spk_0:   0:02
Hello, everybody.

spk_1:   0:03
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show The Big show, the educational show most important and critically acclaimed podcast it has recorded in our car. Today we are heading west in the red studio are on our way to central misery. And we've got a big show for you today because we believe in education. Let me give you an idea of the kind of the kind of education that we need here in America. We were just driving through a town and the town for as long as I can remember, driving through town has had one highway intersection that has a four way stop. Not

spk_0:   0:49
like the light changes color or

spk_1:   0:51
no, it doesn't change, just blinks. It is a stoplight. There's a blinking red light that face is all for you know, it's got a fork fixture so it faces one in every direction, blinking red. Okay, And there's a big stop sign on every, uh, corner. Susan stop! And right under that, there's a little smaller red sign that says four way stop. Okay, well, apparently there's a lack of education out there in public to where people can't count as high as four you look at one, two, uh, 333 Uh, what right? Apparently, because they're replacing, they're not pleasing the stop signs. Okay, They're just replacing the four way stop signs with alway stop signs. I got nothing Spice. I got nothing.

spk_0:   2:05
Your tax dollars at work

spk_1:   2:06
or tax dollars at

spk_0:   2:08
somebody elected a sickly person with an interest in signs

spk_1:   2:11
first. Perfectly good sign. I mean, there's work faded. They were bad. They weren't misspelled. They weren't miss installed. Which reminds me of a story. Many years ago, we were driving back in a camper. She's, you know

spk_0:   2:29
Oh, yeah, that was a surreal

spk_1:   2:32
Well, yeah, a lack of care moment were driving back from Kansas and we were facing unbelievable headwind worrying, eh? Pickup truck with a crab show camper on it, you know, full camper. But it's one of the slide Ian's big, huge one, Happy one. And then that wind is just buffeting us. I mean, it's blowing us all over the place. It was a 45 50 mile an hour headwind. I mean, it was just by the trucks. Big trucks were having to pull over. They were not able to handle this with it was just that bad. And we're driving along and we see a sign. I don't know the exact distance as number is gonna gonna pair guess here. But it was something along the lines of, uh Salina, Kansas, 98 miles. Oh, cool. We're making better time than I thought. Yeah, so we're driving along. We're driving along. Let me see. Salina, Kansas. 100 and 48 miles.

spk_0:   3:41
Sunflower fields. Overpass. Sunflower, sunflower, overpass, Overpass.

spk_1:   3:47
Did we just see that? As in about 50 miles later, you aside, like saliva Kansas 198 miles. Like the town is moving away from us as we're driving towards we're stuck in sunflower fields forever is like one of those Mobius things. Were you the highways of Mobius?

spk_0:   4:08
It is so monotonous. You could imagine you were just on a little rotating wheel that was bringing the same feel, not passes band.

spk_1:   4:15
He just blowing us all over the place is August man, and the truck was really strange. And so we were We didn't have the air conditioner on, and it just it was Redl. Turns out somebody at the Kansas Department of Transportation installed the science backwards thank you. The ones on the jed We're backwards. I wonder if they did it on purpose. You got to

spk_0:   4:38
be pretty bored. But it was Kansas.

spk_1:   4:40
It was pretty funny, though in retrospect. So why all this talk about education? I mean, once we're out of school, were out of school. Education is done, right?

spk_0:   4:51
No, but thank you for playing. Look, what's one prep that you can take with you, No matter how quickly you'll have to leave, no matter how light you have to travel, that will always be able to serve you well in a giant variety of circumstances. Socks what? You know, your socks get fulla holes, so, huh, they become less useful over time.

spk_1:   5:18
But I like socks

spk_0:   5:20
even like socks that are full of holes. But that's a different story. What you know stays with you. What she knows. She's in a wide variety of circumstances. So what's, you know, helps you understand situations in different ways. Then you could understand them if you were just listening to the common patter and the so called common wisdom, which well, it is common ability, right? Education's a big deal, and there's a giant much underutilized, in my opinion, educational resource out there That could be a real service to preppers for absolutely no additional

spk_1:   6:04
cost, not a medicine.

spk_0:   6:06
Because if you're listening to that, you got an Internet connection, and that's all it takes

spk_1:   6:11
an Internet connection. And that includes your phone if you have. Ah, smartphone.

spk_0:   6:16
Yep. And they're called MOOCs

spk_1:   6:20
MOOCs. Oh, I like movies. I like making Mookie

spk_0:   6:23
we're talking about not in the old game show. Oh, substitute work. Play.

spk_1:   6:29
Okay, well,

spk_0:   6:31
massive open online courses. Massive because in some of them I've been in there have been 10,000 people enrolled at once worldwide. 2000 People really don't know in many cases how many people are taking it at once, But in some of them, you do because they have open discussion boards and things so massive because they they're published and they're open to the public and as many people is feel like taking the course consign on addict course. So you end up with lots and lots of people from all around the world.

spk_1:   7:08
Now they have courses at all different levels from from, So you want to say, Ah, hire high school type lower college type course ought up to, really,

spk_0:   7:18
they start lower. They've got supplemental education courses for younger kids, too.

spk_1:   7:22
I did not know that, Yeah, but a

spk_0:   7:25
different structure. But they got

spk_1:   7:26
him, so that would be an excellent resource for for a home schooler.

spk_0:   7:29
That's what they were built for. I'm not as much of an expert on those because I don't take those, frankly, and I take a lot of the ones that are aimed at college, post college or educated lay person, depending on the topic.

spk_1:   7:44
We did not home school because we don't have kids. But if we had kids, we wouldn't want

spk_0:   7:49
that would have been a thing

spk_1:   7:50
with the thing. I probably would have stayed a supplemental and home schooled and then shoot it out of math and science. Yes, she does science, and I don't But yeah, we definitely would've homeschooled. And that's you. That's a totally different thing. I just

spk_0:   8:07
So there are Resource is out there for the kids, but the ones I'm kind of focusing on here are the ones the preppers probably listening to This podcast would be more interested in, and that's adult education,

spk_1:   8:18
right? And there's all it's just all over the place. Anything you want, pretty much

spk_0:   8:23
anything that has a wide enough appeal that the people who put the courses out are willing to put in the time and effort that money to publish the course and make it available. So there are lots and lots of topics, but can't find everything. No, but but pretty much you confined basic principles of how to set up a solar system for your home. But you won't be able to find one that talks about how to set up a specific kind of solar system for for a particular set of circumstances that you might find useful. You won't find one on cardiac surgery, but you will find him on cardiac rehab.

spk_1:   9:09
Well, because, frankly, nobody is really going to be doing off the cuff Cardiac surgery.

spk_0:   9:14
Yeah, if you're surgeon, learned his cardiac surgery off book, find a different search and

spk_1:   9:22
go ahead.

spk_0:   9:22
It's kind of a hands on topic, and that's one of the limitations is

spk_1:   9:28
when you say a hand on your heart, they really actually mean that. Yep, it's kind of

spk_0:   9:35
disturbing to hold a beating heart in your hand. To be honest with you.

spk_1:   9:39
Good tip. Yeah. Try to avoid it

spk_0:   9:42
even more disturbing when it stops

spk_1:   9:45
moving. Right award. So, yeah, prove anything? There's no evidence. So they're

spk_0:   9:56
wide variety of topics available and they're free. Most of the places offer him in two different ways. The ones I take her free. Okay, you can Certainly by a lot of online college, but that's no I'm talking about I'm talking about

spk_1:   10:10
some of that is still worth it. Yeah. Yeah, because you get credit and stuff like that.

spk_0:   10:16
That's what the how a lot of places run these is. They run them both for audit and for certification. And if you decide you want to audit the course, you tell him you want to audit the course. They let you have access to all their educational content. They let you take their assessments, which are electronically grated so they don't have to put any time and effort in it. If you're running it at the same time is a bunch of other people they'll let you engage in the discussion on discussion boards and encourage that, but they won't do anything that takes them individual educator time and cost to serve. You because you're not paying him anything. And what you get is whatever knowledge you take with you out of your head. That's

spk_1:   11:00
what you keep. I have a question. You're using the words they and them. They can you give me some examples of who they end them. It might be

spk_0:   11:10
biggest Producers of MOOCs are major universities. Harvard makes a ton of these and puts him out there. The University of Leeds in England does a whole bunch of these. There are a wide variety of other universities and institutions that have a smaller selection, and those smaller selections are offered through kind of clearing houses of moves like Future. Learn all one word you go to future learn and you'll find courses MOOCs on a whole bunch of different topics and what are offered by this school and what is offered by that school. But they're all offered for free and the future learned people just help distribute the information and get people enrolled. Coursera does the same thing. Ed X does that, and they do most of Harvard's.

spk_1:   12:07
May I throw out throw something out here that you may or may not have been meaning to talk about, but I think it dovetails nicely when you're talking about mix. One of the things they're really good for is for expanding and updating your knowledge on the subject you may already have the basics of. But you may not have the updated version because, you know, things change. The information changes, the research changes. Ah, perfect example of this is the move. Of course, she's been taking on Ebola because she, I mean, she's a path of physiologist. She has an idea of what hemorrhagic fevers are, and she got a pretty good idea of what a bullet is and how it works. But she's taking a course in I don't know if you're finished with it yet, but she's taking a course on Ebola and it's amore. It's a more specific course, and I think she's had before, and it's updated with information that she but she originally learned well, they know more about the disease now than they did then. So can you give a few examples of how this worked with the Ebola thing?

spk_0:   13:24
Actually, with the Ebola, this particular course is about lessons learned from the most recent big epidemic in 25th 2014 2015 13 14 15. They had 30,000 plus cases that were known and a whole lot more that were never reported.

spk_1:   13:42
But there were

spk_0:   13:43
a lot more than 10,000 deaths.

spk_1:   13:45
There were a lot of lessons. Example.

spk_0:   13:50
They talked about how the countries of Western Africa did attempt to respond to these and what worked for them and what did not work for them. What did they have to change about health care, delivery system help keep these things from spreading in the future.

spk_1:   14:07
We're probably going to do an episode on this.

spk_0:   14:11
Yeah, we are what we

spk_1:   14:12
just for once you finish the classes and so we're not gonna go into too many details,

spk_0:   14:16
some of its public health stuff. But some of it is stuff that can be learned at the individual family and household level, as a

spk_1:   14:23
lot of it applies to not only just Ebola, obviously, because we're not really too worried about Ebola here in America, but it would apply to other contagious diseases, highly contagious diseases. Um, so anyway, that's just the example of what we're talking about.

spk_0:   14:39
Also have taken multiple courses on things like immunology. And I took quite a few graduate courses and immunology once upon a time. But that's been more than 20 years, and they've learned a heck of a lot in 20 years. And I found the moves an extremely efficient way. Update my knowledge. With the new research, I could dive into the primary literature, but that is much more time consuming and much less efficient way of bringing myself up to date. I could get a modern text book and read through it, but yeah, have you read those? Nobody does that for fun. It's much more pleasant for me to get a good, high quality move. And I'll, most of those You don't have to spend a whole lot of time watching. I might even be a painting or something else that is just handwork and listening to these courses, and it allows me to keep up with what's new in the field, in a very pre easy on my own schedule kind of way.

spk_1:   15:38
Here's one other thing I'll throw out there to ISS so much of what we do her and I is, we're on the go a lot. You just are, and pretty much if we're not talking to you. And we're not talking to each other about tasks that we have and, you know, just doing locations. We

spk_0:   16:02
want to talk

spk_1:   16:03
about a couple communication stuff of being trying to be on the same page on on most things, you know, we're pretty much got, ah, learning thing. If we're both in the car, I like to do listen to some escapist fiction. I do listen to some proper fiction and yeah, I don't I just called most of that science fiction and go with that, um and, um But you could carry the stuff with you because it's online and it's there for when you're ready to use it. It meets your schedule.

spk_0:   16:47
This Ebola course is structured, as many of them are. The blessings are actually a series of short video clips. Each video clip is between three and 15 minutes long. They're meant to be in small bite size pieces because they know we're going to be working around busy schedules, and each one has a limited topic and their sequenced in a useful way to help lead you through the important information on the topic. And this one is mostly a set of interviews between the educator who's leading the course and some people who were right there. Boots on the ground in the Ebola wards. Managing the Ebola response is setting up the response units. It's all people who are both experts in the field and had personal experience with this particular epidemic, and he's trying to draw out from them the lessons they learn from their experiences. But that's all audible information, so I can. If I were driving, I could just play it beside me. I don't have to look at it and learned while I drive.

spk_1:   17:52
And for me, I have no interest. Whatever in the subject, she just put on some headphones. A boom it sze problem solved. I'm doing my own thing. She's doing her own thing. She puts on her headphones and or I'm doing something else. I'm not paying attention to what's going on in the background. It doesn't bother me.

spk_0:   18:10
He's learned to ignore any amount of disturbing description from Path of Physiology World.

spk_1:   18:18
Hey, listen, need I go on?

spk_0:   18:23
So if you if somebody needs this sort of continuing education for a professional opportunity, maybe you've been a specialist in 11 field and what kind of change? Track a little bit. And you want something to show a potential employer that you do have some experience and background in a topic. They will happily sell you the certification version of the course, which is very similar, but they track your attendance, they track your scores on the assessments, and then they provide that information as a transcript on request to whoever you wanted to. So, for example, if I had needed to establish my credentials as an immunologist who's kept up, I could have bought certified version of the immunology course. And that transcript was worth continuing medical education credits. If I were a physician, which I'm not, I could have used it in that way. I didn't need that. People where I work trust that I know what I'm doing by seeing what I'm doing by looking at the certifications. But it's an option, and that's one of the reasons a lot of these courses are out there is They had to build the course anyway. They provided to the people who need certification for a relatively small fee about 50 bucks course, usually, but then hey, it's built so people who don't need certification, yell can come in and watch our stuff and learn from it. And yea, because we're educators, we like that.

spk_1:   19:59
So there you go, Your tax dollars indeed. At work, except for like, harbor. It's not.

spk_0:   20:05
Yeah, a lot of the universities are funded by their respective governments. Yeah,

spk_1:   20:11
I know. You know, one, that one that I've seen a couple moves on that were kind of interesting to me. We're like Florida State, which is kind of cool.

spk_0:   20:22
And some of them you gotta watch to see the point of view in the slant. Anywhere you get information, we gotta watch the slant on the point of view. For example, when I started watching this course on the Ebola epidemic, it was clear to me that one of the messages that the educator hoped to get across was the need for some kind of pervasive, albeit minimal healthcare system, even in the most rural areas of the poorest countries. In order to be able to know what was going on in these areas and be able to address problems before they came to the big cities and all of a sudden you had tens of thousands of infected cases. So that's clearly something that this educators trying to get across. That's his slant, since he's from Harvard and he has a academic reputation to defend. He has a strong motivation to not play with the fax or bias the presentation in a serious way because that would lose him credibility. And it would lose Harvard credibility. And they wouldn't put out, of course, with their name on it.

spk_1:   21:33
But then again, not many people are really concerned. At least not many people here taking this in English are really all that concerned about what it would take to get a some type of socialized medicine going in the Congo. You know, that's not really a big concern for most of us. So,

spk_0:   21:55
yeah, it's not even at the level of socialized medicine. That's just it. The level of basic infrastructure gotta stuff. So, yeah, it's What I'm saying is you can see a slant in some of the courses, but if you select carefully where you take the courses from, you'll be able to see where they're coming from and make your own judgments, and you confined reliable places that aren't gonna play with the fax and aren't going to overlook significant bits of information because they don't suit their narrative. I wouldn't trust every look out there for that to be true of, but I have a pretty good confidence. That place is like a Harvard is not gonna do that because their reputation is more valuable to them than a game they could get from playing that kind of game in the

spk_1:   22:43
sciences in the sciences will go that

spk_0:   22:46
Yeah, I watch him. And so most of the ones I watch her in the sciences somewhere written, you know, other stuff. That's just kind of interesting to me. And they're not deeply invested in what the educators think.

spk_1:   22:58
Here's my take. Yeah, if you, uh if you really want, like, political or socio type stuff when it comes to MOOCs, Uh, everything we told you does not necessarily apply. You're on your own, you know, I mean that that's a whole different. We were. So she was talking about science stuff, and I would go to some extent, I could see that in any of these sciences you get into the arts humanities, you're going to get more bias built into it because it's the way it is.

spk_0:   23:35
Yeah, I've done a lot of history courses that I've enjoyed, but you do that with the understanding that historians have a bias that is hard to get around when they're choosing their presentation of stuff. It's a lot easier to not be too swayed by your own bias when you're a scientist,

spk_1:   23:53
and if you're you know, when you're looking at a history type thing, you know you'll listen to it. It's interesting and stuff like that and you, but you lower right away. What the guy's biases, even if he's trying to hide it, or the woman's biases, even if they're trying to hide it. Um, but you know, it's still interesting to hear different points of view, whether you agree with them or not.

spk_0:   24:12
And if you're getting the course from a reputable source, even though the bias can be there in the selection, at least the things that they present as fax are probably faxed to the best of their ability. Because again, they do have a reputation to defend

spk_1:   24:26
right. Or at least they're documented facts. But they are

spk_0:   24:31
well, that's what I said to the best of our ability they won't flat out lie idea? No, because flat out lying to you would be death to their professional career. I believe in motivated self interest.

spk_1:   24:45
All right, well, we are at our goal. So we're going to hang this one up and say thank you for listening and we'll catch you the next time.

spk_0:   24:52
Bye bye.