SMILE/Stanford

For many of us, the conversation around mobile learning has shifted from asking whether mobile devices present educational opportunities to how they might best do so.

From that second question, a new initiative has been launched: SMILE, the Stanford Mobile Inquiry Learning Environment, an idea, which, in practice, is almost staggeringly simple. Essentially, SMILE is a learning management system that allows students to create, share, answer, and evaluate questions in a collaborative manner through the use of cell phones.

Students use mobile devices — typically android phones that are connected to the same network — to create their own multiple-choice questions about a given topic. Their classmates answer those questions, and evaluate them based on their difficulty. While the devices need to be connected to each other, they don’t necessarily need to be connected to the outside Web, which is a key issue for some communities around the globe, said Paul Kim, the assistant dean and chief technology officer of Stanford University’s Office of Innovation & Technology and SMILE’s creator.

The drive to make questions that score higher on their peers’ difficulty index ultimately spurs students to think about the subject material in a deeper way, Kim says. And while there are some shortcomings—such as the lack of allowance for longer-form responses like written answers and essays, and a reliance mostly on more simple content elements such as texts and still photographs—the system’s simpleness allows it to be used in a variety of educational environments, ranging from a rural village in southern Africa to a medical school classroom at Stanford itself.

But creating such a project is one thing. Actually putting it into practice is another. So Kim, who has also helped launch SMILE in India, Argentina, and suburban Northern California, shares some of his tactics and lessons learned about how best to launch this project even in communities that are unlikely to have Internet access — or sometimes even electricity.

USE EXISTING TOOLS

Despite reaching out to poor and particularly rural communities around the world, Kim and his team have striven to use as many already-existing resources as possible, even if the devices themselves have to be procured. For example, for a power source on a SMILE pilot project in a remote Indian location with little access to electricity, Kim’s team used the batteries commonly found in motorcycles and rickshaws. Another SMILE project in Southeast Asia is adapting the software for use on tablets students already have through a government initiative. Even SMILE’s central premise—using children rather than a curriculum to create questions—fits the use-the resources-you-have approach.

“Try not to bring in anything new, because you’re not going to find anybody who can service,” devices brought in from the outside, he said. “You’re not going to find any replacement parts. So you have to work with what is already out there, and that was my conclusion.”

ALWAYS PLACE CONTENT IN CONTEXT

Part of why SMILE appears to work in under-served communities is because using student questions makes a shortage of content access less important. And as the project has grown, the launch of Global SMILE will provide another workaround for sites with Web access, since it will archive and curate the best student-created questions, and making them available to users worldwide.

But in this initiative, as well as any other aiming to reach diverse student populations, Kim says it is important to keep any content in a context that make sense in the world in which the students live. That can be easier said than done when simple Western essentials like running water and toasters are non-existent in a rural African student’s life.

For example, “if you are using books that talk about microwave ovens and blueberry cakes baked from the oven,” Kim says, “it doesn’t make sense in a rural village setting.”

EMBRACE SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS PARTNERS

SMILE has worked with populations served by a host of nonprofit, philanthropic organizations, meaning partnerships can often create a more efficient way to administer the program.

Sometimes those organizations are secular, such as the Peace Corps, which has aided work with students using SMILE in Tanzania. But other times, religious charities have also helped provide resources and lines of communication for SMILE projects. Kim acknowledges that affiliating with religious groups can be a delicate issue, but says doing so is often the most cost-effective way to implement a mobile program.

“They don’t need any extra incentive. … They just want to reach out to more people,” Kim says. “It could be controversial. But I always tell people that I work with all religious organizations out there, and it has been nothing but success.”

PUBLICIZE YOURSELF, THEN LET THEM COME TO YOU

Despite advances in mobile education it can still have a stigma among some educators. For that reason, Kim says he has never purposefully targeted specific countries, regions, or communities for the implementation of SMILE, because letting those communities find him is a more authentic way of insuring buy-in.

“A lot of people come forward, and they say, ‘Oh we’d like to do this in our country, in our region, in our school.’” Kim said. “So I’ve been responding. … It’s been always one place leading to another.”

Watch How Free Online Courses Are Changing Traditional Education on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

For those still trying to piece together all the different definitions and scenarios of a MOOC (massive open online courses), this PBS Newshour segment presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of this phenomenon.

From the financial angle, MOOC startups are still trying to figure out how to make money. Udacity is getting revenue from several companies like Google to provide specialized courses. Coursera is charging potential employers for providing names of high-scoring students.

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Coursera, students, and other professors who question the wisdom of these classes weigh in.

Student Tracy Lippincott’s perspective on teacher-student connection:
“The thing that I really miss is actually personal contact with the professor. I like to be able to get personalized advice from the person who’s in charge, and maybe just a little of like a thumbs-up, you know, just a little bit of positive reinforcement.”

Sebastian Thrun on his view of lecturing:
“It’s not my lecturing that changes the student, but it’s the student exercise. So our courses feel very much like video games, where you’re being bombarded with exercise after exercise after exercise. That’s very different from the way I teach at Stanford, where I’m much more in a lecturing mode.”

Stanford professor Susan Holmes:
“I don’t think that you can give a Stanford education online, in the same way as I don’t think that Facebook gives you a social life.”

Coursera, which is seeking authority to give college credit for their courses (as opposed to just certification), is working with a company called ProctorU to verify student identity and participation. Correspondent Spencer Michels demonstrates in this video how online testing would work, and how the system they’ve devised is meant to prevent — or at least curtails — cheating.

Flickr:M.Keefe

By Katrina Schwartz

The sudden growth of free, top-shelf online education sites has the potential to democratize high-caliber education that’s long been reserved for only those who could afford it.

But as these new sites begin to blaze a new path to the possibility of a level playing field, it’s still unclear whether taking courses in subjects like artificial intelligence or game theory will eventually lead to employment.

Are certificates of online course completion from venerable institutions viable substitutes for diplomas and degrees from the same brick-and-mortar four-year universities? Though professors who teach these Massive Open Online Courses are well respected in their fields, is their stamp of approval enough to land a job?

If any job market would be receptive to a non-traditional educational path, one might think it would be Silicon Valley. There are plenty of examples of tech tycoons like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of school or otherwise bucked the system only to become wildly successful. It’s a hub that values creativity and technical skills and might seem a likely environment where a company might be willing to hire a person on the basis of their knowledge rather than where where they got their degree.

If that’s somewhere on the horizon, it’s not necessarily happening yet. When contacted about these online education sites — courses taught by professors at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley — many companies directly refused to talk about how their human resources departments would view a non-traditional candidate. Many had never even heard of Coursera, edX, or Udacity.

But recruiters who did agree to go on the record said that, for the most part, companies big and small looking for computer engineers want employees with college degrees from schools known for their computer science programs. “I couldn’t personally help them,” said Robert Greene, founder of technical recruiting firm GreeneSearch, when he heard the profile of a potential job applicant who had taken all the courses for a computer science degree, from a free site like Coursera or edX. “I work with startups so they want someone with experience and if not that, then a degree from a top school,” he said.

In fact, for start-ups, it’s especially important for programmers to have high pedigrees because those big-name degrees play a big role in acquisition negotiations, he said. “They will value at a top notch engineer at $1 to $3 million in evaluation,” said Erin Wilson, division manager of Jobspring Partners, Silicon Valley. “In that sense I think Coursera will take a long time to catch up to a top-notch degree.” Wilson himself is enrolled in a Coursera Computer Science 101 class — just for fun. He’s “stoked” to learn from Stanford professors, but has no illusions that it will lead him to a different job.

Still, Wilson said there are anomalies in the Valley — not all great programmers went to the top 25 computer science schools. And although he doesn’t think that getting in the door will be easy without an official degree of some kind, he said the idea that down the road when educational models are less fixed, a hard worker with a free online education that comes with practical skills could make the cut.

In the meantime, large, well-established can afford to be picky – places like Google, Groupon and Facebook mostly take applicants from the top 25 computer science programs. Wilson said there’s an “element of elitism in the Valley” that would be hard to overcome.

The skepticism was palpable from those interviewed who know the Silicon Valley job market well. There’s a sense that free education could not be great education. “If you are a smart student some school will take you and you’ll get a degree,” Greene said. “In the Valley, the education is usually a pretty good barometer.”

Companies in finance and banking had similar responses. “Generally we would not look at someone without college experience,” said Rebecca McGovern, executive assistant at the global private investment firm H.I.G Capitol, and the person in charge of recruiting for their San Francisco office. “A college degree is very fundamental — a weeding out process,” she added. She said no H.I.G office would take someone without a four-year degree.

It’s possible that these nascent education sites, many of which offer more than computer science and engineering classes, are too new to have gained traction. Instead, they are being confused with for-profit certificate programs that don’t always have a good reputation.

In this anecdotal and limited survey, the current conclusion seems to be that employers don’t trust these new educational sites yet. Regardless of the names behind them — whether the school or the professor — the four-year degree and the on-campus experience are still highly critical.

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive movement that’s compelling venerable institutions to reconfigure their education platform to an online audience.

Last fall, a group of Stanford professors decided to offer a few courses online free of charge and were overwhelmed when hundreds of thousands of students signed up for their courses. That experiment has spawned the growth of similar endeavors. Here’s a guide to some of the newest free education sites and what they offer, with the big caveat that this will soon change, as more institutions come aboard.

• COURSERA. Coursera is an interactive online learning system that offers free courses from Princeton, Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor and University of Pennsylvania. Their courses span the range from humanities, to social science, computer science, business, biology, medicine and mathematics. Andrew Ng, one of the Stanford professors whose class drew an astounding 100,000 students, and his new business partner, Daphne Koller, announced that they received $16 million in investment capitol from two prominent Silicon Valley firms to launch the project. Students will have access to lectures, interactive elements like quiz questions interspersed throughout lectures to help students recall and retain information, and peer-grading for homework, essays and tests. They plan to use crowd-sourcing algorithms to help ensure accuracy in peer grading, a move that will also  help professors manage such large-scale classes. What’s more, Coursera’s partner institutions will use the online learning platform to enhance in-class teaching. Based on a Department of Education study that shows online learning can be as effective as classroom learning, the participating universities will offer a mixture of interactive and static learning to explore the best way for students to retain the information. CERTIFICATION: As with the popular Stanford courses, students will not get academic credit from the participating institutions, but will receive a certificate of completion from the professor.

• MITx –> edX. MIT took its OpenCourseWare platform to the next level with MITx, which offers full professor-taught courses online (not just class materials), but after just one course this spring (Circuits and Electronics), MITx entered an agreement with Harvard, and is now part of edX. The two universities will use the MITx platform to bring in a wider array of classes to the site. What’s key here is the software for the platform is open-source, so other universities can use it too. The more universities add content, the more compelling a choice edX becomes amidst the growing number of offerings. Both schools have invested heavily in the project — each gave $30 million to a non-profit organization that they will co-manage. Edx will feature video lectures, embedded quizzes, interactive learning, online labs, and a lot of peer interaction. CERTIFICATION: Certificates of mastery will be given to students who demonstrate knowledge of course material.

• UDACITY. Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors who offered the first set of free online Stanford classes last year, which drew 160,000 registrants (22,000 finished the class), left a tenured position at the university to start Udacity, which focuses on computer science. Thrun taught an online artificial intelligence course for free at Stanford last fall with Dr. Peter Norvig, another artificial intelligence expert. Their course drew 160,000 students, with 22,000 students finishing the class. That inspired Thrun to start Udacity, which pulls in outside experts like Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, to teach courses. They do not operate under the auspices of a university, although some of their guest-lecturers do teach at other universities. Their course offerings are aimed at practical computer science skills, like how to build an app or search engine. CERTIFICATION: Students receive a certificate of completion at the end of the course signed by the instructor.

• UDEMY. Staying away from high-profile academic names, this site tagline is “the university of you.” Courses can be taught by anyone, and most are free, though some cost a small fee ranging between $5-$250. Whether or how much to charge is up to the instructor. The course offerings on Udemy are broad; they’ve got non-traditional courses like “Tournament Poker Theory” (cost $39) or “Yoga For Weight Loss” (cost $39), in addition to traditional academic subjects like computer science, business, and marketing. The site encourages anyone to become an instructor and build name or brand recognition.
• P2PU. Similar to Udemy, Peer-2-Peer University uses the open education model to allow users to learn from others on the web or design and teach courses. Course offerings are broad, but there is some attempt to categorize by offering “schools” of web development, mathematics, social innovation, and education. The courses are totally free and P2PU gives out badges in recognition of completion. Again, the model requires a significant amount of participation and collaboration from students, including grading each others’ assignments.
• MINERVA PROJECT. Billing it as the “first elite American University to be launched in a century,” Minerva CEO Ben Nelson, who was formerly CEO of Snapfish, intends to launch a full-fledged, “Ivy League-quality” online university by 2014. Rather than offering separate courses, the university will offer a complete college education with an accompanying degree. The cost is yet undetermined, though Nelson has said it will cost significantly less than most college degrees cost today. The Minerva Project has drawn attention from investors and is trying to draw the best professors possible by giving out Minerva Prizes to the best college-level teachers that come with a cash reward.

Flickr: Incase

By Nathan Maton

Back in 2001, MIT launched OpenCourseWare, a bold idea to put world-class MIT professors’ lectures, syllabi and resources online to the world for free. Today, Open Education Resources (OER) industry leaders are arguing that the free content is only the starting point.

The next stage of the open education movement has evolved into Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) — the key word being “massive,” as in drawing tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Last fall, Sebastian Thrun’s Artificial Intelligence course enrolled 160,000 students and Thrun recently gave up tenure at Stanford to start Udacity, a company that will offer more MOOCs.

But at such a huge scale, what are the digital methods of teaching that work best? Philipp Schmidt, founder of the free online university P2PU, preaches three building blocks: community, recognition and content.

“It was totally clear to me [several years ago] that content is only the starting point,” Schmidt said at recently at a SXSW session. “The really exciting stuff is going to be the learning, the assessments and the stuff that you need the content for. In a way, we started P2PU because institutions weren’t doing it. How do we build community around it and recognition for this open content is my question.”

The Stanford professors readily admit that some of the students who participated in their online courses provided their peers with deeper, more comprehensive answers than they were able to.

You’d expect MIT to tout its content as the solution. But that’s not how Steve Carson, director of external affairs for OpenCourseWare, describes the benefits of their project.

“The most exciting thing is that the last six months of open education have been spectacularly disruptive,” Carson says. “It was kind of a sleepy enterprise for the last 10 years where MIT was doing its thing and there were other projects doing their thing. It was all good and there were positive global benefits, but in the past 10 years I’ve heard people say campus-based education better look out, that this will be threatening to their business model, and I’ve never really felt that until the last six months. The pace of change in open education is qualitatively different than it was even a few months ago.”

Carson argues that MIT’s work is merely a necessary transitory experiment. It only puts classes and course material online, but you still have to watch, frequently from the back of the room, as the professor lectures students. He compares it to Wikipedia. MIT’s videos and materials provide deep references on a subject — but not the actual courses themselves.

Carson is a big fan of Schmidt’s work.  At P2PU, they run online courses that can be taught by a peer (you can create your own course), and they heavily promote the social part of learning. They have a peer mentor program to help students get through their courses and have the most users teaching web development courses, although Schmidt says they’ll be doing less of that. Schmidt believes that even with all the OER in the world, the way people learn is by being excited about it, by making things (even if it is just a blog post) and working together.

“The things I care most about is collaborative skills, are you a good communicator, can you get stuff done?” Schmidt says. “I think that’s the number one thing that isn’t being assessed anywhere that is super important. That’s what you ask when someone wants a job from you: do they get stuff done.”

Carson likes Schmidt’s focus on community, recognition and content because he argues it is more important to discover successful learning techniques rather than merely sign up 100,000 students online. He sees promoting big-sized classes as a way to bring attention to the issue.

“I think one of the higher level struggles these MOOCs are injecting themselves into is to change the way higher education as it is practiced on campus,” Carson said. “It is an opportunity to show faculty members different ways the Internet can support learning.”

And what exactly is the problem all these groups are trying to solve? It’s the sudden acceleration of global higher education demand.

“If you look at the scope and scale of the educational need in the world we’re going to need all of our educational systems firing on all cylinders to come close to even meeting the educational demand emerging in the world,” Carson said. “You could offer a thousand courses enrolling a 100,000 students each and you would not even be scratching the surface of the need in India and China and other developing regions. So we need these educational techniques to solve this problem.”

It took 11 years to get from the launch of OpenCourseWare to the point where a Stanford professor would walk away from a tenure position to launch another online learning venture. So how long will it take to build this next phase? For computer science, experiments like Thrun’s suggest that it may not take that long. Other types of courses Schmidt describes as important don’t yet exist.  And P2PU is still a relatively small community of around 30,000 members. Other countries have small experiments building OER and digital courses using high tech solutions like 3-D simulations, but no strong business model to scale their open efforts.

“We probably haven’t fully made the transition to digitally native pedagogies and learning approaches,” Carson said. “The first generation of distance learning is basically an attempt to move the classroom online, and I think that part of the scalable learning of these massive courses is the breakdown of that model.”

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.

“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 Venture capitalists are investing more than $15 million in the company.

Koller says she believes online classes could bring university classes to millions of people who are now effectively cut off.

But to do this, these classes have to be effective at teaching more than just computer science. How will they teach hundreds of thousands of students to write?

“You’ve asked the right question,” asks Al Filreis, a poetry professor at the University of Pennsylvania, “which is: You are really going to try to do a poetry course?”

They are. In fact, Filreis is the guy they have roped into doing just that. He will teach modern and contemporary American poetry online for free starting in the fall. He says he knows he’s not going to be able to grade thousands of essays.

But “I am really, really game and open to other ways of understanding whether people are getting it because my university has decided to let me free,” he says.

Filreis isn’t looking for correct answers. He wants people to think about the poems he’s teaching and engage one another.

“Poetry is really good in this setting because you can read it alone and get so much out of it, and be perfectly fine with it, but the next step was [to] hang out with some intuitively smart people and collectively — together, collaboratively — let’s read the poem together,” he says.

In his class this fall, Filreis will discuss poetry with a small group of students while potentially thousands make comments online. Coursera is building a system like Yelp that will let these students value each others comments; the most valued and respected will rise to the top.

Will all this work? Is this a way to teach poetry or anything else? Filreis isn’t sure, but he’s excited to give it a try. And it’s possible this fall he could reach more students with poetry than he has in his entire career.

This post originally appeared on NPR.