Episode 50: Retaining What You Study in School With Ben Nelson

Teachers and students alike have known for a long time that note memorization can often lead to a very temporary grasp of learning material, and it is quickly forgotten after a test has been taken. Forgetting information in most cases isn't so much of a failure in memory as it is a failure in the actual learning processes spread across our higher education systems. Ben Nelson, founder and chancellor of Minerva University, noticed this education gap long ago and felt compelled to take action towards finding a solution.

Ben is a visionary with a passion to reinvent higher education. Prior to Minerva, he spent more than 10 years at Snapfish, where he helped build the company from a startup to the world's largest public personal publishing service. Ultimately, the false dichotomy that currently exists in the debate of higher education is whether higher education should be vocational or not. For example, should it just teach you to be an accountant, lawyer, or doctor, or should it be there to educate you for the sake of knowledge? That battle of pre-professional knowledge versus general knowledge is an absurd argument; first and foremost, the American higher education system has theoretically decided to not do either, even though all American institutions of higher education are essentially vocational institutions.

If you think about the American system, you can't study to be a lawyer as an undergraduate, but you can do so in the British system, or even in India or China. In the United States though, to be a lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, or dentist, these vocational traits come in the graduate programs. The undergraduate programs are supposed to teach you what the Founding Fathers referred to as practical or useful knowledge—knowledge that you can apply anywhere, regardless of the field you go into—rejecting the whole idea of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

The entire concept of a free world depends on people being able to transfer wisdom, be it professional or non-professional. Of course in this day and age, people are almost certainly going to be focused on their professions. So they have to transfer that wisdom not just as a civic duty, but as part of their professional role: one profession to another, one industry to another, and one sector to another (not to mention within all their very complex interpersonal relationships and interactions, too). A university education is more important than ever, but the reality is that no university actually teaches any of these things.

The way that most classes are conducted, people generally don't recall what happened in them. If you took every single test that you got an A in as an undergraduate, what do you think you would get on those same tests if you took them today? You will have most likely forgotten everything. In fact, if you took those same tests 20 years ago, you probably would have failed, too, because the reality is that you didn't learn, you were certified. You passed the tests, you jumped through the hurdles, but you didn't actually internalize that learning.

It is easier to learn  something when you have deeply processed the information and applied it. When you make a user association, you retain it. Your mind doesn't remember information because you were tested on it, it remembers the information that you engage with. That's ultimately how education should be structured. Unfortunately, the American educational system has long abandoned even an attempt at that.

Information acquisition is free and easily available today. This is why education should go beyond that, whether the learning is happening in a traditional classroom or in a virtual one.  Real learning entails understanding this information, integrating it, and applying it in multiple contexts outside the classroom. This is why learning should be divided into three separate areas: the acquisition of information, experiential learning, and application in real-world contexts.

Despite the fact that Minerva University is unique and there's currently no other system of learning like it, the components that make it unique aren't that complicated. What makes it unique is rather the implementation of teaching interdisciplinarity, while using active learning pedagogy that is based on decades of research in the science of learning.

In addition, the Minerva methodology is delivered in a digital learning environment, intentionally designed for the purpose of education. We're now seeing an adoption of Minerva University's style of learning by universities in the United States and half a dozen other countries around the world.

As the education landscape continues to adapt and innovate at varying paces, there are going to be institutions that are finally going to actually educate their students, separating themselves from the institutions that will continue to not educate their students. Up until now, no university truly educated their students, according to Ben. They were in an easy position because there wasn’t a need to be competitive. In the future, institutions will have to compete on how smart their incoming students are, rather than on something as ambiguous as exclusivity. There will be a bifurcation, where inputs won't be the primary determinant of outputs, and that will shake higher education to its core.

Connect with Ben Nelson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bennelson3/

Learn more about Minerva University at https://www.minerva.edu/

Learn more about Minerva Project at https://www.minervaproject.com/

Subscribe and listen to our podcast at IlluminateHigherEducation.com

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