So let me add my words of welcome.
I'm sure that you have been welcomed more times than you can count.
But I must welcome you to Harvard, and your thinking
and your experiencing of what a Harvard life might be like.
But what I'd like to do is perhaps help us think a little bit differently
about the kinds of learning experiences that
is possible in a setting like Harvard, and also, in any setting
that one might imagine.
So you've probably heard a lot already about Harvard courses, concentrations,
things that you will experience here.
But what I would argue is that, without question,
while what you experience here will be absolutely
critical to your own learning, we now live in a world where what you learn
can indeed be something that can be a major contribution to what someone
else learns thousands of miles away from you.
So I'm a cell biologist.
But for a number of years, I've been very interested in this challenge
of personalized learning at scale.
And what is the role of a university like Harvard in doing this?
And how can this sort of challenge really change
how you think about your own time here at an institution like Harvard?
So as some of you may know, in 2012, 2011,
there was a lot of discussion around what we called MOOCs--
massive open online courses.
I suspect that some of you have even taken
some massive open online courses, perhaps from Harvard
as well, from HarvardX.
But one of the critical aspects of this is that Harvard partnered with MIT
to develop a platform called edX.
The notion was that we really wanted to share broadly
with the world learning content from top universities around the world,
but to make it much more accessible.
But what did we do?
We made courses.
Things that were 10 weeks long.
12 weeks long.
8 weeks long.
6 weeks long.
So we started off with a traditional notion of how you learn,
which is through a course.
So fast forward to now.
After I founded and built HarvardX, what we now realize
is that, in fact, courses are incredibly important.
Don't get me wrong.
You will have amazing courses here.
But there are other ways in which you can learn that give you more agency--
the ability to personalize in ways that perhaps we didn't have before.
So if we want to make personalized learning more available,
how do we do this?
What platform do we have?
Well, one of the critical aspects of edX compared to any other course platform
online is that we're open-source.
We're free.
So what that means is that there's something called Open edX.
And you see a bunch of numbers and words there.
Open edX and edX together now accounts for roughly 60 million learners
have engaged with the platform around the world.
There are more than 1,300 organizations, ranging from universities like Harvard
to Amnesty International, the World Economic Forum, Microsoft, Google.
A whole variety of organizations use the platform.
All countries have been touched and have access to the platform.
And so what this means is that we are currently
the largest open-source learning platform in the world.
So you're probably thinking, well, I'm trying
to figure out how I feel about Harvard.
I'm looking inside.
Well, what I'm going to try to urge you to do
is to, at the same time that you're looking inside, look outside as well,
and what you might be able to do in that regard.
So what we have done is that we are now building the next generation of the edX
platform--
once again free, once again open-source--
in a project that I'm hearing called LabXchange.
And what makes it next generation is that if you
think about the amount of learning content out there--
and I know that you have seen a lot of things--
literally tens of millions of individual assets have been created.
Probably hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent.
And what you have are a multitude of courses
that have videos, that have text, infographics, simulations, animations,
all of those things.
But all of them are locked in courses.
And so you need to decide, OK, if this is what I want,
I need to jump in, somehow find it, take what I want, and then jump back out.
Or, do I have time to spend 12 weeks doing something online?
What LabXchange has done is completely re-architect the core of the edX
platform so that now everything is combined into a common repository where
the course is no longer the unit size, but any learning
asset can be searched for, found, and utilized for your own purposes.
So that imagine this remarkable library, and a library where you now
get to pick what you want from it.
From a course at Harvard, a course at MIT, a course at Stanford,
or some kind of open educational resource from Amnesty International,
you can now bring it all together and put it together
in a sequence of your own choosing.
You can then add your own stuff to it.
So let's say you're interested in studying the impact of changing water
quality on a particular organism that's important to you,
or that's local to you.
You can take your own research, your own data that you might have gathered,
and you can add this to what we call a pathway.
Now, just putting stuff together doesn't tell a story.
We all know that learning depends on narrative,
and being able to tell a story.
So what the Xchange does is allow you to add sort of interstitial material
that lets you tell that story.
So this allows you to personalize learning experiences for yourself.
But this also allows you to personalize learning experiences for others.
And this is where the collective learning at scale occurs.
We are accustomed to sharing the products of our learning at best.
We share the outcome of what we have learned.
You want to make something, you want to do something, you put things together,
you figure it out--
I know you've all done this--
and you end up with something at the end.
It might be a physical product, an intellectual idea, a proposal-- any
of those things.
And if you're lucky, maybe you can share that with the world.
But how often do we get to share how we got there?
Learning is not just the product.
Learning is also the process.
So for the first time, what we'll be able to do
is take what you have brought together, take the narrative
that you have created to do something, and now you can share that.
We all stand on the shoulders of others, and we all hope--
I think-- that others will stand on our shoulders
some day to do something great.
Now, there's an opportunity to stand on how
others have learned to do something.
So it's both the process as well as what the outcome might be.
So what this allows us to do now for the first time is give a platform where
individuals that are interested in doing something--
to make a difference, to build challenges,
to address challenges in some way--
can now figure out what materials they need, utilize them, and share
not just the outcome of their ideas, but what they learned.
And that these pathways, as we call them,
are something that an individual can share,
a high school teacher can share with her class,
a college professor can share with his or her class.
It is now a situation where we have opened up and cracked open
the process of getting to where we need to go.
So the world is a better place now in many ways
than it was 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 10 years ago.
But challenges remain, as I don't need to tell you.
This is an opportunity for us to connect individuals across the world
to allow them to address challenges.
So right now, 50 undergraduates are working
with me building LabXchange, building content for LabXchange with another 30
graduate students.
This is one of those places where we are not only
thinking of students as recipients, but you're
agents in building the possibilities that we
hope to make available to the world.
And the notion is that, in time, every single student that
does a fantastic summer research project in biology, in physics, in visual art,
in government, in economics will have the opportunity
to put together how they got there, and to share what they created.
All tagged, all searchable, all findable so that someone can stand
on your shoulders when the time comes.
So these nodes, as we sometimes call them, are really important.
How do we connect these kinds of things?
And so one thing we've done is to try to create an example of what
is an innovation node that will take advantage of the platform
to share ideas and proposals for a better world with the world?
So there is a summer program that I run in Paris called The Biopolis.
It's focused on biology and social innovation.
And I won't go into all the details of what it does,
but what it does in part, in its simplest form,
is bring Harvard students and French students
from Sciences Po and the University of Paris
to use Paris as a laboratory to really interrogate ways in which life
in an urban setting can be better.
The first time I suggested this program, colleagues teased me and said,
you just want to spend a bunch of weeks in Paris.
[CHUCKLING]
I'm like, well, you try having 48 students with you.
That's not exactly a vacation-- even though it
is remarkably rewarding for everyone involved, I think.
But what is important here is that Paris is one of-- in some ways-- the most
contradictory cities.
It is a museum city.
It is beautiful.
It's a tourist destination.
It is also profoundly unequal.
It is in turmoil.
And I think now we understand, with the yellow vest movement,
just how in turmoil it is.
So it presents a setting that in some ways
is so contradictory and so complex.
What better laboratory do we have for students to work on making lives better
in a particular place?
The version of this in Boston will be launching quite soon
with both cities being together.
So we have done this now for four years.
There are close to 50 design plans.
And many of these plans-- so there are at least eight start-ups
have come from this.
And a multitude of awards for the proposals have happened.
One I will talk briefly about is BubbleBox.
BubbleBox was developed by a team of Harvard students and Sciences Po
students.
And what BubbleBox does is ask the question, in a city like Paris where
refugee encampments are not allowed, where they are all ad hoc,
where they have to move from place to place because they are frequently
displaced from where they set their tents up, how
do you deal with issues of hygiene, showering, laundry, all of that?
So the team came up with an idea to take a shipping container,
convert it into a truck that's entirely self-contained--
water tanks, solar panels, a shower loop, laundry.
All of it is contained in this box that is self-powered.
And instead of thinking about building a center where the refugees go,
this will go where the need is greatest.
How do you fund this?
You fund it by actually renting BubbleBox
to large music concerts in Europe and elsewhere.
So the government of Jordan is building BubbleBox now,
and the team won the Paris Talent 2024 international competition
for innovation.
So they won more than 30,000 euros to actually build this.
So BubbleBox is in process.
This is the kind of thing where you come here to make a difference,
to do something like this.
You have a way of connecting with others to make this happen,
and we really want to facilitate that for you as much as possible.
So the hope is that you will contribute to a growing core of resources
to really make the world a better place.
That The Biopolis focuses, for example, on the Sustainable Development Goals
from the United Nations, particularly good health and well-being, education
and partnerships.
But if you haven't looked at the SDGs before, I recommend you do,
because there are 17 of them that articulate key challenges
that the world needs to face.
We have a decade to meet these challenges.
The goal from the UN is to meet them by 2030 as best as we can.
And our hope is that more and more Harvard students
can partner with others around the world to build new ideas,
share what they're doing, and bring many more concerned minds into the dialogue
and into the build of what we need to make the world a better place.
So in the past, quite often, both individuals and organizations
competed and got ahead based on building the best silo.
If you had the best knowledge silo, you're more competitive.
You'll get ahead.
That is your advantage.
Those days are over.
We no longer live in a world of knowledge silos.
What is critical is the flow of knowledge.
It's not holding everything to yourself.
It's connecting with others where you are, but also across the world.
So our hope for all of you is that we will provide you with the opportunity
to not just be here, but to connect with the world
to do things that is not simply broadcasting to the world,
but is networking and really making a difference,
both in your own development, but also in solutions to make the world
a better place.
So welcome to Harvard once again, and thank you.
[APPLAUSE]