Title: The Online Revolution: High-Quality Education for Everyone
Speaker: Daphne Koller (Stanford University)
When: Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 3:30pm
Where: Electrical Engineering Building (EEB) Room 105
Abstract
Last year, Stanford University offered three online courses, which anyone in the world could enroll in and take for free. Students were expected to submit homework, meet deadlines, and were awarded a “Statement of Accomplishment” only if they met our high grading bar.
Together, these three courses had enrollments of around 350,000 students, making this one of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. In the past few months, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture, Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that partners with top universities to provide high-quality content to everyone around the world for free. In this talk, I’ll report on this new experiment in education, and why we believe this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for our on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality. I’ll describe the pedagogical foundations for this type of teaching, and the key technological ideas that support them, including easy-to-create video chunks, a scalable online Q&A forum where students can get their questions answered quickly, sophisticated autograded homework, and a carefully designed peer grading pipeline that supports the at-scale grading of more open-ended homework, such as essay questions, derivations, or business plans. Continue reading →
