ALBERTO MOTTA: Hello, I am Alberto.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: And I'm Isabella, and together we're thinking
about education all the time.
ALBERTO MOTTA: All the time.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Currently, our main research portfolio is on this.
We also teach as part of our daily jobs as
associate professors of economics at UNSW,
and we also have jointly a four-year-old together.
And let me tell you, raising a kid even at this very young
age makes it quite clear how important education is,
particularly with all the research out there highlighting
the role of education in all aspects of life and at every age.
So it's fair to say we're thinking about education all the time.
ALBERTO MOTTA: And in particular with our research,
we are focusing on higher education.
And what we want to achieve is the next big leap.
And we really mean the big part.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Big as in better, more inclusive education
for the 21st century and everybody in it.
ALBERTO MOTTA: Here are the ingredients we have in mind.
Well, first of all, we want education to get better and better, richer,
more interesting as we increase the number
of students because like it or not,
large classes are here to stay.
We have to find ways to leverage that large number.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: And that sounds right but it also sounds tricky because conventional
wisdom and a lot of hardcore research has shown time
and time again that the education experience for everybody worsens
as we increase the number of students in the class.
Apparently, something to do with an inevitable
part of how the education system works.
And let's face it, whenever I tell Alberto that we yet
again enrol a lot of students in our courses...
ALBERTO MOTTA: And we are talking about thousands of students.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: We do, I can see his emotional roller coaster.
Great, we must have done something good.
And then immediately after, can we support?
Can we catch everyone?
Or our favourite economics phrase,
assume we never sleep or eat for
the next 10 weeks doing things properly,
making them personal for each and every one of those 1,000
students would still take more than 24 hours in a day.
And I know this is a daunting thought on the mind of many academics.
ALBERTO MOTTA: OK, then, so we need to bring more conventions
and think outside the box.
What if I asked our students as good as professional
staff in marking and giving feedback?
You are probably sceptical.
And to be fair, Isabella and I were also sceptical,
but that didn't prevent us from running
a randomized controlled trial about it,
just like a pharmaceutical company would do to test a drug.
And what we saw was that, in fact, student feedback,
the quality of the marking is just the same as professional staff.
And in fact, students that were more exposed randomly to peer
feedback ended up doing just as well in the final exam.
That really changed the way we were thinking about our students.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: That's right, it made us see them in a completely different light.
They're way more resourceful and capable and aware
of their environment than we give them credit for.
And if they're showing you anything else in class,
it's probably because they're not as engaged as they could be.
Something to think about because their
best and at least for certain aspects,
they can be more than just partners.
They can be us the professionals.
ALBERTO MOTTA: And if you're wondering at this point,
are you guys trying to put yourself out of a job?
Well, we are gonna burn that bridge, but before we cross it, OK?
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: And I think that's (CROSSTALK).
No.
ALBERTO MOTTA: That doesn't sound right.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Alright.
So in all fairness, we should have qualified
this statement a little bit more.
We should have said students are just as
good at providing feedback as academics,
as professionals on average.
And this is the idea behind the wisdom of the crowd principle,
which is nothing new.
Think stock exchange.
Think Wikipedia.
There's this idea that we all rely on collective human knowledge
rather than the opinion of one professional, of one expert.
How did it go?
The idea that there is idiosyncratic risk,
meaning noise associated with each individual judgment.
But if you take the average over a large enough
number of such individual judgments,
the error, the noise cancels out.
And I got that from Wikipedia just to prove a point.
ALBERTO MOTTA: Well done there.
So the wisdom of the crowd works,
and it's quite amazing because it also applies to
things like short answer questions that are
multi-dimensional with rich feedback.
It just works.
But there is more to that.
If you ask a student to put themselves in the shoes of a teacher,
it's even better for their learning journey.
And we know this from a lot of research out there.
It is best for a student to study something and then explain
that to someone else rather than studying it twice.
So that's an added bonus to the wisdom of the crowd approach.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: And of course, this can also break some concerning
trends that we are seeing right now.
Can you imagine Socrates being really
concerned about teaching evaluations?
That would have been a funny sight.
ALBERTO MOTTA: That's a very good point.
If we want to get out of that conundrum,
maybe we need to start thinking about students as not just partners,
but also equals because after all, shouldn't we all be learning
all the time and challenging the status quo all the time?
So we are in the same boat.
However, I should say, if you want to
try to implement a system like this,
you need to look into the smallest details in order for this to work.
And as any good economist would do at this point,
we're just going to say details are available upon request.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Maybe.
ALBERTO MOTTA: Maybe.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Maybe.
ALBERTO MOTTA: If we've got the time.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Right.
Now we've seen time and time again that wisdom of the crowd works.
But how do you get the crowd?
And here we need to break another convention.
We need to reach out and draw in not just young people,
not just students,
but people from all walks of life of all ages,
drawing as many people as we can.
In order to do that, education needs to be engaging and personal.
Think as entertaining as Netflix and as interactive as a video game.
ALBERTO MOTTA: And so Isabella and I actually made a video game.
It's a massive multiplayer online video game, open 24-7.
You control your little avatar and you are in this shared
world with other students and your academics.
And the assessment is really the life of your avatar,
the good things you did,
the societies you developed with other people,
the happiness you achieved.
Even at the end of your avatar life,
we are going to put a tombstone there describing
all the things that you did in a summary for other people to see.
And of course, you have the chance of trying
again as a descendant of your avatar in
the Infinite Dynasty because we want to give
you another chance to get it right.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Thanks, God for that.
Now, wisdom of the crowd kicks in again because it's
a video game and in a video game, the more users play,
the more students are engaged,
the better the video game experience in this case,
the educational experience.
Why?
Because with more users, with more students, you get richer stories.
You get exposed to more types of emergent economies.
You get to see what goes wrong and what
goes really well in each one of them.
You get to fix them.
So, again, large numbers just means better educational outcomes.
And thanks, God for the wisdom of the crowd because marking an MMO,
a Massive Multiplayer Online assessment
like this, it's not mission impossible.
ALBERTO MOTTA: We also worked out ways to integrate already taxation, engineering,
medicine into the same universe, so this can go beyond social sciences.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: Now it goes beyond social sciences, but is it a good idea?
Is mixing fun and study at the end of the day really a good idea?
Now, economists have long recognized that injecting leisure into
productive activities has indirectly had beneficial effects.
Think of a hearty meal with a friend before going back to work.
Can leisure be, however, directly productive?
We've run an experiment on that, and in our case,
it was teaching with a video game.
Can that be productive for educational outcomes?
And the answer is yes.
And more than that, teaching with a video game can actually change
really sensitive decisions like the choice of one's degree.
So it really goes deep.
Now there are caveats, push this concept to the limit
and inject pure leisure into study, a productive activity.
Think of giving your avatar several hats or giving them pets
to follow them around and, well, interesting results.
Women or female students can benefit from this and excel educationally,
while men tend to get a little bit distracted.
Multitasking problem much?
ALBERTO MOTTA: I don't know.
I need to check the data again.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: I'm going to check the data again.
ALBERTO MOTTA: What's going on with this man?
Also, another thing that we studied is the role of leadership.
So we looked at how female and male students reacted to being
lead in the simulation by a female or a male president.
And the interesting part about it is that it looks like men and female
are doing just as well in leading their digital economies.
However, female students end up doing better in the real world in
the final exam whenever they were led by a female president,
really suggesting a symbolic value behind female leadership.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: However, men tend to be completely unfazed by all of this,
whether their leader is a male or female,
whether they know whether their leader is a male or female or not.
And that's an interesting result.
But I guess Alberto's going to follow on here saying
that we need to look at the men's data again.
ALBERTO MOTTA: What's going on with men?
We should check the data again.
If you put all this together, you have a new approach to education,
which is blending leisure and study.
It's changing the role of students,
making them really tapping into the full resources that they have.
And it's also scaling up very well with numbers and making for
a learning journey that is more fun, personal, memorable.
ISABELLA DOBRESCU: So here's to a time when the consumer decision is
going to be between the latest movie released
on Netflix and all the amazing experience of interactive UNSW course,
both rated on Metacritic.
ALBERTO MOTTA: And this is us, folks.
Thanks so much for tuning in.