Fortnightly Mailing

Why give a course away online for free?

Rhodri Marsden asks in the 12/9/2011 Independent why Stanford University is "giving away a course online at no cost".

Marsden's piece is wide-ranging, and it draws on the knowhow of several people in UK HE, including Nial Sclater and Susanah Quinsee.

But it was filed some time ago¹: if Rhodri had done a bit more digging at the time, the possibility that Stanford or an associated business might be looking to pilot a delivery method for future commercial or revenue-generating use might not have escaped him.

Some quick observations:

The Norvig/Thrun/Stanford free online AI course: more transparency needed concerning the relationship between Stanford University and KnowLabs

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Peter E. Murray pulls together several related comments and questions about the relationship between Stanford University and KnowLabs, the "angel-funded" start-up that is closely associated with the free online course that has attracted mass-attention (and mass enrolments) in recent weeks.

Know Labs - looking to "change the future of education by making it more accessible and less expensive"

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Know Labs is the Silicon Valley start-up behind the Thrun/Norvig/Stanford artificial intelligence course:

"We're a Silicon Valley-based startup looking to change the future of education by making it more accessible and less expensive. We provide a high-quality online learning experience using interactive videos, intelligent software, mobile apps, and the social web.  Our initial launch is online this fall: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in partnership with the Stanford University School of Engineering. The class is open to everyone at ai-class.com and is run by the technology we are developing for a larger site: know it."

What interests me is whether Know Labs was already involved (or even there?) when the AI course was originally advertised, or whether the scale of the response either led to the formation of the start-up, or brought it into involvement with Stanford.

See also:

• Over 200,000 people have signed up for the three free Stanford University online courses
• Questions about the AI course

Dick Moore's guide to making short instructional videos

Dick Moore (sometime collaborator, friend, and Trustee of ALT) writes a practical and insight-rich "how to" about making short instructional videos on his Tools and Taxonomy blog. It is just this kind of useful material that gets lost (i.e. is not written) when people with knowhow to share take the easy way out and write performative snippets rather than thought-through pieces. (I am as guilty as the next person in this respect.) 

Whether next year's new year resolution will be easy to live up to is another question.

Over 200,000 people have signed up for the three free Stanford University online courses

By 26 August, well over 200,000 people had signed up for one of the three free online courses being offered by the University of Stanford. The numbers are as follows:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - 132,469
• Introduction to Databases - 37,419
• Introduction to Machine Learning - 37,636

I've posted some questions about the AI course (which would apply equally to the other two), and several readers (Stuart Sutherland, Bob Harrison, Pabritra, John Vornle, and Dick Moore) have responded with other questions and comments. Feel free to add your own.

 

Thrun/Norvig/Stanford introduction to artificial intelligence - just short of 90,000 enrolments in 2 weeks

(Other posts tagged ai-course.)

Note - 20/8/2011. In the small font below I am unsystematically tracking the growth in sign-ups for the three Stanford course.

Two weeks ago I wrote something about (and signed up for) the Stanford University online introduction to artificial intelligence, to be taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun. (Stanford's Introduction to Databases [201108200619 - 23,671. 201108242232 - 35,321. 201108261846 - 37,419.] and Introduction to Machine Learning [201108200619 - 25,935. 201108242233 - 35,685. 201108261846 - 37,636.] are also available online this autumn.

Within 2 weeks - after extensive press coverage - just short of 90,000 people worldwide had enrolled on the course. [24 hours later the number enrolled topped 100,000. 201108190712 - 103,290. 201108200619 - 110,775. 201108242227 - 128,477. 201108261846 - 132,469.]

Salman Khan - turning learning inside out with video / building "a global one-world classroom"

Here, Salman Khan gives a jaw-dropping TED talk, chaired by Bill Gates in March 2011.

Below the talk I've included as text a striking extract from the talk, from 12.5 minutes in:  striking because of Khan's emphasis on data and on teachers' need to use it, because of the ambitious conclusion (I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom .... that's essentially what we're trying to build), and most importantly because of Khan's comment about the dubious concept of giftedness.

Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing. And so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.

Catching the Learning Wave - Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder

Updated 5 August 2010

Lower down is a 30 May 2010 Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder, Director, Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield.  Here is Ray's reaction to Google's 4 August 2010 announcement that it would be stopping development of Wave.

This is really disappointing for those of us who have successfully used Wave for class and other collaborations. It is an especially useful tool for education. As a platform for a host of advanced multiple-media tools and with a wiki at its heart, Wave has served many of us in the past months.

Wave is a complex tool. Those who took the necessary time to learn the tool, found it to be especially robust and useful for many situations. Those who could only invest ten minutes in learning Wave were frustrated and confused.

The potential business and commerce applications were never made clear. Certainly, this was factor in the decision.

30 May 2010

Google Wave has been much discussed and speculated about since it was first announced just over one year ago. Many in the business community have wondered how it can be used for marketing and sales. Others have wondered how it will be integrated into daily communication and collaboration. Still others who lack the patience to test a tool with more than a few layers have wondered just what it is. Google developed the product as an answer to the question what would email look like if it were invented today rather than 40 years ago? (Trapani)

For those of us in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, the answer is clear. Google Wave can be described as a wiki-based platform for interactive multi-media (Web 2.0) tools. As with any good tool, Wave is versatile in application and adaptability. As with any good new tool, it is evolving and expanding.

In December of last year, I joined Brian Mulligan and Séan Conlan of the Institute of Technology at Sligo Ireland (IT Sligo) in a trans-Atlantic collaboration using Google Wave. We joined volunteers from our classes – an energy sustainability class at IT Sligo and my Internet in American Life class at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) – in Google Wave.

The results are published in the journal e-Mentor (Schroeder). In brief, the collaboration was successful, though not without a few technical glitches. Students were engaged and enthused. Some real exchanges took place, even with the very early pre-release version of Wave. We identified some twenty Wave tools that seemed to hold significant potential for collaboration and group work in higher education.

In the six months since that very early experiment with Wave, many upgrades have been put in place and Wave has become a much more stable platform for collaboration. Google Wave is now openly available to the world. That’s not to say it was a secret or much of a closed system before (some three million users were signed on prior to the official opening of Wave on 17 May 2010). But now one can join Wave by logging in with any email address. You can add new users who had not previously been in Wave by typing in their email address. The newbies are immediately sent an invitation to create a logon.

It appears that we may be poised for an explosion of testing Google Wave in higher education this fall. Workshops and Webinars on the topic are proliferating. The Sloan Consortium in the U.S. has already offered three introductory Webinars on the topic this spring and a summer workshop is schedule for June. Enthusiasm has run high in those Webinars that I and two colleagues, Carrie Levin and Emily Boles, have hosted. The “Aunt Rosie” automatic language translation bot is among the popular tools supported by Wave. For group projects, the “playback” feature is also very popular, enabling the instructor to view a kind of time lapse version of how a final report was created, showing how and when each revision was made. The scores of other tools, from mind maps to iframes to voice and video recordings are easily accessible in the extensions folder provided to each user. These extensions will, no doubt, continue to expand as more and more third party providers add to this open source tool.

The question remains, how will we in education use this tool? I cannot presume to speak for the broader educational community, but I can share what new abilities are enabled by this technology and what I think are the most exciting prospects for this tool.

We have had wikis for years – and Google has already created a rather evolved form of the wiki in the form of Google Docs. We have an ever-expanding array of Web 2.0 and associated cloud-computing tools that are launched independently and supported individually by a whole host of providers. What is new with Wave is that these are brought together into one robust wiki-type platform that is open source and can be secured.

Rather than separate logons and locations for the array of Web 2.0 tools we may wish to employ in a class, we now have a single platform through which our classes can collaborate and utilize these tools: one logon; one URL. And, we can embed waves into our learning management system.

The most exciting uses of Wave, I believe, are the ones that break down classroom walls and institutional barriers. Just as we showed in joining classes between IT Sligo and UIS, there are no international or institutional boundaries with Wave. The collaboration potential is as broad as the Web itself. It is both a synchronous and asynchronous tool with live video, chat and language translation capabilities. As with all wikis, a history is kept of all activities for asynchronous review. With these capabilities, I see the opportunity to easily:

1. Join classes within an institution. For example, a biology class could meet with an ethics class. The students could conduct a case study related to bio-ethics, merging the classical ethics approach with the high-tech aspects of cutting edge science. The faculty members could encourage the discussion and probing of issues that arise in the ethical pursuit of science.
2. Join classes across institutional boundaries. For example, a 19th century American history class at one institution could join with a US Civil War history class at another institution for a couple of weeks to interact on the topic of the Lincoln presidency. The faculty members could encourage their students to engage with students in the other class to gain a breadth and depth of perspectives on the topic that would not normally be part of either class.
3. Join foreign language classes. An English class in China could meet with a Chinese class in the UK. Cultural as well as language learning could take place.

The opportunities are endless. For the first time, the technology is in place to easily accomplish this kind of collaboration at the instructor and individual class level. In many institutions, creating a brief collaborative module can be done by the instructor without time-consuming proposals, governance reviews, and inhibiting technological issues. It is no more complex than arranging for a guest speaker to address your class. But, in this case, you are reaching out anywhere on the globe (or the campus) to create a planned (or spontaneous) collaboration that add depth and richness to the learning in your class.

schroeder.ray[AT]uis.edu or rayschroeder[AT]googlewave.com

References

Schroeder, R, Mulligan, B, & Conlan, S. (2010). Waving the google flag for inter-institutional class collaborations. e-Mentor, 7(1), ISSN 1731-6758. Also available online: http://www.e-mentor.edu.pl/33,723,Waving_the_Google_Flag_forInter-institutional_Class_Collaborations.html
Trapani, G. (2010). The Complete guide to google wave [First Edition]. Retrieved from http://completewaveguide.com/guide/The_Complete_Guide_to_Google_Wave

Nicholas Negroponte's open letter about India's $35 tablet device for education

Below is a long excerpt from an open letter by One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte following the announcement by India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal (above left) of plans to develop a $35 tablet device for education. (The picture to the right is a representation of the OLPC XO3, due (?) later this year.)

1. Focus on children 6 to 12 years old. They are your nation’s most precious natural resource. For primary school children, the tablet is not about computing or school, it is about hope. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.
2. Your tablet should be the death of rote learning, not the tool of it. A creative society is built not on memorizing facts, but by learning learning itself. Drill and practice is a mechanism of the industrial age, when repetition and uniformity were systemic. The digital age is one of personalization, collaboration and appropriation. OLPC’s approach to learning is called constructionism. We hope you adopt it too.
3. Tablets are indeed the future. OLPC announced its own eight months ago. However, caution is needed with regard to one aspect of tablets: learning is not media consumption. It is about making things. The iPad is a consumptive tool by design. OLPC urges that you not make this mistake.
4. Hardware is simple. Less obvious is ruggedness, sunlight readability and low power. We use solar power because our laptop is by far the lowest power laptop on the planet. But do not overlook human power – hand cranking and other things that kids can do at night or when it rains. Just solar would be a mistake. Rugged means water resistant and droppable from 10 feet onto a stone floor.
5. Software is harder. Linux is obvious, but whatever you do, do not make it a special purpose device with only a handful of functions. It must be a general purpose computer upon which the whole world can build software, invent applications and do programming. We know that when children program they come the closest to thinking about thinking. When they debug, they are learning about learning. This is key.
6. More than anything, of all the unsolicited advice I have to offer, the most important and most likely to be overlooked is good industrial design. Make an inexpensive tablet, not a cheap one. Make it desirable, lovable and fun to own. Take a page from Apple on this, maybe from OLPC too. Throw the best design teams in India behind it.

Learning from the Extremes - a CISCO report by Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong

Here is a link to the executive summary [190 kB PDF] of Learning from the Extremes [621 kB PDF], a thoroughly referenced and visually appealing report about the future of schools by Charles Leadbeater and Annika Wong (link to bio needed) for CISCO, and linked to GETideas.org, an open CISCO-funded "public service site providing community, collaboration, and resources for education leaders worldwide".

The 28 page report takes as its framework this "innovation grid":

                                                   Formal Learning         Informal Learning

Sustaining Innovation     Improve                       Supplement

Disruptive Innovation     Reinvent                      Transform

Key
Improve schools through better facilities, teachers, and leadership.
Supplement schools by working with families and communities.
Reinvent schools to create an education better fit for the times.
Transform learning by making it available in radically new ways.