Fortnightly Mailing

The trouble with university: exclusivity, grades, and lectures

Prompted by the launch of Udacity [see also Sebastian Thrun's explanation], Matt Welsh, who used to teach at Harvard and now works for Google, writes what he describes as a "little rant" - 1500 words - that ponders "the failings of the conventional higher education model".  He focuses three main failures of HE - Exclusivity; Grades; and Lectures. But he also includes some caveats, concluding "I'm not sure there can ever be an online replacement for The College Experience writ large". Welsh's piece is the stronger for the large number of often thoughtful comments that follow it.

Taking the red pill: Sebastian Thrun's candid reflection on the AI course

After a horribly embarrassing introduction, this 25 minute talk yesterday by Sebastian Thrun gives Thrun's own candid and personal reflection on last Autumn's AI course, which had 160,000 sign-ups (nearly 100,000 of whom were on the advanced track), 46,000 submitters of the first homework, 23,000 submitters of the mid-term exam, and 20,000 who completed the final exam.

Highlights of the talk:

• the large drop-out rate from the lectures on the same course at Stanford, with students preferring to use the free video-based version;
• a volunteer army of ~2000 translators;
• individual feedback from students in terrible places in the world or under big social pressure who completed the course;
• Thrun's own epiphany concerning the wrongness of "weeder" classes;
• Thrun's decision not to teach by lecture at Stanford again and instead to concentrate his efforts on a private venture-capital funded initiative called Udacity, whose online courses will be free.

Udacity aims to enrol 500,000 students on its first two courses: CS101- Building a search engine; CS373 - Programming a robotic car.

My own and others' reports from the AI course.

A reaction to Apple's "reinvention of the text book"

Jeevan Vasagar, the Guardian's Education Editor, asked if I'd be willing to comment on today's event and announcements in New York by Apple about education.

This prompted me to follow the event using the Verge's live pictorial blog, from which you yourself will get the gist of what Apple is doing. There is more on ZDNET; and there is this piece in the Guardian.  [At the bottom of this post I am adding links to pieces I come across that seem to shed useful further light.]

My reaction?

It is difficult to see how the impressive-looking tools, content and services announced today by Apple will not be the kind of "game changer" that we've got into the habit of expecting from Apple.

Students, particularly in the US, pay a lot for prescribed textbooks even if they manage to buy them second hand. Provided they own an iPad and provided the right text-books are available (the second proviso is even more serious than the first) then Apple's text book service will provide a more interactive and probably pedagogically more effective experience than will the use of conventional text books; and at a much lower price.

Alongside this, and only from the look of it, the text book writing software that Apple will be giving away will be of intense interest to teachers and content developers in the Apple-using world. It remains to be seen whether the teacher-creators will be any match, in the quality and/or slickness of what they make, for the big publishers with whom Apple is already working, or for the smaller content developers and in-house production teams in universities who get started with the software now.

But there are lots of issues. Here are three.

1. Learning requires work (rehearsal, re-expression, discussion, making things, analysis, etc) on the part of learners, and "activity design" to ensure that the work happens. Learning is helped by formative feedback - which is notoriously difficult so far for machines to provide. Will the content that flows via Apple from publishers and authors onto iPads now or in the future make/help learners do the work of learning? Or will what we see be mainly "jazzier text books" - in effect interactive TV documentaries?
2. How if at all will creators of Open Educational Resources be able to work within the framework provided by Apple? (I want someone to comment below "it will be easy, and here is how".)
3. What is the business and licensing model for Apple and for the content providers? Will it tend to encourage a "monoculture" of online text books where what dominates is what is available rather than what is good? Will it reduce the diversity of printed text books?

Over the next 18 months we are going to find out.

Note 1. I am grateful for feedback from several members of the Association for Learing Technology - for which I work part time - helped me work out what to say to the Guardian - and influenced this piece in other ways.

Note 2 - added after original publication. Links to other interesting posts I come across on this topic are below.

• Audrey Waters in Mindshift - 19/1/2012
• Leon Cych commenting on the Guardian piece "education is what happens between your ears and not on a screen" - 19/1/2012
• Peter Kafka on why it makes sense for textbook publishers to have their textbooks sold for $14.99 or less - 19/1/2012
• James Clay - "'Reinventing Textbooks', I don't think so" - 20/1/2012
• Niall Sclater - First impressions of iBooks 2 - 20/1/2012
• Downes - wide ranging overview of reaction - 20/1/2012
• Ed Bott - a scathing attack on the highly restrictive iBooks end-user license agreement - 20/1/2012
• Jason Perlow - an oversimplifying ZDNet piece asserting that the costs of providing childred with iPads are too huge to contemplate - 30/1/2012

Pseudonymous comments

I've been having an exchange with a commenter  on this blog about psuedonymous comments. My basic position is that substantial comments are much more useful if the identity of the commenter is clear. I do not reject psuedonymous comments out of hand, but would encourage commenters who feel they must obscure their identity from readers of the blog (though not from me) to include in their comment something about themselves - role, area of work, expertise etc - which would help readers situate the comment. If I think the value of a comment is high even without that additional information then I will usually publish the comment. As in this case. I would welcome readers' views on this.

David Hu's use of AI - including Bayes networks - in the Khan Academy's assessment systems

Some weeks ago I posted a link to an interesting post by David Hu about how the Khan Academy is beginning to use machine learning and AI in its assessment systems. David Hu was an intern with the Khan Academy, and here is a video he made reflecting on the work he did during his internship. Do not be put off by the first few seconds of the video, or the later slightly breathless sections. There is real science, clearly expressed, about the "journey towards better assessment practices".

You can also read Hu's fuller post-mortem on his internship.

Interviews about "remote learning" with Dan Cardinali, Paul Mitiguy, and Peter Norvig

Here are links to three November 2011 "canteen" interviews (audio and, in two cases helpful text transcripts) with Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google), Dan Cardinali (President of Communities in Schools) and Paul Mitiguy (Senior Consulting Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University). The interviews form part of the resources of an undergraduate project by Deniz Kahramaner, Jon Rodriguez and Ben Kallman about "the challenges and ethical implications of implementing large-scale distance education platforms". 

The interview with Peter Norvig draws on his contemporaneous experience with the Stanford/KnowLabs Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course [November 2011 article in ALT News Online; my weekly reports from the course] and contains several perceptive and diverse insights, ranging over:

• course design (and the advantages of combining the deadline driven "discipline" of face-to-face learning with the "anytime anyplace" nature of asynchronous learning);
• the advantages (from a learner's point of view) of video, and challenges (from a course design point of view) of using it;
• the need for design/production environments for teachers and for experimentation/exploration environments for learners;
• the value, from a learning point of view, of ambiguity in presentations and open-endedness in questions;
• recruitment (and a possible business model for providers of free remote education);
• the possible motivations for teachers to contribute to the production of free courses;
• the need for collegiality and collaboration between the start-ups that are getting involved in online education.