A Web Weaving Wonders: Mark Taub’s Perspective on Modern Education in a Digital World
Mark Taub is the Vice President of the IT Professional group at Pearson Education. He previously served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Pearson Technology Group and Senior Acquisitions Editor of Prentice Hall, a publishing company owned by Pearson. Mark has overseen the publication of Computer Science and Engineering book, instructional videos and digital courseware and created online training programs that prepare students for professional certifications. Prior to his time in Pearson, Mark directed technical publications at The Santa Cruz Operation and was a direct contributor to the development of the Unix Shell software. Mark holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Philosophy from Princeton University.
Business Today (Arjun Jagjivan): I noticed that you received both of your degrees in Philosophy, a field which seems quite distanced from your career in IT; how did that come about? In other words, what drew you to the tech industry?
Mark Taub (MT): When I was an undergraduate, I took a philosophy degree, but I did a lot of math as well… philosophy and mathematics and computer science really line up quite well. Philosophy is all about taking complex problems and breaking them down into manageable parts, and that’s really what you do in mathematics and computer science; it’s about very clear, analytical, rigorous thinking. Philosophy has the added benefit that unlike math and computer science, it’s also about clear, analytical, and rigorous communication; it’s a written discipline in a way that math and computer science are not. I think that maps very well onto publishing, especially with the kind of publishing I do.
BT: How do you think the Internet has changed the manner in which students learn? How do you shift your approach to anticipate and address these changes?
The Internet changed everything; [it] destroyed the old order in publishing and created an opportunity for the new order. It shifted power from the big retail stores, such as Barnes and Noble and the independent bookstores (there used to be thousands all over the country), and it shifted power in the book selling and distribution business from those brick-and-mortar stores to Amazon, and it’s given Amazon a lot of influence over publishing. It’s caused a lot of those stores to collapse. Publishers used to have a lot more leverage than they have today… [they] acted as gatekeepers and in some sense decided what the public was going to read and when it was going to read it because there was no [other] way for writers to get their content distributed… it made publishing a lucrative business. Of course, the Internet disintermediated the publishing industry... a lot of what was previously sold by publishers is now available for free; you only have to look at YouTube and Wikipedia to see that.
But the Internet has also created remarkable opportunities. The Internet has allowed publishers to publish in formats that previously [they] could only dream of: interactivity, video, social, cloud-based, etc. For students, it’s been a revelation because the tools available for learning today are so much more sophisticated and effective than the tools available to earlier generations...as much as the Internet has wreaked havoc on a whole business model, it’s created remarkable opportunity. At Pearson, we’ve been hammered like other publishers by the Internet, and we’re benefitting; we’ve taken advantage too.
BT: During your time as Editor-in-Chief, Prentice Hall made a push in 2003 to release more online books as open-source material. What do you view to be the benefits and/or drawbacks of publishing content online when it comes to business?
MT: The benefits are that you can publish in multiple formats: it could be instructional video, it could be simulations, it could be a virtual environment, the products could be gamified… Publishing online allows you to update information much more quickly, and it allows you to apply data analytics to learning. The publisher can track how the learner is using the learning product, and based on the data it improves the learning product. The holy grail of our publishing today is personalized learning: different people learn at different speeds… the learning content should adapt to the habits of the learner.
BT: How do you think the emergence of online educational tools has affected the structure of the market in which Pearson operates?
MT: It’s no coincidence that the market is consolidated: the print publishing business had its own financial model, and when that financial model no longer became viable, the companies that were in that business had to cut back… to take advantage of these new online formats requires a very significant capital investment, and that puts pressure on companies to consolidate. Also, I think publishing companies today are global and more outward-facing than before. The beautiful thing about digital products is that it’s just as easy to deliver a digital product in Connecticut as it is in Calcutta, so it’s given publishing companies a more global perspective.
BT: I understand that two years ago, Pearson Workforce developed video training courses for professionals seeking IT certifications, rewarding them with a badge of completion they could share on social media. In which direction do you see the future of online learning heading, and how do you think it could affect the composition of the job applicant pool?
MT: Badging is going to become very important for learners, because employers these days, unlike the past, are less interested in degrees and more interested in skill; that’s why you have big employers like Apple coming out and removing the requirement that in order to work for them you have to have a bachelor’s degree. Several high-profile companies have eliminated the requirement that employees have college degrees; what they’re interested in now is the skill the employee brings to the job, and there’s really no way to validate those skills outside of credentialing, so credentialing is going to become so important. It’s going to become important for people who don’t have degrees but would still like to obtain middle-class jobs, it’s going to become important for people who have the wrong degrees (for example, in liberal arts), but in order to get a job they may need to acquire technical skills, and the only way they can prove that is with the right credentials, whether it’s a badge or certification from a widely-recognized certifying body.
BT: Do you think that online education programs offer a sufficient alternative to a formal college education, and why? Could it become a potential competitor with established institutions of higher learning?
MT: It’s never going to fully displace the college experience. There aren’t enough institutions available to meet the demand for education that’s growing all over the world; hundreds of millions of people every year are entering the education market. I think lower-tier universities are going to have a very hard time as more people question the value of a degree from a lesser institution —no one’s questioning the value of a college degree from Princeton. Those institutions are going to have to evolve or they’re going to go out of business, and they’ll have to have a focus not only on giving students a well-rounded education but also giving them the specific skills they need to succeed in the job market; they’ll have to become more employer focused, more skill-focused. You could well imagine universities incorporating credentialing and badging into their education programs so that when the student graduates, they not only have a degree but also have these credentials and badges which show they possess each skill.... I think that’s inevitable.
BT: Pearson recently developed a program called AIDA, a virtual math tutor that utilizes machine learning algorithms to help students with calculus. To what extent do you factor such new technologies into your consideration when trying to design software for educational resources?
MT: Artificial intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and natural language processing... there’s a revolution going on in these fields which is affecting businesses and governments all around the world, and what makes these technologies available today is data. What we’re doing at Pearson is the same thing that all these other corporations are doing, trying to figure out how to improve the learner’s experience… Wouldn’t it be great if whatever you’re working on, whatever time of day or night it is, you’re stuck and you need to reach out and get some advice, you could pop up a chat window and type in a question and get an actual useful answer? Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing to have your own personalized tutor who was omniscient and infallible?
BT: In light of your own experience, what advice would you give to college graduates who are concerned that their specific degree may restrict what jobs they are qualified to apply for?
MT: We live in an interesting time demographically. There’s this huge cohort of Baby Boomers who are leaving the labor force; 10,000 are retiring every single day. Somebody else is going to have to take up those jobs; they’re not just going to disappear… it’s a great time to enter the labor force. The fundamental requirement for success today really isn’t any different from what it was 100 years ago: you need to think about what you’re passionate about, what you want to dip your toe in… you need to understand what skills are required in order to get that entry-level position in that field, you need to take an inventory of your own skills and identify where the gaps are. But the wonderful thing is that whatever the field is, whatever the gaps are, you can probably find reasonably-priced online training that will address that skill gap. You might be able to find training that’s credentialed or badged so that once the training is complete, you can prove to prospective employers that you are qualified to take an entry-level job in whatever your interest is.