s01e10: Rob Rubin: What Can the Development of the Flu Vaccine Teach Us About Online Learning and Skilling the Workforce?

Distinctive Voices

This lecture will explore what happens when you look at online learning as a complex system, analogous to the yearly development of the flu vaccine. Dr. Rubin will draw on the complexity theory behind two-sided networks (critical to understanding both the economics of Health Maintenance Organizations and vaccine creation) and identify fundamental gaps in learning systems. He will then describe how Microsoft applied this work to the reskilling challenge in Data Science. Drawing on the work enabled from the analysis of big data by learning scientists, we can understand the DNA of a professional program and the behaviors of successful learners. This work led to a dramatic increase in ROI for education/workforce skilling, and has introduced approximately 2000 newly trained Data Scientists in little over a year.