J.M. Álvarez-Pallete and Satya Nadella: Learning, Teaching and Working after 2020

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
Welcome to the EnlightED Podcasts, the worldwide conference that focuses on the challenges of education in the new world. Driven by Fundación Telefónica, IE University and South Summit, it gathers leading experts in education, technology and innovation.
How can technology help us to address new ways of learning, teaching, working, or training, so that we, as a society, can respond to the challenges of the future? Two of the people who have the most to say on this issue globally, the CEOs of Telefónica and Microsoft, José María Álvarez-Pallete and Satya Nadella, reveal some of the most important keys in an enlightening dialogue.

**Satya Nadella** (0:53)
Hi José María, how are you?

**José María Álvarez-Pallete** (0:54)
Hi Satya, how are you? Everything is fine? So Satya, good morning to you in Redmond, good afternoon from my site here in Madrid. It's really a pressure to have the chance to share a conversation with you. Thank you so much for your availability. I know that you're passionate about technology and education and have still your value-based vision of the future of Microsoft. You're an inspiration to us all and I really feel proud to have the chance to share thoughts with you. This is not the first time and these have always been most enriching occasions for me.
In your own words, we should be passionate and bold because if you don't jump on the new, you don't survive. You have also said that we all should have the learning beat always switched on. These are great advices for us to start our conversation on the digital education for the future.
Satya, how can technology create really more opportunities, not just for a few, but for all? How can technology empower students and teachers to enhance learning outcomes and create the world of tomorrow?

**Satya Nadella** (2:01)
José María, it's such a pleasure to be able to join you and also to congratulate you and everyone else who is putting together this conference because it's such an important topic, which is about the education and educational outcomes. Clearly, as you said, technology can help, but before I start on technology, I would say the educational outcomes really depend on obviously the inspired students and the inspiring teachers and all of the support they get from families, communities and administrators. Because sometimes as technologists, we all talk about technology, but technology is just a tool. It needs to be in the hands of the people and the students and the teachers in particular, as you said.
To me, I would say a couple of things, José María, in particular in the times we are living through. I think it has become very, very clear that when you think about education, you perhaps want to think about how we are responding to some of the constraints, right? This time it's a pandemic as a tail event, but who knows what the next tail event is. So we need to now have digital technology that helps education continue, educational outcomes to be continued in spite of the tail event. So how does one recover? How does one reopen and then reimagine? All three of these things, I think, are important and digital technology can play a role.
Just even in the response phase, José María, I've been very impressed with what the educators have done, right? I mean, this remote education, whether it is the music students in Queen Sofia School in Madrid, right? Whether they were able to sort of continue their instruction it's, you know, the hundreds of students there or the thousands of students at say University of Bologna in Italy or the entire school system in Senegal.
All of them were able to go instantly to remote education. But now I think this next phase is perhaps the more telling phase where teachers and students are going to come together to start reimagining how educational outcomes can be held high. Because after all, it's about the engagement of the student.
One of the things that I think a lot about is even in our own tools like teens, how do we make sure that the tool is helping the student discover the information, the teacher organize their pedagogy in ways that it's more engaging. That I think is going to be one of the most important things. And this is where even some of the other innovations of ours, whether it's Minecraft to help students or whether it's Flipgrid to help students stay more engaged. These are all things that we are trying to do so that ultimately students can learn, teachers can really make sure that the student engagement is high. So that's how I see technology playing a role. And in that context, I was thinking, José María, maybe you can also talk a little bit about, because you are very close to this, you're very passionate about this.