Incoming Education Revolution

I attended a tech-talk given by the two founders ("the super stars of machine learning", Dr. Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng) of Coursera. The talk was quite interesting. After listening to the TED talk given by Salman Khan and attending this event, I really think we are on the brink of an education revolution. Here are some highlights of the event (recalled from memory). 

1. Dr. Koller first presented some statistics. From the 80s, the health care cost had grown 251%. You think that's bad? Then you should know that college tuition had grown 460%. (At this moment, I realized how serious this issue really is.) Now the student loan may even be a bigger bubble than the house loan crisis in 2008.  

2. So far research indicates that the most effective way to assess and reenforce learning is, surprise, surprise, test. That's why they specifically designed their course to have a short quiz after 5-6 min online video viewing. It ensures the students have mastered the subject before they proceed further. 

3. A lot of students feel more comfortable at taking online courses because they can learn at their own pace. You will not feel embarrassed to ask a dumb question or repeat a video 7 times until you get it. Course videos are broken into 8-10 minutes video chunks, each chunk is easier for students to digest (and for instructors to revise in the future).

4. Self evaluation of your learning progress is actually the most accurate one. Next is peer evaluation. (Another surprise to me.) They trained students to do peer evaluations. For essay type of homework, peer evaluation is chosen, though the grading can also be done by machines. The reason? Your peers can give you feedbacks, machines can't. (It reminds me what Einstein once said "computers are useless, they only know answers". )

5. They proposed the idea of "Community TA". Basically students from previous year who got good grades can volunteer to be TAs and help answering and monitoring online forums.

6. The average time between a student posts a question on the forum to the time an answer is posted is 22 minutes. Way shorter than a real teacher can do. (The online forum is like the site stackoverflow and all the answers are ranked by other viewers.)

7. Their site is running on AWS. (Confirmed once again cloud computing is real.) With all the user interaction data available they can run analytics to find hidden patterns (for example, 2000 students give the same wrong answers, why?)  and to improve the learning experience.


8. There were 100,000 students registered in Dr. Andrew Ng's online "machine learning" class last fall. About 43K students submitted at least one homework. Around 10,000 students finished the course. Dr. Ng said there were usually 400 students attending his machine learning class at Standard per year. To reach the same number of audiences, he would have to teach 25 years!