

What my 11 year old's Stanford course taught me about online education - pooya72
http://gametheorist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/what-my-11-year-olds-stanford-course.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed:+GameTheorist+(Game+Theorist)

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saturdaysaint
A lot of these course systems seem to overemphasize the real-time component.
It strikes me that almost all of the negatives were the result of this kid
trying to "catch up" to the schedule, which was of little benefit to him since
he (like the vast majority of participants, I'd imagine) couldn't participate
in the real-time elements. The way they're trying to encourage these rigid
course schedules just seems unnecessary, anti-learning. They could create
wikis with FAQs, addenda, videos of hangouts and vastly expand the impact of
each course by orders of magnitude.

If anything, it looks like Coursera and edX actively bury the finished
courses. I wonder what Khan Academy's impact would be if he'd gone with this
approach.

Of course, this just reveals the conflict of interest - these institutions
sell degrees, so they aren't necessarily excited about offering an easily
accessible, thorough directory of courses.

~~~
mhurron
Known deadlines help people schedule things. I've found them helpful.

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randomdata
This is what I always hated about school. My mind knows when it ready to take
in certain kinds of information, but working on someone else's schedule leaves
me trying to do just that at non-optimal times. The results end up being much
poorer than when I'm able to control when learning happens.

With that said, I realize that everyone has widely different learning styles.
Maybe these new digital classrooms have room for employing different
techniques to personally cater to each and every individual?

~~~
mhurron
Udcaity seems to have a course with deadlines and then then when that is
completed the same course without deadlines.

You would just have to wait for the second run of any course to get the learn
at your own pace track.

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cwe
I took CS101 the first time around, which did have hard due dates. Now I'm in
CS253 and the homeworks are much more flexible. They still have dates, but
they are more for when the solutions are posted, and homeworks can be
submitted after that. I think the actual grading will be on the final project.
I like this method much better, as I have been in the same boat, falling
behind because life gets in the way.

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jessriedel
This is a lesson for _all_ online videos:

> The most important button for video lectures is not ‘play’ but ‘pause.’
> Students can always choose to pause at a point and, say, absorb a slide.
> What that means is that when you are creating an online lecture, you can
> build this option in and go fast. This is something that the Khan Academy
> have already worked out. But that Stanford course was still in the old
> style.

~~~
Drbble
Yes, When I did he stanford course I just skipped from slide to slide and
backed up if the slide was unclear.

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blahedo
A lot of the OP's comments about online education should be read critically by
a lot of the teachers and professors out there who are currently experimenting
with a "flipped classroom".

Short version: in a flipped classroom, you do the fixed content before the
"lecture" period, and then during the "lecture" you do the "homework" in the
prof's presence, with feedback, comments, and interaction. (There's a lot more
to it; if you're curious, go look it up.)

The problem as I see it is that a lot of the "flipped classroom" advocates see
the ideal pre-class prep as just video-recorded lectures: do exactly what you
used to do, except in front of a video camera. I think that the flipped
classroom has a lot of merit and have incorporated some of its ideas in my own
teaching, but I really feel like the people videotaping their lectures are
really missing the point and need to read this blog post for some of the many
reasons their approach is problematic.

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swalsh
A bit off topic, but something i've been wondering for a while. Imagine for a
second (and it's a bit of a stretch) that a majority of the worlds population
had the same tenacity as this young 11 year old. Imagine the world used these
new tools for online education, and imagine the amount of people who
understand & can apply advanced mathematical concepts that today is the domain
of graduate students increases by several orders of magnitude.

How does the world change? Will we simply speed up the process by which we
maximize value in all known sectors? Or does something new happen?

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zaptheimpaler
Is no one else awed by the fact that an 11 year old kid was able to partially
understand a college level course on game theory? Is he an especially gifted
child, or am I underestimating the capabilities of kids?

~~~
superuser2
It wasn't until 11th grade phyiscs that anyone bothered to explain what
derivatives and integrals _are_ , let alone how to calculate them or what they
might be good for. Let me reiterate: it took until high school physics, twelve
years into my math education, before someone showed me that calculus is the
best/only tool for answering questions about _nature_ , and that all the
algebra crap matters because you can't do calculus without it.

Fourth-grade me had intuitively latched onto the idea that a curve's slope
must itself have a slope. Limits (at least 11th-grade precalculus level
limits) would have been well within my grasp in elementary school. In
"helping" my dad with a basement remodel, I had actually wanted the area of a
shape bound by a curve, but had no idea how to proceed. I developed an
elementary understanding of recursion in my PHP and Python-hacking days
(elementary and middle school - no time for that now) and had no trouble with
time-complexity, object orientation, or introductory functional programming.
_NONE_ of that was so much as hinted at in school until sophomore year.

I don't know why we treat these ideas like dangerous weapons whose existence
can only be hinted at until one comes of age.

I am a much better thinker than computer. Because my experience with "math"
was years of drilling arithmetic, doing long-form multiplication and division
without a calculator (WTF?), converting between forms for lines and parabolas,
finding the x- and y- intercepts, plugging and chugging the quadratic formula,
simplifying/solving nasty algebra, etc, I hated it. Nobody bothered to show me
the point, I got sloppy, and now I'm sitting here with A-es and B+es
throughout high school math, 660 on the SAT math section, 26 on the ACT math
section (not outrageously difficult conceptually but a high-pressure speed
trial), and no shot at any decent university's computer science program.

I think society loses a lot by making elementary/middle-level education about
drilling exercises instead of engaging students with ideas to think about with
the mechanics treated as secondary. Especially at the elementary level when
kids are still naturally curious and have time and energy left over after
school/homework to think and process. If I'm exceptional, my grades and test
scores don't show it - I think a lot of kids could have handled substantially
more on the ideas front.

Also: Shortly after learning to read in kindergarten, I was reading well above
"grade level." Either I was innately gifted or "grade level" is pathetically
low. I don't mean to disrespect the education experts, but it seems I've been
helped orders of magnitude more, even at 8 years old, by the ambient presence
of public radio, reading "grown-up" books and news _I found interesting_ , and
participating on internet forums than by identifying subjects and predicates
or regurgitating plots onto tests. (Forced practice of composition is good -
I've seen it help good writers get better, but I've _never_ seen a bad writer
improve through schooling).

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zmj
It's interesting that none of these criticisms apply to the Udacity offerings.
I feel like that team has a more original approach than the university
professors who are transplanting their lectures to the Internet.

~~~
capsule_toy
It looks like Coursera is trying to scale rapidly. If you look at the
potential course offerings, Coursera has much more. The problem is it's harder
to control quality. The Machine Learning course is great, but the Computer
Vision is much less engaging.

On the other hand, Udacity seems more focused on a couple of core offerings.

~~~
huherto
Isn't it great that at the beginning the coursera ML course was better than
the Udacity AI. And now it seems like the tables have turned. We all are
learning about this and the quality of the classes should go up.

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yaz
It amazes me that your 9 year old could distinguish between the ideas and the
presentation. :) It's a skill I'm stil trying to make-innate (can't find the
word for that).

~~~
mattbot5000
grok

~~~
hackinthebochs
Every time I see that word it makes me cringe. It sounds like a disgusting
bodily function. I wish we could all decide to let this "word" die in peace.

~~~
Drbble
I feel the sake way about "bochs".

~~~
hackinthebochs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochs

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evoxed
> After all, this is what they were getting in class but could now pick and
> choose where and when to attend. They would see the liberation. But for an
> 11 year old, there was a more demanding standard and, on many levels, a
> standard worth respecting.

This is, in my opinion, the most important point of this entire era of
information, accessibility, and everything else. While everyone else is
getting grumpy about how the kids are taking all this relatively new stuff for
granted, we're ignoring the fact that _these are literally the people who will
build "the future"_. People are motivated by what they take for granted– it's
the baseline, it's what everyone deserves, and it's what we're responsible for
making better _all the time_.

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eriktrautman
I enjoyed taking the 11-year-old's perspective of university style lecturing
because it really does force an examination of the established video-ed
paradigm. I'm currently taking an online developer's course at Udemy and
finding it sorely lacking in some key respects as well. They aren't the same
issues as those with videotaped lectures, but in the end it shows that people
have a long way to go before the new online medium is properly exploited. You
have recorded lectures, structureless YouTube style videos, and 'gamification'
of learning all vying to find that sweet spot of applied individual education.
I just wish it was figured out already so I could learn development more
efficiently...

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0ren
> But then if you think about it for two seconds you have to wonder why we
> want a good signal of these students’ ability. This is not assessment for
> accreditation so who cares about getting such incentives right? What one
> surely wants are problem sets that signal to the student whether they had
> mastered the material or not

First, I think their business model (talent discovery and job placement)
depends on good assessment of students' ability. At least, this is Udacity's
business model[1].

Second, I think that the OP's assumption that this is not for accreditation is
wrong. I think they do want Coursera's statement of accomplishment to be
valuable on it's own (even if "Stanford" is not mentioned in it). For
instance, if I were an employer, I'd hire anyone with Coursera's statement of
accomplishment in a challenging class as the Probabilistic Graphical Models
class [2]. Of course, the only problem is, as the OP mentions:

> For online courses, no one has cracked how to verify whether an identified
> student is the same person as the one doing the assessment.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3859253>

[2] The class started with 44000 students [3]; by the 4th week there were
about ~2000 left [4]; my guess is there are around 1000 left after the crazy
5th assignment... Though, One may argue that these statistics in part are due
to rough edges and cryptic instructions in some of the programming assignments
and quizzes.

[3] [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/daphne-
kolle...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/daphne-koller-
brings-the-world-into-stanford-classes)

[4] according to the published class' 4th week quiz statistics.

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dnquark
The new crop of online courses is awesome, but what's even more awesome is
imagining how much they can (and will) improve in the next few years.

Coursera's current production quality, style, and platform leaves much to be
desired. Andrew and Daphne should realize that flipping the classroom is not
enough. The whole point of flipping the classroom is that most learning
happens _outside_ the lecture hall. In an online context, this means that the
emphasis must be on creating engaging and useful exercises and a vibrant
online community. It also means that lectures have to be _far better_ than
those delivered in the classroom. Taking your old powerpoints and inking over
them while running screen-capture software just doesn't cut it. Ask Vi Hart.

In addition, Coursera classes are run mostly within the framework designed for
a university course -- complete with rigid schedules and limits on
collaboration (dictated by honor code). If my goal is simply to "learn some
subset of X", not "learn all of X in a given time frame and get tested on it",
this is all unnecessary baggage.

When Udacity completely separated itself from Stanford a few months back, I
thought it was a risky move putting them at a disadvantage. Right now, Udacity
is producing better content. When we come to a point that it is the quality of
education that matters and not the branding, they might be significantly
ahead.

~~~
__float
Is it possible that this is simply a personal difference? I love Daphne's
lectures. They're short enough to be to the point while still making concepts
understandable. I'm currently going through the "preview" of her PGM class. I,
of course, don't have access to assignments or any assessments, but I still
find it quite engaging.

In fact, the thing I like least of school is the repetitive homework, so this
works well...for me. And perhaps that's the most important thing here.

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cjy
My favorite part is the kid using what he learns:

For school, the kid goes on the streets of Toronto to raise money for cancer
research. He notes that a homeless man has likely already found the most
attractive location to raise money (near the subway). Then, he uses backwards
induction to infer that the homeless man will leave if he begins collecting
for a more worthy charitable cause in the same location.

~~~
Drbble
How is that backwards induction?

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takosuke
The kids feelings reflect my own. After the high standards I got used to
thanks to Khan, I expected more of the same and was sorely disappointed. Most
of the stuff on Coursera is not better than reading a book unassisted. In most
cases, it's worse. Udacity fares much better, they've taken tips from the Khan
book and tried to fit the medium instead of pointlessly replicating the
university experience online.

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kylemaxwell
Side note: small gray text on a white background... I hope my fellow bloggers
know better than to do this.

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mwexler
Totally not relevant... I read this as "what my 11 year old Stanford curse
taught me..." and had to click to see what a Stanford curse could be.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming, my apologies for this station
mis-identification.

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dz13
_It is not simply the case that the elite institutions will be able to take
their existing courses and pop them online. More will need to be done and
lectures will have to be rethought_

I really liked what he said about online education design. The potential
exposure of a university course to hundreds of thousands more students than
before means that their quality will be under more intense scrutiny.
Ultimately, I think that's great and hopefully viewership can pressure
professors to construct more engaging lecture videos.

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code_scrapping
It actually has a couple of very good points. I know that faculties are
actively considering introducing on-line courses. It's a good moment to cast
in opinions and shape it. Does anybody else have comments on good/bad sides of
on-line education?

My note would be that there seems to be a clear difference between the courses
which are lecture-based and the ones which are exercise-bases (later being the
lest frequent ones)

