Sanjay Sarma - Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn

Learning is an adventureand as anyone whos survived an adventure will tell you, thats not always a good thing. It can be a long, rewarding process that changes the way you experience the world and reveals capabilities you never knew you had. But in the retelling adventures are extolled only by the victors. For every adventurer whos slain an educational dragon, there may be dozens lying in caves and ditches nearby, smoldering in their armor, ruing the day they made their attempt.

My closest scrape with outrageous educational misfortune came at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. The moment stands out in my memory with uncanny clarity, as though it had been filmed at double the standard frame rate, as in Peter Jacksons somehow-too-vivid Hobbit movies. It happened my final year at university.

Actually, to be technical, it was the summer after my final year. Although I had entered university firing on all cylinders, at some point my straight As gave way to curvier letters, and finally, just before what should have been my graduation, I managed to flunk Controls, a course required for my engineering degree.

That meant summer school: one chance at redemption. In most of India, summer means the monsoon season. In Kanpur, its wetter than it is hotand it is as hot as anywhere Ive ever lived. The dormitories werent air-conditioned, but the rooms did have French doors that opened onto a small terrace, and so, like every other sucker lucky enough to be taking remedial summer courses, I pushed my bed close to the French doors, so that at least my upper half could enjoy the occasional breeze. My worldly goodsmy trunk of clothing, books, a stash of sweets Id brought from homewent at my feet, at the other end of the room.

One morning, I woke up at eight or so, bleary eyed. Something was amiss.

Or rather, something was looking at me. Something with an impressive set of teeth.

I dont know if youve ever experienced the rapid transition from drowsiness to abject terror, but I dont recommend it. Every part of my body froze except my eyeballs, which swiveled on their bearings to take in my visitor. Staring back, fangs bared, was a rhesus macaque.

Too late, I realized my error: I had situated myself between my stash of sweets and any passing hungry simians.

Monkeys, in my opinion, are cute only on the other side of a television screen. They can be mischievous in all the worst ways, even violent, and they sometimes carry rabies. We stayed like that, face-to-face, for what felt like minutes. I pictured my obituary: Once-Promising Student Mauled at Summer School.

Five years earlier, in high school, no one who knew me would have predicted such an ignominious fate. Together with about 70,000 of my peersthe comparable number today is on the order of a millionI had sat for the Indian Institutes of Technologys entrance exam. It was, and remains, perhaps the most competitive exam in the world. With some variation by year, only the top 2 percent of test takers are accepted to any of IITs campuses, which means for every fifty would-be dragon slayers, only one prevails. When my cohorts scores came in, I learned that I had placed among the top five hundred students in the country. The news came as a major relief. Though I had won the neonatal lottery in the sense that I had been born to educated parents who prized learning and independent thought, we were far from wealthy, and they had made it clear to me that if I were ever going to make something of myself, academic excellence would be non-negotiable. After I saw my name on that board, it seemed my adventure was off to a promising start.

But at some point at university, the going became a slog. It became difficult to figure out how and why the abstract coursework I was supposed to be learning mattered in the larger scheme of things. It wasnt my professors fault; I was being taught by some of the better professors in India, and plenty of other students were doing just fine. And it wasnt that I didnt want to care about the material. I wished desperately, in fact, for the stuff I was being taught to fit into my head as effortlessly as it had in my childhood.

But instead, for the first time in my life, learning had become difficult. In a way, I almost envied the monkey slavering at the end of my bed. All he had to do was wander along the row of dormitory windows and take whatever food was on offer. To him, my university was a buffet, filled with treats just waiting to be discovered. It should have been that way for me as well. I could see some of my friends partaking in the spread of knowledge, but I couldnt force myself to eat. In a very real sense, the monkey was better adapted to my university than I was.

Today, more than thirty years later, Im happy to report I survived the most dangerous part of my educational adventure. The macaque at the end of my bed scampered away, permitting me to spend the rest of the summer forcing down the curriculum of my Controls course (and reading J. R. R. Tolkiens entire Lord of the Rings cycle). If I hadnt been given that second crack at that course, however, or if something else should have come between me and my studies that summer, I shudder to think about the later educational journeys I would have missed out on.

Instead, today I find myself in a unique position: not just engaged in my own lifelong pursuit of knowledge, but also the lead guide for many others. I head the Open Learning effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where its my job to fling open the doors of the MIT educational experience and extend aspects of it to as many people as might conceivably benefit.

My quest is hardly unprecedented. Many others across time and space have made similarly ambitious attempts: geniuses, visionaries, disciplinarians, anti-disciplinarians, administrators, philosophers, gurus,