un impact énorme : cela ne change pas beaucoup le comportement des utilisateurs mais l’impact est énorme puisque les notes peuvent être diffusées partout dans le monde. Cela ouvre puisque cela casse la frontière physique de la salle de classe qu’on avait avant.

C’est vraiment dans notre philosophie d’intégrer les acteurs du système éducatif, d’avancer avec eux, de recueillir leur feedback, de comprendre leur intérêt, de comprendre leur problématique, pour justement créer un outil qui soit une solution à leurs problèmes. Pas seulement quelque chose qui existe à côté, mais vraiment une solution à leurs problèmes.

Êtes-vous en train de dire que ce service aura un impact à terme sur la façon d’apprendre ?

Oui, on le voit déjà, c’est assez flagrant. Par exemple, si on prend un cas très concret, cela permet aux étudiants d’aujourd’hui de challenger ce qu’ils apprennent en classe avec des avis extérieurs. Cela leur permet d’apprendre beaucoup plus en réseau. Cela signifie qu’ils n’apprennent pas d’une source unique, le professeur. Ils apprennent finalement de tout le réseau des gens qui s’intéressent à leur sujet.

On a vu beaucoup d’interactions se créer entre les gens qui sont tous passionnés pour un même sujet, qui ont envie d’apprendre la même chose. Sauf qu’avant, ils étaient complètement à part, des uns des autres.

Grâce à notre système, ils peuvent se retrouver. Finalement, ils ont le même but, même s’il y en a qui sont étudiants, alors qu’il y en a qui travaillent ou qui sont retraités. Ils ont la même passion.

Pourquoi ne pas les rassembler tous ensemble pour qu’ils s’auto-alimentent et que justement chacun amène son expérience un peu différente, son point de vue, sa perspective différente pour avoir un apprentissage qui est beaucoup plus collaboratif ?

C’est finalement plus représentatif de ce qu’il se passe dans la vraie vie. C’est-à-dire que dans la vraie vie, on apprend avec plein de gens, qui ont des points de vue différents et des parcours différents. C’est ça qui fait la richesse de ce service.

Quel est le retour le plus positif que vous avez eu jusque là ?

On en a eu beaucoup. Ce que nous avons vraiment beaucoup apprécié, c’est le retour d’un professeur qui s’appelle François Fourcade qui nous a fait un petit texte pour nous expliquer en quoi il était content de participer

APPENDIX

à cette initiative Unishared et en quoi cela avait changé la manière dont il avait envisagé son rapport avec les étudiants. Notamment sur le fait que cela lui permettait, à posteriori, de retourner sur les notes collaboratives et de comprendre quel avait été le retour des étudiants sur son cours. C’était impressionnant, la lucidité qu’il avait sur le rôle que doit avoir un professeur aujourd’hui. Sur le fait qu’un professeur doit aussi apprendre à ses élèves à collaborer.

Finalement, même dans l’entreprise, une des qualités qu’on attend d’un élève de grande école, c’est qu’il ait cette capacité à collaborer. C’est ce que permet aussi Unishared, car lorsqu’on doit collaborer en temps réel avec des gens à côté de nous, des gens à travers le monde, c’est tout un apprentissage qui est incroyable.

Cela permet de mettre le doigt sur tout ce potentiel de collaboration un peu partout dans le monde, un peu dans tous les secteurs. Ce potentiel es, à mon avis, aujourd’hui exploité à 0,2% et il va continuer à se développer de manière incroyable dans les années qui viennent.

Ce retour du professeur, nous a vraiment montré qu’Unishared est un outil qui est utile pour les étudiants mais aussi pour les professeurs. Il peut y avoir un intérêt pédagogique, un outil de changement et d’apprentissage et on peut vraiment intégrer tous ces acteurs dans le processus. C’est important d’intégrer tous les acteurs du cycle d’apprentissage et du système éducatif, tel qu’il est « designé » aujourd’hui.

N’y a-t-il pas des professeurs qui ont peur de voir leur rôle comme expert unique, qui détient tout le savoir sur un sujet, contesté avec l’arrivée d’un outil comme Unishared ?

Oui, on a aussi ce cas-là, cela peut effectivement arriver.

Ce que l’on fait aujourd’hui, lorsqu’on avance avec les écoles, c’est définir un périmètre restreint avec uniquement des professeurs intéressés. Je pense que quand il y a changement, il y a toujours des forces de résistance.

Et puis, peut-être Unishared ne peut pas s’appliquer à toutes les salles de classe, à tous les sujets, à tous les professeurs… On en est très conscient.

passe aujourd’hui, c’est qu’ils sont isolés du processus.

Et nous, au contraire, ce qu’on leur propose, c’est de les réintégrer dans le processus. Nous pouvons leur donner les moyens de les suivre et d’en profiter.

Je pense que le mouvement d’Internet, de la mise en ligne, du partage, de la collaboration sont des mouvements de fond qui ont lieu. Il y a deux positions : soit on le refuse et on dit qu’on ne veut pas en entendre parler, on ferme les yeux. Soit en se dit qu’il y a peut-être des dérives possibles, qu’on va essayer de les éviter, mais que l’on peut en profiter pour changer les choses, pour améliorer deux-trois trucs. Nous, c’est ce qu’on propose.

D’après vous, quelles sont les dérives possibles ? Y a-t-il des risques que vous avez déjà identifiés ?

Oui, bien sûr. On dépend vraiment d’un pari de participation. C’est aussi pour cela qu’on doit faire un produit qui est à la fois facile à utiliser, « fun », et dont la valeur ajoutée est évidente pour tous les acteurs. On peut, par exemple, avoir des étudiants qui vont toujours récupérer les notes sans jamais participer. En fait, c’est une pratique qui existait déjà avant ; il y a toujours eu des élèves qui récupéraient les notes d’autres élèves pour les photocopier. C’est quelque chose qui existait déjà et qui est aussi possible avec notre plateforme.

On fait le pari que si ces étudiants-là ne prennent-ils pas de notes, c’est qu’ils sont bons autrement ; parce que ce qui les intéresse, c’est plutôt d’aller chercher de l’information sur Internet pour enrichir le document. Peutêtre posent-ils des questions pertinentes, pour challenger vraiment ce qui est dit sur le document. Peut-être ces étudiants-là ont une valeur ajoutée différente qu’on pourra réussir à intégrer grâce à notre outil. C’est ce qu’on essaie de faire.

L’idée, c’est d’avancer progressivement, avec les cours et les professeurs que cela intéressent, puis faire la preuve par la pratique. Montrer simplement que c’est bénéfique et que cela va dans le bon sens.

C’est aussi pour cela que notre outil fonctionne très bien en présence de groupes restreints. On ne vise pas les 500 personnes d’un amphithéâtre sur un seul document pour bien fonctionner. La plupart du temps, ce sont plutôt des groupes d’amis qui, à 10-15, font leur prise de notes ensemble. Là, cela se passe très bien, parce que justement, ces personnes, avant de prendre des notes ensemble, ils se révèlent très bons dans la participation collective, pour mettre en forme, pour rechercher des informations, pour challenger. Et très rapidement, ces rôles différents se mettent en place.

Souvent, pour convaincre ces professeurs-là, ce que j’aime faire, c’est une recherche Google sur le sujet de leurs cours pour qu’ils se rendent compte que les notes des étudiants de leurs cours sont déjà en ligne. Seulement, ce qu’il se

À moyen-long terme, l’un de mes rêves serait que l’évaluation dans une université ne se fasse pas uniquement sur la performance individuelle, mais aussi sur la capacité des étudiants à participer à l’apprentissage collectif.

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APPENDIX

Encore une fois, je pense que, pour les entreprises, lorsqu’on a un employé, l’objectif n’est pas qu’individuellement il soit très bon ; c’est plutôt qu’il participe au développement de l’entreprise globale. Pour la société c’est la même chose ; pour une communauté c’est également la même chose.

Ce qui est intéressant chez un individu, c’est à quel point il peut élever tout le monde, à quel point il peut apprendre aux autres, à quel point il peut tirer les autres, pour que globalement la communauté, la société ou l’entreprise progresse.

Je pense que la prise de notes collaborative permet de valoriser la collaboration et la participation. Pourquoi ne pas imaginer, à terme, un mode d’évaluation, qui ne soit plus axé sur la performance individuelle, mais qui intègre également l’aide apportée à la classe pour apprendre, pour avancer collectivement, pour identifier les problématiques. Evaluer à quel point l’individu a contribué finalement. Cela permettrait notamment d’éviter les problèmes de « passagers clandestins » : au lieu d’exclure les gens qui sont un peu différents, qui ne prennent pas de notes, ou qui apprennent différemment, on propose de les réintégrer, pour qu’ils puissent contribuer à leur manière.

On voit que vous vous affichez comme une structure très collaborative et on sent l’engagement derrière pour l’économie collaborative. Quel est l’aspect de l’économie collaborative qui vous intéresse le plus : l’ouverture aux autres, le partage, la co-construction…?

Je pense que tout cela est lié. Pour moi, le collaboratif, et même de façon plus large, le social sont importants. Je fais partie d’une organisation qui s’appelle MakeSense qui justement essaie d’agir pour l’entrepreneuriat social.

Je suis convaincu que l’innovation, aujourd’hui, doit être sociale. Elle doit être sociale tout simplement parce que l’un de ses challenges c’est de se faire accepter par les gens.

On a l’impression d’être dans une société où tout change et le changement est très difficile à faire accepter. Pour moi, le seul moyen pour faire accepter ce changement rapidement, par un grand nombre de personnes, c’est que ce changement ait du sens. Qu’il soit porteur de vision, qu’il porte un objectif d’amélioration sociale et écologique et qu’il ne soit pas juste économique, pas juste matériel.

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Pour moi, le collaboratif s’inscrit vraiment là dedans. C’est un moyen de se dire qu’on part d’une perspective qui est uniquement individuelle pour arriver à une perspective plus collective. On ne pense plus à l’individu comme un

acteur seul mais comme un potentiel contributeur à un groupe, à une communauté, à un pays.

C’est pour cela que, pour moi, l’innovation et le collaboratif sont liés. Cette innovation ne pourra fonctionner que si elle est collaborative. L’économie et les communautés ne pourront devenir collaboratives qu’en utilisant de nouveaux outils, de nouvelles innovations comme la plateforme qu’on essaie de créer. Donc les deux sont vraiment liés et se servent l’un l’autre.

Finalement, il y a pas mal de gens qui ont cette vision un peu ancienne, que les objectifs sociétaux sont un frein au développement d’une structure, sont presqu’une contrainte, alors qu’au contraire je suis convaincu que les deux s’alimentent. Unishared ne peut exister que par sa volonté d’impact social. Nous sommes structurés comme un « social business », une entreprise sociale. Donc, on a autant d’objectifs sociétaux que d’objectifs économiques. À titre d’exemple, l’un de nos objectifs sociétaux, c’est d’ouvrir au maximum la connaissance et de la rendre disponible à un maximum de personnes. Cet objectif sociétal est au fondement de notre organisation. Autrement dit, nous avons énormément d’étudiants qui partagent justement pour participer à ce mouvement-là. Si, à un moment, on décide qu’on n’a plus d’objectif sociétal, Unishared ne fonctionnera plus.

Ce n’est pas une contrainte, les deux sont imbriqués, et on n’arrivera pas à atteindre nos objectifs économiques sans avoir nos objectifs sociétaux et à l’inverse nous n’arriverons pas à atteindre nos objectifs sociétaux si l’on n’a pas cette viabilité économique. Dès le départ, nous avons construit cela comme un modèle hybride d’entreprise sociale.

Quand tu parles d’innovation, à quel type d’innovation te réfères-tu ?

L’innovation sociale ou plutôt l’innovation technologique ? Finalement, il me semble que vous utilisez une technologie qu’existait déjà…

Oui, tout à fait ! Nous essayons d’utiliser des technologies qui sont déjà existantes, mais peu utilisées, pour la diffuser. Finalement, nous sommes plus dans l’innovation sociale parce qu’on permet de faciliter la prise de note collaborative. On se spécialise sur un cas d’usage très précis. On construit la couche d’apprentissage social au-dessus d’une technologie déjà existante.

On est convaincu que la plupart de temps les outils sont importants, mais ce qui est encore plus important c’est la couche sociale au-dessus. L’exemple le plus probant

APPENDIX

c’est Wikipedia : la technologie des wikis existait avant Wikipedia, mais ce qu’a fait Wikipedia, c’est construire la plateforme au-dessus des wikis avec l’impact que l’on connaît aujourd’hui. Pour nous, c’est une très bonne inspiration.

Quand j’étais petit, on parlait beaucoup d’un système qui allait révolutionner le système des encyclopédies et des savoirs et qui s’appelait Encarta. C’était une encyclopédie classique, qui a ensuite été rachetée par Microsoft, mais qui changeait beaucoup le format : il y avait des vidéos, des photos, c’était sur des CD-Roms. Donc, à l’époque, c’était assez innovant. Tout le monde disait que cela allait changer notre manière d’accéder au savoir de manière incroyable.

Quelques années plus tard, il y a eu un monsieur qui s’appelait Jimmy Wales qui voulait faire un pari différent.

Il a fait le pari que cette encyclopédie ne serait pas créée par une personne, par dix personnes, par cent personnes mais qu’elle pourrait être créée par n’importe qui. Il a donc commencé son système et au départ tout le monde lui disait qu’il était fou, puisqu’il y avait Encarta en face, que le contenu créé par les utilisateurs ne serait jamais aussi bon, jamais aussi bien formaté. Qu’il y aurait des erreurs, que cela ne marchera pas.

C’est assez marrant, si à l’époque, on avait mis Wikipedia face à Encarta auprès des financeurs, cela aurait été un massacre énorme. Alors qu’aujourd’hui, Encarta n’existe plus et Wikipedia fait des milliards de pages vues tous les jours. Nous, c’est le même mouvement qu’on suit sur l’éducation.

Aujourd’hui, il existe des systèmes qui s’appelle des MOOCs (massive open online courses), qui sont surtout promus par de grosses universités américaines. L’idée est tout simplement de convertir le système classique des universités en cours en ligne. Sauf que lorsqu’un professeur donne un cours, l’objectif est de le donner à 100 000 personnes. C’est génial, cela change beaucoup de choses, mais on se rend compte, qu’en fait, ces 100 000 personnes à la fin ne sont plus que 4 000 qui finissent le programme. Il y a 96 000 personnes perdues en cours de route ! Et on redécouvre la limite liée au nombre de personnes.

Le même message est diffusé à des milliers de personnes alors que cela fait 500 ans qu’on a compris, dans les universités physiques, qu’on ne pouvait pas diffuser le même message à tout le monde ; parce que tout le monde n’est pas au même stade d’apprentissage et qu’il y a des besoins de pouvoir poser des questions, d’interagir. On a l’impression que sur Internet, on n’a pas encore compris

cela. Il y a des gens qui construisent des MOOCs, nous on suit une logique très différente.

À propos des MOOCs justement… Il me semble que des élèves les utilisant recourent à Unishared pour les rendre plus interactifs. Peux-tu nous en parler ?

Oui, dès le départ, on a eu des gens qui prenaient leurs cours en ligne, sur ces MOOCs, donc globalement en regardant les vidéos, même s’il commence à y avoir un petit peu d’interactivité. Ils avaient le besoin de prendre des notes en collaboratif sur Unishared, justement pour avoir cette partie « je n’apprends pas tout seul devant mon écran, mais je me connecte à des gens, je parle à des gens, je pose des questions à des gens… ».

Par exemple, on a eu un cours (qui s’appelle « Gamification ») qui avait été donné sur Coursera par la Wharton School of Economics et qui était très populaire sur la plateforme. On est en train de réfléchir justement sur la meilleure manière d’améliorer cette expérience avec de la vidéo. On a fait un test pour avoir sur la même page une vidéo de cours, ou des slides, ou pourquoi pas, juste la voix du professeur et de l’autre côté de la page le document de prise de note collaborative d’Unishared ; et en bas, tout un panel d’interactions pour permettre de poser les questions, pour vraiment avoir cet aspect social de l’apprentissage. Cela a très bien fonctionné.

Peut-être allons-nous avancer dans ce sens-là, même si nous sommes convaincus que l’apprentissage doit être hybride et qu’il ne pourra pas être complètement online. Il devra intégrer des groupes de travail physique, des salles de classe. À terme, c’est un peu comme avec le e-commerce. J’ai un peu travaillé pour eBay, et à l’époque le CEO d’eBay avait choqué tout le monde en disant « e-commerce is dead ».

Ce qu’il voulait dire, c’est qu’aujourd’hui il n’y a plus de e-commerce ; il y a surtout du commerce hybride, entre le physique et en ligne. Les gens, quand ils achètent un produit, ils vont d’abord voir en ligne et ensuite acheter le produit dans un magasin physique, ou l’inverse. Il n’y a plus de processus qui soit uniquement physique ou uniquement en ligne. Surtout avec le mobile, la frontière entre les deux fusionne.

Et c’est la même chose pour l’apprentissage. Cela ne fait plus sens de se dire qu’on va apprendre tout dans une salle de classe ou que l’on va apprendre tout en ligne ; il faut les deux. Il faut qu’on puisse apprendre à la fois en ligne et en hybride. .55

APPENDIX

On s’est amusé à inventer une nouvelle notion en partant des MOOCs, Dans « massive open online courses » on a gardé le « massive » parce qu’on est convaincu qu’il y a une demande énorme d’apprentissage. Il faut trouver quelque chose de « scalable », pour diffuser l’apprentissage auprès d’un maximum de monde. C’est toujours ouvert, « open », parce qu’on a besoin de démocratiser justement. Il y a plein de gens qui n’ont pas accès à l’éducation ; il faut leur donner cet accès-là, grâce à l’ouverture. Mais ce n’est plus « online », parce que cela doit être hybride c’est-à-dire à la fois en présentiel et en ligne.

Unishared est également utilisé pour les groupes de travail, pour les réunions. Il y a aussi des mémoires qui s’écrivent sur Unishared. On est alors plus dans un mode de production…

Ce deuxième O se transforme en « collaborative ». Ce qui fait qu’on passe de cette notion de MOOC, qui est finalement une traduction de l’université qu’on essaye de prendre telle quelle est, pour la diffuser à 100 000 personnes, pour étendre la classe à 100 000 personnes.

On passe donc de cette notion de MOOC à celle des MOCCs : « massive open collaborative course » ! Cela permet la différence et c’est finalement la direction que prennent pas mal de structures qui faisaient avant les MOOCs et qui prennent de plus en plus conscience de l’importance de la collaboration et des interactions. Donc, je pense que nous sommes en train de nous diriger vers ces MOCCs.

Nous avançons en mode agile avec nos utilisateurs. On leur demande beaucoup de feedback. On est à leur écoute et on essaie tout simplement d’améliorer le produit progressivement et de toucher de plus en plus de personnes.

Nous allons bientôt faire un programme aux Etats-Unis, dans trois semaines : il va nous permettre d’avoir une vision sur la manière dont nos utilisateurs américains se servent de cet outil. Cela sera intéressant pour nous : on sera à 500 mètres de Stanford University ! Cela va nous permettra de voir un peu comment ils appréhendent l’outil ; de voir s’il y a des pratiques différentes là-bas.

Et donc, d’après toi, ce n’est pas la fin de la salle de classe ?

Non, pas du tout.

Vois-tu des détournements d’usage d’Unishared ? De nouvelles façons de s’en servir ?

Oui, tout à fait ! (…) On voit notamment des utilisations pour des conférences. On avait créé une page spéciale pour un évènement qui s’appelle « Convergences », qui était un cycle de conférences. Pendant deux jours, nous avons eu plus de 70 pages de notes prises de manière collaborative sur l’événement, ce qui a permis notamment de faire des comptes-rendus de toutes les conférences, alimentées directement par les participants.

Finalement, on s’est rendu compte que, dès qu’il y avait des phases d’apprentissage en physique, la prise de note collaborative permettait de créer automatiquement l’équivalent virtuel. Dans toutes les situations physiques, dans lesquelles on apprend, il y a une valeur à transmettre cela en ligne, une valeur à passer du mode solo au mode collaboratif. Et il y a une valeur à créer justement cet équivalent virtuel sur Unishared parce que cela prend le physique et que cela ouvre toutes les opportunités du virtuel.

56.

Il y a beaucoup d’usages différents possibles, parce que finalement la pratique de prise de notes est très répandue.

On prend des notes tout le temps, partout, tous les jours.

Dès qu’il y a de la prise de notes, c’est applicable.

Quels sont les futurs développements envisagés par Unishared ?

Depuis le début, nous avons construit un produit global qui aide les communautés locales. C’est pour cela qu’il est finalement très important pour nous de nous déplacer régulièrement pour avoir de nouvelles perspectives, pour voir comment les usages peuvent changer d’un pays à l’autre, pour continuer à apprendre. Je pense que ceux qui apprennent, en plus de nos utilisateurs, c’est surtout nous ! Le fait de voir comment cela se passe ailleurs, va beaucoup alimenter cet apprentissage là.

Finalement, nous avons surtout parlé de l’enseignement supérieur. Avez-vous des retours des lycées, des collèges ?

Oui, cela commence. Nous avons une professeure de collège qui a utilisé Unishared avec ses élèves dans une salle informatique. Cela dépend des pays. En France, on se heurte encore au faible taux d’équipement informatique des lycéens qui n’ont pas d’ordinateurs en classe. Mais aux Etats-Unis c’est différent ; nous avons hâte de voir comment cela peut se passer là-bas dans les lycées.

Nous pensons que l’outil est aussi très adaptable et cela ouvre de nouvelles perspectives. Quand on pense qu’au lycée, le programme est commun à tout le monde, cela permet très vite de parcourir l’essentiel du programme en collaboratif et de créer, pourquoi pas ?, de nouvelles tâches dans une salle de classe. L’objectif n’est plus uniquement de prendre des notes, de noter ce savoir qui est finalement un peu le même partout, mais plutôt de l’augmenter, de le questionner, d’interagir.

APPENDIX

Aux Etats-Unis, on a surtout tout un mouvement de « flipped classroom ». Avant, on avait surtout le cours magistral dans la salle de classe et le travail personnel, les interactions en dehors de la salle de classe. Aujourd’hui, il y a de plus en plus de professeurs qui se rendent compte que cela vaudrait le coup de faire l’inverse : tout ce qui est magistral, passation de savoirs, se ferait en ligne, via la vidéo, des documents ou des articles donc en dehors de la salle de classe. Ainsi, on réserve la salle de classe plutôt pour des interactions, pour des questionnements, pour des travaux concrets, des ateliers etc. Au lycée, on pourrait imaginer la même chose : un document de prise de note collaborative fait avec plusieurs élèves d’un même niveau et qui pourrait être fait en dehors de la salle de classe. La classe serait alors réservée aux interactions, aux questionnements, aux approfondissements.

Ces mentors, sont-ils des professeurs professionnels ?

Je pense qu’il faut avancer petit à petit, mais on peut avancer progressivement vers un système qui évolue un peu. Je ferai bientôt partie d’un groupe de travail mené par Fleur Pellerin sur la manière de faire évoluer l’éducation et le numérique. Cela sera intéressant de voir ce qui en ressort.

Derrière chaque création d’entreprise se cache une histoire. Quelles sont les motivations qui vous ont amené à créer LearningShelter ?

Entretien avec Charles Lefebvre du Preÿ de LearningShelter (21 décembre 2012)

Pourrais-tu m’expliquer ce qu’est LearningShelter ?

LearningShelter est un site Internet qui permet d’apprendre ce que l’on veut, qui permet d’apprendre tout par vidéo-bulle avec un mentor. La vidéo-bulle est un peu comme un appel sur Skype avec des fonctionnalités avancées qui sont le partage d’écran, la prise de notes à deux, l’édition collaborative de document. À titre d’exemple, quand je donne un cours de mathématiques, cela me permet de partager l’exercice ; ou quand Grégoire donne un cours d’informatique, cela lui permet de partager son écran pour montrer à l’élève ce qu’il en train de coder et son élève peut également partager son écran pour lui montrer ce qu’il est en train de coder.

Qu’est-ce qu’un mentor ?

Un mentor est un professeur particulier qui fait des cours un à un. Ce mentor accompagne l’élève pour lui faire acquérir une autonomie dans la matière. Il ne s’agit pas seulement d’un cours en « one-shot », il s’agit vraiment de cours pour maîtriser un savoir ou une compétence, que ce soit un cours de Photoshop, de mathématiques ou encore de programmation informatique.

Non, on a été beaucoup influencé par ce qu’on appelle l’éducation « peer-to-peer ». Les mentors sont des gens qui ont à la fois une expertise, une compétence mais qui ont aussi vraiment envie d’enseigner. Ils ont envie d’enseigner pour plusieurs raisons : pour une raison financière parce que cela leur rapporte un peu d’argent mais aussi parce qu’ils aiment vraiment la matière et qu’ils ont envie de la partager. Pour vous donner un exemple, les mentors qu’on a en design, la plupart du temps ; ce sont des étudiants en fin de cursus en école de design qui sont aussi designers freelance. Ils apportent à leurs élèves, à la fois une expertise technique, mais aussi une expérience, le retour terrain qu’ils ont, ce qui est un vrai plus.

On a eu l’idée il y a un an et demi, quand on était en deuxième année d’école ; nous étions en année de césure.

Alexandre et moi donnions beaucoup de cours à l’époque, et on a commencé à donner des cours en ligne, par Skype, parce qu’on avait des élèves qui habitaient à Autun ou à Annecy, et qui souhaitaient qu’on leur donne des cours.

Comme nous habitions à Paris, c’était compliqué ! On a donc commencé à donner nos cours par Skype et on s’est dit qu’il fallait faire quelque chose avec ça parce que c’était intéressant ; et puis on n’était pas les seuls à le faire. À côté de cela, nous étions un peu frustrés d’être en école de commerce et de ne pas pouvoir apprendre à coder, de ne pas pouvoir apprendre pleines de choses, de ne pas avoir le choix sur notre éducation, sur ce qu’on voulait apprendre. C’est de cela que venait notre envie de créer un site internet qui reprenait à la fois ce qu’on avait eu, c’est-à-dire le cours particulier en « one-to-one » en ligne, mais qui permettrait aussi d’ouvrir l’éducation pour donner la possibilité aux gens de choisir ce qu’ils veulent apprendre.

Aujourd’hui, nous travaillons sur ce projet à plein temps depuis 6 mois (…) avec l’idée de changer un peu l’éducation, pour la rendre plus ouverte. Il y a eu beaucoup de maturation entre l’idée initiale qu’on a eue il y a un an et demi et le projet actuel.

On a lu ce qu’écrivaient des gens comme Sir Ken Robinson, François Taddeï, et Marc Bray. Cela nous a donné envie aussi de contribuer à ouvrir l’éducation, à la rendre plus libre. On a l’impression de ne pas avoir souvent le choix sur ce qu’on veut apprendre. .57

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Pour ma part, je suis des cours de philosophie en ligne donnés par l’Université de Nanterre, mais ce n’est pas ouvert. J’ai dû m’inscrire, me déplacer à trois reprises à la faculté de Nanterre pour mon inscription. J’ai dû donner tous les papiers administratifs, passer devant un comité qui a validé le fait que je pouvais entrer directement au niveau licence. Bref, c’était compliqué et très lourd administrativement. Même si c’est en ligne, ce n’est pas encore ouvert. Je ne pouvais pas y accéder comme ça, librement, depuis chez moi.

Enseignez-vous toutes les disciplines ?

C’est un peu l’objectif à terme. Pour le moment, on a déjà un choix assez large de matières, qui vont des matières académiques telles que les mathématiques, la physique, la chimie, la médicine pour la préparation au concours jusqu’à des cours de montage vidéo, de représentation architecturale, de tous les logiciels de DJ, Photoshop, Illustrator, AfterEffect, mais aussi HTML6 ou encore de la programmation informatique. Le but c’est vraiment d’avoir tous les sujets à terme. Nous avons, par exemple, ouvert la catégorie « droit » il y a peu de temps.

On aimerait bien ouvrir la catégorie « musique », avec des gens qui donnent des cours de guitare par exemple.

Parles-tu du « learning by teaching » ?

Oui, c’est un peu ça. Je le vois bien avec les mathématiques. Je sais qu’il y a des concepts de mathématiques que je maîtrise mieux maintenant parce que je les ai appris à des élèves en Terminal. L’effort de mise en perspective, de contextualisation, permet de mieux maîtriser sa propre matière.

Combien d’utilisateurs avez-vous actuellement ?

Je n’ai pas les dernières statistiques. Cela ne fait qu’un mois et demi que le site Internet a été lancé. Le premier mois, nous avons eu une centaine de cours donnés avec environ 150-200 utilisateurs inscrits. Et il y a eu 50 classes créées par des mentors. C’était un bon bilan pour le premier mois.

Votre service s’adresse-t-il à tout le monde ?

Comptez-vous travailler avec des universités, des écoles, des entreprises ?

Oui, nous avons des profils d’élèves qui sont très différents : cela va de l’élève du lycée qui veut passer son bac à l’étudiant en école de commerce qui a envie d’apprendre à coder pour créer son propre site internet ou à utiliser Photoshop, jusqu’au type qui a 55 ans et qui a envie de lancer son propre site Internet mais qui ne connaît pas grande chose et qui veut apprendre à utiliser Prestashop.

On a aussi une mère de famille qui habite en Savoie et qui veut prendre des cours.

Pour l’instant, nous avons lancé le site en français, parce que c’était trop compliqué de le lancer en anglais et parce qu’il faudrait alors gérer différents fuseaux horaires.

Cependant, nous avons déjà eu des gens qui ont pris des cours alors qu’ils étaient à Tahiti, à Munich, à Milan. On ne s’attendait pas à cela du fait que le site est en français.

Pourquoi pas. Mais on n’a pas prévu ça dans un premier temps, puisque cela nous semble compliqué. Il faut les démarcher, etc. (…) Maintenant, avec l’ESCP Europe, nous faisons désormais partie de leur comité de pilotage pour les questions d’éducation en ligne. (…) Donc, pour l’instant ce n’est pas d’actualité.

Quel est le modèle économique de LearningShelter ?

Il est simple : sur les cours payants, on prend 10% de plus que ce que demande le professeur. Les prix des cours sont variables, mais en moyenne le prix d’un cours se situe entre 15 et 25 euros. On laisse nos mentors choisir le prix qu’ils veulent mettre. Globalement, ces prix sont moins chers que les prix qu’on trouve sur le marché (…).

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Bien sûr, la rétribution financière les intéresse, surtout pour les étudiants qui donnent des cours pour arrondir leur fin de mois. Ils sont contents de gagner un peu d’argent, mais en même temps, ils ne demandent pas très cher (…). Ils font cela aussi parce qu’ils aiment vraiment ce qu’ils font. Il y a aussi cette idée, que lorsqu’on enseigne, on maîtrise mieux sa matière.

Quelles sont les motivations des mentors pour donner des cours ?

Penses-tu que le service proposé par LearningShelter peut avoir un impact, à terme, sur la façon d’apprendre ?

L’idée de LearningShelter c’est de ne pas mener l’éducation par l’angoisse des notes mais plutôt par la curiosité et de l’ouvrir. Comme je le te disais tout à l’heure, un élève qui est actuellement au collège ou au lycée qui a envie d’apprendre à coder, le plus souvent, il ne pourra pas le faire. C’est la même chose pour d’autres logiciels ou des langues rares ; ces cours ne sont pas proposés.

L’idée c’est vraiment d’ouvrir l’éducation. Même dans des matières plus classiques, comme les mathématiques ou la physique, nous permettons une certaine spécialisation de l’éducation. Il y a des gens qui ont besoin de revenir sur des concepts, qui ne comprennent pas forcement tout, tout de suite (…). Les gens qui sont dans une même classe, la seule chose qu’ils ont en commun c’est leur âge.

Du coup, il peut y en avoir un qui bloque sur les maths, alors qu’il pouvait très bien comprendre, il n’est pas plus

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bête que les autres. Parfois, ils ont juste besoin qu’on leur réexplique, qu’on leur explique cela différemment, qu’on prenne un petit peu le temps avec eux.

plusieurs personnes qui ont essayé de faire ce qu’on fait et qui se sont cassés les dents à cause de cette barrière technologique. C’était une vraie barrière.

Finalement, ne s’agit-il pas d’humaniser l’éducation grâce aux nouvelles technologies ?

Maintenant il y a cette application HangOut, et puis il y en a d’autres qui sont en train d’émerger. Il est vrai que nous avons bénéficié de cela. Notre apport n’est pas du tout au niveau technologique, mais nous apportons une vision.

Oui, il s’agit de personnalisation : il s’agit de mettre des gens en relation pour personnaliser l’éducation. On permet à un lycéen d’une petite ville de province, qui n’a personne autour de lui qui a fait de hautes études, de rencontrer quelqu’un qui a fait une grande école ou un designer professionnel ou encore un développeur confirmé qui va lui apprendre à encoder un site web. C’est vraiment l’idée de personnalisation qui nous tient à cœur.

Quel est le retour le plus positif que vous avez eu jusqu’ici ?

Maintenant les gens peuvent mettre un commentaire après un cours, pour recommander le mentor. On a eu de très bons commentaires. (…)

Comment mesurez-vous l’impact du service proposé ?

Pour l’instant, c’est nous qui faisons le suivi. C’est possible parce qu’on n’a pas encore atteint une taille critique.

Mais il s’agit d’une question qui va se poser à l’avenir.

C’est important.

En quoi LearningShelter apporte-il quelque chose à l’économie collaborative ?

Cela dépend de ce que l’on entend par l’économie collaborative. J’ai l’impression qu’il s’agit d’un terme plutôt général et qui comprend beaucoup de réalités. Ce que j’aime bien dans l’économie collaborative, c’est de décentraliser un peu l’économie. Les gens s’organisent ensemble et c’est facilité par les nouvelles technologies pour échanger, acheter… faire tout ce que permet l’économie.

Notre service est participatif puisqu’on est sur l’éducation « peer-to-peer ». On permet aux gens, qui n’ont pas une réputation particulière ou une notoriété, de donner des cours. Ses cours vont intéresser des gens, qui n’ont pas forcément envie de prendre un cours avec une star, mais qui souhaitent être suivi.

Quelle technologie utilisez-vous ? Votre service est-il basé sur une innovation technologique ou sur une innovation sociale ?

On utilise Google HangOut pour ouvrir une vidéo-bulle qui permet de réunir deux personnes. (…) Notre service est possible grâce à cette nouvelle technologie. Il y a eu

Les cours particuliers ont toujours existé. Nous nous sommes aussi inspirés de SkillShare qui donne des cours collectifs aux Etats-Unis et qui a revisité ces cours.

Ce qu’on a essayé de faire, c’était de viser un marché qui existe déjà en France, celui des cours particuliers, en facilitant cet usage ancien. On essaie aussi de l’élargir à d’autres activités. Au-delà des matières académiques, on souhaite permettre l’acquisition de nouvelles compétences.

La vraie innovation d’usage c’est de pouvoir mettre en relation quelqu’un qui habite à Caen avec un élève à Paris ou un professeur de Toulouse avec quelqu’un de New York. (…) Cela peut changer la vie de certaines personnes.

Quels sont les futurs développements que vous envisagez ?

C’est un peu difficile de répondre à cette question, puisqu’on n’existe seulement depuis un mois et demi.

Parmi les pistes possibles, on aimerait proposer des cours collectifs mais cela nécessiterait d’avoir un site un peu différent. On a aussi réfléchi à l’enregistrement des cours.

Aujourd’hui, la vidéo-bulle n’est pas enregistré ; souvent l’élève prend des notes mais il garde aussi le document créé de manière collaborative, le GoogleDoc. Quand il s’agit d’un exercice de codage, il garde le code. Notre objectif n’est pas de remplacer des tutoriaux en ligne ou l’école, on se voit vraiment comme un complément. (…)

Par rapport aux MOOCs qui se développent aux EtatsUnis, c’est vraiment l’interactivité qu’on propose en plus.

Nous, on croit à ces micro-interactions entre professeurs et élèves pour plusieurs raisons. Par exemple, personnellement, les supers profs que j’ai eus pendant ma scolarité sont ceux qui connaissaient mon prénom. Ce sont ces profs-là qui m’ont marqué. C’est aussi pour cela qu’on voulait appeler nos professeurs « mentors ». Il y avait cette idée, qui remonte dans le temps, du mentor qui s’occupe de son élève et qui va vraiment lui apporter quelque chose, même au-delà des compétences apportées. Il y a tout un retour d’expériences. .59

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Ces micro-activités, c’est vraiment ce qu’on apporte en plus des MOOCs. Parce que j’ai du mal à voir en quoi les MOOCs sont une innovation.

Vous dites que vous avez eu des expériences différentes par rapport à la façon d’apprendre. Pourriez-vous détailler un peu ce que vous entendez par là ?

Il est vrai que c’est impressionnant, parce que le but de ces universités, c’est de pouvoir avoir un amphi d’un million de gens. C’est super ! Mais cela reste un amphi avec tous les défauts qu’on trouve en amphi, avec tout ce qui ne va pas. Evidemment, cela permet la massification, mais ce n’est pas très intéressant. Cela permet aussi une meilleure visibilité pour les universités, pour les étudiants, c’est l’accès gratuit aux cours. Mais il n’est pas garanti que des plateformes comme Coursera restent gratuites.

Après, en termes d’apprentissage, il y a beaucoup de gens qui ont commencé à suivre des cours sur Coursera et qui n’ont pas fini ; d’autres sur Khan Academy et qui ne sont pas allés jusqu’au bout. Je pense vraiment qu’on apprend mieux avec de l’interaction, qu’il est important de permettre ces interactions.

Oui, en prépa, par exemple, c’est quelque chose de très intense, des petites classes où on travaille beaucoup ; on est vraiment dans l’univers des idées, des bouquins, etc.

J’aimais cela et quand je suis allé en fac d’histoire, j’ai continué ainsi. Puis, j’ai fait un mastère : j’ai commencé à faire de la recherche, mais au bout d’un moment, j’ai un peu saturé sur le fait que c’était un peu trop vertical.

Il y a un prof, un cours et à la fin il faut ressortir ce que l’on a appris. Mais lorsqu’on fait de la recherche, on est très seul et moi j’avais besoin d’avoir quelque chose de plus vivant, j’avais besoin de plus en contact avec des gens, de faire des choses à plusieurs, de travailler en équipe, toutes ces choses-là. Mon frère, qui était en école de commerce, me racontait toutes ses expériences que je trouvais intéressantes. En arrivant à HEC, j’ai vu qu’on apprenait de façon complètement différente parce qu’on ne faisait quasiment que des travaux en groupe. En revanche, intellectuellement, c’est quand même nettement moins riche et stimulant. Donc, il y a du bon et du moins bon dans les deux. Je trouvais quand même qu’il y avait un gros contraste et il me semble qu’il y a un juste milieu à trouver dans tout cela. C’est-à-dire quelque chose à la fois de stimulant intellectuellement, mais aussi enrichissant personnellement, dynamique et convivial ; des choses qui ne sont pas vraiment des valeurs présentes dans l’enseignement d’aujourd’hui.

Entretien avec Marc-Arthur Gauthey de CupofTeach (7 janvier 2013)

Pouvez-vous présenter CupofTeach ?

Oui, bien sûr ! CupofTeach est une place de marché de cours donnés par des experts à des particuliers, près de chez eux, en présentiel, dans la vraie vie. Nous l’avons lancé en juin 2012 et aujourd’hui, il y a 4 000 inscrits sur la plateforme, on a donné plus de 3 000 heures de cours et il y a environ 300 professeurs référencés, sachant que, pour l’instant, nous ne sommes présents qu’à Paris.

Derrière chaque création d’entreprise se cache une histoire. Quelles sont les motivations qui vous ont amené à créer CupofTeach ?

J’ai toujours voulu devenir prof. J’ai fait des études d’histoire et je voulais devenir prof d’histoire. Finalement, cela ne s’est pas passé ainsi car j’ai fait une école de commerce par la suite, mais cela m’est resté en peu en tête.

En vivant des façons d’apprendre très différentes - que ça soit en prépa, à la fac, en école de commerce ou dans le cadre de mon plaisir personnel - je me suis rendu compte qu’il y avait sûrement des choses à faire, à changer, à imaginer. C’est un peu comme ça que j’ai eu l’idée de CupofTeach avec Mathieu Séguin ; on s’est dit que tous les savoirs du monde sont repartis autour de nous et que si nous les mettions en commun, on pourrait créer quelque chose de plus grand que n’importe quelle université.

60.

Donc l’objectif de CupofTeach est de répondre à ces différents besoins en même temps ?

Oui c’est ça et j’espère qu’on y arrive. En tout cas, c’est ce qu’on essaie de faire. L’objectif de CupofTeach c’est déjà de permettre à chacun d’apprendre ce dont il a envie, quand il en a envie ; ça c’est le premier point. Le deuxième point, c’est de donner une dimension à la fois conviviale mais aussi pratique, économique et qui soit sympa !

C’est donc une question de choix, c’est-àdire de réintroduire le choix de ce qu’on va apprendre ?

L’idée est simplement qu’on a besoin d’apprendre des choses toute sa vie, pour mille et une raisons : par plaisir, par besoin, pour se former, pour changer de vie, pour s’améliorer professionnellement. Il y a des solutions qui existent qui sont tout simplement l’école, la faculté, les ateliers que l’on peut trouver dans le milieu associatif ou dans les instituts. Il y a aussi la formation professionnelle ; mais tout cela n’est pas forcément toujours bien adapté pour pleins de raisons. Pour des raisons de prix, pour des raisons d’engagement souvent, parce que ce sont

APPENDIX

souvent des programmes assez contraignants en termes de temps. La formation professionnelle par exemple, c’est hyper procédurier. Il y a toutes ces choses-là et notre idée était de répondre à des besoins plus précis : « j’ai besoin d’apprendre quelque chose, je vais sur CupofTeach. Je trouve ce dont j’ai besoin, je clique, je m’inscris ». Et c’est réglé ! On en parle plus ! « Avec 2-3 heures de cours, je vais apprendre ce dont j’ai besoin ! » Voilà l’idée.

Quel est le modèle économique de CupofTeach?

On prend des commissions sur les paiements. La personne qui veut donner un cours s’inscrit sur le site, propose un cours avec une date, un nombre de participants, un lieu et un prix. Les participants vont pouvoir s’inscrire en ligne et paye et nous prenons une commission sur le paiement. Normalement, ce sont des cours collectifs avec, en moyenne, 8 participants.

Les professeurs sont des professionnels ou s’agit-il de personnes qui partagent leur passion ?

Globalement, ce sont des particuliers qui ont une vraie expertise, qui sont des experts de leur secteur et c’est ce qu’il fait leur légitimité.

Travaillez-vous avec des universités, des écoles, des entreprises ?

Avec rien de tout cela ! C’est de particulier à particulier.

On ne travaille pas avec les écoles parce que c’est déjà complexe de leur faire comprendre ce qu’on fait et surtout parce qu’on s’est construit contre le système traditionnel de l’éducation et de la formation. Nous sommes une alternative à ce système. Demain, avec CupofTeach, quelqu’un pourra quasiment élaborer sa formation sur mesure pour à peu près dix fois moins cher qu’ailleurs. Le problème qu’on peut avoir en entreprise, c’est que n’étant pas maître du « sourcing » des professeurs (puisque nous sommes complètement ouverts), nous ne garantissons pas la qualité. Cependant, on garantit une modération, on garantit qu’on va tout vérifier, mais on ne va pas recruter des professeurs. Donc vis-à-vis des entreprises c’est trop compliqué pour l’instant.

Quand vous dites que vous allez tout vérifier, cela veut dire que votre rôle est celui d’un médiateur ?

On est un tiers de confiance. On relit tout, on ne met en ligne que les annonces qui nous paraissent pertinentes, rédigées correctement, qui s’inscrivent vraiment dans ce qu’on cherche à créer… Et c’est loin d’être toujours le cas ! On échange beaucoup avec les gens, on fait la modération et c’est ce qui garantit globalement la qualité des cours.

Etes-vous présents sur toutes les disciplines ? À l’origine oui, on était présent sur tout. En fait, on s’oriente maintenant, de plus en plus, vers des choses plus qualifiantes et professionnalisantes au détriment de tout ce qui est de l’ordre du loisir. Car le loisir intéresse finalement beaucoup moins. On va donc plutôt proposer d’apprendre à « créer un site internet avec wordpress » ou « lire un bilan comptable » et arrêter les enseignements du type Cours de cuisine, Cours de couture, etc. qui marchaient beaucoup moins bien. On se demande si on ne va pas tout simplement les retirer du site pour se spécialiser sur le besoin plutôt que sur des choses de l’ordre du désir, qui relèvent du loisir.

Pensez-vous que le service proposé par CupofTeach aura un impact, à terme, sur la façon d’apprendre ?

Je l’espère, mais d’un autre côté, je me dis que ce n’est pas gagné. Ce que l’on fait est encore très marginal. On est dans une culture du diplôme et de la certification des compétences. Or, ce n’est pas ce que l’on propose ; ce n’est pas du tout ce vers quoi on s’oriente et donc cela va prendre du temps. Oui, à terme, je ne sais pas à quelle échéance, on regardera vraiment la compétence des gens et on se préoccupera moins de leur parcours ou du diplôme qu’ils ont. On verra qu’il y a tel poste disponible dans telle entreprise et qu’il faut telle compétence. On se débrouillera pour tester les gens en entretien, on verra ce qu’ils savent ou ne savent pas faire. On a déjà impacté un certain nombre de choses, mais malgré tout, cela reste quelque chose de très marginal. On en est parfaitement conscient. On est vraiment un moustique au milieu de tout cela. La réalité, c’est que je n’en sais rien.

Quand vous dites que vous avez déjà impacté sur un certain nombre de choses, vous pensez à quoi ?

Tout simplement aux gens que j’ai au téléphone qui ont participé à des ateliers et pour qui nous représentons une vraie solution. Ils sont contents d’avoir participé à ces ateliers ; ils sont contents d’avoir appris de nouvelles choses, dans un contexte qui est différent de tout ce qu’on peut trouver et pour un prix qui défie toute concurrence.

Pour eux, nous sommes un service vraiment utile. Reste à savoir si ces personnes sont assez nombreuses pour qu’il y ait un vrai marché. On est quand même une entreprise et une entreprise doit être viable !

Comment cela se passe ? Où ont lieu ces cours ? Chez le professeur, dans quels locaux ?

Globalement, je les incite à faire cela chez eux. Ils ne le font pas si nombreux que cela. Soit ils louent des salles,

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soit ils ont des salles à leur disposition sur leur lieu de travail ou dans une association. C’est assez varié, il n’y a pas de règle générale.

Et la fourchette des tarifs ?

C’est environ 40 euros pour un cours de 2 heures, avec un groupe de 8 personnes. On s’inscrit pour un seul cours, il n’y a pas de programme.

Quel est le retour le plus positif que vous avez eu jusqu’ici ?

J’ai pleins de retours positifs ! Il y a pas mal de gens qui sont en reconversion professionnelle qui vont sur le site.

On s’est beaucoup focalisé sur les créateurs d’entreprises, les gens qui veulent entreprendre, etc. Pour eux, c’est un apprentissage très ludique et pragmatique avec des enseignements dont ils vont pouvoir se servir immédiatement, dès le lendemain, dès leur sortie. Et, typiquement, ce ne sont pas des personnes qui auront besoin de prouver leur compétence à qui ce que soit, puisqu’ils apprennent avant tout pour eux, pour s’améliorer eux-mêmes ; ils n’ont pas besoin de se justifier. La personne qui est venue le plus a participé à 8 ou 9 ateliers. Cela veut dire que, pour cette personne, nous sommes vraiment une superbe solution. Elle fait son programme à la carte, en fonction de ce dont elle en a besoin.

C’est de l’apprentissage sur mesure ?

Exactement.

Avez-vous un retour sur le lien qui se crée entre les participants ?

De fait, il y a des retours, mais on ne cherche pas à les tracer. Dans la mesure où l’on fait du présentiel, ils se rencontrent et j’aime bien dire qu’on est un site de rencontre parce qu’au final, ce sont des gens qui sont passionnés par les mêmes « topics », qui ont les mêmes types de besoins, qui se retrouvent dans une salle… Et, par la force des choses, ils discutent, il y a des contacts qui se créent. Après, dans quelle mesure… je suis incapable de le dire.

De manière générale, comment mesurezvous la qualité du service proposé ?

Après chaque atelier, le participant reçoit un mél dans lequel il est invité à laisser un commentaire, à recommander ou non son professeur. Cela permet de créer un historique du professeur et ensuite de proposer au participant suivant, quand le professeur proposera une nouvelle date, d’avoir des avis critiques. Comme sur AlloCiné pour les films ou sur eBay avec les transactions.

C’est exactement la même chose !

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Côté professeur, avez-vous reçu des retours ?

Il y a plusieurs choses. Il y a des gens qui sont là juste pour partager leur passion. Il y en a d’autres qui sont là pour avoir des revenus complémentaires. D’autres encore sont là parce qu’ils sont experts dans un domaine et que le fait de donner des cours à la fois les crédibilise professionnellement : ça leur permet d’être identifiés comme professionnels par les participants, pour d’autres activités.

Est-ce que CupofTeach s’affiche comme étant collaboratif ? En quoi CupofTeach apporte-il quelque chose à l’économie collaborative ?

En fait, je ne connaissais pas l’économie collaborative avant de lancer CupofTeach. J’ai découvert tout cela en faisant. Le collaboratif n’était donc pas du tout un objectif Je pense que c’est une tendance qui est assez globale, une tendance de fonds. Je ne me suis pas dit : « Tiens, il y a l’économie collaborative, il faut qu’on aille dedans ». J’ai fait un truc et il se trouve qu’en analysant, cela rentre dans ce cadre. D’ailleurs, le cadre n’est pas vraiment défini. Ce que l’ont fait est collaboratif parce qu’on permet à des individus de rentrer en relation, de faire des choses ensemble et de s’affranchir de systèmes existants, tout simplement. Après, est-ce qu’on le revendique ? Pas plus que ça ! Evidemment, je participe à pas mal d’événements. Je fais beaucoup de choses avec Ouishare. D’abord parce qu’on s’entend bien et parce que j’adore ce qu’ils font. Mais, ce n’est pas un argument !

L’économie collaborative c’est très bien, mais il faut que le service soit utile. Sinon, cela n’a aucun intérêt !

D’après vous, votre service est-il innovant ?

Oui, bien sûr. On est une innovation sociale. Est-ce que c’est si innovant que ça ? Finalement, pas tant que ça parce qu’on met juste un site internet sur des choses qui se faisaient déjà de façon complètement informelle.

Quand vous allez à la boulangerie et que vous voyez les petits papillons proposant des cours, c’est exactement la même chose, sauf qu’il n’y a pas de plateforme pour le gérer. « Donne cours d’anglais », « Cours de soutien scolaire » etc., on est déjà là-dedans. Dans les années soixante-dix, il y a eu des réseaux d’échange solidaire qui se sont créés, qui participent de la même chose. Et puis, depuis toujours, avant même l’invention des écoles et des universités, la transmission des savoirs est la chose la plus élémentaire du monde. Au final, on a juste créé un usage web sur quelque chose qui existe depuis toujours.

Ce n’est pas révolutionnaire en fait ! Cela fluidifie, ça facilite, mais le fait de demander à quelqu’un qui est plus qualifié que soi, qui nous apprenne quelque chose, c’est la base de l’évolution humaine, de la transmission. C’est

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la chose la plus élémentaire de la condition humaine : apprendre et puis transmettre.

Quels sont les futurs développements que vous envisagez ?

On a plein d’idées. Pour l’instant, tout n’est pas bien fixé.

Il y a des fonctionnalités sur le site qui n’existent pas, qu’il faut qu’on ajoute. Se développer en dehors de Paris, cela ne va pas arriver tout de suite à mon avis : on a encore besoin de structurer ce qu’on fait. Pour l’instant, il faut continuer à avancer sur ce que l’on fait, bien comprendre, créer de la notoriété, créer l’usage, parce que malgré tout, ce n’est pas si facile.

Quelle est la plus grande difficulté que vous rencontrez ?

C’est tout simplement de remplir les cours ! Ce n’est pas trop difficile de trouver des professeurs. Ce qui est plus difficile, c’est qu’il y ait des participants. Parce qu’il ne faut pas se mettre le doigt dans l’œil : les gens, quand ils paient, ils veulent la garantie qu’ils en auront pour leur argent ! La dimension collaborative, finalement, les gens s’en foutent un petit peu. C’est pour cela qu’on ne le revendique pas plus que cela. C’est très bien en soi, ils trouvent ça chouette, mais ce n’est pas cela qui va les pousser à sortir leur carte bleue ! Ce qui va leur faire sortir leur carte bleue c’est : « est-ce que j’ai besoin de ça ? est-ce au bon prix ? », sachant qu’il y a beaucoup de variables, telles que la proximité, le prix, l’horaire et le besoin précis… Cela fait beaucoup d’éléments qui doivent répondre aux attentes avant d’acheter. En fait, ce n’est pas évident tous les jours !

Vous avez parlé de développements, de nouvelles fonctionnalités que vous voulez ajouter sur le site. Pouvez-vous préciser ?

Oui, par exemple une messagerie à l’intérieur du site, pouvoir ajouter plusieurs sessions pour un seul cours avec par exemple un cours en trois parties qui sera sur trois semaines, ce genre de choses.

NB : Commentaires donnés à la suite de l’interview, une fois que la caméra était éteinte, mais qui me semblait pertinents.

133. Selon Eric Ries, spécialiste de start-ups, les « vanity metrics » sont des chiffres liés au nombre de téléchargements, nombre d’utilisateurs inscrits, nombre de pages vues. Ces chiffres ne sont pas forcément en corrélation avec des chiffres plus importants, tels que le nombre d’utilisateurs actifs, le coût pour attirer de nouveaux clients et puis le chiffre d’affaires et les marges réalisées. Pour plus d’informations : http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/ vanity-metrics/, consulté le 9 janvier 2013.

Il y a beaucoup d’enthousiasme mais cela reste très difficile sur un plan business et ce malgré les « vanity metrics »133. Je donne beaucoup d’interviews, il y a beaucoup d’intérêt, mais pour l’instant il n’y a pas vraiment de marché et il n’y a pas beaucoup d’argent dans ce domaine. Aujourd’hui, les gens ne sont pas prêts à payer.

Leur objectif reste de dépenser le moins d’argent possible.

C’est en train de bouger, il y a d’autres initiatives qui se créent et qui vont dans le même sens. Ce qui est sûr, c’est qu’on ne va pas apprendre aujourd’hui comme dans dix ans. Cependant, entre-temps, il y a beaucoup de start-ups qui vont se casser les dents sur un marché qui n’existe pas encore.

Et d’après vous, le fait qu’il n’y ait pas de diplôme à la fin, est-ce un frein ?

Non, ce n’est pas un frein. Cependant, il y a beaucoup de gens qui nous demandent si cela rentre dans le DIF (Droit Individuel à la Formation) et la réponse c’est non, cela ne rentre pas dedans. En fait, les gens se sont habitués à ce que toutes leurs formations soient prises en charge financièrement par d’autres structures. Parfois, on nous dit qu’une formation à 50 euros sur CupofTeach est chère ! Mais c’est parce qu’ils le paient de leur poche ; ils oublient qu’une demi-journée de formation Photoshop c’est 600 euros ! Sauf que c’est l’employeur ou l’Etat, qui paye, donc ils ne trouvent pas ça cher. Alors qu’en réalité, ce qu’on propose n’est vraiment pas cher. Il y a donc ce contraste entre les deux : on propose quelque chose de moins cher mais qui ne rentre pas dans le cadre du DIF. On veut faire quelque chose de beaucoup plus simple, beaucoup plus facile d’accès.

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APPENDIX

134. http://www.goodreads.com/ quotes/46630-do-not-train-a-childto-learn-by-force-or

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

Plato134

64.