Merrilea Mayo Transcript

[MERRILEA MAYO]: And yet, there are two problems in that: one is
that often it’s not scalable, and I know you see yourself as an entity
that worries about scale. And so, there are all sorts of issues there
about how would you get to those kind of interventions to scale and
from that. But the other problem is that ultimately we go to the agony
of formal education because at the end we get this degree, which is
our ticket to a job. So, the ultimate goal is really the job, right? And,
you know, sort of buried in that is the skills to get the job; what people
want is the job. And we could actually incentivize and monetize a lot
of innovation completely outside of and therefore, potentially, in
competition with and stimulating innovation in the formal education
system if through informal education you could actually get that job.
What you get now is usually nothing. So, you know, if I go to museum
and I learn all about dinosaurs, well, that’s great, I’m a better person.
And -- so what? It’s not like I can really market myself better to some
paleontology outfit or you know, if I -- if I spend, you know, some are
working with my, you know, uncle Bob, you know, it is, I don’t know.
Now actually, blue collar skills may translate a little better, but, say,
you know, I help him with his accounting for his, you know, small
company. Well, that’s kind of okay, but it’s not the same as having an
accounting degree no matter how much you learned. And so, one of
the things I’m very interested in is, are there ways for companies, for
example, to test, this is the same way college test using SAT exams,
prospective employees for skills and knowledge base that they need,
so that where and when you got that knowledge and those skills
relevant and you can have a direct ticket to a job no matter how you
got educated. So, that’s sort of one of my themes is trying to figure
out ways where you could imagine an alternative education scenario
where learning is anytime, anywhere on demand, which is being
enabled by technology, but for all that learning that you could do,
motivated by yourself and your circumstances, you would actually be
able to translate into some beneficial personal economic good. And
that I think is actually a key missing factor for a lot of the education
ovation that’s happening, you know, you complete wonderful after-
school programs, for example, and yet unless somehow that learning
gets translated into something that isn’t tested and certified in a
formal education environment is almost useless.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: You know, for me what’s really interesting is that it

starts to identify this spectrum of institutions or touch points that
enable people to really learn dynamically and it’s no so focused on this
bricks and mortar or really be down one hole people. I feel like there’s

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a lot of tendency to go down hole, like, really down technology or really
down bricks and mortar or --I don’t know. There’s -- I agree and
understand, sort of, what you’re saying and it’s emerging through our
research that that is important. And one of the things -- I can’t
remember the name of the institution. For some reason, I want to say
it’s like the ACT organization or something, it sounded similar to that,
where they’re giving sort of national credentials to people with skills,
and I wonder if there is any other –

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah, there is a National Workforce Readiness

Certificate, and in fact ACT has, I think, been a partner in developing
and sort of distributing some of that. And that’s sort of a model of, I
mean, something that could emerge as a much more widely adopted
and much more sophisticated but the idea is kind of the same. The
key is actually to get employers to take those tests as an actual
criterion in your application as it were for employer -- employment.
And we often thought of the whole industry sector, say, IT, or to decide
that, yeah, you need to -- we’re going to look at scores on these three
tests as something that would qualify you for employment. Then you
get a lot of pressure back on the school system and education system
generally saying, you know, whoever can provide this is some place
people are going to go because if you decide what I want, you know, I
really want a job with Oracle or, you know I want to be an IT person,
you know you have to take these three tests and you know you have to
score certain amount to get into the better job. But you are going to
go to who can ever provide that, you know, the learning required to
get to that point regardless of whether there are commercial, non-
commercial, formal, informal, you open up a huge ecosystem. We ran
across this issue because, you know, my portfolio deals with game-
based learning, virtual world space learning, et cetera, and while we
can demonstrate that the learning in these environments is incredible,
and in fact learning gaps between B and D students disappears and
students love it and it’s all tremendously wonderful. But on the other
hand, you know, getting the stuff through the narrow -- the pipe line of
time and energy and money that exist to get into the formal education
system is very hard. I mean, it can be done; I was on a phone call with
somebody who successfully did it, just before this call. But it’s very
hard, and it will be so easy just to put the stuff out there and let people
take, absorb it, you know, in their own free time, in their own way. But
then they can’t get anything for it.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Yeah, I just read something about the proposal for
the Obama schools and the open education or open access to courses
that’s sort of bouncing off the MIT and of course where ---

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[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. So, you can work through all that open
course, it’s on the MIT website, and, you know, you could actually
internalize a lot of that knowledge and yet, you know, what do you
have to show for, you don’t have the MIT degree and I certainly
understand why MIT doesn’t do that because you haven’t paid them
the money, but you have no way of certifying to someone that yes,
now you have done equivalent of MIT after Physics 312.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: So, knowing all this stuff, knowing it’s successful,
you know, the success ability, I’m talking about this narrow pipeline,
how are you moving forward? What’s your -- what’s the strategy to get
this done?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Well, you know, my strategy is actually to

develop a parallel universe. So, to developed universe where you can
learn -- first of all, we can get these learning experiences out to people
where they live and work and not necessarily through the formal
education, although that does happen too, and then to create an
economic system where if you learn it, if you could do it, you should be
able to prove it to someone and get a job based on that. You should
be able to get a job based on who, you know, what you can do and not
what the label on your degree says. I mean, saying that you have a
Harvard degree means you are in a specific place for four years. What
you did, I mean binge-drinking, hanging out and -- no, okay? And in
fact, most of the content you learned -- well, first of all, you shouldn’t
have to learn content anymore. You can look up any actual content
you need, you should be really learning the skills. But, you know, most
of what you learn probably was forgotten the day after final exam, if
you’re anybody like me. So, you know, what you are actually
purchasing, when you purchase a Harvard person, is, and this has been
demonstrated, someone who was screened coming in as a likely
success story; and therefore, coming out is also a likely success story.
It doesn’t really measure the skills and abilities that you gain along the
way.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: So, it’s interesting around the economic, sort of,
separate economic system and I imagine you’re sort of taking things
from like that, the Linden Labs or some of these, I remember Chinese, I
think it’s QQQ or something that, sort of disrupting the -- potential for
disrupting the currency in China.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Okay. I hadn’t really thought about that.

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[CHRIS FINLAY]: Okay. So, I guess I sort of thinking, one of the, you
know, you’re talking about, I don’t know, just this whole economic
system outside of what exists and how to spur the change, you know,
something that’s coming across my mind and how to do that sort of
outside the law in a way because there’s so many ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. Well, outside the current system.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Right, yeah. But there’s so many regulations and so

much, you know, tightness around teacher’s union and all these things
that go with those traditional models, but in then there is these schools
that are starting to step into the distance learning space and ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Right.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: You know, it starts to cover up what I think is a

larger opportunity and I wonder -- I wonder how you see that being sort
of the Viking at the gate or the brighter light that really sort of washes
over the traditional school ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: You know, even virtual schools still have this
mentality, I mean, it’s a virtual place but it still links you with an
institution, right? So, you can get your degree from a virtual
university, okay. But you’re still linked with some named brand that’s
certifying that you’re okay. You’re not self -- you can’t certify yourself.
That’s sort of the big difference. You can’t independently prove that
you’re okay, some brand with the name and preferably with a bigger
brand and a bigger name will certify as being okay. So, self-
certification, you know, being able to go off and take a test anywhere
is sort of part of this. What I see, you know, future is really on
demand, anywhere, anytime learning that you can just use in byte size
increments. This is another problem we have. We have a system
where to do anything meaningful you need a two or four year chunk of
time, a two or four year chunk of money, and those people in this
highly mobile society, in particular those who are stressed
economically or have life exigencies like alien parents or whatever,
can’t do that, okay. This is what really cuts out formal education for so
many people, particularly at the collegiate level. So, you know, looking
back on my own experience as a professor, a lot of minorities dropped
out not because they were doing poorly but because there was a gap
between this financial aid, the increment in the next financial aid
increment or they had a family member get sick and there was no one
to take care of them and they couldn’t pay for hospitalization. So,
somebody had to go home and do it. I mean, all these things happen,
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you know, real life intervenes. And yet we have a system that
assumes that you can put away a secret two years of time and two
years of money for associates degree or four years of time or four
years of money or whatever, and be unperturbed. And so, I think if
you get education down the smaller byte size pieces, and you have a
way to certify that having done enough to be small size, byte size
pieces, you have the equivalent of a big byte, you know, that’s worthy
to get you to a job. You just open up things for a lot of people to learn
however and whenever they want to and you -- your whole classes of
people who couldn’t really participate in formal education, not to be
able to educate themselves and move up, sort of, the ladder. I, sort of,
sent a white paper written on this and I can’t remember if I sent it to
you or not.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: No, no. Actually, that’s one of the things I was
looking around a little bit, and I didn’t really see the links on your
pager.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Okay, yeah. Let me do that, because this was

not published or anything. What happened was, our foundation
actually terminated its -- most of its education effort, you know, when
we went to the big financial crisis and stocks dropped 40 percent, of
course, went down what was all invested in the stock market, and we
just lost enormous amounts of value. So, division I was in pretty much
closed down mine as the couple of programs that were started by the
founder himself.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: So, we talked about the two-halves, it’s sort of a

two-part vision. The first part is, let’s get highly rich educational
experiences out there for anybody who can access them, you know,
putting them to formal education pipeline; I mean, you can. That’s
going to be to be one avenue but let’s get them out there for
everybody. So, that’s one part. And then, let’s make them have some
economic value to people. So, it doesn’t matter whether you learn the
stuff in the classroom, you learned it in the library, you learned it in the
museum, you learned it on the web, any electronic distance learning
from some, you know, funky provider or area; as long as you learned it,
you know it, you still get credit for it, you still have the chance to
advance. And let’s do this in smaller chunks -- do it in a way that
people can accumulate small chunks at a time, bite size pieces,
because not everybody has the time or the money to do very long
stretches of education. And I also think of concept lifelong learning. I
thought learning shouldn’t mean you quit your job, you go back to
school for four years and you come back to a job that doesn’t exist

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anymore. I mean, lifelong learning should be, you pick it up along the
way and at some point you’ve accumulated enough extra that you
could get a promotion or slightly different job, but right now we have
no way to measure that or to get credit for that.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: So, I mean, it’s such an interesting point in time to

be -- it seems like, you know, I think people have been kind of burned a
little bit by, you know, Microsoft promise of education tomorrow and
what’s really possible now. How ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: The thing is, it’s not the technology that’s really
a key thing. I mean, it makes things possible but that’s not the thing
to focus on.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Right. So, how -- what are you doing to sort of shift
that thought? How are you trying to get people into the right mental
model, like, what are some of the things you used to bring them in?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: If you come from Stanford, okay, well, either

your parents had a lot of money or you lived in the area, I mean, a lot
of reasons you could get to Stanford degree, but what I’m interested in
is, can you do this job? And so, the key thing in all -- well, the two key
things. So, the main thing was to get a set of employers across one
industry sector to agree to some kind of assessment system that we
actually use in hiring practices, i.e. their HR departments would use
the numbers off of these tests to determine whether people are
qualified or not to have a job in their company. If you could do that,
then everything else falls in place because then -- for example, if
you’re bowing and you tell all your aerospace engineering departments
to collaborate with, then okay, we’ll, you know, starting next year
we’re going to have these three tests, and everybody is going to have
to take them in order to work at our company, and let your students
now and you could tell, you know, the recruiting offices. But you’ve
got to also put it on your website, so you could let anybody know who
wants jobs, you got to take these three tests. And if that happen, and
that happened across a whole industry sector, so that you can’t -- if
you’re a student or a perspective employee, you can’t escape the need
to take those three tests, then the need for formal education falls by
the wayside because the big criterion is you got to pass these three
tests, and how you pass them, who cares, and nobody, you know,
there’s no restriction on that. But that was sort of the big piece of it to
get, and we had probably six to eight IT companies lined up, big ones,
to go through with this, as I said, when the funding fell apart. So, and
there was only probably a couple hundred thousand -- a $500,000.00
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effort to get the tests created, you know, agreement of cross-industry
on what such matters

[CHRIS FINLAY]: I mean, historically speaking, it seems as though the

leadership really has come from business anyway, right, so.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: This is very interesting because business will

engage in education in a way that they are almost always engaging
through the existing school systems, like, they tried to develop
curriculum that people could use or donate money for the
scholarships. And what we try to tell them is, look, you can set the
agenda. You don’t have to like beg the school to do what it is that you
want them to do and produce and produce the kinds of people you
want. You just set that expectation. They will have to respond in the
same way that the government says, you know, you will show
adequately -- adequate yearly progress to you school -- will have to
respond, I mean, they don’t have a choice really.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: As you say, the purpose of school’s to get a job. So,
if the jobs are saying, well actually here is the way to do it and then
there’s really not much that could be done about it.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: No, they just set the expectations rather than
begging the schools. You know, our students really know nothing
about experimental design. They can’t do problem solving. Well, fine.
It’s -- if you can test for problem solving and there are test to do that
actually -- well, that’s where the ACT and the ATS has come in to this
world, you can actually test for complex skills like that, you can test for
leadership, you can test for communication. It turns out
communication, you know, sub-divides into -- all over it, et cetera, oral
communication or things like, do you maintain eye contact when
speaking, do you know organize your thoughts, you know, and have
them clearly outline before the beginning of a presentation, you
answer -- repeat questions that are unclear. I mean, that’s like a whole
list of things that comes to good oral communication. So, you know,
even tough it sounds vague and fuzzy, there are test for these things.
Test for 21st century skills and you could use them.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: I think you said there’s three tests and obviously
you’re laying out some of the criteria or some of the variables for
measurement.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. It turns out if you go to the National

Workforce Readiness skills, now the kinds of the jobs that I’m talking
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about and the kinds of employers I’m talking about are probably one
step up from what those things test for. But the National Workforce
Readiness certificate, that’s the three major skills tested for then, I
think they’re up to five, but the three major ones cover 80 percent of
all jobs. I mean, but of course there are a lot of little jobs, you know,
like McDonalds employees, et cetera. But 80 percent of all job are
basically, can you do applied math? Can you read for information?
Can you open a manual and figure out what’s it saying and then do it?
A lot of times there won’t be someone who knows how to do it or
you’re doing something you haven’t done before, so there’s no one to
ask. And then, the last one I forget. I thought it was communication,
but I could be wrong, but there’s like three basic skills. And most jobs
require those skills in some degree of quality. So, for some jobs, if the
skills are on a, like, one to three level -- actually, I think in the National
Workforce Readiness, it’s like bronze, silver, gold, you know, some jobs
are basically bronze, silver, silver. Some are silver, gold, gold, you
know, in terms of the level of those skills that are required. But it’s
really very fundamental skills, and I think there’s kind of where we’re
missing in terms of formal education. When I leave college, I actually
don’t know all that much about the content that I learned. And in fact
for whatever my first job is, 90 percent of what I learned is not going to
be asked for in that job. What I have learned is how to cram a lot of
information in my head on very short notice, like, the night before the
exam, you know, how to, you know, convince my peers to work on a
group project, you know, there are a lot of skills you learn, and those
are things that really transfer from job to job to job, and that’s what
the National Workforce Readiness skills try to capture some of those
things.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: What do you see is maybe some of the industries or

emerging infrastructure that would start to emerge or models of
learning, you know, I could see sort of hubs of where people kind of
come together and agree meet somewhere and chat or, you know,
these sort of things that ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: One of the things that I am heavily into is virtual

world, and one of the things that’s really great about that is you can go
through experiences, the education experiences, the learning
experiences with anybody else who is interested in learning the same
thing at the same time, and their data that showed that when you
engage in a group learning activity or you have collaborative learning,
the learning outcome is about 50 better than solo learning because
you’re learning from your peers as well as from the experience. And
so, it’s a very rich environment and you could have people coming in

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spontaneously from all over the world to participate in various
immersive electronic learning experiences. So, this is part of the
anytime-anywhere vision that we had is that, you know, I’m really
interested in learning linear algebra, there are three people in Bulgaria,
one in Russia, two in South Africa that also need to learn it for
whatever purpose, you know, we go into the linear algebra world and
we do all the stuff together, we make friends, we show up, we help
each other to the problem, you know. And so, these communities of
learning that develop can be very strong, very helpful and -- and
because different people have different innate levels of expertise, you
end up with a system where everybody is a teacher. And this is
actually a very interesting economic issue. Right now, it’s very hard to
scale up most education interventions because the distribution system
involves getting a trained personnel on the ground, and that’s the why
we usually think of it. So, if our -- for most education interventions --
like, today we have a new curriculum and we want to get into the
schools, we have to train teachers in the new curriculum. Okay. Well,
that costs salaries to do the teacher training. Or you want the classes
that are half the size. Well, that costs salaries to get twice as many
teachers in the ground. It turns out almost every intervention you can
think of requires trained individuals, which require salary, which turns
out to have linear cost scaling. If we want to double the size of the
program, we need to double the size -- the number of trained people,
which doubles the number of salaries. And that’s why most
educational interventions fail, as they cannot be scaled up to full
scaling, cannot be scaled nationally because linear cost scaling is so
crappy. I mean, it’s too expensive, you know. So, you can always,
always do it on small scale. But with these electronic communities,
people come in together where the students are the teachers and
they’re helping each other through it, plus you have a rich, you know,
set of expert back up resources and information and help, you know,
help forums and stuff. You don’t have to have an extra teacher; an
extra trained person for every additional user, because the users
themselves end up teachers half the time, and so that the cost
structure is completely inverted. And instead of being linear, it’s like
exponentially decreasing. The more users you have, the more
teachers you have; the more information in the ecosystem, you have
the better the learning experience. So, it’s -- this is one of the things I
think is going to cause it to takeoff once we get it to a critical level, is
the fact that you cannot beat the cost of delivering education, that’s
why. For example, I mean, Whyville, which is a virtual world with little
math and science activities has currently 4 million players, most of
them girls ages 8 to 14. Okay. And that’s not even like brushing the
tip of the iceberg but it could happen because that’s sort of innovate in

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the edge of the space, but it shows you the scale that can be
achieved. And you could go much lower. It’s just that I don’t know if
anyone has done a virtual education world that’s lower than about 4th
Grade. I know virtual world where lots of kids much younger than that
hang out, but they’re all entertainment-based. Nobody’s designed the
education version.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: And maybe you could point to some of the coolest,
some of the smartest points -- you’ve already mentioned the number
of resources, but some more examples that we could maybe use --
point to ourselves in the future, and snow people how it can be done.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. So, there’re various ones. So, you know,
Whyville is -- so, Whyville is a very interesting; it’s actually run on a
commercial model by an academic. So, it’s got a nice -- nice
sustainability plan as it were because I do think like a commercial
company even thought the intent is academic. So, whyville.net is an
interesting place to go. It’s very cartoony, you know, you see this little
kid’s place, but lots of kids are there doing stuff. Another place to go --
now, this one is the one that’s offered to school systems. So, it’s sort
of hybrid, but Dimension M is an algebra game, multiplayer that’s
offered to school systems -- making history. Now, there is an
interesting one. It’s a history game that is marketed to schools but by
far they are consumer base is -- like, 50,000 people have just bought it
independently to play it, learn from it. So, this is what I’m talking
about. And the thing is the medium intrinsically has enormous skill; I
mean, you know, 10 million -- well, actually, no, like, 14 million people
are playing World of Warcraft, which is, you know, bigger than greater
New York City, about the size of greater New York City, all around the
world they’re playing together. I mean, I play that game; I play with a
guy from Russia and a guy from you know, and I learn lots about those
cultures, playing with those guys and doing stuff with them all the
time. And the level of sophistication, how you learn from other people
in the structures that are developed to learn from other people in those
games are -- is tremendous. You can go on some of the forums, Elitist
Jerks, you know, and see the mathematical modeling that people use
to figure out whether, you know, intellect is more important spirit in
some particular obscure situation, so.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: That’s awesome.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: So, the infrastructure and the model is there in

the commercial space, is what I’m saying, and the scalability is clearly
demonstrated by this commercial space. And we’re just seeing

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emerging examples in the academic space of what could be -- I
actually have a list of games in virtual world that I could send to you
that’s kind of interesting, but you can access for free and play around
and see what’s going on.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: It would be fantastic, I’d love to ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. Second Life is often used by college

professors to do some things in classes, but I don’t think they’ve been
very imaginative in how to approach it. I mean, a typical college uses
a Second Life, which is a virtual world, it’s just like take the lecture
where you sit in the classroom and listen to the lecture and have the
same professor, like, do it in Second Life. So, okay, now you’re looking
at a screen of a screen, with the same PowerPoint slides on it that it
had before; they’re like two steps removed from what could be
happening. So, they -- yeah, not everybody is using the -- it’s like
getting technology, when it first emerges, people do with it what they
did like you know, the computer becomes a typewriter and then only
later that you figure out, oh, you could do this thing called the web and
that’s like a really different than what the typewriter could do.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: That’s great. We’re actually working with a fellow

name Chris Rice at Kansas -- University in Kentucky actually, who
seems to be doing a pretty good job with using that -- using Second
Life in his classes, if you need someone who was interested in testing
or trying or be in a case study but ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: --- the classes, I’m sure you could be in?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: No, I mean, I think there are tremendous

innovators in the space. I’m just not sure that the number of college
professors who decide that they’re going to put their class in Second
Life is really the best example out there.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Definitely. What -- so, how do you think this will
change the role of teachers?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: The big difference is that there’s a huge

democratization and if you play any of the -- play online games in a
commercial space, you recognize that immediately because you have
this avatar, nobody really knows how old you are, nobody really knows

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what race you are, nobody knows if you’re rich or poor, nobody knows
if you have a title from Harvard or anything. And so, what happens is,
enormous democratization, people who really know what they are
doing, they emerge in a complete meritocracy as being the experts.
So, if you have a teacher who is good at what they do and really
understand the subject manner and can help people navigate
experiences based on that, then they will emerge as the leader of a
small group who’s interested in pursuing that experience. You could
also see, you know, in the -- right now we have a hybrid situation
where all these things are -- some of these things are played in
classrooms and the teacher’s automatically assigned as the leader,
and then they have to take on a much more helpful guide role as
opposed to stage on a stage role. So, they’re in there with the
students, you know, helping them guide through the experience, but
what you’ll often find is some students become much better at it than
the teacher is, which can be very threatening to the teacher, but -- and
just in -- so, people started to gravitate to the person who really knows
how to accomplish what it is, whatever the goal of the group or the
individuals is at the moment.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: So, you know -- so, okay. So, if it’s still open and
democratic and anybody can be these players, how do you start to
mitigate for quality, which is ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Well, the quality has to go into the construction

of the experience and it can be very real -- reality based. So, for
example, maybe you want to have -- you want to teach structural
engineering and so you can have a virtual world where the objective is
to be able to build a bridge across the San Francisco Bay, and it’s a
very open-ended problem. You say you have this much money, you
have this much money in the budget and it has to be done by this
date, you know, go figure out how to do it. And then what happens is,
people have to solve the sum like, okay, well, if I really want to
accomplish at which, you know, my scheme is by the way if I got this
done I would definitely have, you know, two ticks up in my application
to bowing. If I got this done, then, you know, I would need someone
who -- yeah, I would either need to find out myself or find someone
knows something about trust analysis to do the distribution of ways, I
would need to know someone who -- I would need to find some
distributors for the stuff, I need to set up a project management plan
to get everything happening. So, you -- if you set the goal as an
authentic whole people have to know what to do in order to accomplish
it, and if -- I mean, this is really easy because if you -- if you fail, I
mean, the bridge doesn’t work, right, and it’s pretty obvious, so, if you

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-- if the goals are set authentically and are measured accurately, then
you know whether the experience has been a valid learning
experience. This is -- in fact, employers are now asking for this
performance-based assessment. Can you do it? Not that you learn it in
school and that you pass the test number, but can you actually do it?
So, not as you fill out your homework and pass the test on trust
analysis, but given the assignment to build a bridge, could you actually
go out and do it, and that’s what the future holds, I think, is the test of
your skills, any applications of those skills to perform in situation.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: So, essentially maybe this -- these testing bodies

would sort of set out challenges and establish them as good challenges
and then let people sort of organize to meet them essentially, is what
you’re saying.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. And in fact, there are -- part of what we

see, there are different ways you can see the whole thing, I mean, we
don’t have a crystal ball to know exactly what the future holds. So,
one of the components of this maybe a meritocracy based on
evaluations of other people. So, for example, if you’re offering a
service via amazon.com, you can see whether this retailer had four
stars or five stars based on customer reviews, right? If you’re in a
virtual world environment where they’re building bridges and roads
and cars and stuff because you want to be in engineering, you’re
learning your skill set that way with lots of people everywhere, you too
will probably have a rating based on the people that you’ve worked
with and for, that will be three starts, four stars and five stars and that
will be part of your public record with people writing comments on, oh,
she’s fabulous to work with, she really knew what she was doing, you
know, I’d been honored to work with her anytime, or, you know, she
really screwed this up, she never showed up on time, you know, we
hated her. And that kind public evaluation could easily become a
component of your overall sort of performance based assessments.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: And, in fact, in some industries such as the film

industry, that’s how it works already. People come together for large
projects spontaneously, you work on a movie and you get a reputation
based on the people you worked with and for and what they have to
say about you, and that’s really your currency ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: --- it’s not the degree. And so, you can see a
reputation-based system evolving in concert with, sort of, the specific
activities that you’ve undertaken that proved that you could do
something. You’re on a team, you’ve been on five successful teams,
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they managed to do these great successful things and not like that but
everybody on the team thought you were like the lynchpin of the
team.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: So, if this was -- while we’re successful and start to,
you know, have rapid uptake, what do you think would happen to the
bricks and mortar, like, what role do you see them playing?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: They would be in competition with a lot of other

things and they would have to show that -- I mean, there are some
things that are probably, you know, best talked with a small group of
people, sitting around, listening to someone else, you know, knows --
but you would actually have to demonstrate that you had value as
oppose to being the default. Right now, bricks and mortar are, sort of,
the default, that’s where we go, that’s where we assume we have to
go. But whether they will succeed in situations where what they have
to deliver as a way of learning X is much better than some other way
of learning X.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: And so, this -- the way to approve value would be to
meet those three learning criteria, three standard tests, would that be
---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Well, yeah, at the very low level of performance,

yes. I mean, as you get higher level, there’ll be, sort of, other test or
whatever, or other performance-based tests. But yeah -- so, you would
-- you would -- for example, right now we, kind of, do that at the high
school level -- or for SATs for college. The college has the tests called
SATs, and one of the things that parents look for when they figure
which school district to pop their house in or to buy a house in, what
are the SAT scores of the graduating seniors in this high school, right.
And, in fact, there are districts that people pay a lot of money to have
a house in because the graduating -- the SAT scores of the graduating
seniors and the acceptance rate of the seniors in the college is much
higher than another places. And so, by -- and so those schools thrive.
I mean, they have, like, rich donors and parents in the rich school
district, then they do very well and they provide very useful education.
So, all we’re saying is, you know, take that step further and you know,
your job has certain requirements and certain tests, and it will become
known which schools or which non-schools, which online activities,
which, you know, museum, summer camps or whatever provide the
outcome that the parents and the kids and everybody are looking for,
and those things tend to be highly sought after. So, you create your
own economy, competitive economy of providers. You know, this is a
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very futuristic thing because it seems it does not necessarily -- I’m not
sure what happens in the feature to, sort of, government based,
municipality-based funding of schools as such. But it definitely
provides an incentive for them to want to, especially the for-private
ones, to compete with other vendors of information and training.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: I mean, it seems you say it would rapidly decrease

the cost of schools to follow this model.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah, the peer learning network -- and you know
what you’ll find too is retired teachers will hang out there, people who
gained expertise through actual employment will hang out there, you
know, they’ll help other people along because they’ll gain social status
that way, have people -- other people look up to them, and that’s a
very powerful driver of behavior.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: And so, what -- I mean, there must be -- I know

there is a lot of different names for communities for people who are
interested in this kind of technology in this future, is there -- are there
some keywords or some key names that you would sort of ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Well, from the -- from the development of the

sort of virtual world game experiences, there’s a so-called serious
games community, immersive learning community; so those are
certain keyword games, immersive learning. I mean, all that is just
about the delivery of the educational experience to this electronic
media. The whole part about, you know, if you could get employers to
buy into it, by testing against what people have learn that way, that
part doesn’t exist anywhere really.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: What would you call that? How would you
summarize that or tag it?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Well, you know, there are two tags that I’ve used
for that concept. One is snap shot credential, the idea being if you
could just take a picture of what you could do, what your skills and
abilities and knowledge are at a given state -- point in time and just
present that to an employer. They will be so much more valuable than
something that says I was in this place, Harvard, 20 years ago, you
know? Do you remember anything from then, you know, is it relevant
to this time, who knows? So, one term I used is snapshot
credentialing, the idea is being if you could say what you can do now,
you can match that to a job you’re qualified for now regardless of
what’s going on before, you know, what may happen since, and that
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allows you to move up the job ladder incrementally as you -- as you
drove, you know, it’s a lifelong learning because your snapshot at each
point in time is different. The other concept to this is -- the term that
I’ve used is micro credits for micro knowledge, the idea being that you
could get small chunks of learning and get recognition of that, it
doesn’t have to be you know, a semester or a year or two years, but
sort of -- and that terminology also is sometimes called unbundled
education. It’s, kind of, called really a couple things about unbundled
education; that if you, you know, just getting the learning into smaller
chunks but then having a way to recognize those smaller chunks.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Nice. So, you know, for me it is design, I remember

there are certain turning points for me where I really just saw the value
and how -- how design, you know, sort of fit in the world. Was there a
point at which you started to see or a moment -- I know you talked
about doing some teaching, was there -- like, how did you become so
seriously engaged? Was there a moment for you when you saw what
technology could bring or this fundamental shift of that system?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: No, there is two points in that -- or I guess,

several points to let up, but for me, one is, yeah, being a professor and
noticing that most education was entirely wasted. I mean, college is a
great social opportunity for social growth, but in terms of learning, I’d
say -- you know, before I became a professor, I thought that college
was a good thing for, like, 90 percent of mankind; after I finished or,
you know, after a few years into it and all the drunk, you know, hung-
over people coming to class or not coming to class or whatever, who
were there just because their parents told them to be, conclusions
probably waste on 80% of all people; they should really wait to a point
in time where they want to learn. So, because its -- its seen as a step
to a job but most people aren’t actually that engaged in learning itself.
So, there is that. There is also the experience I have with my husband
and my son, who are all avid gamers, so -- that’s getting into it, but the
moment came when I was working at the national academies, it’s been
a lot of science policy issues. Science and engineering were of course
the huge one. Why don’t we have enough scientists in this country?
Why don’t we have enough engineers and all these interventions? I
mean, all start to sound the same after a while. Let’s have more, you
know, government provide more money for scholarships to people to
go to a grad school or get undergraduate degrees and, you know,
missing discipline X, Y or Z, you know, let’s have more innovative
curriculum that will inspire kids to, you know, to want to be scientist or
engineers, you know, maybe we should have a hip-hop schools
devoted to science and engineering around the hip-hop theme. I

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mean, when that one came to our foundation, it was taken very
seriously. You know, it’s possibly doable but certainly not scalable.
And that was the whole thing with many of these information -- many
of these innovations is they were just not scalable. You think about
them because I don’t care, we can have a summer camp. At the end
of the summer camp, we’ve affected, you know, 50 kids, one of whom
might be inspired enough to do something different than he was when
he went to summer camp. So, there’s so many failure points going to
summer camp and ending up as a scientist, so many decision points
that, you know, for a lot of money and a lot of time, we really haven’t
had that much influence, and so few people. And so, this whole thing
about, you know, not being able to reach a lot of people at these
innovations and it was just driving me nuts. I didn’t want to do
anything anymore that would affect 25, 50, even 400 kids. But the
problem was, on a scale of millions. And so, one day I was sitting in a
lecture and it was a lecture by Ed -- uh, I’m forgetting his name, the
guy who did economies of virtual world, I know I’m blanking on it. But
anyway, I’m listening to his lecture and I am looking at this graph he’s
put up, and it’s a graph of how many subscribers there are over time
for various multiplayer online games, it’s tracking subscription growth.
And these are the people who are paying money, clearly must be
engaging in it, or they wouldn’t be paying money to be on this game.
And the Y-axis of the scale was just huge; I mean, it completely
dwarfed the entire national problem in producing scientists and
engineers. Any one of those games had more people participating in it
than were being graduated annually in all colleges, all universities, all
science, all engineering disciplines in the entire US. I mean, it was just
amazing. So, that was when it hit me that if you had a medium like
that where one game can reach more people than an entire nation’s
worth of lecture halls, and it only cost like 20 bucks, why aren’t we
doing this? Then the question was, could games teach? And that’s
certainly down the road that I went along, trying to figure out, okay,
can we -- this meeting can clearly reach a lot of people but can it do
something worthwhile. And then the evidence slowly started to, you
know, come forward that you actually you know, you can reduce the
learning gap between D and B students by this approach; you can --
you know, you can show that the mental map of concepts are much
more deeply detailed and much more interlinked than they were, you
know, using this approach; you can show that test scores go up using
this approach. So, it was clear that they could teach, but what really
drew my attention to it was the scale after, you know, months of
working on, you know, policy solutions that had no scalability.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Yeah. I hear you. I think we feel very much the

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same about the impact and about trying to sort of characterize the
system and show how to scale and, boy, I would love to see that chart
if you have that hang around, it’s pretty powerful.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: I can show you -- there’s a paper I wrote -- this,

sort of, reproduces a more modern version of that same chart, and you
can see, sort of, where the US education system sits and where these
games sit; it’s been like, okay. Yeah, building another school and with
teachers is really expensive. Anything on another CD-Rom, I mean, is
it a large upfront investment? You know, for commercial games, it’s
like 10 or 20 million, but for education games, actually it’s more like
half a million, and when you divide that by the number of people that
reaches, oh my God, it’s insanely cheap; therefore, insanely scalable.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: What do you think -- I’m sure you must have had
some experience with, you know, there’s a lot of assumption that, you
know, every student knows how to use all sorts of different types of
technology, all the young kids know all the tricks, but there’s a -- you
know, a lot of the students don’t actually know that. What are some of
the barriers they’re coming with or they don’t have the interest or the
awareness of getting involved in those sorts of games. That’s just
some thing you would personally?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: There are, I mean, there is a -- I don’t really see

the type -- okay, so there are barriers, but the ones, specific ones, you
indicate are not really. There are barriers in terms of technology
people have access to. So, for example, a lot of the best stuff is out
there for -- 3D Immersive Learning requires graphic chip and a lot --
and you need a fairly expensive computer to get one or expensive in a
typical computer issued in your workplace or school. So, that’s, you
know, that’s the limitations. So now, you’re talking, okay, well, rich
kids, you know, who have these stuffs at home. And so, there are
actually hardware barrier, there are cultural barriers, for -- for example,
girls do not want to engage in games where it’s person to person
competition. First -- player against monster is okay, player against
challenge is okay, player in a team against the challenge is fine; it’s
very accessible. But when Suzie has to go up against Sally or Bobby,
you know, one-on-one competition of who is better, they hate that. So,
there’re certain game design elements that you can’t use for certain
audiences that will turn people off. Similarly, women don’t like games
that are very long; they like them in shorter chunks because their time
tends to be very split up. But there are lots of things about, sort of,
getting to -- knowing your audience and trying to track the possible
audience. But now, look at the Sim. That was a game that had a

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hundred million players, and it’s just mind-boggling. Can you think of
any educational thing we’ve done really of that scale? I don’t know.
Maybe no trail left behind, that’s about it. It certainly is a different
place for me.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: No, it’s certainly a different level of engagement.

Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I have to say that I actually have
spoken to some students who are really disinclined. I mean, well, my --
you know, it’s ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Oh, you say that I don’t want to learn to this
way. That, you know -- and I guess that speaks to the -- for the whole
ecosystem, the different learning approaches that will probably evolve
in the future. You ask what would be the role of school, and maybe
there are people who would rather sit than listen to someone talking.
For them, that’s how they will choose to get their information.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Yeah, I think there is also sort of, you know, and
we’ve also found out a lot about having pure mentors and you know,
people show them the way and the sort of thing. So, I think that -- I
don’t actually think the barrier is that great even for people who
currently sort of are disinclined that way. But I also ---

[MERRILEA MAYO]: So, one thing that is true is that when you look at
learning via a game versus learning via textbooks, a textbook comes
with no tutorials on, sort of, how to use text book. It has not been
extensively user-tested; you know, thousands of users before its
release, they feel like make more sense and we put it early on, maybe
its graphic needs to be just a pad larger for it to grab people’s
attention. So, they look there first and get that concept before this
concept. Software engineering is a completely different story. It is
user-tested. If somebody can’t get from Point A to Point B, what is
wrong, you know, why aren’t they getting this? And they, you know,
retest and reengineer and retest and reengineer until most of the
hurdles that you would normally encounter in trying to get from Point A
to Point B are gotten rid of. Part of the reason we need teachers in the
classroom is that the textbook is not a learning tool. Some textbooks,
it’s extremely poorly designed, you need someone there to help you
get through because you’re not going to get through it on your own;
whereas most people can pick up a game and yeah, there’s tutorials
and there’s help and you go to avatars in the peers and all sorts of
ways you can navigate to get help into the content. Textbook comes
with no planning, no user-testing and no help.

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[CHRIS FINLAY]: Right on.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: But I have not run into the problem. You’ve run
into with people who are like really disinclined, but of course I hang out
with the, sort of, more stratified groups. So, I’m sure the other exists.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Yeah. It’s pretty interesting. And I really think it

does have a lot to do with examples, you know. Even people, you
know, you talk a lot about first generation, whether they go to college
or not has a lot to do with someone else going to college in their family
and well, what does that really mean? It just means someone is
showing them the steps in, you know, an over or generalized way, you
know. So, I think there are a lot of those aspects to the thing.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah, I will say that a lot of girls feel

uncomfortable around some game-based things or games generally,
but it’s because they can’t stand poorly-designed user interfaces and
there’s a whole cadre of games out there that assume that you’ve
played Mario Brothers 1 and, you know, the user interfaces is
completely designed around knowing that, without mentioning it. So,
you know, people not knowing that you use WASD keys to walk, which
is something anybody that’s played any game would know; but if you
haven’t, you don’t know. And so, the good games actually go through
that part in its tutorial in the beginning so that you know, and many
people who really can’t stand games feel like lost because that stuff
isn’t given to them upfront.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: And they’re supposed to know and they don’t

know and they get frustrated. A lot of college tuition money needs to
be saved up. That’s the other thing, it’s going to be an interesting
revolution. It’s when college gets so expensive that people really start
looking at alternatives; is there anything we can do to cost less and
still get the same end point?

[CHRIS FINLAY]: Yeah, yeah. I’m aware they’re going to be poorly

served. So, you know, if you had the opportunity to go out and talk to
students that we have, what would you want to ask them?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: You know, it’s funny. There is an essay that I

saw written by a student -- no, it’s not a student, it’s an older guy, but
about what student -- a student daily life like in the future, I thought it
was really dead-on. I mean, without ever communicating with this guy,
he had a vision very similar to mine, but it was sort of written in the
sense if I woke up and I did this and I did that. I would love to put that
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in front of people. I would need his permission, ask students after that,
asked them if that’s the future that they think it’s worthwhile or
interesting in the way that it’s better or worse than the situation they
have now.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: It would be great to have you to share it also, that

would be excellent.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. I had to find the person who -- who -- I got
it passed on by someone who said, don’t pass this on further. I’ve got
to go back the original author and see if whom -- I don’t know. It got
passed like -- it’s so good it got passed to a bunch of people with the
instruction. Don’t pass this on further to someone who then passed it
on further, right, so.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: I love it.

[MERRILEA MAYO]: It was so good; it was so, so there, in terms of

really capturing what learning in the future might feel like to an
individual person, an individual student that I would love to pass that
by and see how people react to it.

[CHRIS FINLAY]: It’s so funny, it’s the piracy problem, right?

[MERRILEA MAYO]: Yeah. Well, when you have something that good,
it’s hard to not want to share as it were. So -- and I guess the --
another thing that would be interesting for me is --psychologically we
have this image of a teacher, and it would be interesting to, sort of,
break that down and ask students, you know, use adjective to describe
teacher. And then step back from those words and say -- and figure
out how many of them are actually useful or germane to learning.
Like, maybe it’s old lady -- well, does she have to be old? Does she
have to be a lady? I mean, just step back from the words that they
use, how many of them actually have to do with learning? And all
those that have to do with learning, how many of them could be
satisfied by other means?

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