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At Stanford University last summer, computer science professor Sebastian Thrun suggested he and his colleague Peter Morvig do something no university had done before. The previous year, the pair had elected to take over teaching course number CS221:
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. "We felt it was time for a change in education," says Norvig. "No one had put together all the pieces in the same way we wanted to offer."
This year's course would be different: anyone with web access could take it. Lectures and assignments -- the same ones administered in the on-campus class -- would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn't issue course credit to the non-registered students, but at the end of term students who completed a course would be awarded an official statement. In 2010, Norvig and Thrun taught their course to nearly 200 students, all from Stanford; in 2011, 160,000 students from 190 countries enrolled. "I was flabbergasted," says Thrun. "I was blown away. I was also a little fearful, since it was clear we'd go to a place where I'd never been before. Before we went online, Peter had guessed 1,000 [students might sign up], and I had optimistically thrown out 10,000 without actually believing it. I usually try to guess high." The university model, where academics lecture to student-filled halls, is broken. "This approach to education," wrote Eric Mazur, a physicist and Harvard lecturer, in Science in January 2009, "has not changed since before the Renaissance and the birth of scientific enquiry... The traditional approach to teaching reduces education to a transfer of information. Before the industrial revolution, when books were not yet mass commodities, the lecture method was the only way to transfer information from one generation to the next."
Academia barely noticed the industrial revolution, but a group of independent, like-minded pioneers, including Thrun and Mazur, are plunging it into the information revolution. By taking the lecture out of the hall and replacing it with online, interactive content studied at home, teaching time is spent on just that -- teaching, not declaiming. And once the university is flipped, it's open to the entire world.
In July 2008, Daphne Koller was in a Google Faculty Summit at Mountain View, which gathers computer scientists from academic institutions around the US.
Koller is a professor in computer science at Stanford; she enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at 13, and now studies how Bayesian probability theory can be applied to genetics. The main topic at the summit was YouTube. "I said, 'Wait a minute, if we have this capability of producing videos at a very large scale -- available to so many people so easily -- why shouldn't we do that with our classes?'" recalls Koller. "Instead of having to give the same lecture 15 years in a row, I can take that lecture, chop it up so that the units correspond to cognitive modules that are easier for a student to assimilate, and augment it with interactive components."
Instead of sitting passively in lecture halls, her students, Koller thought, could watch videos which would also include interactive, question-and-answer elements in their own time.
Face-to-face time would remain, but instead of a one-way propagation of information, it would become a "much deeper interaction" -- case studies, discussions about particular problems. Koller took her idea to John Bravman, the vice-provost of education at Stanford, who took her to John Hennessy, the university's president. Hennessy gave Koller $100,000 (£63,000) to develop new software; her course would be the first pilot.
Koller sold the idea to her 170-strong class, but implementing it was a challenge, despite another $200,000 in funding from Google and various seed programmes. She had to create the online content and technical back-end, as well as a completely new teaching method. "It wasn't the smoothest sailing; we had technical issues," she says. But surveys completed at the end of the term showed that nearly three-quarters of the class preferred the new method. Flip teaching is essentially a type of tutoring. The difference is that new digital tools enable teachers to coach large classes: one-on-one tutoring, scaled by the web. It was likely first described in 2000, by J Wesley Baker, a researcher at Cedarville University, Ohio, in his paper The Classroom Flip: Using web course management tools to become the guide by the side.
Although unaware of Baker's research, Koller applied the model to higher education. The flipped university worked, and other experiments confirmed this. Eric Mazur, at Harvard, had been trying the method in his classroom and found that, judged on pre- and post-test scoring, learning gains nearly tripled in his class once he began "to turn [the] traditional information-transfer model of education upside down". (He published early findings from his classroom and others around the world in The Physics Teacher journal in 2002.) A paper published in
Science by researchers at the University of British Columbia in April 2011 found that students using an experimental flip-learning approach did more than twice as well as those using traditional methods. Koller found another benefit. "Once you start gathering data at the level that one can in these online systems -- every click, where do students pause, where do they rewind you get these amazing datasets that tell you so much about how people learn. That's a tremendous opportunity to refine the way we teach, both at the global level and the individual." This data is real-time: Koller found herself adjusting classes based on how students had done on the test, what she calls "just-in-time teaching".
Koller had flipped her lecture hall. The next step would be to open its doors to the world. "Once you have a set of video content with integrated activities and assessments, you can make the same content available to those not fortunate enough to attend the Stanfords and Oxfords of the world."
Thrun was aware of Koller's work at Stanford, but not particularly impressed by it. "It didn't inspire me," says Thrun. "She tried to fix something that didn't seem to require much fixing, and the students' responses were mixed." But in March 2011, Thrun watched as Salman Khan took the stage at TED in Long Beach, California.
The Khan Academy founder told the story of his nearly six-year-old website, which provides more than 2,800 tutorial videos in subjects such as science, maths and economics. Khan had started filming videos to tutor his 13-year-old cousin, who lived on the other side of the US from him, in maths. His approach was lo-fi: he would talk through the material while sketching out visuals on Microsoft Paint. Khan hosted the videos, which still preserve the Sellotaped-together feel of his original lessons, on YouTube. Word rapidly spread over the rest of the globe. Khan ended his TED talk by describing the academy as a "global one-world classroom".
Joining him onstage, Bill Gates called the Khan Academy "the future of education".
The idea that new technology could open up higher education to a mass audience is not a new one. In 1926, John Stobart, director of education at the BBC, wrote a letter to the corporation's director general, John Reith, describing a new idea that he called "the wireless university". Stobart started with a question: "Are we to place broadcasting at the disposal of the various existing universities, or are we going to break out on a new trail of our own?" He complained that those current courses had "grown out of various historical sources such as the medieval trivium in the older universities". Citing the "ubiquity" of radio, Stobart wrote that the "wireless university, working under its different conditions, should, as far as possible, break away from tradition."
Stobart asked Reith to think the notion over while he was in Scotland, admitting that his proposal was, for now, a "fantasy" -- "a Wellsian sketch of possibilities". The Open University (OU), founded in 1969 in Milton Keynes, drew on Stobart's vision, working with the BBC to broadcast educational programmes. Despite being described as "blithering nonsense" by future prime minister Edward Heath, OU pioneered distance teaching and still has around 250,000 registered students, the vast majority in the UK.
Thrun, inspired by the ubiquity and interactivity of the web, would set about turning Stobart's fantasy into reality. Back at Stanford after TED, he dusted off a PowerPoint presentation he'd put together in 2007. Back then he had begun envisioning a YouTube for education, a for-profit startup that would allow students to discover and take courses from top professors. In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines and certification. Although Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare -- the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi and homework from 2,100 courses -- he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual class- room lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.
Thrun knew first-hand what it was like to crave superior instruction. When he was a masters-degree student at the University of Bonn in Germany in the late 80s, he found his AI professors to be lacking. He spent a lot of time filling in the gaps at the library, but he longed for a more direct connection to the experts.
Thrun created his PowerPoint presentation because he understood that university education was a system in need of disruption. But it wasn't until he heard Khan's talk that he thought he could do something about it. He spoke with Peter Norvig, Google's director of research and his CS221 coprofessor, and they agreed to open up their next class. It was an educational experiment, but Thrun realised that it could also be the first step in turning that old PowerPoint into an actual business.
In June he took the next step: cofounding KnowLabs, which he funded with $300,000 of his own money. He pulled in David Stavens, one of Stanley's cocreators, as CEO, and he tapped Stanford robotics researcher Mike Sokolsky to be CTO. They converted Thrun's guesthouse into a temporary office. Once ensconced on a scenic hillside on Page Mill Road near Stanford's campus, the team began planning. They had eight weeks before the autumn term started -- not unreasonable given the modest scope of the project. By late July, 5,000 students had signed up. A few days later the class numbered 10,000. And then Stanford called.
Thrun had neglected to tell them about his plan -- he'd had a hunch it might not go down well. The university's chief complaint: you cannot issue an official certificate. Over the next few weeks, 15 meetings were held on the matter. Meanwhile, enrollment in CS221 was ballooning: just two weeks later, numbers totalled 58,000. In the 15 meetings, not one person objected to Thrun's offering his class online for free. The administration simply wanted him to drop the assignments and certificate. He refused. Those two components, he argued, were responsible for driving signups. Eventually they reached a compromise: offer a statement of accomplishment, not a certificate; and include a disclaimer stating that the class wouldn't count toward Stanford credit, grade or degree.
By mid-August, word of his AI class went viral after a write-up in The New York Times. Enrolment passed 100,000. KnowLabs' website had been built to handle 10,000 students. Class was starting in a matter of weeks. "That," Sokolsky says, "is when I stopped sleeping."
Thrun is thrilled. His experiment is working. More than 20,000 students have taken the midterm and are turning in weekly assignments. The website's stability is improving. CS221's YouTube videos have been viewed five million times. The team at KnowLabs has automated and ramped up workflow: film, edit, double-check the lessons, post and monitor the message boards.
The course is hitting eight of Thrun's nine educational components. They've hired a second engineer, who also serves as a teaching assistant to oversee the discussion forums, and in November they took on a video editor and a web designer to rethink the interface for future courses. In December the company secured funding from Charles River Ventures, a VC firm specialising in early-stage investments. First order of business: another hiring spree, which more than doubles the staff, bringing it to 14. Know-Labs revamped its software from scratch and started to work on a full site redesign.
KnowLabs already has competition, and it's close to home. Of the three Stanford computer-science courses being offered to the public, two use Daphne Koller's platform. Neither has attracted anything like the number of enrolees CS221 has, but some students taking all three classes say the materials and website for CS221 are less polished. And where Thrun is stepping down from teaching at Stanford to launch KnowLabs, Koller and Andrew Ng (the professor who taught CS221 before Thrun and Norvig) are developing software for their own venture, Coursera, an independent platform for serving online courses, with the blessing of Stanford. The plan is to offer 14 classes in 2012, including cryptography, anatomy and game theory. For now, these are all free.
On the other side of the US, MIT has announced that it is creating MITx, which will serve up a handful of online courses this autumn. Enrolment and participation will be free, but to earn a certificate of completion students will have to pay a "modest" fee.
In March, TED-Ed launches its own free education platform offering six-minute videos; in April, it will start providing interactive tools for teachers, so that they can either pull video content from YouTube and TED-Ed, which comes with lesson plans, or create their own videos, and combine these with online quizzes (their own or provided by TED) to create customised lessons.
In the UK, the OU is embracing digital tools such as Moodle, an open-source "virtual learning environment"; it has had nearly 48 million downloads on iTunesU, Apple's higher-education content hosting service. "My philosophy is that you should be able to do an entire degree on an Android phone or iPhone," says Niall Sclater, director of learning, teaching and quality at OU. "And the ebook platform is evolving rapidly: you can imagine more interactivity, where you have a forum within an ebook, so at the end of a chapter you discuss it with other students."
Thrun isn't worried that these respected seats of learning will crush his startup. He's envisioning his own digital university, with a less conventional curriculum; one based on solving problems, not lectures on abstract topics. It would offer a viable alternative for students of the global one-world classroom -- particularly those who lack the resources to move to the US and attend college.
KnowLabs recently launched an online platform called Udacity.
The name, a mashup of audacity and university, is intended to convey the boldness of both Thrun's and his students' ambitions.
His goal is for Udacity to offer free eight-week online courses.
For the next six months or more, the curriculum will focus on computer science. Eventually it will expand into other quantitative disciplines including engineering, physics and chemistry. The idea is to create a menu of high-quality courses that can be re-run and improved with minimal involvement from the original instructor.
KnowLabs will work only with top professors who are willing to put in the effort to create dynamic, interactive videos. Just as Hollywood cinematography revolutionised the way we tell stories, Thrun sees a new grammar of instruction and learning starting to emerge as he and his team create the videos and other class materials. Behind every Udacity class will be a production team, not unlike a film crew. The professor will become an actor-producer. Which makes Thrun the studio head.
Thrun's venture is deliberately radical. His homepage states: "I am against education that is only available to the top one per cent of all students. I am against tens of thousands of dollars of tuition expenses. I am against the imbalance that the present system brings to the world. I want to empower the 99 per cent." He imagines that in ten years' time, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only ten institutions in the world delivering higher education -- and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.
But Udacity, along with any for-profit education company, will need a business model. The OU's Sclater says that, at the moment, this lies in the last ninth of Thrun's university criteria: qualification. "The business model is mainly around students obtaining qualifications," says Sclater. Will people pay for a Udacity degree? "Verification is the problem: are employers going to be prepared to accept self-certified qualifications?"
However, the old university business model may not apply. "People will start to buy smaller chunks of learning," according to Sclater. He says that the OU uses a freemium model, where free content on iTunesU and YouTube drives people to sign up. "Employers will pay their staff to go and learn a particular topic." Koller adds that, at universities, less expensive physical courses could be supplemented by resources such as Coursera's.
KnowLabs's Stavens is also thinking about the business of university 2.0. Though Thrun cringes at the "one per cent" notion of charging students, people might eventually pay for add-ons -- study aids, say, or offline materials. He also considers other revenue streams. Near the end of the CS221 term, he emails his top 1,000 students, the ones with perfect or near-perfect scores on homework and tests. The subject: Job Placement Programme. Thrun solicited résumés and promised to get the best ones into the right hands at tech companies, including Google. A recruiter who places a hire typically earns ten to 30 per cent of an engineer's first-year salary, which might be $100,000. Stavens figures he could charge much less. After all, KnowLabs discovers talent in the course of doing business.
It's the last day of Thrun and Norvig's Stanford class and Thrun steps up to a podium to deliver a lecture. Only 41 students out of 200 show up. Four stroll in late. Two fall asleep. Five leave early. That's not uncommon. During the autumn term, the Stanford students taking CS221 preferred watching the KnowLabs videos. In previous years his students averaged 60 per cent on the midterm exam; this time around they did much better. The class averaged 83 per cent overall.
He doesn't congratulate himself for long. He acknowledges some harsh feedback from his students. "We made a lot of mistakes," he says. "In the beginning I made each problem available only once. I got an email from a student saying, 'You're behaving like one of these arrogant Stanford professors looking to weed out students.' I realised we should set up the student for success, not failure."
KnowLabs tweaked the software to allow students to keep retrying problems. Koller had her critics, too: "Some of my students said:
'If I wanted an online education, I wouldn't have come to Stanford.' It's a reactionary point of view. But with every revolution, you're going to have people who prefer to stick to the old ways."
The Khan Academy
The Khan Academy was founded by MIT engineering graduate Salman Khan in 2006. The website supplies free first-person tutorials on subjects as varied as economics, art history and computer science.
Financial donors to the academy include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and the O'Sullivan Foundation.
Udacity
When Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun posted a free AI course online last year, it attracted more than 160,000 students from 190 countries. The experiment prompted Thrun and two other roboticists to launch the for-profit online "college", Udacity. Courses offered include Building a Search Engine and Programming a Robotic Car.
Codecademy
Launched by Y Combinator graduates Zach Sima and Ryan Bubinski in August 2011, Codecademy teaches people how to program in multiple computing languages quickly, easily and for free. Their approach teaches by talking students through the processes -- you write code while being led through the basic principles.
OpenLearn
UK-based distance-learning institution the Open University joined the democratic education wave in 2006 with OpenLearn, a website that provides free global access to the OU professors' learning materials. This includes more than 600 courses divided into topics spanning from Body & Mind to Money & Management. open.edu/openlearn
TED-Ed
TED wants its ideas to spread even further, to "brains that aren't fully wired yet", according to curator Chris Anderson. The TED-Ed hub combines instructional videos with interactive content and lesson plans designed by educators. Teachers can submit audio lessons to the site: the best recordings will be turned into new videos and win their maker $1,000.
Steven Leckart is a correspondent for wired US. Visit wired.co.uk for his impressions of taking the AI course. Tom Cheshire wrote about Tumblr's David Karp in 03.12
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
