$100 billion worth of hope.
Companies will spend nearly $100 billion on leadership development this year. Ask how they know it works and the most common answer is: we hope it does. Most programs include some form of assessment: a quiz, a scored role-play, a satisfaction survey. But those measure recall, perception, or a single observed moment. None of them […]
I got my completion certificate!
In investment banking, most of the training I sat through existed to satisfy a regulatory requirement. Click through, pass the quiz, print the certificate. As a teacher, PD was a coin flip, some sessions genuinely changed how I taught, plenty didn’t. But here’s what strikes me looking back: the system recorded both exactly the same […]
Announcing Marten Roorda, former CEO of ACT, as advisor
We’re thrilled to share that Marten Roorda is now advising immersionED on research, measurement, and assessment. If you work in assessment, you know Marten. He spent his career at the very top of the field, as CEO of ACT and before that CEO of Cito, two of the most respected measurement organizations in the world. […]
Thanks to my Greek history professor.
My German history professor tested what I memorized.My Greek history professor tested how I think. One I forgot by finals. The other became the foundation of my company. The Greek professor said on day one: “Most of you will never work in history. This class is about developing how you think through the study of […]
Everyone thinks AI will destroy higher education.
Everyone thinks AI will destroy higher education. I think it’s exposing what was broken all along. AI can write the essay. Summarize the reading. Generate the study guide. Complete the problem set. And half the institutions I talk to are spending more time policing AI use than rethinking what they ask students to do. If […]
Two nurses walk into an ER . . .
Not all simulations are built the same. Most show you what students decide. They should show you how they think. Two students walk into a nursing simulation. Both choose to escalate a patient to the ICU. Same decision. One recognized the early warning signs and weighed them against three competing diagnoses before acting. The other […]
We built the most expensive worksheet in education.
I resisted AI longer than I should have. We had built something genuinely ambitious but it wasn’t a game-changer. Students could walk through the streets of colonial Boston in the days before the Massacre. They could confront figures of the Protestant Reformation in immersive 3D environments. They were stepping into history, making choices, living inside […]
“Trust us, our graduates can think” isn’t enough anymore.
I added an economics minor just to prove I was hireable. Not because I loved econ. Because I knew “history major” on a resume made recruiters skeptical. Most professors I’d talked to knew it too. They just didn’t have a way to fix it. That’s a broken system. That’s a broken system. Professors develop the […]
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
A dean told me last month: “We know our programs develop great thinkers. We just can’t prove it to anyone.” Not to parents writing tuition checks. Not to employers asking if graduates are job ready. Not to accreditors demanding evidence of career-connected learning. Tolstoy wrote that everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one […]
I was an Excel monkey.
I spent 4,000 hours memorizing Excel at Morgan Stanley. 40 hours a week. 100 weeks. As an analyst, you were basically an Excel monkey. I loved my team but the path to doing the interesting work ran through one bottleneck: how well you could build a model. If you weren’t the best modeler, you got […]