Irving Wladawsky-Berger

The Evolution of Online Learning

Where will good jobs come from in our emerging digital economy?  This is a really important question given the dramatic changes taking place in the economy, mostly driven by the continuing advances in technology and the forces of globalization.  Unfortunately, we don’t have very good answers.

But, just about every study on the subject points to a similar trend: for the foreseeable future, the US economy will need better educated workers.  Workers without a post-secondary education face a contracting set of job opportunities.  Those with higher educational attainments will be in the best position to obtain good jobs with good pay.

Moreover, while the overall unemployment/underemployment rates remain persistently high, a 2011 McKinsey report found that employers are having trouble filling specific positions because they could not find applicants with the right skills.  The report projects that if economic conditions improve, there will be a shortage of 1.5 million workers with college degrees by 2020, but a surplus of almost 6 million of workers with no high school degree.  It also projects a shortage of workers with technical, health care, and other skills requiring a post-secondary education but not necessarily a college degree.

This is not surprising given the central role of information and knowledge in our increasingly digital economy.  However, our colleges and universities, the very institutions to which the country should turn to help us address these growing educational demands, are facing problems of their own.  Tuition costs have been rising faster than the rate of inflation, thus making it harder for them to serve the students most in need of their services.  Many educational institutions are facing financial difficulties.  The financial crisis has been aggravating the situation, at both public and private institutions.  Government education budgets are under pressure at all levels, - local, state and national.

Reflections on Storytelling

Storytelling has played a central role in human communications since times immemorial.  Storytelling predates writing.  Oral narratives were used by many ancient cultures as a way of passing along their traditions, beliefs and learning from generation to generation.  Over the centuries, the nature of  storytelling has significantly evolved with the advent of writing and the emergence of new technologies that enabled stories to be embodied in a variety of media, including books, films, TV and the Web.

While contemporary storytelling is mostly associated with entertainment, education and culture, it also plays a major role in business.  In particular, storytelling is widely used in the development of brands for products and services as well as companies. 

Establishing a brand requires much more than advertising, mindless jingles or assertions that no one believes.  It is akin to engaging in a conversation with your intended audience, where you talk about your challenges and aspirations for the product and the company in order to create emotional associations and expectations.  In short, you are creating and telling a story about your brand.  And, the more powerful, important and complex the messages you are trying to convey, the more important it is that you do so by telling a compelling and emotionally resonant story. 

Good storytelling is particularly important when introducing a complex and potentially disruptive offering in the marketplace whose value is not well understood.  It’s a good way of explaining what the new innovation is all about in as simple a way as possible.  As a concrete example, let me share my experiences with the development of IBM’s Internet and e-business strategy in the mid-late 1990s.

Data Science - the Emergence of a New Discipline

Data Science is emerging as a hot new profession and academic discipline.  Data Scientist: the Sexiest Job of the 21st Century is the title of a recent Harvard Business Review article.  Its authors, Tom Davenport and D. J. Patil, define data scientist as “a high-ranking professional with the training and curiosity to make discoveries in the world of big data, . . . Their sudden appearance on the business scene reflects the fact that companies are now wrestling with information that comes in varieties and volumes never encountered before.”  They note that demand for data scientists is racing ahead of supply.  People with the necessary skills are scarce, primarily because the discipline is so new that there are no university programs offering data science degrees.   

But, the situation is rapidly changing.  A number of universities are setting up graduate programs in data science.  In New York City alone, for example, NYU has launched a new Center for Data Science which will start offering a Master in Data Science in the Fall of this year.  Urban informatics, - the application of data science to urban problems, - is the primary focus of NYU’s new Center for Urban Science and Progress, which will start a masters program in Applied Urban Science and Informatics this Fall as well.  Columbia University is starting an Institute for Data Science and Engineering.  Similar research and educational programs are being organized in universities around the world.

The emergence of data science is closely intertwined with the explosive growth of big data over the past decade.  Davenport and Patil write that:  “More than anything, what data scientists do is make discoveries while swimming in data.  It’s their preferred method of navigating the world around them.  At ease in the digital realm, they are able to bring structure to large quantities of formless data and make analysis possible. They identify rich data sources, join them with other, potentially incomplete data sources, and clean the resulting set.  In a competitive landscape where challenges keep changing and data never stop flowing, data scientists help decision makers shift from ad hoc analysis to an ongoing conversation with data.”

Data science goes beyond the use of data mining, business analytics and statistical analysis to look for patterns in large data sets.  It is more multidisciplinary in nature.  According to Wikipedia:  “Data science incorporates varying elements and builds on techniques and theories from many fields, including math, statistics, data engineering, pattern recognition and learning, advanced computing, visualization, uncertainty modeling, data warehousing, and high performance computing with the goal of extracting meaning from data and creating data products.”

Beyond GDP - Measuring Value in a Service-oriented, Information-based, Digital Economy

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the basic measure of a country’s overall economic output based on the market value of all the goods and services the country produces.  Most measures of economic performance used by government officials to inform their policies and decisions are based on GDP figures.  But, many concerns have been raised about the adequacy of GDP-based measurements given the major structural changes that economies around the world have been going through over the past few decades.

GDP is essentially a measure of production.  While suitable when economies were dominated by the production of physical goods, GDP does not adequately capture the growing share of services and the production of increasingly complex solutions that characterize advanced economies.  Nor does it reflect important economic activity beyond production, such as income, consumption and living standards. 

A few years ago, a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress led by Nobel-prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen was convened to look at the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress.

“What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed, decisions may be distorted . . .,” it noted in its report issued in September of 2009.  “So too, we often draw inferences about what are good policies by looking at what policies have promoted economic growth; but if our metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences that we draw.” 

The Commission recommended complementing classical measures of GDP and economic production with additional measurements that captured people’s well being, as well as factoring in measurements of sustainability to help reflect the evolution of the economy into the future. 

A Tale of Two Americas

“Explanations for our current political volatility abound: toxic partisanship, the ever more fragmented and strident news media, high unemployment, economic upheaval and the clamorous upwelling of inchoate populist angst,” wrote Stanford University historian David Kennedy in an excellent essay in the New York Times following the 2010 elections.  “But the political instability of our own time pales when compared with the late 19th century.  In the Gilded Age the American ship of state pitched and yawed on a howling sea of electoral turbulence.”

The Gilded Age is the name given to the era following the Civil War, roughly from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s to the turn of the twentieth century.  It was a period of intense political competition between the two parties, with a string of presidents that few now remember.  “Generations of American scholars have struggled to find a coherent narrative or to identify heroic leaders in that era’s messy and inconclusive political scene,” writes Professor Kennedy. 

Yet, the Gilded Age was also a time of major innovations and rapid economic growth.  The country kept moving on and making progress, including the development of railroads, steel and factories of all sorts in what is often referred to as the Second Industrial Revolution.  The telephone and electricity were both invented and initially deployed during this period, as was the world’s most comprehensive public education system.  By the beginning of the 20th century, the US emerged as one of the world’s industrial and economic powers, as well as an increasingly prosperous and powerful country. 

I thought of Professor Kennedy’s essay when reading The America that Works, a special report on US competitiveness in the March 16 issue of The Economist.  “Luckily, dysfunction in Washington is only one side of America’s story,” is the tag line in the report’s overview article.  As was the case in the late 19th century, this is a tale of two very different Americas.