Socially Responsible Real Estate Development (Part II)

In my preceding blog post, I argued that socially-responsible real estate development can not be achieved merely by making philanthropic donations or branding efforts.  Direct engagement with a wide range of stakeholders, using the tools of Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, is required. And, the point of such interactions is not merely to minimize the adverse effects of what the developer wants to build; rather, the goal should be to meet as many of the interests of as many of the stakeholders (including the developer!) as possible.  In my new MIT MOOC,  the proper ways to use EIA and SIA are described. The MOOC is a five week, online course that will be offered for the first time in the summer of 2017. More information about enrollment can be found at the Samuel Tak Lee Real Estate Entrepreneurship Program at MIT (stl.mit.edu).

While the United States and Europe have a long history of requiring EIA and SIA, they are mostly used to justify design and development decisions that have already been made, rather than as a means of engaging stakeholders with conflicting interests in joint problem-solving. Many developers view EIA and SIA regulations as nothing more than a nuisance.  They decide what they want to build, hire consultants to make sure all regulatory requirements are met, do their best to market a positive view of their project and (in the United States especially) go to court to fend off legal challenges from opponents. This completely misses the opportunity to discover low-cost ways in which a developer can simultaneously meet local needs and solve long-standing problems while earning public support for their project and even permission to adopt innovative practices that might otherwise be prohibited. EIA and SIA can be used to meet BOTH the interests of the developer and the people most likely to be affected by whatever new project is being planned.

In the MOOC we present a case study of one of the largest mixed use mega-projects currently being built in Asia. The goal is to construct housing for more than 700,000 people on reclaimed land just off the edge of a developed area. By some estimates, the project will cost more than $60 billion over a twenty year period. The developer sought at the outset to skirt long-standing EIA requirements. While land use decisions in this particular country are usually the exclusive domain of state and local governments, the federal government was forced to get involved in this instance because the neighboring country was worried that the project would adversely affect them. The project was put on  hold until the developer completed a detailed EIA.  The cost of halting development was substantial.  In the end, the project had to be scaled back by more than 20% and new plans had to be prepared.  Nearby fishing communities, adversely affected by the early work on the project, had to be compensated for their losses. Had the developer engaged the relevant stakeholders in an EIA and SIA before starting construction (and before locking in on a version of the project that showed little or no concern for the interests of others), they would have saved an enormous amount of time and money. Also, their reputation would not have taken the international hit that it did.

In the MOOC, in which anyone can enroll at no cost, participants will have a chance to (1) read carefully selected excerpts from relevant books and articles (with short commentaries explaining how and why EIA and SIA work); (2) view mini-lectures summarizing best practices around the world; (3) try to respond to challenging scenarios (to see whether they can apply what they have learned); (4) watch edited conversations with enrollees who have already taken the course at MIT and completed the scenario assignments;  (5) listen to short interviews with experienced real estate developers describing what they have learned about socially-responsible real estate development; and (6) test their knowledge by taking a short multiple choice quiz before and after the course.  In addition, there are short animations that summarize the most important points in each module.  All told, each of the five modules in the MOOC takes about 3 - 5 hours to complete (depending on your ability to read and write in English). Certificates of completion are provided by MIT.

In making the MOOC, we talked with a number of very experienced real estate developers who have undertaken projects all over the world.  We also made our way through most of the published work on EIA, SIA and what is called Collaborative Adaptive Management. I tried to incorporate some of the ideas contained in my earlier book (with Patrick Field) called Dealing with an Angry Public (Free Press, 2010). What struck me most is the maxim that developers "need to go slow to go fast." That is, many developers believe that speed is of the essence. They rush to get things built,  sell their product as quickly as possible and generate a positive cash flow to satisfy their investors.  Short-cuts at the beginning, however, including efforts to sidestep direct involvement of stakeholders in meaningful EIAs and SIAs, actually add to the time and cost involved in completing a project. Even more important, efforts to push through a pre-conceived version of a project miss the chance to "create more value" for both the developer and the community.  It turns out, socially-responsible real estate development is the most profitable kind of real estate development -- in both the short-term and the long-term.

Teaching Negotiation Online: What Happens when you Adopt a UX (User Experience Design) Orientation?

I taught an online negotiation course for the first time this spring.  MIT’s Professional Education Program and its Office of Digital Learning (ODL) invited me to design and teach a course for professionals around the world willing to pay approximately $500 to participate in a six week course for about 3 – 5 hours a week. I chose to focus on Entrepreneurial Negotiation and gave the course an added twist by adding to the title “The MIT Way” (reflecting the MIT motto of “mens et manus” or mind and hand, or knowledge and practice”). Over the past few years, ODL has attracted tens of thousands of online learners, so it sounded like an exciting opportunity. 

Some of you have heard about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses).  MIT participated jointly with Harvard and other top-tier universities -- through an entity called Edx -- to offer free online access to regular college courses.  These consisted of videos of college lectures supplemented by power points.  Students took machine graded multiple choice exams at the end of each module, and received a certificate of completion if they made it all the way through a class. Production and dissemination were paid for by foundation grants or donated by universities hoping to sell accompanying books or other teaching materials.  Edx has run through many millions of dollars. Only a tiny fraction of the global participants who signed up for most MOOCs (many of them high school students) actually completed the courses and mastered the material.  So, MIT has decided to look for a more financially sustainable and effective way of sharing the knowledge developed on campus with a wider international audience.

The MIT professional staff I worked with are practitioners of a new approach to online learning called User Experience Design (UX or UXD or UED). I like the Wikipedia description of UX: it is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product. It is revolutionizing all kinds of design efforts, including the way companies market products and organizations interact digitally with their clients.  The MIT Professional Education staff, with its UX orientation,  made me rethink every aspect of my approach to teaching negotiation.  I will share a few of things I learned.

First, online learners prefer to watch videos rather than read text. When I say videos, I don’t mean videotaped versions of the 50 minute lectures I would usually give in a regular class or training program.  They want short, animated or otherwise highly produced segments that get to the point and entertain (infotainment). The MIT team informed me that my usual negotiation lecture introducing key negotiation concepts would need to be reduced to a six minute animated short.  It took some doing (and a lot of help from several skilled graphic artists, especially one in the Czech Republic I never talked to directly) to present almost two dozen concepts in a six minute cartoon strip based on two key characters – Novi (a female, African-American inventor) and Vic (a male, Caucasian venture capitalist) who were about to negotiate the possibility of some kind of joint venture keyed to a new device Novi had created.  If you start, as UX does, from the standpoint of the learner rather than the instructor, everything you say and the way you say it, changes.

MIT has developed a platform that allows hundreds (actually thousands) of course participants to interact face-to-face simultaneously via the web (not skype).  So, each week, more than two hundred participants negotiated with randomly assigned partners from elsewhere in the world.  Each negotiation was scheduled for 60 – 90 minutes. When the scheduled time for negotiations was over, students could watch a taped version of my MIT graduate students doing the same negotiation (from start to finish) that they had been assigned.  Viewing my same negotiations that the online participants had just completed was optional, but almost all of the online students chose to view the tapes. Then, they watched me (on tape) interacting with two sets of my students who had completed the negotiation assigned to the online class that week.  My online video debriefing of each week’s negotiation assignment involved me going through the full tape of my two graduate student pairs of negotiators and selecting video highlights focusing on the key learning points I wanted to raise.  When I met with the four students (in a studio setting) to debrief, I had two giant screens on the wall that I controlled from a laptop in front of me. I pre-selected highlights (almost like a sports broadcaster reviewing all the games on a particular day) so I could question my students, pressing them to explain why they did what they did, what they might have done differently and what they learned.  The tapes of these studio interactions initially ran for several hours. But, with the help of my editing team, we were able to post-produce three or four eight minute segments keyed to the theme of the week. The online participants were also asked to complete short assigned readings each week from the electronic version of my recent book).  My assumption was that watching me debrief my students would resonate with the experience the online learners had just had. From the polling we did, that turned out to be true. It was as if I was debriefing the online learners.

When I first saw the tapes of my students completing the negotiations that the online class was assigned, I didn’t want to leave anything out.  Every second seemed valuable.  After multiple tries, however, I was able to isolate 8 – 10 minutes of highlights (especially pair handling the same moments in the negotiation differently). I pre-load these for the studio debriefing with my students.  When I reviewed the several hours of video of the debriefings that followed (all unscripted), I didn’t see how I would be able to cut these down to three or four segments of seven to eight minutes.  I had to put myself into the learner’s position. What did they most want to know?  And, why?  Each finsished video segment was “tested” multiple times by people like those we thought would sign up for the course.  While you need skilled editors to smooth out the video and audio, and to add titles and music, those of us who have only taught from our own perspective can eventually, on our own, identify with the needs of the learners.

There are lots of other innovative instructional elements in the course.  We interviewed Cambridge entrepreneurs – mostly MIT spin-offs – in their offices. I asked them on camera to talk about the most difficult negotiations they have had. These were also reduced to six minute cameos that appear week by week and align with the four teaching themes around which the course is structured – dealing with ego and emotion, coping with uncertainty, managing technical complexity and building trusting relationships. While I got better at preparing five or six minute mini-lectures introducing topics like these, it took the guidance of a skilled video producer to help me transform my usual pedagogical style to a learner-oriented approach to presenting my ideas.  By the way, I found it impossible to use a teleprompter to read scripts. It was only through multiple impromptu takes that I found the voice I was looking for.

The MIT teaching platform allows students to share their written work with each other, and give each other grades and feedback (all anonymously).  I assigned a short-follow-on scenario each week that picked up where the assigned negotiation exercise left off.  They had to write out one page of their best advice to Novi and Vic in each situation. Then, each participant had to offer comments and grades to at least two other people on their written responses.  I provided a detailed grading template with an example of how I graded a student’s response to each assignment. This is all accomplished electronically and automatically by the MIT Professional Education platform.  But, a problem emerged when a handful of online participants offered nasty comments and unfair grades.  I had to add an online ombudsmen (one of my post-docs with a lot of negotiating teaching experience). He was available to re-review comments and grades for anyone who felt they had been treated unfairly. While this only amounted to 1% - 2% of the participants, I was genuinely surprised at how mean the class participants could be to each other.  Remember, everyone was paying to participate in the six week course and these were mostly young professionals.  These were not your usual internet trolls who write vitriolic comment and leave.

I asked the participants to reflect at the end of each week (in writing, but for themselves) on what they learned and what they were confused about.  At the end of each week I entertained questions (on the Open Electronic Forum also supported by the platform). I chose about a dozen (from about 50 – 60) questions to answer in writing each week. It took me about two to three hours to write out my answers each week. It was clear that participants were taking the class very seriously and reflecting carefully on what was happening.  I posted by weekly answers for the whole group to see each Monday morning as a new unit began. I could tell from their questions where I had failed to be clear or where the materials I had developed did not go far enough.  Answering their questions in real time was important, also, for those who had expected to interact with me personally when they had signed up for the course.

In the last week of the course, I asked them to prepare a composite reflective memo.  While we polled the group each week (after every exercise and assignment) to find out the ratings and judgments about each component of the class),  their detailed closing evaluations made clear that the idea of a “learning journey” really does make sense.  They elaborated on what they took from the course (relative to their individual needs) and gave me a sense of whether I had succeeded.  There’s no way a “final exam” makes sense in this context (and I wonder, in retrospect, how much sense it makes in more traditional in-person classes).  My focus on their evolving theories of practice and the importance of continuing to learn from your own negotiation experience may be the most important thing I gave them.

Preparing and presenting the online course made me think very hard about how people learn to negotiate, how they acquire and master various micro-skills, how they confront and reformulate their personal theories-of-practice and how they learn from their own ongoing negotiating experiences.  As I try to think 10 years ahead, I imagine that my face-to-face negotiation instruction and training sessions will incorporate a lot more prepared video elements (before and after class).  I’ve already introduced a new kind of video assignment in my “regular” MIT class – requiring students to videotape (using an ipad) at least three other pairs or groups of students doing assigned negotiations and producing (using imovie) annotated video presentations for the rest of the class.  The act of having to edit, add titles and sub-titles, and narrate a three to four minute composite video turns out to be a great way to get students to realize what they are supposed to be learning.  Video debriefing allows us to all be looking at the same thing.   

The MIT Professional Education team hired someone (an MIT undergraduate, it turns out) to write the detailed code “automating” every moment of the six week on line course.  Imagine you had to anticipate every question, every concern and every bit of confusion that online learners might have. Then, you had to write the instructions to those learners (both in terms of how to use on the platform and in terms of queuing up the learning assignments they are required to complete).  That’s what it means to incorporate a UX perspective in online negotiation instruction.  That’s what I think we should all learn to do.

An Online University? Are you Crazy?

I wish some of the people who are so excited about the prospect of online college courses being taught by famous faculty members understood a little bit more about what a university education is really supposed to accomplish.  The reason students (ought to) go to college is to enhance their capacity to function in the world-at-large once they graduate -- to function as citizens, productive workers, parents and as potential leaders in all walks of life.  When colleges do their job, students learn fundamental skills (like how to master a new body of knowledge, express their views effectively in writing and in spoken terms, and how to listen and respond to others with very different values and beliefs). They are also expected to familiarize themselves with a substantial body of knowledge (the Cannon of Western Literature? Great Books? Key Concepts in Science and Math? Great Moments in History? Competing Theories of Social Change and  Human Progress? ) that educated people use to make sense of what is going on around them.

You can read about all of these things.  There's nothing new about that. And, now we can put these materials and study guides on line.  Big deal.  And, we can capture the best lecturers in the world presenting these materials and post them online so that people all around the world can listen and watch without having to relocate. We certainly do that with recorded music.  But that doesn't a university make!  We wouldn't imagine giving someone a degree in music theory or performance because they had listened to long list of records or disks. Any anyone who thinks that open on-line enrollment in a catalogue of college-level classes equals a college degree, is sadly mistaken.  And, even if we add computer-graded exams to be sure that the many thousands of people taking these on-line courses have read the material, we will still be nowhere near what it takes to master fundamental skills and use a substantial body of knowledge.  Mastery requires real-time interaction with other learners and hands-on coaching by skilled teachers.  It requires, trial and error, feedback and reflective discussion. That's why large lecture classes are almost always supplemented by small sections in which students try to use the skills and knowledge they are reading or hearing about in collaboration with other students and teachers.

There are three reasons that on-line universities or efforts to approximate them will fail.  First, the most important feedback students need takes the form of questions asked, answered and reconsidered in real-time with a cohort of other learners. A list of Frequently Asked Questions with standards responses pre-prepared by instructors won't give each student the opportunity and responsibility they need to try formulating their own questions as they grapple with the material.  Second, students invariably learn more from other students than they do from faculty as they try wrestle with the materials they are trying to learn.  This, in turn, requires a safe and supportive environment in which students dare to ask questions (even if they feel foolish revealing what they don't know) or offer tentative answers to questions posed by others.  This works best when students meet outside of class on a regular basis, study together and  earn each other's trust.  They also need one-on-one time with faculty (or teaching assistants) to talk about assigned materials, review work in progress or get feedback that puts exam results in context and makes sure they figure out why they got something wrong.  Grades (especially when they are machine-generated) can't do that.  Third, when skill development and not just knowledge acquisition is the goal, students need repeated opportunities to try-fail-reflect- and discuss to achieve mastery. Multiple choice, machine-graded exams will never be able to substitute for hands-on faculty coaching and real-time interaction with peer learners.  That's why we need smaller not larger classes (or cohorts of students).

My own university (MIT) is poised to invest tens of millions of dollars in on-line education for the world-at-large. There are some ways in which this could be enormously helpful (and could strengthen residential learning), but merely recording and transmitting on line (even for free) the "best" course in various fields is not going to help very much.  We tried that in the past by writing text books.  People all over the world were encouraged to use the basic economics and physics textbooks developed by MIT faculty. Did that improve and sustain the quality of teaching in other universities?  I don't think so.  The only way to do that is by enhancing the capacity of teachers in those other places and help them enhance their teaching skills.  On-line courses are going to be used as an excuse by college administrators in other parts of the world (and even in the US) to fire faculty members and give students credit for taking on-line courses (offered by MIT and others).  That won't strengthen education in the developing world, for example, it will weaken it.  On the other hand, we could use MITx to create an on-line learning community for economics or physics faculty members around the world.  It would need to be highly interactive.  The focus should probably be on how to meet the culturally-defined learning needs of the students each of these faculty members is trying to teach. An on-line forum -- with the capacity to upload teaching demonstrations by one participant that could become the focus for the larger group to review--would aim to share what we know about teaching key concepts or using various teaching methods.  Strengthening teaching capacity in as many places as possible ought to be our goal, not reducing or eliminating teaching capacity.

I can imagine giving students a lot more video material to look at before classes begin.  I teach city planners about the way certain kinds of resource management challenges can and should be handled.  Seeing detailed video accounts prepared by colleagues all over the world, showing how certain problems were handled, would be a wonderful supplement to the readings I assign.  But, when students come to my class, I will still pose hypothetical scenarios to see if they can use what they have been viewing and reading.  I want each student to be ready to respond to any question another student might ask, or that I might ask.  I want to give them collective feedback on their latest assignment.  I want them to react to the feedback I provided to them individually on the quiz or exam they recently completed. Then, I will ask them to work in teams or small groups to come up with the best response to still another hypothetical situation I have proposed. Finally, I want to gather them together for a cross-group discussion where one person from each group presents their group's "best advice" to the hypothetical client (using everything they viewed or read before class, as well as the ideas that came up during their small group discussion). This is the only way I can help my students master the material I am presenting.

On-line video and other interactive materials can help students prepare for a class or review what
happened in a class, but it can't substitute for the real-time group learning that college education is meant to offer.  Similarly, on-line course, if used correctly by qualified faculty members, can supplement what it taught -- especially if it is accompanied by on-line forums that explain to faculty how they can use new materials to teach their particular students. But, online courses can't substitute for residential (i.e. face-to-face, real-time) learning.

There will never be an on-line university that offers more than minimal vocational training -- learning the material, step-by-step, by yourself, at your own pace and taking a machine-graded test.  That doesn't come close to generating mastery (i.e. an ability to use concepts and methods in an improvisational way). Mastery can only be achieved through trial-and-error-and-coaching-and-correction-and-question-asking in a continuing group of trusted peer learners.