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Dear Candace,
Congratulations on the Amazon gig.
As you can tell by Monday’s IHE story, your role at Amazon is of significant interest to our community of learning nerds.
While my guess is that you will hate showing up twice in two days on Inside Higher Ed, I’d ask your indulgence in sharing this open letter.
The fact is that your Amazon gig may matter more to your admirers, colleagues, and fellow learning obsessives than you may realize. It is wonderful that Amazon has recognized the brilliance of your research. That you have the opportunity to apply your leading scholarship in learning science to as large and influential company as Amazon sounds pretty cool.
It sounds as if you will be working with Amazon on educational efforts for the people who work at Amazon. Is that right? So half a million potential learners.
The challenge will be convincing Amazon’s leadership that the company has more to gain than to lose in sharing methods, data, and outcomes. The goal is when it comes to advancing learning science that Amazon would benefit from adopting the scholarly norms of academia.
You have frequently spoken about the problem of a black box approach to learning algorithms. Part of what is exciting about your research is your commitment to surface the underlying mechanisms of learning.
Amazon should not think its investment to advance learning as private intellectual property. Rather, the culture at Amazon should evolve to where the company understands that sharing advances in learning science will ultimately benefit Amazon. After all, not every person who will ever work at Amazon works at Amazon now.
A commitment to transparency and open scholarship by Amazon in the field of learning science, based on what the company is learning from their own internal educational efforts, would constitute a big win for our larger discipline. This sort of commitment could push other companies, some with quite large employee education programs, to similarly contribute to moving the science of learning forward.
It would also be wonderful if Amazon could join our open online learning and open education resources (OER) communities in a meaningful way.
What if Amazon commits to making its educational content and platforms open to the world’s lifelong learners?
Amazon could benefit from all the (anonymized) learning data that it could collect using an open approach, data that could be used to accelerate improvements in the quality of what the company offers its employees. This has been the mindset of those of us creating open online courses, as we are committed to using an open learning approach to improve learning on our campuses.
I hope that your role at Amazon encourages the sort of thought leadership and public scholarship that you have so embodied in all of your roles. Transparency, openness, and critical evaluation are the reasons why the science of learning has advanced as it has. Amazon, under your leadership, has an opportunity to contribute to our discipline.
What would you ask of Candace?
