Truly active learning: Empowering modern classrooms with Fred Dixon

Recently, our hosts connected with Fred Dixon, CEO of Blindside Networks and co-founder of the open-source virtual classroom platform BigBlueButton. 

In this episode, Fred shares his mission to eliminate the "back of the classroom" in digital spaces, arguing that virtual learning should never be a passive experience like watching a YouTube video.

We dive deep into the science of active learning and why "purposeful struggle" is the essential "burn" required for neural pathways to actually change. Fred provides a candid take on the rise of AI in education, warning that while it is a powerful tool for educators to gain back time, it risks becoming "ultra-processed food" for students—leading to cognitive offloading rather than true mastery.

Key topics discussed include:

• Active Learning vs. Passive Meetings: Why tools designed for business meetings (like Zoom and Teams) often fail the pedagogical needs of a classroom.
• Using digital analytics to help teachers identify struggling students and provide mentorship at the upper end of a learner's ability.
• The "Oreo Cookie" of AI: Navigating the short-term incentives of AI shortcuts versus the long-term rewards of mental effort.
• Social Constructivism: How the integration of Moodle and BigBlueButton creates a social environment where learners help one another.
• Fred's take on "The Future of Education"

Whether you are an educator looking to increase student engagement or a learner navigating the age of AI, this episode offers a grounded perspective on how to ensure "learning never stops".

Catch Fred at https://blindsidenetworks.com/ or https://bigbluebutton.org/ or connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ffdixon/

Visit Moodle at Moodle.com

Transcript

Well, hello, and welcome to the Moodle Podcast, where we talk about the future of learning without pretending it's already figured out.

And joining us today is Fred Dixon, who is the CEO of Blindside Networks, co-founder of BigBlueButton, uh, which is a Moodle-certified integration. Fred's here to chat about his views on the human side of digital learning, how we can move from access to agency, uh, when it comes to learning using educational technology like an LMS and virtual classrooms.

And hopefully, in all of that, we will cover the full range of aspects, including AI, including digital sovereignty, all the good stuff.

 So Fred, uh, welcome to the show.

My pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Um, you spent well over a decade advocating for a very specific vision of the virtual classroom, and you've said there should be no back of the classroom in a, in a virtual space in a digital world. Where, where does the student go when they're hiding, in your view, and why is this a bad thing, and why is it your mission to make that hiding place impossible to find?

Yeah. So look, if you're listening to this, I want you to think about the last time you were on a Zoom or a Teams call, and there was some transfer of information. Someone was hoping you would learn something, and you maybe didn't have your webcam, and you were sitting there.

And after about 20 minutes, it was like, "Oh, my God. This is really hard to follow." And then it's done, maybe in an hour. You maybe were in a workforce training, and you say, "Yeah, I was there for an hour," and then a day later, you couldn't recall anything, right?

It just didn't stick. We all have the experience of watching YouTube videos. Should a training or an online class be similar to a YouTube video? No. That would be horrible and a waste of time. So we, so I as the co-founder of BigBlueButton, and BigBlueButton is a virtual classroom platform designed to ensure every student learns.

And the way we did that was we built in tools for active learning and live analytics to ensure the teacher has insight on what students are doing without kind of doing the Ferris Bueller, "Anyone? Anyone?" You know, and maybe there's a class of 20 and two people are sharing webcams.

I always laugh when, you know, when I look the virtual classes that are taught with Teams or Zoom, and they're like, "Well, I have webcams." Well, of course you do. That's all the platform provides you, right? It's all up to you as the instructor. So the place where BigBlueButton started from, it's actually 17 years now, was that, uh, passive learning is horrible, uh, whether it be in a physical classroom or online.

It's even more challenging online. Um, active learning is way better. You know, brain science shows that you can take notes. You can re-read content. You can re-listen to things. None of that really affects actual learning. It's only when you actually do work, so like going to a gym, you could look at the weights and leave, and we would all agree, nothing's gonna happen to your muscles.

You could show up at a class, and you could listen for an hour, and maybe your brain changes. Hmm, probably not. So the foundation at which BigBlueButton is active learning, and that means that you have activities you do during the class, and I think we'll get into this a little bit more later on, is that there's analytics to guide the instructor, and the role of the instructor or educator is so important to this whole process.

And I think there's some, certainly some commonwealth there between what we look at as the role of the instructor and what Moodle looks at the role of the instructor, but yeah, it's, it's from a place of active learning. We try to design BigBlueButton to support that.

So that's really more about participation than visibility, right? It's not just enough to have your webcam turned on and be in the Zoom or whatever it is, or the BigBlueButton, ideally. It's about something more than that. Can you talk, maybe a little bit more about that active part?

So there, actually, there are two components to it. One is, uh, the teacher is constantly starved for information, right? So you can read the room in a physical class. But in an online class, we're like, "Well, are you there? Can I see you through the keyhole?" Yeah, there's some of that going on, right?

So uh, to reduce the dependency on webcams, and webcams are really important for building relationships. It's, I think you would argue that any time in your life that you have been influenced by an educator, it was because you had some sort of connection with them. They were aware of you.

They cared about you. So there's this humanistic part of us. So there's one, and the second is the teacher, they have an they have a curriculum. There's some information that they need to make sure that you're learning. Active learning today, we would send you off to Kahoot! or Nearpod or Pear Deck, right?

So you, a lot of schools would say, "Look, I'll use Teams or Zoom, but I'll, I'll complement it with all these third-party products, like all everyone else does." What does that tell you? It tells you that the platform that you're using has no idea what you're trying to do.

It's just like, "I gave you your webcams. What more do you want from me? Go, go use third-party tools. Go bleed out student data to third-party tools." So BigBlueButton says, "No, no, no. The platform does understand what you're trying to do." You're trying to get the students to engage in active learning.

That means you're quizzing, polling, breakout rooms, shared notes, multi-user whiteboard, and these are built in, number one. And the second is, when the students are using them, BigBlueButton has visibility in all the activity, so it surfaces that activity to the instructor. And what this does is it gives you two dimensions for looking at what the students are doing in your class.

And what are you trying to do? You're trying to help them learn, right? So the role of the educator is to encourage, to support, to challenge, to reward, to model, to provide leadership, right, to ensure the students do some purposeful learning. So you get these sort of two axes to go to the root of your questions, like, what does BigBlueButton do?

Provides you visibility into what students are actually active. You, if you decline to talk or chat or raise your hand or respond to a poll, you will be less active than others, and instead of cognitively trying to think about, "I'm looking at a class of 25 people of which I see five webcams in Zoom, who here is not active?"...

it's an impossible, you know, there's just, you, it's, you, a teacher would not be able to do it while teaching the curriculum. But we'll tell you who's active by, like, a, an activity score so you can decide are there people that are kinda trying to fly under the radar?

And that's where we say there's no back of the classroom in BigBlueButton. You cannot hide. I often joke with people that, you know, if an instructor says to somebody, "Hey, Dan, look, um, go ahead and respond to polls. It's okay if you make mistakes. It's how you learn." And, Dan, if you were only familiar with Teams and Zoom, and you weren't shown your webcam in BigBlueButton, you'd be like, "What?

Uh, I'm not showing my webcam. How is it possible the teacher's not aware, aware of me?" Uh, it's because we don't rely on webcams. We'll give you the, the teacher gives you data. And we'll also give you data in terms of how well students are doing on any low stakes and formal quizzes.

So you have these two axes. You have, okay, are they doing well on the quizzing and how active they are. And with that you can get a pretty good spread of students. You just want everybody doing the quizzing. Doesn't matter if you learn, uh, if you, write or not.

It's the act of doing it that's, that's important. And we tie all this activity into BigBlueButton. We make it part of the platform. We surface the analytics to the instructor and we guide them like a co-pilot to in terms of, like, "Okay, if there's any students here that may be flying under the radar, or maybe struggling a bit, we'll do our best to give you insight in who those are, so that you can make the change where it matters most in the moment."

And this ties into last month, we had Liz on talking about digital capital and the digital divide, and often that's framed as kind of an, uh, hardware problem of, you know, access to, to laptop or even kind of the technical skills. But this is about enabling the educators to have, sort of to give confidence, to give support, to give kind of experience to those students in their, in their learning, to give them some agency as well.

Yeah. The way I look at it is it's you won't really notice the difference with BigBlueButton until you notice the absence of it. So if any time we can take someone who's familiar with Teams or Zoom and Meet, and bring them into BigBlueButton and show them how much engagement you can do, and what the analytics you can do, and how easy and fluid it is, and tell them, "Okay, now go back.

Stay Zoom." They'll be like, "Well, wait a minute. I don't wanna give this up," right? There's a difference here which I wasn't aware of before. That's a very analytical, pedagogically focused, you know, active learning, active recall, spaced repetition foundation on which we tried to build BigBlueButton. So these are not just, you know, hey, we did 49 webcams, what more do you wanna do?

Like, no, we really thought through what has to happen in the classroom for the student actually have increased learning outcomes, and what support the instructor or the educator needs to best enable that. And from that point of view, we came to many different conclusions than what, Teams or Zoom would do.

I think, too, another way it ties into our, our topic last month with the digital divide is, you know, Fred mentioned when you're doing it with Teams or Zoom you have all these third party connectors, right? For the polling and for all the other little tidbits. And I think about all the time we waste in meetings for people to connect to things like that, and how much harder it is for someone with low digital capital to manage multiple logins, and going to various websites while they're also trying to manage their, uh, video conferencing session too.

It just feels like we're exponentially requesting, "Hey, be simultaneously engaged in five different platforms to be present in one platform," feels unintuitive to say the least. Um...

And such is the world that a lot of people teach because they think, "Well, everyone else does it, so it must be the right way to do it." And it's not. It's horrible, you know? So it would be like trying to run your school on WordPress. It looks good, but it is, it knows nothing about education.

You would not run your school on, on WordPress. You would use it, you would use an LMS like Moodle. So why are we teaching virtual classrooms with a tool that is designed for meeting? In the class, the goal is not to meet, it is to learn. And so if the platform supports you, you just have a much better experience, um, teachers have a better experience, students have better experience.

I wanna continue on this kind of, like, digital capital thread just to, like, again, tie it back to last month's topic, 'cause it, it's been really rattling around for me. So, um, when a learner logs in but doesn't feel like they belong in a space, what should the design of that space be doing differently to your way of thinking?

When you as a student come into a class, right, we are going to learn best when we apply ourselves, called purposeful struggle, when we have a chance to do some activity, measure the results, and assess them, right? So that's Bloom's taxonomy. The idea that we're building up the hard pyramid, and that, uh, we have a range of skills that we can do.

So pick any topic that you're learning, any language, any math, science, or so on. There is a range of things that you can do on your own to learn, right? So you can do microlearning, you can read something, you can try something on yourself. But it turns out there's this range of learning, and the most efficient learning is at the upper range.

... it's kind of like a workout in the gym. You know, you could have a casual workout, but your muscles aren't gonna respond. But man, if you have a trainer that is pushing you, and you're sweating, and they're screaming, "More! Give me one more rep!" Right? You have a really good workout, sweat a bit more.

Um, the same thing happens with learning, and that is, uh, there's a zone of learning. That's Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. It's a very big phrase, but all it means is this. If something's too easy, you don't think, "2 plus 2, anybody? Four?" If something's too hard, "327 plus 468." Okay?

That might be a bit hard. But in the middle, there's this zone, and at the upper end of the zone, the most efficient way you can learn turns out you can only learn it with the help of others. And we know this, right? It's a tutor. It's a teacher.

It's a mentor. It's a coach, right? Nobody gets to be the best at something without having mentorship, and we all wanna be the best at what we're doing. That upper end of the zone, you can only get there through others, and what does that mean? It means that you'd rely on the interaction with others, helping each other out, having others give you feedback, the teacher.

What is that social environment called? It's social constructivism, and that is the foundation of Moodle. So we, as a synchronous component, do provide a platform for social constructivism, where the teacher's goal is to get the students to do very specific, like scaffolding, and immediately get them to apply, apply, apply.

Monitor what they're doing, either in a group, breakout rooms, or together. See students who may be struggling and give them feedback in the moment. And ideally, you get students struggling at the level of each of their individual abilities. That's the even harder part to do, right? So we all want each other to be at the upper end.

If you can pull that off, if you can sit you can have students say, "Man, I showed up for Mrs. Anderson's class, and she just works us so hard." Well, you're probably gonna do better on your tests than you would if you like, "Oh, I showed up at class.

It's like, oh, I'll just record it now. I don't really do it." So I'm on this mission to hopefully convince students that when they show up at a class, they should be prepared to struggle, purposeful struggle. They should be prepared to help each other out. They should be prepared to work knowing that the teacher is there to put, like, the finger under the bar and get that last rep out.

And if you can build an environment like that, it's way better than, "I'm gonna show up in a Zoom. I'm gonna listen for an hour, and I did the class. I attended." Yeah. You went in. You looked at the weights. You walked out. Nothing happened to your muscles. Nothing really happened to your brain.

Waste of time for everybody. I think it could just be that much better. And that's the fundamentals of what we think about when we wonder how can we enable that to happen and we just fade in the background. We, the platform.

And you said just before we, uh, we came on live that you've been spending a lot of time recently imagining the future of all of this, and going deep into what AI kind of affords us here. what's your thinking there?

Yes. So if I just build on those fundamentals, I would say that you can think of, there are three types of classes that you could have. You could have a class which is passive, right? I go into a Teams or Zoom call. I'm really slagging Teams or Zoom here, so sorry if anyone works at Teams or Zoom, but hey, I don't think you have the best product for teaching and learning.

So call me on the mat. Challenge me. Uh, passive learning does not work. If it did, we would have had much better outcomes during COVID. And this is planning out. I can watch a dozen YouTube videos on something. Nothing happens until my brain, until I really sit down and start doing something and making mistakes.

You can have active learning, which is, like, you're actively doing things, which is way better. And then you can have this upper end, which is like the authentic engagement between you and somebody else. Somebody is in this class, usually the educator, who is aware of you and cares about you and is going to hold you accountable, right?

And now the learning happens, right? I show up to learn English because I'm... Or Spanish, because I'm gonna be, I'm gonna go and talk Spanish for an hour, and I gotta be able to do it. This now washes up against the world that we are in with AI. So what does this mean?

Well, there are two roles in the class. There's the learner and the educator. Now let me say, first and foremost, the educator has to do a lot of, a lot of administrative stuff. They have to create curriculum. They have to create rubrics. They have to create content, quizzes. Bring on the AI.

Help them do that more efficiently, right? Obviously, don't go as far as you just farm it out, and the student's like, uh, "Hey, this assignment looks like it's just generated with AI." No. You want to save as much time as you can for the educator. To what end? Well, what does the learner need?

Does the learner need AI? And here's where Fred is gonna take a, maybe a contrarian opinion. When you walk into the classroom, physical or virtual, the last thing you need to do is have an AI on your desk. And the reason is, is that it will offload the real thinking that has to happen.

You know, purposeful struggle is struggle. Uh, and I'll use a gym analogy 'cause we got this wrong somewhere along the way. If you go into the gym and you're lifting the weights and you feel some reaction in your body, your muscles are gonna feel a certain way. what do what's that sensation you feel like when you're in the gym and you're having a really good workout?

What do your muscles feel like? Pain. It feels like pain, honestly. Well, okay. Pain is, pain is a, pain is one. Uh, burn is another, right? You got the burning in the muscles, like feel the burn. And that tells you, your muscles are basically telling you, "Look, I have extended beyond my normal capabilities.

You are pushing me." Just FYI, a lot of people who are, like, addicted to it's like, "Yeah. Game on. Let's do this. This is... I'm gonna walk out of there. I'm gonna come back stronger. I'm gonna do it all over again." And three months, six months, I mean, it's just inevitable.

Your body will respond. You'll just get stronger. Basically, there's two parts of learning. There's a state where you do not know something.... and there's a state where you've mastered something. Pick anything you want to learn. What is the feeling in between that state? And I'll just say the feeling that most people feel is frustration, right?

So I'm in a class. I have turned off all my computers, I have closed the textbook. I am now trying to work on something that the instructor has given me, and I feel frustrated. "I'm stupid, I'm dumb, I don't know this. Why is this so hard? It'd be so much easier if I looked the textbook." Somehow we equated that, and that is the feeling of the burn, right?

Your brain is woken up. Uh, Daniel Kehne came up with this System 1, System 2 thinking. System 1 is, like, instant thinking, like, "What's two plus two? It's four. I don't have to think about it." System 2 is, like, the brain has to wake up. It actually has to do stuff.

The brain is lazy. It takes energy and so on, right? So you need... Your muscles are lazy too. So you want to be in that mode where you're, like, feeling frustrated, and AI will take all that frustration away. That is the problem right now. Teachers should have AI to just create more time for an authentic engagement with the students, but the slippery slope for the students...

And the way I phrase it is this. Uh, the road to cognitive offloading is paved with AI. The more you use AI, the less you are gonna learn. Who amongst us does not now make sure their GPS is on when you leave your driveway? Why? Because you're just become cognitively dependent on the GPS, right?

Our brains can do spatial. It's how we evolved to this point. The message I have that I'm just... I will say it anybody. If you are a learner, you are going to be learned best when you're in an environment where you are being challenged and pushed, the purposeful struggle at the limit of your ability with the assistance from others under the guidance of an educator who is aware and cares about you, and is going to be there to give you help so you are free to just push yourself as far as you can.

If you can do that over and over again, you will have way better learning outcomes. And we just somehow got it wrong where the, the, the feeling of frustration causes people to think, "I'm doing something wrong." It's actually the feeling you wanna get to. And you do that more effectively with others, and that's what social constructivism is

How do you actually convince the student of that? is the, is the message literally what you just said to them? Because, you know, if you set off in your car and you... Your sole ambition is to get from A to B as quickly as possible, then, of course, you can disengage your brain and just follow the satnav.

If your goal is to remember, to learn how to get from A to B and to remember it, then you should, you should switch that off. And that requires learners to make that distinction between, "I just wanna get from A to B as quickly as possible," versus, "I want this to really stick for the long term." And, and those kinda short-term versus long-term incentives are difficult to balance sometimes.

Yeah, and you're absolutely right. You used the right term. Long-term and short-term Incentives. Incentives, like, is the dopamine hit gonna happen initially, or am I gonna struggle for a while and the dopamine hit happens? So I think your learners are uniquely challenged today to do this. And the problem is that technology is not conditioning them to feel this long-term payback for effort.

Anything of significance that we do in life, the most rewarding thing is when it comes after a period of struggle, that you achieve something that maybe you didn't think you could do. And then you get that hit and you realize, "I wanna do that again and again." And I think people who have had the benefit, let's call it pre-phones, pre-cell phones, we had to learn things the old-fashioned way.

But really, it was, we lifted the weights, right? Our brains actually had to think. We were doing memorization, rote learning, building exercises, making presentations, writing essays. Like, that's how we built up the mental model of how to do things. And now I believe the challenge is, 'cause your question is how do you communicate that?

Well, let's start first by the challenge they have. Social media, been around since 2010, let's call it 15 years, uh, has made us anxious. COVID, uh, which was around for two to years or so, has made us isolated. TikTok has taken away our attention span, so that long-term, you know, long-term uh, delayed gratification's not there.

And now we bequeath everybody... All learners in the world now have AI, which will lift the weights for you, right? So I think learners today are uniquely challenged, because if they just follow all these things that I just talked about, they're not going to be in a state of mind where they're willing to, like, close the textbook and really do the learning.

So how do... What's the antidote to that? The homework apocalypse is among us, right? So take-home assignments have been hugely diluted, especially for learners who are competing for limited spots at a university or in a job, right? You... You know, again, we were talking before the session. It's like doping in a sport, right?

I mean, should I just learn everything without AI and everyone else is gonna, you know, represent that they know something when they don't, but they get the job? That's a really hard, that's a really hard thing to make a learner, uh... ... to make them challenge to do it.

So, I, I would say there are a couple anecdotes to this. One is the most important person in this equation is the educator, right? Someone who can help them, encourage them, challenge them. Like, "Don't use AI. Don't show up my class without having done the work to, you know, learn some basic Spanish, and then we'll get going with it." That's what you're here for.

And the second, um, the second is the mindset. So I think any of us who did well in school, the best experience was when we had to struggle. I think if school came too easy to somebody, it was probably didn't set them up for the grit that they needed later on in life when things didn't come easy.

Because you can always find something that's more challenging. You're better served that in your formative years, in K-12 and higher ed., you got pushed, you had to learn, you felt that, uh, "I didn't know. I wasn't good enough." You worked through the imposter syndrome, and then you sat down and you did the work.

You got the grades, you got the marks, you got that feeling of doing it. And I can share with you my personal approach to this, 'cause we have a motto at Blindside Networks. Every day, the motto is, "The learning never stops." I have never stopped learning. Like, building a virtual classroom platform is not easy.

I did not pick something that was easy. So I'll share with you from a learner's point of view, I would advocate looking at learning in three phases. One is curiosity. If you can't awaken your brain to doing something, like, "I'm genuinely curious right now, like, why is this not working?

What's this problem?" Or, "When am I supposed to learn?" Or, "What does the essay say?" Or, "What is the teacher trying to say?" You have to kind of trick your brain into waking up. If you can do that, that curiosity will take you a certain path. And then the second phase, the hunt.

"I can smell the prey. I have enough clues." It's like, "I can figure this out if I just push harder, and it ... " right? Could be a math problem. could be essay. "I think I can get this right." Uh, the third phrase is flow. Right? So if you can get to a state where everything just flows around you and you lose track of everything, and you're just in the problem, that is one of the most enjoyable states of mind you can get into.

But think of all the things you have to get into it. So your question was what can a learner do today? Go to a structured environment. Find a good educator. Do not allow yourself to not lift the weights. Push yourself and understand that this feeling of frustration you feel is the burn in your muscles.

If you can trick your mind into saying, "I want to feel frustrated," generate curiosity, think about the hunt. I mean, we're designed as hunter-gatherers. And then you will hit this state of flow. Best feeling in the world. Yeah. Excellent.

I have something perhaps a bit contrarian that's a bit off script, but I'm, I'm reflecting, Fred, because my own educational experience, like, I'm, I'm right at that age where the, the iPhone hit when I was, like, a sophomore in college. Um, so I had, like, the really analog youth and high school and early college experience.

And then as ... And, and I remember my elders were always like, "Oh, kids these days have it so easy. You can go to the library on your laptop and look at all these papers, and you don't have to do like we did where you had to comb the stacks and find the physical pile of books and go get your citations." And, and, "Oh, you won't ever be ..." You know, like, when I was a real little kid, "You won't have a calculator in your pocket for the rest of your life." Right?

But actually turns out we fully do, right? So I I see it from these like two perspectives, like this, this kind of, like, sense of, oh, well, everything's passive and isolated, and people aren't gonna have ... You know, you're not doing the real work of building your brain and building your skills and learning things if you're partaking.

But I feel like it, on the flip side of it, kids now see the systems at play, and they see, "Okay, these are the systems. This is the game. These are the hoops I have to jump through." And I think that's a whole new and different and interesting kind of learning that learners are doing in the age of AI, where they're looking at this, this educational system that has maybe been built on and from the foundations of people going to physical libraries and only having access to the books that were in their little town.

That formed our educational system, and it isn't really the case anymore, right? Like, so we have this education system that's built on this woefully outdated way that societies managed knowledge in an era when any question you have is answerable. You can, you can find out something and get yourself started down a path of discovery through your own motivations when you're up against it, right?

So I think ... I don't know. I I don't know what I'm asking, just that, like, isn't there isn't there something beautiful about the systems' thinking and, like, the way that students are learning to game the system, right, and to, to get their diplomas or whatever without really memorizing when the Magna Carta was signed, because they can always just look that up?

But instead, they have this overarching picture of, "I have to jump through this hoop, so I have to do this. I have to engage the AI here." I think that's kind of cool and might lead to new things. I don't know. What do you think?

Okay. So I think, uh, you're pointing out that, you know, we had to do things harder. Ah, back in the one-room schoolhouse, it was a chalkboard and a piece of chalk, right? And you had ... There was no paper, right? Giving people paper, you know, the fact that, you know, what was it?

When writing came out, I forget which, the philosopher said, like, "Okay, now we just write everything down. We don't to remember anything," right? The death of learning. There is a certain amount of manual effort that we have to do that we don't need to do anymore. Going to library is a good example.

Finding a book, for the sheer purpose of reading it, can I just get to the book part? 'Cause I, I just wanna save that time. That is true. Uh, if I'm gonna make something in my kitchen here, I don't have to grow the vegetables. I don't have to raise the cow.

I can get the food. That was not the case, you know, 50 or 100, 100 years ago. But now we're at a place where we we, like, to use the food analogy, we just tap the buttons and food shows up. We don't cook food anymore, right? So we've been given the ability to have it easier to create, but we have also been given the opportunity to short-circuit it altogether.

And, uh, the food analogy's probably pretty good because we can realize it. Like, yeah, the food showed up at the door. I didn't cook it. The problem with learning is ...The point at which you cognitive offload is almost invisible to you, right? So it's the event horizon of learning.

If I'm going to learn something, biologically, I cannot learn it unless I create new neural pathways in my brain. And biologically, I can't do that unless my brain wakes up and starts to, like, do some heavy lifting. You know, feeling frustrated and so on. If I misinterpret the ease of using AI to make me to learn, I am essentially going into the gym and having my trainer or, or something lift the weights for me.

And I'd been measured my success by how many weights I can lift, not by what I learned. The problem with our educational society today, we measured it by weights that you can lift. It's a first order approximation. If you can write this essay or you can do this assignment, you must have learned something.

But we've done it in a, we've done it in an industrial, you know, assimilate way, right? God, I wish when I was in school that every class had two teachers. One taught the class, and the second one walked around and said, "What can I do to help you learn?" 'Cause we were just all expected to learn it ourselves, figure it out ourselves, right?

So, I think that there is a lot more scaffolding to help you learn, but it is a slippery slope where it is so easy to cognitive offload, because, you know, you, you don't take on the assignment. There's five questions on it to do. Ah, I'll get it, I'll do the first one.

You're done in 30 seconds. You're facing 10 minutes for each question, you're facing a full hour. It's an impossible choice to make. And you know, there was a famous experiment where the kid, a young kid is put into a room and there's an Oreo cookie on the table. The experimenter says, "Look, I just have to go out, but if I come back and the Oreo cookie's still there, I'll give you a second one." And it was how strong could the child resist taking that Oreo cookie, 'cause it's right there, right?

And there, there was a argument that this experiment showed the stronger that you were able to delay the gratification, you, this, this extrapolated to, like, hey, I can probably do better in life if I can just not, just grab the Oreo cookie right away. And, uh, if you eat Oreo cookies day in, morning, noon, very predictable what happens, right?

You're not gonna feel good, you'll lose energy and so on. If you use AI morning, noon and night, people say, like, "What's gonna happen with learning with AI?" Well, it's very predictable. If I just used AI morning, noon and night to do all my assignments, I will learn nothing.

And there, there was a really good early study done at MIT where they hooked up 48 students to an electroencephalogram where they had them once each month for three months write an essay. Group one could use, uh, ChatGPT, group two could use Google, and group three could not use anything.

And they just looked at their brain. They didn't ask them, "Did you feel like you learned or not?" And it was very predictable. Group one, uh, there was very little brain activity. The people who, the, um, reviewers who, uh, reviewed the essays called them soulless. There's no insight in them.

Uh, the second group used, uh, Google, little bit more thinking. And third group had write essays themselves. Much better essays, much better learning. They had to work harder. And then they did something very clever. They flipped it around. So group one was given, um, asked to write the essay themselves on the fourth time.

And so did it help, did AI for the first three essays help them write the fourth one? No. When they had to write the essay by themselves, they they couldn't remember what they wrote in the first ones, 'cause they didn't do it. They were no better off than they were before, and they struggled.

Turns out that group three, after writing the essays themself, when they were given AI to assist in writing the fourth essay, they actually did better. And why is that? isn't AI supposed to take away your learning? Well, they built up the mental models. AI was an assistant at that point.

They weren't replacing it. already built up the framework to do something. AI just assisted you. And that goes back to your, they didn't, AI didn't force them to go to the library. It assisted them in providing this, the stuff, but they still did the work. I just think it's really hard for students to get it, uh, to, to do the work now when AI is like the Oreo cookie that if you just eat it, your brain will say, "That was great.

Give me more." AI is like ultra processed foods for learning.

I think it's about clarifying those incentives, whether that is passing your school exams, passing your university exams, succeeding in the workplace, whatever you choose to do, recognizing that learning will be a constant through your professional life,

Absolutely.

... that success throughout that depends on you developing these skills, not just responding to the specific questions and not just providing the information, because that information is ubiquitous, but it's about demonstrating those success. 'Cause that's why people go to the gym. They build up their muscles because they want to achieve, you know, they want the body, ...

physique, they want the, the, the sporting excellence. And success is measured over the long term, not over

Yes.

over the short term.

you know, our educational system must change. It can't be an assembly line of learning, where there was take-home assignments and there was one essay and there was one exam at the end. I mean, we learn best when we learn with each other. It should be, you know, I'll, I'll say things, I don't know if it's possible for to pull them up, but should be smaller groups, oral exams, more, uh, collaboration amongst the students and the educator.

Uh, awaken the curiosity in the students. Drill into them. Like, nobody sat down with me and said, "Okay. Hey, Fred. Here's how your brain works." Okay? It's, "Before you go through all the learning, let me just tell you how it works," right? We're all very good at muscles works, right?

Like, you know, there's a certain limit of which you can work out, right? But you're all searching for that most efficient workout. Um, I think we could do better educating learners of how your brain actually works, and then we could build the platforms to support the optimal learning. And let's tie it back to Moodle and to BigBlueButton, right?

We're all both on a mission to build platforms to empower educators to improve our world, and that is, in many ways, I feel like we make musical instruments, right? So we can have the best virtual classroom platform, we can have the best LMS, we are still dependent upon who is going to use the platform.

You can have a, amazing piano, a Stradivarius, uh, I can't play I can't play the violin, right? So I would not do very well with the violin. It doesn't matter how good of a violin it is. I can't play the violin, right? We want educators who are really good at educating, and we're like the instrument that they, they can use.

Um, and that students realize that the whole purpose of going through school wasn't just to get the marks, it was learning how to learn. It was build up that mental model, so that when you did use AI, it complemented you, it extended you as a multiplier. Zero times something is still zero.

If you know nothing, AI times zero is still zero. You can do stuff to which in the workforce, yes, you know, we are all incented to do things, but I'll go back to the motto, the learning never stops. The more that you understand how to do something, the better able you are going to be able to thrive in the world that comes.

You can use tools better than anybody else. AI is a tool. Sure, people around you, um, but I've, I've... One of my favorite, um, one of my favorite, uh, teachers, uh, you know, I never uh, inspirations was Richard Feynman. Richard Feynman was notorious for learning things from first principles.

He was more, uh, he was quoted once by saying, "If I could just forget how to do a problem, I'd have the joy of doing it all over again, and learning," right? So it just, and he got it, right? He was very smart, um, but he got this method of like, "I wanna know things from first principles." So if we can cultivate in learners the concept that, hey, you are going to take a longer time upfront, but man, the payoff is gonna be in spades.

If you short circuit, maybe you can get through, maybe you can you, you know, you can win this race by doping, you know, in bicycles. We all look at it, and look, there are many times where world does not celebrate someone who has learned things by first principles. I don't think anybody wants to see someone deliver a draft plan for a house using paper and pen.

Those days have gone, right? But you still need to know that the person who signs off on the plan, the architectural plan, has the engineering skill. Uh,

we are going into a different world, and I think the authentic authentic engagement between a teacher and instructor, the educator and the learner, is even more important. I wake up every day thinking about, man, if I... What can I do to improve our world? You know, if I can, if I can pull hard and there's one lever that I've got, which is building a more effective virtual classroom, then maybe I can make it a platform that helps, you know, educators be better.

Like spend more time with the, this, the, with the learners, get them to do more things, get more insight. Um, I think, and the fact that we didn't talk about open source, the fact that, you know, like Moodle, we give BigBlueButton away to the world. If you're going to change the world, you're gonna need to give something to the world.

And so we decided early on that we were going to give BigBlueButton away for the purposes of like, okay, if everybody was using it, there would be entrepreneurial opportunities there, right? We can provide hosting, we can provide value added products and services, we can do consulting effort, we can do support contracts.

All of that has panned out. Um, there are many activities going on in Europe right now for using, uh, open source more than ever before. And I think those platforms which have done a good job of building up, uh, are well positioned. I see Moodle as having a similar opportunity, which has been paid off.

I, you guys recently passed, was it 500 million registered learners on Moodle's platform, right? So, like, how big is that lever to pull, right? How big of an opportunity there is to empower educators to improve our world? And I look at it, this is a huge multiplier. Everything that Moodle does to improve its platform multiplies over all those educators and all those learners.

Everything that BigBlueButton can do to make the, the, uh, virtual class environment more efficient and more effective for, for authentic engagement, you know, the more people that we can empower, the more that they can use it as well, the more we can help improve our world. And I will say upfront, like, I view, there's the asynchronous part in Moodle and the synchronous part of BigBlueButton.

My goal is to figure out how to increasingly make those feel like one complete platform that understands the goal of the class, physical or virtual, is not to meet, it is to learn. If we can do that, you know, UNESCO's or sustainable development goal number four, quality edification for everybody, you know, we're, we are, we are, uh...

I look at us as a supporting actor in that role. The main principles are the-... educators and learners, right? They have the stage. We are the supporting actors. But, man, if we can be really good in our roles, we set the stage for them to be successful. Um, and I just think that there's so many things that could be done to make that stage even better.

And I think that there's so much distractions right now in the world, especially with AI, that it's really challenging for the, uh, the educator, uh, because they ... The things that they used to do for teaching are now gone away. You know, the greatest tool they had for, if you were English, was to read someone's essay.

It gave you insight into their, their thought process. That's, you know, that's largely missing now, except for when you get them to write it in classroom, where you've gone through a metal detector to make sure you have no AI, you know ,when you go in and sit down on the desk.

And I think the learner is challenged to misinterpret, um, the shortcuts that AI can give you, cognitive offloading, uh, to misinterpret the feeling of frustration, which is what your brain really needs to lurk, work, to learn, and to misinterpret that, you know, the social environment which you learn is something to be taken advantage of to the full.

Like, shouldn't you, you know, don't show up in class and not participate. It's just, you're, you're missing an opportunity to learn, and learning how to learn is really ... You don't figure this out until after you've done all the marks and got the grade, but that was what the real thing I took out.

I took a math degree. If you plotted me on what Green's theorem was, I couldn't tell you, but I had to do a lot of work along the way, and that paid off later on. I just got ... I know if I put myself into a position where I have to work on something for long periods of time, it, it paid off before.

I may not make it always. Um, if I have, if I'm banging up against the wall, it's nice to have an educator around to just kind of give me that hint in the way that I can make it in the future. And that's the world we, um, we're living in.

I think Moodle and BigBlueButton have a really important role to play in that world, and a really important message of like, man, the the first time someone tells you that AI will make learning easier, you should just like, "Whoa, I, uh, I'm calling you out 'cause that's not how it works." You're telling me I can go in the gym, and I can work work lift less weights, and I will have a better result.

I'll buy that if it's, if it's paired with a very good knowledge of how my muscles work so that the workout could be more efficient, but I still have lift the weights. And I think, in the world, if you're ... We're gonna hear a lot of things about AI.

Everything's AI. What's your AI story? And if I can, if I can give one message to people listening to this, is just ask yourself, is it gonna make learning easier or is it gonna make learning more efficient? You can go for efficiency, right? You can compress an hour workout down to 40 minutes.

You're gonna sweat more, but if someone else lifts the weights, it's, it's theater of, you know, you're not ... You're wasting your time. And the same thing is, you know, learners to understand that, you know, it could be more efficient, but you still have to think. And thinking is very pleasurable experience if you can get to a state of flow.

And we have a ... We're the supporting actors in that play

Well, thank you so much. That's, you certainly got my brain, uh, muscles in my brain working today. Lots to chew on there. Fred, tell us before we go, uh, where are you gonna be? You're often on the road talking about this kind of thing in, in person. Where can people catch you?

Uh, so look. We have an online community with BigBlueButton. You can go to, um ... We actually recently launched, uh, we have bigbluebutton.org in the open source. We recently launched bigbluebutton.com. That's more on the commercial side. So I do wear two hats. I'm in the open source community, like, doing a lot of the project management, the evangelism for BigBlueButton.

And I have my CEO hat on, where I'm trying to, you know, realize all the entrepreneurial opportunities that, uh, an open source project creates, 'cause you create a two-sided market. You have people who want to use it, and people who are looking for ... And then they're looking for service providers who can help you use it.

We're on the service provider side. Um, you can find me on LinkedIn at Fred Dixon, uh, if anything I said about pedagogic and theory and learning and what were happening, if you're interested to chat about it, I'd be interested to talk to you, like reach out. And in terms of online, every year we do our BigBlueButton World Conference, which is an online conference on BigBlueButton, using BigBlueButton, about BigBlueButton.

And so, you, uh, you, if you have, uh, an idea you'd like to present about, uh, you'll see some, some notices go out about, you know, we welcome people to, uh, you have something you want to share, like in a 25-minute presentation. Yeah, just find me online at LinkedIn.

Uh, my email, ffdixon@blindsidenetworks.com on the business side, and ffdixon@bigbluebutton.org on the open source side.

And you can connect with Fred in the links in the show notes or just visit him at blindsidennetworks.com. Thanks for listening, and we will see you in the next episode.