online learning

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April 24, 2012 | 10:06 AM | By

Ivy League Poetry Professor Will Try Yelp-Style Crowd-Sourcing

Flickr: UTCLibrary

By Steve Henn

Last year when Andrew Ng, a computer science professor at Stanford University, put his machine learning class online and opened enrollment to the world, more than 100,000 students signed up.

“I think all of us were surprised,” he says.

Ng had posted lectures online before, but this class was different.

“This was actually a class where you can participate as a student and get homework and assessments,” he said.

The class was interactive. There were quizzes and online forums where teaching assistants, fellow students and Ng answered questions. In the end, tens of thousands of students did all the same work and took the same tests that Stanford students took; thousands passed.

“By providing what is a truly high-quality educational experience to so many students for free, I think we can really change many people’s lives.”

“Stanford has always been a place where we were not afraid to try bold new things, often without knowing exactly what the consequences were going to be,” said Jim Plummer, the dean of engineering. “And this is an instance of that.”

Now Ng and Daphne Koller, a Stanford colleague, are launching a company called Coursera to bring more classes from elite universities to students around the world for free online.

“By providing what is a truly high-quality educational experience to so many students for free, I think we can really change many, many people’s lives,” Koller says.

Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan will join Stanford. Two Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Coursera, online learning, Stanford
January 30, 2012 | 7:00 AM | By

Lessons and Legacies from Stanford’s Free Online Classes

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Class

By Steve Henn

Last year, Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun — also known as the fellow who helped build Google’s self-driving car — got together with a small group of Stanford colleagues and they impulsively decided to open their classes to the world.

They would allow anyone, anywhere to attend online, take quizzes, ask questions and even get grades for free. They made the announcement with almost no fanfare by sending out a single email to a professional group.

“Within hours, we had 5,000 students signed up,” Thrun says. “That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had 10,000 students. And Monday morning, Stanford — who we didn’t really inform — learned about this and we had a number of meetings.”

You can only imagine what those meetings must have been like, with professors telling the school they wanted to teach free, graded online classes for which students could receive a certificate of completion. And, oh by the way, tens of thousands have already signed up to participate.

“I think the impact will be large and it will be widespread.”

For decades, technology has promised to remake education — and it may finally be about to deliver. Apple’s moving into the textbook market, startups and nonprofits are re-imaging what K-12 education could look like, and now some in Silicon Valley are eager for technology and the Internet to transform education’s more elite institutions.

Thrun’s colleague Andrew Ng taught a free, online machine learning class that ultimately attracted more than 100,000 students. When I ask Ng how Stanford’s administration reacted to their Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, online learning, Stanford
December 5, 2011 | 12:00 PM | By

Will Online Education Expand in California?

Lenny Gonzales

By Joanna Lin

For public school students in California, where you live usually determines where you can learn. To David Haglund, that’s not right.

Last month, Haglund, principal of the Riverside Virtual School, an online independent study program run by the Riverside Unified School District, introduced a statewide ballot initiative [PDF] that would give students unrestricted access to publicly funded courses – wherever they are.

The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative is “designed to eliminate control by ZIP code,” Haglund said.

Under the proposal, schools, districts and county education offices would be required to make available to all students the courses needed for admission to the state’s universities. Those courses, known as A-G requirements at the University of California and California State University, could be offered at a student’s school or district of residence or any other publicly funded school, and they could be classroom-based, online or a blended model of the two.

Nearly 27 percent of California public high schools in 2007-08 offered too few A-G courses for all students to take them, according to an analysis [PDF] by UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access.

“We in our public school system in California say, ‘If you don’t live within so many square miles of a building, you can’t play,’ and that’s not fair,” Haglund said. “And it’s particularly unfair when the Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, california, online learning, Riverside
October 6, 2011 | 11:08 AM | By

Can Online Tutoring Work as Well as Face-to-Face?

There are some 40,000 tutoring companies in the U.S. While most of these are face-to-face operations, many offer online tutoring. The problem is that most of the online services don’t have a particularly good reputation — not among students, not among parents, and most damningly perhaps, not with the Better Business Bureau.

The $8 billion-a-year industry presents a big opportunity for a smart company. Plenty of online tutoring companies are trying to find the secret sauce that creates a quality experience. First, it must provide an easy experience technologically. In other words, it can’t be difficult or cumbersome to locate or request a tutor or to engage in a tutoring session, nor can the tools tutors need be antiquated. Second, and most importantly, it must offer quality tutors — those with knowledge in the subject matter and experience teaching and tutoring.

Tutoring should be akin to mentoring, and as such, it’s a relationship that benefits from more than just subject matter expertise.

One young startup, TutorCloud, which just graduated from the Imagine K12 education start-up incubator this summer, is trying to do just that.

First, the technical piece: TutorCloud offers an online classroom with both video chat and a whiteboard. While some people may balk at the idea of online tutoring sessions, co-founder Blair Silverberg argues that many students are already using video chat to talk to their peers as they Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Tech Tools, online learning, online tutoring, TutorCloud
August 23, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

Stanford for Everyone: More Than 120,000 Enroll in Free Classes

Stanford Artificial Intelligence class

By Anne Raith

Professor Sebastian Thrun has given his lecture on artificial intelligence at Stanford University more than once. He knows that a lot of students are interested in his introductory course – almost 200 students have showed up in past years. But this fall, it will be different, even for him. There will be more than 100,000 students from all around the world who will listen to him – online.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence is one of three classes that the Stanford computer science department will offer as a free online course this fall. As of yesterday, more than 124,000 people had enrolled: high school students, professionals and retirees from North and South America, Europe and Africa.

“We want to open our lectures and bring education to places that can’t be reached today, to people that haven’t had access to higher education.”

“We want to open our lectures and bring education to places that can’t be reached today, to people that haven’t had access to higher education,” says Thrun, a Google Fellow and one of the world’s best-known artificial intelligence experts.

Professor Andrew Ng, whose course Machine Learning will be also be online, adds that the proliferation of Web access is democratizing education in ways it couldn’t have been done before. “In the last ten years, information technology has disrupted many different industries. Somehow the Internet hasn’t quite made it into the classrooms,” he says. “But with online education we can provide education to the world much more cheaply and change the horribly inefficient way we have delivered education till now, just lecturing to our students.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, online learning, Stanford
May 25, 2011 | 6:00 AM | By

5 Surprising Perspectives About Online Schools

Lenny Gonzalez

Most people think of online learning as a quiet, solitary experience. But over the past few months, after interviewing students, parents, and educators, a different sort of picture has emerged. We’ve learned about who teaches and learns online, and why, what works and what doesn’t, and perhaps most importantly, whether online learning affords the same quality of education as that of traditional schools.

I spoke with Apex Learning CEO Cheryl Vedoe, one of the leading online curriculum providers to traditional and virtual schools; Maureen Cottrell, a science teacher at iHigh Virtual Academy in San Diego, California; Rian Meadows, an economics instructor at Florida Virtual School; Patti Joubert, the mother of two full-time Florida Virtual School students; and Carylanne and Christiane Joubert, her two daughters.

“It takes down a lot of barriers that kids have to asking questions in class.”

As with most issues in education, nothing is black and white. There are many different kinds of learners and teachers, and while virtual education may be a revelation for some, it would never work for others.

It’s true that Skyping and instant-messaging can’t replace the face-to-face experience — and for those who need the social interaction — both teachers and students — virtual schools would be difficult. “The high school experience in which you’re socializing with your peers or doing sports after school is important. There are a lot of teachers who would hate to use Skype all the time; they’d prefer being in the classroom. They would hate my job,” said Cottrell, a science teacher at iHigh Virtual Academy. “I think you have to be a certain personality type and have a certain mindset to be a virtual teacher and still ensure student success.”

That said, here are five surprising perspectives you might not have associated with online learning.

1. Students get more one-on-one interaction with teachers, not less.

  • “Students still talk with their teachers; you might even say they talk more. When I was in school, you didn’t have many one-on-one conversations with your teachers. Your teachers spoke to you, they didn’t speak with you. Here, they do oral exams, they talk with the kids, they really get to know each student.” — Patti Joubert, parent of Florida Virtual School students Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Florida Virtual School, iHigh Virtual Academy, online learning, virtual schools