When Stanford’s Doctor Sebastian Thrun handed out leaflets for his upcoming online course on Artificial Intelligence at an academic conference in Spain, he received only 80 registrations. So after he forwarded the email to a colleague with a large network, he was somewhat surprised to check and find that over 58,000 students had enrolled for the free course.
In a testament to both the growing popularity of online learning, and the power of viral marketing, the course has attracted record numbers of prospective students from 178 different countries. Doctor Thrun and his colleague, Peter Norvig, are two of Silicon Valley’s most respected experts on Artificial Intelligence. Both now work at Google, and both teach at the prestigious Stanford University’s department of Computer Science.
The course itself does not confer a Stanford degree or any credits, and students receive only a perfunctory certificate of attendance – but the course is free, based on the latest online learning technology, and the subject matter is close to many wannabe IT professionals’ hearts.
Low Barrier to Entry
As well as being a free online course, run under Stanford’s project to bring university-level education to places where no education is usually found, the course requires only basic algebra and probability theory, and is accessible to just about anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.
They were inspired by Salman Kahn, an MIT-educated electrical engineer who posts free tutorials and lessons on YouTube. Thrun says that their mission statement is simple but powerful: “The vision is: change the world by bringing education to places that can’t be reached today.” Khan’s school takes an approach to education favored by many young schools: students are expected to go over lessons at home (either as video or text), and then come to class to do assignments under the supervision of the teacher.
In this case, even the classroom exercises will be performed online, with the teachers making innovative use of modern technology to ensure a personal and egalitarian approach to giving students individual attention.
Cutting Edge Technology
With both lecturers being leading thinkers at Google, you’d expect some pretty innovative approaches to using technology – and you wouldn’t be disappointed. As well as using videos and other interactive material to convey coursework and assignments, the course will make use of new technology by Google to grade papers and moderate classroom discussion.
Student-teacher communication is obviously an issue – you simply can’t answer questions from 58,000 students individually, especially when the university isn’t earning a dime from the exercise. Even if only 5% of students emailed a question in, that would still be over 3,000 emails for two otherwise very busy men to answer.
Instead, Thrun and Norvig are making use of the Google moderator service, similar to that which manages the Google help pages and discussion groups on Google Groups. Using this system, the most common questions will be “voted” to the top, so that they can be answered in a public forum. They might not be able to get to all of them, but by and large the majority of students will be able to get personalized help for their problems.
Grading the papers is also a problem. Even conventional computerized grading and examination systems would strain and crash under the load of even 10,000 students. With a course attended by more people than there are in the entire Stanford student body, special considerations had to be made. A cloud-based examination system, running on Amazon’s extensive cloud network, will be handling the thousands of simultaneous exam-takers.
Bringing Stanford to the World
Aside from an AI course, two other courses are also being offered under the same program. The three courses together form an “experiment” in providing content in a free, open framework to everyone in the world.
While there are some concerns that offering up Stanford’s prized knowledge for free might be a threat to the university itself, Dr Thrun says, “I’m much more interested in bringing Stanford to the world,” he said. “I see the developing world having colossal educational needs.” Stanford, which has some of the highest tuition rates in the country, has traditionally held back from offering any content for free, unlike some comparatively-priced schools like MIT.
He says that Stanford simply does not otherwise have the facilities to educate so many people, by using so few resources, and that by offering course content in this way, in addition to its regular educational offering, will allow the university to become more competitive in the modern age.
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