TEDxParisUniversités - Clément Delangue - Students will change education

Hi everyone ! I’m thrilled to be here to talk about education And I will begin by introducing you to Dale who is 21 and who decided last year to stop going to classes, to drop out. He didn’t drop out for financial reasons, or because he didn’t get his dream university, or because he wanted to start his own company. No. He realized that he can learn in a better way by himself, without going to classes without being enrolled in university programs without graduating. And he is going a step further. He thinks that the same goes for every student So he started the UnCollege movement that supports and give tools to students willing to drop out He is not the only one thinking that way. Peter Thiel pledged to give $100,000 to students who drop out to launch their projects. When it comes to me, I had the opportunity to study in four different universities for the last two years. And I often wanted to drop out. Not only for the $100,000… Because it was sometimes very tough for me to attend boring classes. And this is even worse for boring classes, without Wifi Or to have exams you could find the solution in fifteen seconds on Google.   All this could lead us to drop out of school. But I didn’t. For a simple reason, I’m deeply optimistic. I am convinced that things can be changed. And if so, it should be from the inside. So one year ago, I realized it was time for me to think about the problems I was facing everyday in education and to find solutions. And the first problem I faced is that the classroom is a bubble. Whereas it should be a place for openness to the world, to the others, I’ve never felt so isolated than in a classroom. And there are existing tools to solve this. The one I used was Twitter. So I started to live-tweet my classes instead of taking notes. And the outcome was incredible. One of the first comments: “this story is a myth”. Live-tweeting your classes resulted a way to stop learning by yourself for yourself And to start learning from the others and with the others. But I noticed another problem. When your are in the classroom, with other people interested in the same subject as you do, it’s very difficult to interact or collaborate with them. And when you try, the professor ask you to stay quiet And again, there are tools to solve this problem, It is Google Docs that allows you to take realtime notes with comments and chat Right from the start it gave us the social experience our classroom was missing. But it wasn't enough. And then I realized that I didn’t want to share what I was learning ONLY with my existing followers. And because I wanted all the students to be able to do the same if they wanted to. So I created UniShared that is already used by many students to take notes collaboratively and opening them to the world. What I got from this experience is that students can change education. And I’m going further, they can and they must! To me, they are the only legitimate people to decide the way they want to learn. And it makes sense Students knows better what is good for them how they want to learn AnAnd it can no longer be said that a 20 year old student who can vote drink or drive is not mature enough to decide how he wants to learn. If some students are going on Facebook during classes, it’s not the problem of Facebook, of the internet, of the students, it just means that the systems, the pedagogy, the way classrooms are organized are not right anymore. Take the example of Facebook, “I want to make Harvard more open” said Marc Zuckerberg when he hacked the face book of his university. And it shows how viral a student movement can get. it can spread at an unbelievable speed and have a huge impact upon the world So my point today was that students can, must and will change education. And this is the only option we have to go back to Dale and tell him that the solution is not for students to drop out or to give up the system. The solution is to give them the opportunity to be involved, to take action to change education to make it better ! Thank you all !!