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Intimacy + Trust + Emotion + Identification with sympathetic characters + Narrative + Curiosity  = Engagement

This general consensus came from the panelists covering “Hollywood Meets Harvard: It’s All about Engagement.” Speakers were Tom Graunke, chairman and CEO of StormWind; Rob Wrubel, president of Apollo Lightspeed; David Siminoff, cofounder and chief creative officer of Shmoop; Justin Kitch, CEO and cofounder of Curious.com. The moderator was Jeffrey Snipes, chairman of Mindful Schools.

Engagement comes through exploring the universality of the human experience, they noted. Emotion takes over, and one can suspend disbelief when a character levitates and a fox speaks.

Then the question is: Why isn’t learning engaging? We know it’s not for lack of desire or because it’s too expensive. For example, the infrastructure to engage and draw on human emotion has dropped from $500,000 to $3,000, Graunke said. “Bringing emotion [into learning] is now affordable and whoever grasps that will be the winners.” Playing a vital role in fostering engagement is the teacher – not just the technology.  

Wrubel noted that as the University of Phoenix grew its program over 20 years, they stuck to one principle: the faculty practitioner as the facilitator and a forum of collaboration mixed with competition.  

He spoke of parlaying that model into other games. One has a teacher requiring students to rack up 100 "shmoints" (points). There’s a leader board and kids fighting for shmoints. The power dynamic shifts as geeks, a.k.a. the new “classroom thought-leaders,” rule. “A guttural competition raises the stakes and humanizes the experience,” he added. The prize: a T-shirt.

But how do we know if we’re delivering learning this way? We need more experiences to know what’s working. Siminoff said, we have lots of data but it’s disparate and flawed. The context in which a question is asked can have a greater effect on the answer than the question itself.

What’s clear is that compelling content is king – and needs to catch the attention immediately. Kids don’t pay attention for more than 140 characters and 60 seconds, Kitch said.

That makes the first eight seconds crucial to draw in students. The model becomes the movie trailer. In 180 seconds, people understand the plot and concept enough to decide whether they want to buy the movie. So it will be with learning that after 180 seconds, a professor will have earned credibility with a student.

In this approach, content doesn’t need to be packaged perfectly. In fact, it’s best if it’s authentic. He noted the poor quality of YouTube’s design and its videos. Yet, “it’s blowing away all forms of consumption.”

They compared video of an endearing Polish elderly lady explaining how to cook perogies as her husband holds a shaking video camera with a beautifully shot stir-fry sequence complete with sweating vegetables.  Polish lady won, hands down.

In another example of engagement, Hackathon is exploding by presenting real problems, real stakes, and real prizes, like hiring the winner of the coding competition. Seventeen-year-olds get excited to think they can really run a data center and Cisco might give them a scholarship. Instead “we keep merchandising miserable STEM,” Kitch said.

Edgy content boosts engagement, too, Siminoff said, pointing out that kids like and seek out the jokes on Family Guy.  

Panelists envision branded content experts and a distributed network of experts behind new learning. For 101 intro classes, a stellar professor will teach thousands of students. Professors with virtual and word-of-mouth high satisfaction rates will thrive. Kitch foresees a Harvard professor being at a disadvantage in the future. “He’ll be seen as a stodgy professor who bloviates too long.”

Everyone will be thinking about how they brand, share, and monetize their intellectual property in the future.  “We’re all building a body of intellectual property,” Kitch said.

So what will online learning look like 10 years from now? Snipes asked the panelists.

Wrubel described lots of media and gaming in learning. People will subscribe to general education classes and be in charge of their own learning plan.

Siminoff said that we’ll have reached a tipping point in a debate on whether we fund public schools. He sees the current trend of voting down school bonds as a harbinger, as more families put their children in charter schools and read grim news stories about public schools. Charter schools will have a very large presence in 10 years.

Kitch said technology will allow learning to follow students around similar to the way books, photos, and music follow people around now.

Graunke said the best content and the best teachers will triumph. “We’re going to get really good at figuring out who are the best English teachers, psych teachers, etc.” It might be $ .99 to sign up for a class; someone will create an accreditation system for this learning. The demand is so great to solve this problem, he finished.