RANDAL PICKER: It's an awful time in the world,
but I think it's a really interesting time in education.
We've never had a moment like this one
where everyone at the same time has
jumped into this technology.
PRESENTER: The coronavirus is changing life
as we know it on a daily basis.
In COVID 2025, we'll explore how the pandemic
is rewriting our future.
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RANDAL PICKER: The ability to teach through the technology
is really powerful.
I can lecture.
I can call on students.
I can engage in Socratic dialogue.
I can replicate what I can do in the classroom.
Things that had been hard in the past, bringing in guest
speakers, being in multiple campuses at once,
the ability to tie those together
in a much more seamless fashion, I think that's exciting.
Distance shrinks in this medium, and I
think we're going to see it used throughout education
in the United States at precollege level, college,
professional level.
That's exciting across the planet.
There's definitely been a trend towards remote learning,
but I think that's been unevenly distributed.
This is going to give us a second set of tools.
We've had one way of doing things,
and now we're going to have an additional way of doing things.
And I think that's what's exciting.
It's just like you're a chef or something where,
all of a sudden, they've said, here's
an entirely new set of ingredients
you've never worked with.
To really make this technology work
and to do so on the widest-possible basis,
we need to have the physical infrastructure in place
to do that.
So I'm sure you've been reading stories
about what's happening at the precollege level, places where
they'd like to do online education,
and they don't have internet.
They don't have a device to do that.
We frame that as the "digital divide."
I'm teaching a class right now where
we're talking about Federal Communications Commission
broadband policy.
Broadband's so incredibly important.
So had this happened 10 years ago,
I think we wouldn't be doing anything like we are doing now.
When we built this country, we made a decision
to make the post office, which was
the most direct instantiation of the federal government.
We put it everywhere, even in rural towns
where there was no way that made financial sense because we
wanted everyone to be connected together
in this new, democratic enterprise that was the United
States.
Shrinking the digital divide is really about federal resources,
and the COVID crisis makes it clear how important this is.
Privacy issues are obviously important.
Now, as we bring this into our educational environment,
what am I allowed to screenshot?
Can I take pictures of students?
Are those educational records?
We have a federal privacy statute for student records
that controls all of that.
I got an email from a former student the other day
who asked a question about a particular situation
that he'd seen a story about.
If I want to use a camera to take a screenshot,
it's not as visible as it is in a classroom.
And so how we bring the right privacy
values to this new environment is something
we're going to work out.
Law evolves in conjunction with social evolution.
And as technology evolves and how we're using the technology
evolves, what comes around--
along with it?
I think we need to be careful with regard to this technology.
I think there will be a temptation
to think we can swap in technology
for the in-person experience that shows up in a classroom.
And I think that would be wrong.
You know, I'm staring into a camera right now.
To the idea that we could put this camera
in at the front of the classroom and we've
delivered an education, a rigorous education,
an education where you test and consider ideas, reject
some, accept others, I think it would be a mistake
to think we can simply swap one in and swap out the other.
We need to augment, not replace.
Five years from now, we'll be beyond the medical crisis,
beyond the economic crisis, and we'll
be able to take this technology in this period
of experimentation, and we will have figured out really
how to put it to use.
I think that means that we will be shrinking distances.
We will be able to bring people into a classroom
in an easy fashion.
The country, the world runs on ideas.
We need to get those ideas in in as many possible ways to as
many possible people.
I think this technology is going to help us do that.
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