Helen Zille's 4 Ts for improving education

I'm part of an initiative called Entrepreneurs Organization. It's a worldwide initiative comprising 8,000+ members over 130 countries and it's mission is to help entrepreneurs learn.

There are a number of ways the initiative facilities learning. One of the most effective is through events called "In the Boardroom" sessions, or ITBs as we like to call them. We arrange meetings with business leaders in their boardrooms, where they kindly share their experience of business with us. Through these events i've had the privilege of meeting Jannie Mouton (PSG), GT Ferreira (Rand Merchant Bank), Gareth Ackerman (Pick 'n Pay), Robbie Brozin (Nandos) and many others.

The most recent "In the Boardroom" session, held yesterday, was with Helen Zille - the Premier of the Western Cape. She isn't a business leader but she is, in my view, an incredible leader.

I am not particularly political, and so I didn't have an arsenal of questions for her around policy issues and the future of our country. But last year I did have a heated exchange with her on Twitter over some snide remarks she made about a TEDEducation event. I even wrote a blog post in which I probably went a little far in responding to her remarks. So I was looking forward to hearing her speak and interact with her face to face.

She gave an excellent talk in which she described the role of Government in enabling entrepreneurs, highlighting some of the local success stories and sharing her view on the importance of entrepreneurial activity to the future of the country.

Sure, she's a politician and knows how to fill up a speaking slot but her talk was, for the most part, filled with substance and thoughtful rhetoric. She was booked for a 60 minute presentation and ended up spending a generous two hours with us. She spoke intelligently on all the topics she touched on, gently defended her views on sensitive political issues, and sparred with some of us (and won!) on the issue of alcohol advertising and the need for some degree of a Nanny State.

​I was particularly interested in what she had to say about the importance of education. She explained that the way to fix education is through a focus on improving four key areas:

• Teachers
• Text
• Time Management
• Technology

​These key focus areas resonate with me in online education as much as they do in face-to-face education. Although i'd probably rewrite the list as follows (I really tried to keep the aliteration, but failed!):

• Teachers and Administrative Coaches
• Instructional Materials
• Time Management
• Technology

​Why the changes?

Teachers are expected to be competent across a range of functions. It's not fair to expect teachers to know their subject matter intimately, inspire students through creative lessons, AND be administrative powerhouses. For this reason, we separate out administrative and subject matter roles at GetSmarter. Every student is assigned a teacher and an administrative coach. This separation of roles allows the teachers to become truly great at teaching. And the administrative coaches can focus on becoming truly excellent at pro-active administration. The result of 94% completion rates for over 5,000 students last year, speaks volumes for this approach.

​Textbooks are really effective instructional materials. But in today's digital environment, instructional videos, interactive tutorial systems, and other digital learning tools are outperforming static textbooks. 

The Premier's reference to Time Management makes my heart glad. To achieve any significant project one needs effective time management. We bake effective time management practices directly into our courses so that both students and teachers have a disciplined foundation upon which they can perform on the course. It's painful to tell CEOs that they're not on track to hand in their assignment for a course, but it's effective! 

And technology. Well, this enables improvements across the role of teachers and administrative coaches,​ in the quality of instructional materials, and in better time management.

I'm feeling pretty inspired by the Premier's enthusiasm for South Africa. And I love her vision for improving the education system. 

You've got my vote, Helen.

Record, review, re-learn

Last night I was interviewed by Bruce Whitfield on his Money Show as part of his Shape Shifters segment. The show is featured on Cape Talk and Radio 702 and has a fairly large audience at 200,000+ listeners. I was keen to impress, so I spent an hour beforehand thinking through the sorts of questions Bruce might ask about GetSmarter and online education generally. This helped me keep certain discussion points top of mind. With a few minutes to go before I was on air, I felt prepared.

​Bruce is a great interviewer. And I know my subject well, so even though he asked me questions I hadn't prepared for I felt comfortable throughout the entire interview. I left the interview feeling that the interview had been a success. He asked good questions. I answered with authority, and there were playful, energetic interactions throughout. I also had a lot of fun.

​That could have been the end of my experience of this interview. But as I got to work this morning I received an email from Cape Talk with a recording of the interview. What a great opportunity to review my performance!

So I spent 20 minutes listening to the clip and wrote the following review:​

1. ​I need to stop filling the space between sentences with "ums" and "ahs". While listening to the recording I was acutely aware of how this detracted from the quality of the talk, even though I was happy that the content of the talk was good. I would never have recognised this issue if I didn't review a recording of the interview. My solution moving forward: i'm going to slow down the speed of my delivery, and i'm going to embrace the pauses. And i'm going to get recordings of all the interviews, review them to find ways to improve, and re-learn again and again.
2. ​I need to focus on delivering sound bites. I found myself telling stories, which in itself isn't bad, but I didn't finish the talk with any specific take aways. And I think these take aways are key to the message I want to send, and the value that the listeners take away from the interview. I need to think in terms of sound bites and then deliver these sound bites. My solution moving forward: i'm going to prepare by anticipating as many questions as I can, and then write down bullet point answers that could each be seen as a sound bite. Then, during the talk, i'm going to look for opportunities to seed these sound bites into the conversation.

​As I went through this process I thought of a simple summary of how we can learn from our performance in public: record, review, re-learn. 

I've got a lot to learn. And when it comes to improving my performance in interviews i'm going to follow the process of recording, reviewing and re-learning. Over and over again. I'm excited.

Here's the recording from last night's interview:​

Link here

I danced 10,362 steps at a wedding this weekend

How did I know? I was wearing a Jawbone UP. 

What is a Jawbone UP? UP is a wristband tracks your movement and sleep in the background. It works together with an app that displays your data, lets you add things like meals and mood, and delivers insights that, according to the company's website "keep you moving forward." It's a holistic approach to healthy living, and it starts with a better understanding of yourself.

​Here is a screenshot of my movement this past Saturday. I got up really early to catch a flight to Durban, hence the activity around 5am, and the dancing began around 10pm and continued until the early hours of Sunday.

I'm only using it for tracking my movement and sleeping patterns. The UP interface is perfectly good for entering meals and resistance-based workouts (activities the UP can't track) but I find this a little too much effort. So I default to the easy things to measure and all it takes is the discipline of wearing the UP bracelet.

The UP has a certain wow factor that gets people talking about it. But no sooner have I started discussing the UP with friends and family, when the inevitable "that's great and all, but it looks like an expensive gadget for geeks and I can't see the benefit" comment is made.

I completely disagree.

​The saying "what gets measured, gets managed" comes to mind. This is one of the concepts from a management philosophy called Managing by Objectives. And for the first time, the UP has given me a really easy (read: all I have to do is where a bracelet) way to measure my physical movement and sleeping patterns. It also happens to have an app that represents this personal data in an attractive, engaging way.

​Just by being exposed to this data, I can begin to draw connections between things I do, and the degree of their impact on my physical activity and sleep. Without measurement, this wouldn't be possible. And once I have the data, this can drive decision making.

So here are some of the things i've learned over the past two weeks of using UP to build my own personal data analytics:​

• ​Dancing at a wedding is equivalent to a 6km run in terms of calories burned. If I know I have a wedding coming up, I can miss one of my 5km runs in a week and still reach my physical goals for that week. I always knew that dancing was a great physical workout, but now I have more precise analytics.
• I'm pretty active during the working day. I had thought that I sit at my desk for extended periods of time, but my analytics tell me that i'm up and about at last every 40 minutes. This could be a good thing physically, and it could also be destructive to concentrated periods of work. I'm going to interrogate this further.
• On average, I fall asleep in about 4 minutes after watching a TV series episode. This isn't particularly useful, but I know that it takes me longer to fall asleep when I haven't relaxed by watching an episode. I'd like to run experiments with other pre-sleep activities like reading a book, watching a TED talk, etc... and see if these activities have an impact on the quality of my sleep.
• ​I have deeper sleep on weekends than during the week. I need more data before I can draw decent conclusions, but the early analytics are in line with what I would have expected. Quality of sleep is one area that i'm particularly interested in measuring, and UP measures deep and light sleep, with the former being the more important in determining overall quality of sleep. I work 12+ hours most days (out of choice, I love it) and every now and again I struggle to sleep because my mind becomes over active. By using data from UP, i'm going to attempt to draw conclusions about what activities cause me to sleep badly. I have a good sense for this already, and i'm going to confirm it with real data.

​The benefit to me is clear: simply by being exposed to this sort of personal data, I will draw connections I never did before and i'll improve in those areas with almost no additional effort. Add in a little extra effort, and i'll definitely see improvements.

Wearable computing is coming, and personal analytics will be an increasingly important part of our lives as we strive for continual personal improvement. The UP ​is just the first iteration of a generation of wearable devices. And as the cost of implanted devices come down - devices like those "installed" by people who suffer from diabetes, that measure blood/sugar levels, heart rate and a whole range of other personal metrics - I have no doubt that subcutaneous devices will become more popular. And as that happens, accuracy in measurement will improve.

But that's a little painful for a Monday. I'm going to stick with my Jawbone UP and see what else I can learn about my daily physical activity and sleeping patterns. 

The future of learning, from the Open University

I snapped this picture two weeks ago in Camden Town, London. Apart from the clear blue skies, which were a welcome surprise for us coming from wintry Cape Town, the real excitement that day was the meeting we had with Future Learn - a project coming out of the Open University.

Future Learn has been launched in response to the MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) craze that originated in North America in 2012 and has now swept across the globe. Udacity and Coursera, two for-profit companies, are the two front runners in the MOOC race, and now Future Learn is set to become the first European-based provider to compete.

After meeting with Future Learns' CEO and ​Commercial Director, it's clear to me that they are not just going to add scale to the MOOC movement, but will help evolve it from where it is today towards a new model of education. I am particularly interested in how they will leverage their base that is the Open University. For some time now, the Open University has been running comprehensive online programmes that deliver exceptional education according to sound online pedagogy. And while the other MOOC providers are, for the most part, having to build this capacity as they go, Future Learn can work from an incredible base of existing knowledge on how to deliver online courses effectively.

I'm excited to see the first few courses they launch later this year.

A trip down Carnaby Street, I mean... memory lane

After matriculating in 1999, three friends and I moved to London for a Gap year before starting at University. It was one of the most exciting things I could have done as an 18-year old: move to a foreign country, gain my freedom and be fully responsible for myself. Yet, after 5 months and too many expensive phone calls to my girlfriend in South Africa (not smart!) I only had £500 to my name. This was an issue because my mates and I had planned a 3-month trip around Europe, and we each needed £1,500 to complete the trip. They had the cash, and I didn't. As a teenager, there's not much worse than being left out! So I had to find a way to earn the extra money in 4 weeks, and the data entry job I had paying £7 an hour wasn't going to cut it.

I decided to sell my services as a web designer. I had only dabbled in websites at this point, but I didn't have many options and this seemed like a sensible one, particularly if I could charge a few hundred quid for a single website. And so, Sam Paddock & Associates was born. Only, without any associates :)

It's hard to believe this today, but back in 2000 most businesses didn't have a website. One of the businesses I got interest from, after hundreds of cold calls, was a dentist in Carnaby Street. And after 2 nerve-wracking meetings, in which I think I compared myself to a painter who could produce any look for his website that he wanted, he agreed to spend £500 on a website with me. I was ecstatic!

I have a vivid memory of walking out of his dental rooms, shooting straight across the street to the local Pret a Manger (the same store is still there today) and treating myself to a deluxe sandwich. I think this was a first for me, and a major departure from Tesco's baked beans! Then I walked boldly down the road and called my father from my cellphone to share the story of my sales success. As I think back on that day, I realise that it's one of the defining moments of my life. I put myself out there in an area I wasn't familiar with, and someone bought what I was selling. For more money than I could have imagined.

Fast forward to the present.

And so this week, while visiting London for meetings to look at the expansion of GetSmarter into the UK, I stumbled upon Carnaby Street while doing some shopping for my wife. I quickly retraced my steps of some 13 years ago and felt a warm nostalgic feeling as I did. It was a powerful experience to re-live that feeling of success I felt 13 years ago. I got a little caught up in the moment and decided to take a photo of the Dentist's rooms - pictured below:

​Picture of the Dentist's office on Carnaby street.

The experience has made me think about the value of reflecting on the past as a means of appreciating the present. It was an amazing experience to see how far I've come in 13 years. It was like having a two-way conversation with my 18-year-old self. I really enjoyed it. And I want to do more of it. 

​What a great trip down Carnaby Street. I mean... memory lane.