Accelerating 3D Print Education to Improve Learning and Future Business Outcomes Worldwide with David Hollands

 

Our distance-learning education systems have been forced into rapid technology-immersion that tech like Zoom are becoming common for Kindergarteners. But there is a stark difference in learning outcomes at all educational levels when economics and access to technology, like 3d printing, come into play. On today’s show, David Hollands joins Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard to talk about 3D print education and its role in making the world a little smaller by connecting communities and helping them participate in global industry. David is the Education Industry Strategy Manager for the Asia Pacific and Japan for HP, working with government leaders and educators to drive the development of initiatives, policy, and research on emerging technology to further educational development.

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Accelerating 3D Print Education to Improve Learning and Future Business Outcomes Worldwide with David Hollands

We’ve got a great interview with David Hollands. Tracy, I was impressed. It was much better than I expected it to be.

We’re going to talk about school so you thought it was going to be boring. We’re talking 3D print education. We’re continuing this education and steamed topics that we’ve been talking about for a couple of episodes because we’re trying to group these in groups of things. We talked a lot of foundational things with megatrends and sustainability. Now, we’ve got the educational segments that we’re talking about. We’re laying the groundwork then as we move into manufacturing and design and all of the other things that we’ve got going in this great series. You thought education is going to be boring.

It wasn’t that. Reading all the information, all the bio, I was struggling a little bit for where is the 3D printing tie in, but it kept presenting itself over and over.

Let’s give David a little bit of background and information on him. David Hollands is the Education Industry Strategy Manager for Asia, Pacific and Japan for HP. He oversees HPs education strategy in that region. He works with HP’s country teams, governments, leaders and educators to drive the development of initiatives, policy and research on emerging technology to further educational development with things like 3D printing. With the aim of helping to realize HP’s big, broad goal of improving learning outcomes for 100 million by 2025, 100 million students have improved learning outcomes, that’s fantastic.

David has a passionate commitment to helping education as his life’s calling and sees himself as a volunteer by spending his time across many different education initiatives, projects and communities across the region. He serves as a thought leader and industry advisor, including acting as an industry advisor for the National Digital Technology Curriculum for the Australian government. He’s joining us from Perth, Australia. We’re talking around the world, thankful for technology. I’m glad that we’re doing this because we do need to tie in an understanding of where we’ve been going at this education piece and see the bigger, broader education and how can steam education and 3D print education in general improve and come to making better workforce, humans, community, designs and all those other things that we’ve been driving for all along here.

It’s exciting stuff. Let’s go to the interview with David.

David, thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to have you on the show. 

It’s a pleasure to be here.

We’re interested to talk about some deeper things regarding education and get your perspective as to how that applies to 3D printing and perhaps higher education.

We talk about education here is it’s not like, “Let’s teach you how to 3D print.” 3D print education means we’ve got to have a lot of broader talk about manufacturing and engineering. There are whole components about it. It does seem to be a higher education conversation, but we should start a little bit lower and prep first. What do you see as the critical factors in prepping up so that we can get the great workers coming out of our higher education with the skillsets that we need?

How do we get ready for higher education? We can think about building a foundation of understanding. It’s interesting that when we get into something like technology, it’s probably preparing our minds and perhaps our hearts for the purposes for technology. They play an incredible role in engaging us in meaningful work and also in the skills that we’re looking for. We hear a lot about 21st century skills and they’re often called soft skills. These are things that universally allow us to adapt to environments, to different communities of people we might be working with in a flexible way. The emphasis is on how we develop those critical thinking collaboration and communication skills. Believe it or not, apart from being exposed to the technology opportunities, things like 3D printing at those grade school levels, it’s about imparting some of those skills early. Once we reach a point where we’re doing engagement with real-world problems at university or higher education, we’re equipped to work with people, communicate our ideas and adapt and change as new technologies and disruption occur.

During this time of COVID, and we’ve been mentioning it in the episodes while many people are sequestered, you’re around the world in Perth and we’re out here in California and our kids are not in school. In our universities, we were having a big discussion here about whether or not some of the universities in California were going to have students back. We were thrilled to hear some were because you don’t get those great communications and collaboration skills when you’re sitting alone at home. It’s not quite the same. That’s an unfortunate side effect that we may have is this little residual bump of difficulty in finding good people as we move forward to hiring who have great skills because they missed out.

That’s true and the situation we’re in, and it’s hard not to talk about it, apart from the negatives around kids learning being disrupted, if we think about the opportunities of STEM, where we are right now. We’ve seen some amazing examples of that, the touch on the use of 3D. We’ve seen the grade school kids all over the world participate in helping to create the medical apparatus like mask holders and things like that using domestic 3D printers. What’s amazing and great about that is when we give learners the opportunity to develop their education, understanding on something that matters to them, unsurprisingly, they accelerate the educational outcomes. It’s almost a no brainer to say if we took an adult who has no reason to study, like the three of us, and said, “I’d like you to go back and do Algebra,” I’m going to have a hard time convincing you to study that for the next six months for no reason.

We’ve already been having this discussion about many of us parents who feel like we’re going back to algebra and on fractions and all of those things that we no longer have to do manually anymore as we’re helping our kids at this time and it’s not fun.

Education as a field is fascinating because a lot of what's old is new again, like immersing in production and creation. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

Think about the fact that these students are engaging in design because I certainly do care about the challenge that’s out there in the world. If we offer them the opportunity to do project-based learning and look at ways in which we can make that immersive for them, and 3D print is an immersive technology. For those that have access, this is a big opportunity for them to ground the reason for learning in something meaningful.

That’s the big question right there that you’re putting out though. The access is an issue because it’s an economic, Wi-Fi and bandwidth issue. You have all of that going on too. That’s cumbersome and problematic for a lot of families. That’s unfortunate. As we’re talking about that prep level, we are going to have to do a better job to compensate for that. 

Access is about firstly, being a part of the digital world. We know at a worldwide level, there’s a big challenge in terms of that access to digital. We know that’s a huge game-changer for opportunities in our lives. When we take an extension like 3D printing as a technology, we know that this deepens the digital divide. If we start to talk about the trajectory of 3D printing and the fourth industrial revolution where we want to, as we’re considering its place in education, ensure that we can give access to everyone who’s a student. This is an amazing opportunity to democratize manufacturers, for example, which is incredible for developing countries and communities whose traditional crafts and trades have been challenged globally through the mass manufacture. How do we give them back that opportunity for their families and communities? We’re sitting in an incredible opportunity to do that, but we do need to think about, “How do we build the education capabilities that empower that?” That’s in developing countries, but we know this is a big problem still in developed countries like the US and Australia. There are still gaps.

You’ve been working with leaders as an industry advisor. You work with the administrators and the bigger groups in looking at education from different standpoints. There’s nothing more, I’m going to say bureaucratic and complex than trying to navigate the university system or our school districts. I say that from personal experience. How do you start that conversation with them about how they can improve their initiatives? How can we improve the learning outcomes as well because that’s important?

It comes down to depending on who we’re talking to, what matters to their country, city and community? What is the greatest importance to them? Thinking about the implications for that longer-term and then tying whatever I’m going to talk about in terms of educational development to the technology that’s best going to help them negotiate those issues. Tying it to 3D printing, I was in India and I was talking with the India Council for Technical Education. That’s their big body for governing all of the technical education in India. They regulate the curriculum for engineering, science, all of those disciplines. When I was talking to them, one of their challenges is they have these institutions all over India that are being underutilized to some extent. They have this enormous challenge with youth unemployment in India. They have this resource, which is aimed at helping them and they’re doing an incredible job despite the logistical issues. What I was able to talk about there was the opportunity for India’s future in terms of democratizing manufacturer. Talking about 3D printing, for example, in that context, I was quickly able to show them, “Imagine a community that can participate in global manufacturer in the ideas industry through design in these centers that you already have.”

This is great for them because not only does it mean that there’s an economic opportunity which could grow at a grassroots remote level, but also as we know 3D printing already does an amazing job at medical devices and interventions. You can imagine that having some 3D capabilities means that those outside of your community if you’re connected to them, can create things at your location, not necessarily needing to be there. That means we could have prosthetic technology being delivered into those communities with the medical experts located in another country. It’s about saying, “If we have this opportunity, this could be the future for those remote communities in India of which there are many.” That’s one cool example of a conversation I had. It was encouraging to see how 3D could be put into that conversation. Remember, it wasn’t about, “Let’s rejig your additive manufacturing future in India in the sense that we’re going to helps your industries transform.”

It’s like bringing that supplementing in to grow the industries and the needs that they already have. That’s an interesting way to look at it. I understand that HP has a goal of improving learning outcomes for 100 million by 2025. Tell us a little bit about that because that’s a big goal. I’m glad that they have that goal, but I’d love to hear what that means.

Our mission at HP is to make life better for everyone everywhere. It grounds us in how we are trying to develop our technologies to improve lives. Sustainability, you’ll notice, has been entrenched since our founding in how we do things. From an education perspective, if we think about how we truly transform the world, what is the basis of that? If we go and do something in a country and we help their education, we empower the future generation to have more and fair opportunities. We address a whole bunch of issues that the world faces before they happen. It seemed obvious to us, and it has, that we could do something there that goal, which is as you say, not a small goal. Also, it pushes people like myself who are in the education team and our whole company to look at ways in which we collaborate. We play a role as a technology industry to help do what we can to provide our expertise to share our vision of the future with education. Along the way, education has unique challenges. We talked before about access.

 

The first thing we’ve got to do in order to hit that scale, and that’s what it’s about, is how do we scale in education? It’s about exploring the challenges, as I said, in a nation and community that are impacting them. From our perspective, trying to pull together the stakeholders so we can do something which has a huge impact. I’ll give you an example, one that I’m quite proud of. In China, for the last couple of years, we worked with the Ministry of Education there to look at their math curriculum for middle school. We began to call about how we create this on-ramp. We did research with their universities around, is the way in which we teach something like math helping kids to develop those soft skills and apply it to real-world situations? It turns out, we could do a lot better. We worked with the Ministry of Education on that research. There are 45 million kids learning math in middle school in China and doing it around investigation. Instead of the three of us probably sat there with our math book when we’re fifteen, what they have are these environments. We looked at their environment and what they were learning and how they were learning. They’re doing it in an investigative way.

It sounds a lot like Alexandra’s integrated math program. Our oldest daughter went to art high school and they had that. Everything was a word problem and everything was an exploration. It reminded me of some of the things we did when we would get to higher math when we started to get into calculus. It was early on and it was such a different and more creative approach I thought to math and it was fabulous than they did it with the program, but it was fantastic. It sounds like this is similar.

You mentioned HP getting involved in helping a math curriculum for the largest country on Earth and why math? Here’s an interesting thing. HP invented the scientific calculator. We still make them, but it is about trying to look at this from a big scale perspective. That’s coming back to technologies like 3D printing. How we like to encourage education around that is to try to run alongside industry so that we can push the bounds of scale and speed. Those are the two things that we need for the 3D industry to take off. Even if you’re at home, you pray for the day that your 3D printer will churn out multiple models in a few minutes. That’d be wonderful. Let’s not forget there can be a Zen-like experience watching the model being built.

It has kept our kids busy for some time. 

It’s like gardening, it could be quite therapeutic. Maybe we don’t want the printers to go the way of incredible speed, but it is super important. Education is a problem at scale, so 100 million is the goal. This will force us into a position where we’re coming up with solutions with communities, with governments, and with institutions that have the promise of scale and hopefully deliver. If we can do that, it is about approaching iteration and incubation. If you think about 3D printing as being an incredible opportunity to rapid prototype, we’re familiar with that. Even with the humblest 3D printer, we can get our ideas out, even if they’re not 100% there. It’s about rapid iterations and rapid prototyping so that we have not one idea to consider that could scale a hundred. Take that philosophy with you when we think about technologies like 3D printing and we might have a chance of getting to 100 million.

A hundred million seems like initially when you first hear the number, a daunting goal or a challenge. When you’re in speaking with these governments, the Indian government governing all their education, maybe there are 45 million students impacted there. India and China are big and popular countries. 

You should hit your goal fast there.

I was thinking that’s the thing, you’ve had both education systems in those big countries, you probably will hit the goal. I can also see that we know from experience, in China at least, I can’t say I have any experience with India, but how they teach things like math in China is different than we’re used to in the US. I don’t know how it is in Australia. They look at a number like 1,000, and it’s not 1,000. It is ten 100. They have different ways that they look at and teach math. I imagine that presents some interesting challenges for you.

Let’s invite global conversations around #3Dprintingeducation and encourage higher education to jump onboard the industry. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

It also goes to tying into the factors you were talking about, creating these soft skills of critical thinking and collaboration. That’s what we found at certain countries who are great at teaching math and science. The true STEM by not having a little bit of that art and that more abstract thinking in their approach fails to people who can be creative and critical thinking in applying towards innovation and things that we will need even more when more of our AI is crunching our data for us.

Education as a field is fascinating because a lot of what’s old is new again. When we talk about this focus on immersive learning that it is project-based or immersive learning, experiential learning, you’ve got people like John Dewey who conducted those experiments many years ago and found that if you allow more senses to be involved in your learning process, humans seem to do a better job of it.

We have Montessori. That’s the same model.

What we’re learning even about our brains and how we learn is we’ve discovered the Earth isn’t flat anymore. I spoke to neuroscientists about this field of understanding human learning from a neuroscience perspective. It’s an interesting time that we’re in, but it’s confirming a lot of things. If you take the simplest one, people learn differently in different ways. Our brains and how they’re equipped to learn the next thing that we’re talking about or looking at is more like a musical symphony that’s been going on for however long you’ve lived. At that moment, you’re inserting the music. That’s how we learn. A cup means something to your mind based on all of the exposure to concepts, memories, and negative or otherwise.

It’s a complex thing, but I suppose what we’re looking at is, how do we offer learners a variety of different modes or ways of learning something grounded on something they care about all that matters either to them or to the world. Technology is allowing that to be possible at scale because the reason we have a lot of set format in education is to deliver scale. We’ve been fortunate in the world, particularly developing countries where maybe a couple of years ago, we’re able to produce a scalable education system that for the most part, tried to deliver to as many people as possible.

That’s the challenge though of the developed countries. Here in the US for instance, everything in our education process is fractured. You mentioned the controls over the school districts and it’s not. Sometimes the state level, like New York State has a higher control and California has different sets. You look at that and that fracture frustrates families and parents and we get through the system. That’s where in the 3D print industry, we’ve seen this proactive, grassroots program to bring it into the schools and/or supplement it out so that it was accessible. That’s why we had a lot of makerspaces and a lot of those popping up to make it happen because it wasn’t going to happen faster, the other system and then force everybody to go like, “We better catch up,” then the school district would comply.

Research is important in these areas because the education system that we have and we can feel fortunate in developed countries where that’s making a big difference, has done for years, has been from maybe 100 or so years ago and those overarching structures. There are limitations that are there, and maybe we’ve hit the limits of those. Come back to community contexts. If you think about individual towns, cities and suburbs, there are different things going on there. If you think about it from a human capital perspective, it’s imagining how could we take all the skills, knowledge and ability of different people in this area perhaps globally as well and apply it to the unique problems that we have? I’m sure where you live if you move three suburbs over, there could be some different things that are going on there. This is the same in every community on Earth.

If people like us who know a thing or two about technology are coming to the conversation about, “What are the problems we’re seeing? How do we think about from our perspective, those problems in terms of stuff that we can now do, which is constantly changing?” There’s a new opportunity coming up maybe to resolve these problems. It’s defining them first, having some consensus about, “This would be great to solve.” Moving from that to, “Is there an opportunity for AI technology that we have to play a role to help that at scale? Let’s test it.” It might be that we don’t have yet the answer in technology, but that gives companies like HP and others an opportunity to figure out and research it and maybe create it. This is a way we can all approach the challenges in education, but there are also opportunities.

 

Once we start thinking about 3D printing, coming back to that topic, it’s amazing what it could be doing from an education perspective at scale. What’s possible we need to research? At a higher education level, the conversations if I put them in two categories, what does it offer in terms of research? Universities have always done an amazing job of contributing valuable research on pretty much everything. Where does it play roles there? The other one is how does it transform teaching and learning? Specifically, we need to train people in additive manufacturing, that’s a new thing, and it’s going to create enormous amounts of jobs. What about transforming every kind of learning? If I’m studying philosophy, is there a role for 3D printing and philosophy? We maybe want people to learn it better.

That ties right to the episode where we were interviewing Cindi Schulze in the middle school. That’s what she was looking at. She was like, “Can I teach 3D print in the context of teaching a history, a social or an English assignment?” That’s what she started to look at and do that she found successful and that other teachers in her community wanted to model. She found that by applying the lesson that was there and then having 3D print become a tool within that, it started to share the technology at the same time to understand the application and use of it.

I mentioned the project in China and other places and it was an investigation. Research is the foundation. It’s taking these technologies and they’re disruptive and then carefully considering what does it make any difference in learning outcome. Holding it loosely sometimes there’s a lot of pressure on educators at tertiary, secondary and primary levels that they should be engaging in tech for the sake of the fact that it’s out there. It’s dangerous that instead what we could be doing is saying, “I don’t know what are we having struggles with? Let’s investigate to see if this is of any use at all where it could be.” I’ve got a question for the two of you. Think about when you’re at school, it could be university in this case or a grade school. What are the subjects that you would describe as non-immersive, non-experiential and maybe boring?

We went to the same college, Rhode Island School of Design, and I would say that probably our least immersive one would have been Art History because there was an occasional dozing off in that class that would happen commonly. 

History in general where you’re reading about history, whether you’re in primary school or secondary. You can’t experience it as well as you can science experiments, art classes or maybe even math that you’re performing and calculating things and come up with solutions.

English literature, there are always plays. There’s vocalization of things. That’s more immersive too, but you’re right. History is the one that we have hidden to. 

We did a Campus of the Future research around immersive technologies. For HP, that includes extended reality, which has 3D printing. We’ve done two bodies of this research and we gave the initial question about, “What are this useful for extended reality and domestic technologies?” We have 21 R1 universities across the world in the US and they went and looked at this stuff. We coordinated the output of it through EDUCAUSE and they published it. The first findings were, “Here’s a bunch of areas where they take something like art history and they engage more of your senses.” It has these benefits, but it also did this bit where it looked at the level of immersion. Did it make a difference? Was it harder to do it than maybe something else?

It was looking about the form and function of say 3D printing, which was included around these questions, “Can we understand whether it has an outcome?” We followed up after we found a bunch of areas to investigate with the second body of research, which then looked at teaching and learning more discreetly to say, “What are the opportunities around those two areas where it helps?” Some of it is obvious. You talk about art history and imagine if you can engage something which might be a little bit more motivational than reading a book. What we’re going to create is an artifact from art history that you’re going to create.

3D is all about #immersivetechnology. It isn't just about making at a manufacturing level. It's about why you're even doing it. @hp @zbyhp Click To Tweet

Walking around a sculpture. That’s the difference is when you get to walk into it and you get to see it, that’s where XR could be fantastic to bring to many places.

You start to get to use some of the things that you love about expressing your art. If we give you the opportunity to express an artistic thought in the context of your history, or if the teacher is handing out objects which relate to art history, or we’re giving you an immersive experience so you might put a VR headset on and walk through some of the things, the galleries that they’re talking about in the book that you don’t get to see. We know that this has a profound effect on people. The secret sauce is finding out what scales. It might not be practical to take 30 people or 100 people in a lecture theater and strap a headset to them all at once. We want to be hard-nosed in some ways around saying, “If we could find a way to do this, could we share it with everyone everywhere in the world?” That’s HPs focus on the research that we do in our team around these educational questions.

To get 100 million, it’s about saying, “What’s universally applicable in big situations?” We’ve established as well through Rady Children’s Hospital. We worked with him with our 3D printers because it’s a pediatric facility looking at surgery. They’re using, for example, the abilities we already have to scan organs to prepare for surgery. We’ll get all this imaging, but what we discovered with them is that if the surgeons have the opportunity to look at the heart of that little baby because there are differences in symmetry with different humans, differences in size and scale. If there’s trauma, that trauma will be unique to people. They’ve created a fundamental link between being able to create these models to prepare for surgery and a much higher level of confidence with the surgeons. Believe it or not, surgeons are pretty confident people. Let’s face it, they have to be. You can imagine how important it is to build on that if you can so that they have this sense that they know how to plan and go in and do this work.

It expresses that visualization. You were talking about educational development factors and some things that are fundamental to what’s going to make a more immersive education and going to make this more successful to improve learning outcomes. That’s our obvious goals. Do you have some that are guiding principles? When you’re always analyzing what’s going, advising one of these school districts, these industries or these governments, are you looking at certain factors within that?

At a macro level, at a high-level, HP embarks on this. We have an approach called NETA, National Education Technology Assessment. That takes us through a whole bunch of community surveys. It’s leveraging a whole bunch of data, 100 years from different sources. We did one of these in the State of Idaho. It involves enormous numbers of surveys and talking to people and different communities so that we could look at the human capital development opportunities for that state. Maybe provide some input on where there were opportunities for the state to maybe look at the legislature, look at different ideas in terms of shaping the way they can do their education, finding opportunities for them. That’s an example of something that we do. We uncovered this opportunity for social and emotional education because the communities can have a lot of challenges around these areas. We talk about that in the education community a lot globally is this social, emotional intelligence and how it plays a role to give people these highly adaptive skills in the workplace and resilience.

What was encouraging I heard is that the governor there is supporting some policy and funding to put into social, emotional learning. It’s nice to be HP and work with Brookings Institute in this case, sometimes with UNESCO, and provide a whole group of communities in the United States where they have this opportunity. We’ve done similar things in countries like Rwanda. If you have a look at Rwanda, most people remember that country as a place that was war-torn and Black Hawk Down was the movie that set the tone. If you have a look at it from where it’s come from, it’s an amazing place. We were fortunate some years back to do and made it with them around their education system. That is why we do this. In the higher education context, it’s about team members like ourselves sitting down with the universities. This Campus of the Future research that we’re doing and the concept of it is one that we love to engage higher education institutions so that we can look at different universities delivering different areas of special education areas that they’re specifically good at and giving them some encouragement around reshaping some of that education to better-equip people for the fourth industrial revolution and the change in society that we want.

It’s occurring to me that the Campus of the Future also needs to include a better alumni engagement into lifelong learning. I feel like they reach out to us all the time and ask us for money, but they don’t ask us if we want continuing education or if we want to learn something new. That is an opportunity, especially when you can do virtual learning because we’re all over the world. We’re no longer in the same town we went to college in. That’s a shame that we don’t have that yet. That sounds like the Campus of Future needs to have that.

That’s the concept. It’s not the four walls of the lecture theater or the campus itself. We’ve got these two terms, Classroom of the Future and Campus of the Future. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek because it doesn’t mean the campus as we think of it traditionally. It doesn’t mean the four walls of a classroom. What it does mean is it’s thinking about, I like to say places, spaces, and people. If I thought about YouTube in the context of Campus of the Future and your alumni, you’re engaged in this amazing area of 3D printing and you’ve got a passion for it. You’re super on the pulse talking to people like me and much smarter people. You have enormous amounts of resource to offer to help keep the universities on the pulse.

 

How do we take the people like yourself and even the extended community that you’re connected to and meaningfully at scale connect that into the institution in which you’re an alumnus? What is it that you help them address in terms of their challenge? Because you’re in 3D printing, I have an idea about that. The first part is that we need a bunch of people who understand additive manufacturing. You understand this well, so you can encourage them to pursue the development of curricular around that. You also know what taking people who’ve got an interest in additive manufacturing the best way to engage with those people. You’re talking about a whole range of different learners. Some of them are grandmas and grandpas who are taking out 3D.

You’re talking about breaking down that traditional wall. There’s a strict wall a lot of times, at least here in the US between our university system and our corporations and entrepreneurs and not professors. We have that clear distinctive wall. That’s why there has always been this struggle in communication, which is like, “You’re not putting out the right employees that I need. We’re bringing you great people and you’re not hiring them.” That collaboration needs to start to happen. That wall needs to break down in order for the curriculum to get better for us to be able to have great workers as we go forward and be able to hit the ground running and have that cycle back into more money into the schools again. 

I would say on large, the higher education community and universities as a community, you hear it a lot. They’re much all about, “How do we engage industry more in undergraduate courses, not just postgraduate research?” They do want to do this and it’s about an exciting opportunity we were all sitting on to help them. Part of that is thinking about those problems you mentioned, which is we have skill shortages in a whole bunch of areas both in technical and nontechnical, traditional areas. As our population’s age and HP talk about megatrends a lot. A lot of countries, we’ve got an aging demographic and it’s changing. What that means is enormous amounts of pressure on healthcare. We talked about Rady Children’s Hospital. We can talk about aged care as well. Immersive technologies, helping them deliver a lot more healthcare a lot quicker and a lot more effectively because that’s what society is going to need. When we think about universities, every country in the world, in fact, faces this problem. We can’t train medical practitioners fast enough. There are not enough of them to give treatment to everyone, in a nutshell.

We have nursing shortages here as well. That’s a good example.

We think about how long it takes to train someone in the proficient skills and knowledge that’s required to become a doctor or a nurse. One of the things is if you could accelerate it whilst not losing any quality in the learning and skill development, the world would be profoundly changed if you could take even one month or one year off that time to train. We can then meet the needs. As I said, aging demographics also mean that we won’t have enough. Let’s say young, middle-aged people as highly skilled surgeons to perform the knee surgeries. We’re all going to need when we’re 90 and still kicking around. This is an example of many of the areas, which that’s what society is living in for good reasons. We live longer. We’re lucky to be able to do that in developing countries. Whatever the problem looks like, there’s this great opportunity for us to huddle around higher education, work with them. There’s a willingness to do this. If I think about the company I worked for, HP is 80-plus years old. It had its birthplace on campus and university students. Part of our facility is still on campus at that university. It’s historically a great place for things to start, but we do need it to ramp-up a lot more. I’ll come back to 3D printing and as I said, the thing about it is we want to have conversations and encouragement for higher education to jump onboard industry.

HP, as an example, if you can imagine, we are eating our own dog food, if you like, in terms of the belief in 3D manufacturing. Even our own 3D printers have at least 100 something parts that are made by the 3D printers. Believe me, we want this to happen as a manufacturer because of the incredible logistics savings and incredible sustainability outcomes that we get from that. It’s disruptive but it’s quite simple. If we’ve got more talent coming in to fill the pipeline with great ideas exposed and stimulated by the possibility of technology and that’s what 3D is all about an immersive tech. It isn’t just about making at a manufacturing level. It’s about why you’re even doing it. It’s about, “If I do it, what can come from that for a higher education institution?” I can engage in accelerated learning and accelerated research. My undergraduate is at grasping concepts like art history. They’re not dying a thousand deaths there if it’s our history. It could be creating models around any non-immersive topic. It could be theoretical physics needs a bit of a kick in the butt. You might start to build models that visualize that. There’s going to be a whole bunch of amazing physicists who might need visualizations to grasp the concept and they’re going to go off and do crazy stuff for us.

I love where you guys have been going with this. This is interesting in how you’re researching around the world. The last question that comes up in my mind that I want to make sure that we cover here before we end is that you’ve got this improving learning outcome for 100 million by 2025. How are you going to measure that? How are you going to measure that outcome and that learning growth? 

There’s a short-term and long-term way of doing this. The good news is there’s probably a great consensus on what outcomes are in both cases. In the case of longer-term, it’s the human capital development, the prosperity of communities. It’s a good idea to sit down and figure out what that is. In the case of the NETA we did in Idaho, it’s looking at all of these different factors socially around rates of criminality, poverty or pick any one of the seventeen sustainability.

We’re not just going to look at grade point average. Is there anything like that? We’re going to look broader at how the community is growing?

We’re starting to look at what does it mean to be a citizen of the world and your community to have not just your rights, but to be able to engage in prosperity, fair work, and quality of life. That’s about access. We could define that and at the big scale, it’s about saying, “If we looked at the SDGs, the Sustainability Development Goals, there are some metrics in that 192 nations, including nations like North Korea have signed up to. It’s first time in history.” Before that, we had the Millennium goals. One of the goals from the Millennium goals was if you thought of educational poverty, we got to reduce that by 50% in the space of fifteen years that they went on for. That was from 2000 to 2015 globally reduced poverty by almost half and for access to education. If we can do something similar in the next fifteen years, that’d be wonderful.

Measuring outcomes, it can be in those blunt ways, but we can also refine it a lot to not just say, “I’ve got access to education,” but what could it do to me, “Did I get a job? Do I have freedom? Am I able to start to change what freedom looks like in my community or my country?” We hope that’s what education does. It helps equip people not just to be better selves but create better communities and the world. We’ve got these goals. Let’s not forget that some projections we need 2.5 Earth’s worth of resources by 2030. Apparently, we haven’t gotten into 3D printing Earths yet. Unfortunately, that’s going to be a bit of an issue. We’ve got real-world problems that affect all of us on this spaceship we call Earth hurdling at thousands of kilometers an hour around the sun. We’re all in the boat together. We’ve got to fix the boat to make sure it doesn’t sink. We can certainly think about how education is playing a role to equip people to do that by seeing whether it’s working.

Down at the classroom level or at the lecture theater level, it’s about looking at things like the students themselves and their levels of engagement and attainment. Even industries coming alongside and validating what’s being learned for two reasons. One, the university knows they’re on track, but the second piece is if an industry is there and the students are around that, then the student gets a chance to understand what it’s like in the real world of work, don’t they? They get to understand, again, coming back to that point about, “Why am I learning?” They can conceive of what they can do in society. They can learn based on things that are happening, real-world things more so but this is the opportunity. We can talk about these outcomes being, “I’ve got a whole bunch of learners, super engaged, and they’re doing real-world learning.” That means they might be solving problems of pollution, helping to solve engineering design challenges that accompany as mine might have. This is happening now, a laundry list of issues. Students go well with our guys who haven’t figured it out. You have a crack. If they can demonstrate they’ve got some good ideas, what a wonderful thing to put on your résumé.

You helped not virtually or theoretically helped a company that may or may not exist. You help the real one. This is important. We want to measure those things. Yes, of course. You said grade point average is stuff like that. There’s a reason we had them it’s because we needed the education to scale. We needed to justify our taxpayer’s money. If that’s what was funding it or our parents’ money. We need to do that. It had limits or it’s had limits like grade point. It’s been a limit that we’ve had to scale because we haven’t had the opportunity for technology and different ways of working to engage. Industry involvement has always been in higher education but limited because if you want someone like me to spend a day talking to a university, I’ve got to travel where I can only do a few universities in a year. We live in a different world. It’s possible to scale one idea of one person to thousands, tens of thousands of people. Let’s apply that and change the outcomes that we want to be a bit more ambitious.

David, I can’t think of a better way for that to be the end of this interview. Thank you very much for your time and for coming on and sharing your thoughts with us.

It’s my absolute pleasure.

Accelerating 3D Print Education to Improve Learning and Future Business Outcomes Worldwide — Final Thoughts

I enjoyed that interview more than I thought it would and it was not to be disrespectful to David. He’s certainly incredibly knowledgeable about his subject. We’re quite fortunate that due to the global pandemic, he was in one place long enough at home in Australia that we could get a good interview with him when he’s not distracted by an event, university or giving a lecture.

That’s the funny part of that as we’d done the series, we’ve jumped around a lot based on people’s schedules and other ones. His was one of the last ones plugged in. We had two that were on this later side. The funny part is that he mentioned many things of all these episodes that are to come and episodes that have already happened and he didn’t even know it. He hasn’t heard of them because none of them have aired yet.

It shows that he has a good grasp of how 3D printing is affecting global education, manufacturing and all things. It’s interesting because I have a good friend who’s in secondary school education in Connecticut and they’re using 3D printing and able to have a dinosaur bone that is from somewhere on a dig that they have a scan of it and they can print it. Students in the classroom can see and experience that. Maybe on a more obvious level and things like that, though, that present this great opportunity of this global classroom, you don’t have to transport this fragile fossil from one part of the country to another. Everybody around the world can experience it. I was thinking about potential applications and thinking about a place that few of us ever get to go like Stonehenge. At someplace I’d like to go and see based on my education and part of our art history and all things that we learned. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to go there, but it would seem that if somebody scanned a digitized Stonehenge, there would be an opportunity to at least 3D print scale a model of that and then be able to understand that and experience it.

In the XR, we can virtual reality walk around it because that episode is coming up. We’re going to get to hear some more about that I know. There are many exciting things. What I think is that because we’re technology immersed here and we’re 3D print immersed. We have a broader possibility as parents and as community members of seeing the possibilities and the opportunities. Those of us, including all your readers out there and all the people at HP, we are privileged to be able to have this much technology understanding. When we think about that, all of us do see those faults and those system breakdowns in our education system, whether it’s at the primary school level, all the way up to higher education.

3D print education itself, we’ve been talking about that on and off over our entire, almost 600 episodes of this show where we’ve been talking about these different things and how big a struggle it is. It’s not just a 3D print struggle. It’s every time there’s some technology to integrate whether it’s data science or AI, you’ve got to go through this painful process of integrating it into our educational system. What if that system was technology open? What if that Campus of the Future and that Classroom of the Future that David was talking about has the plugin possibility for us to tap in the experts everywhere? Not wait until our professors and our labs are filled with the technology and equipment that they get to access it when it’s there and there’s someone capable of talking about it.

You can’t wait. That’s one of the great things that’s happened in the 3D printing industry overall is that I don’t think that people have waited. Remember Cindi Schulze, who at first didn’t want to be bothered with 3D printing? She didn’t want to have to try to figure out a curriculum issue and forced into it. She saw the opportunities and became one of the biggest advocates for it.

We have classrooms that we have in the Midwest. We had some of our teachers from Ohio came on the show and we’re talking about that. It’s a broad problem of looking at how the integration happens.

It is a broad problem. What also came to me as we’re talking with David is about some of what we did with our mentorship. We had a winner, Kelechi, in Africa and how 3D printers were being put in Africa. It started to make the world smaller in terms of moving business, education, and society forward and having 3D printing plays a role in that. That was exciting. I’m glad we played a small part in trying to make this world a little smaller and that way. HP, with their resources, they’re doing some amazing things, 100 million people.

This is what you didn’t hear on the show because he was telling us that after the fact, but his team is 25-plus people. This education team that he’s a part of is big and it’s all over the world. Whether it’s working in the countries, working with the governments or it’s on the grounds, putting out the initiatives, doing the research, doing the NETA studies, doing the leg work of what’s needed to be done. They have a big team, they can deploy against that. When he was mentioning how great it is to be able to talk with us here and be able to do that because he’s normally on a plane, we get the sense of how important it is for a company with resources to be able to do that.

The universities or the school districts aren’t necessarily going to be able to fly someone to start talking about it. We can virtually come in and do that. Let’s get that Classroom of the Future and that 3D print education amped up to that next level. The rest of us or all have been saying that for a while and we’re all ready for it. We’ve got such great episodes coming up. We’ve got a lot more lessons learned and a bunch of other things that are going on in the series. You don’t want to miss it. You can check out the series at 3DStartPoint.comt/hp, sponsored by HP here. If you missed some of the last ones and you’re catching this one, because the word education caught your eye, make sure because there are going to be six prior to this one. You’re going to want to catch those as well. Thanks, everyone, for reading.

Everyone, thanks so much. I hope you enjoyed this one. Stay tuned, there will be another coming shortly.

 

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HP E-Book on 3D Higher Education

 

Important Links

• David Hollands
• HP
• Cindi Schulze – previous episode
• 3DStartPoint.comt/hp
• Additive Manufacturing in Higher Education: Leading the Way to the Industry of Tomorrow
• How HP Multi Jet Fusion is Being Adopted and Incorporated into an Academic Environment
• Szent Istvan University Bringing 3D printing to the Next Generation of Engineers

 

More About HP

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