One Course, 150,000 Students.
AT the May announcement of edX, the Harvard-M.I.T. partnership that will offer free online courses with a certificate of completion, Susan Hockfield, the president of M.I.T., declared: “Fasten your seat belts.” If anyone was ready for the ride — the $60 million venture aims to reach a billion people — it was Anant Agarwal, the director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Mr. Agarwal, named the first president of edX, describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” who first went into business as a child in Mangalore, India, building coops for 40 chickens and selling their eggs. Start-ups still call to him: in 2005-6, he took time off from M.I.T. to create a semiconductor company. And in December, when M.I.T. decided to plunge into the world of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, with a new platform called MITx (now folded into edX), he came forward to teach the first offering, which ran March 5 to June 8 and enrolled over 150,000.
How did you come to teach the first course?
I just backed into it. M.I.T. asked me to look for a teacher for the MITx prototype course. I talked to some of my colleagues, who are much better teachers than I am, but I couldn’t get anyone to agree to do it. Many of them said it couldn’t be done in three months. But I’m really impatient, I like to get things done, and I’ve started enough companies to know that you can do things that big companies wouldn’t think was possible.
The debut course was “Circuits and Electronics.” Why that one?
It was not my first choice at all. A computer science or digital course would have made more sense, but “Circuits” was something I could teach. It’s one of the hardest courses at M.I.T. You need differential equations and calculus, and we had to develop online simulated laboratories.
We’re starting slowly, with four to six courses in the fall and maybe a dozen in the spring. We hope to offer computer science, biology, math, physics, public health, history and more.
Did you expect so much demand?
With no marketing dollars, I thought we might get 200 students. When we posted on the Web site that we were taking registration and the course would start in March, my colleague Piotr Mitros called and said, “We’re getting 10,000 registrations a day.” I fell off my seat and said, “Piotr, are you sure you’ve got the decimal point right?” My most fearful moment was when we launched the course. I worried that the system couldn’t handle it, and would keel over and die.
Granted, there are no papers to grade, and assignments aren’t free-form, but how does one professor handle so many students?
We had four teaching assistants, and my initial plan was that they would spend a lot of time on the discussion forum, answering questions. One night in the early days, I was on the forum at 2 a.m. when I saw a student ask a question, and I was typing my answer when I discovered that another student had typed an answer before I could. It was in the right direction, but not quite there, so I thought I could modify it, but then some other student jumped in with the right answer. It was fascinating to see how quickly students were helping each other. All we had to do was go in and say that it was a good answer. I actually instructed the T.A.’s not to answer so quickly, to let students work for an hour or two, and by and large they find the answers.
The discussion forum has many interesting features, like karma points. If someone posts a question, and another student votes it up, which is like “liking” the question, the student who posted it gets karma points. Or if a staff member checks an answer as correct, the student gets a big bonus of points. If you get a large number of karma points, you get some of the privileges of an instructor, like closing down a discussion when people have come to the right answer.
How does this all work with a global enrollment?
It’s been amazing. You’d see someone post in Brazil looking for other students in Brazil so they could meet and have a study group at a coffee shop. Facebook sites for the course popped up, not all in English. There are people in Tunisia, Pakistan, New Zealand, Latin America. And a professor in Mongolia has a group of students taking the course. He got them all a little laboratory kit, so they’re doing the experiments live along with the course.
Most students who register for MOOCs don’t complete the course. Of the 154,763 who registered for “Circuits and Electronics,” fewer than half even got as far as looking at the first problem set, and only 7,157 passed the course. What do you make of that?
A large number of the students who sign up for MOOCs are browsing, to see what it’s like. They might not have the right background for the course. They might just do a little bit of the coursework. Our course was M.I.T.-hard and needed a very, very solid background. Other students just don’t have time to do the weekly assignments. One thing we’re thinking of is to offer multiple versions of the course, one that would last a semester and one that could stretch over a year. That would help some people complete.
EdX operates under an honor code, with no way to verify that the student who registered is the one doing the work. Is that likely to change?
It’s quite possible employers would be happy with an honor certificate. We’re looking at various methods of proctoring. We have talked about people going to centers to take exams. There are also companies that use the cameras inside a laptop or iPad to watch you and everything else that’s happening in the room while you take an exam, and that may be more scalable.
So what is the future of edX?
When there are more courses, I could imagine people taking several of them, and putting them together, getting the certificates, and using it something like a diploma. I think the courses will get better and better, but we don’t know how they’ll be used.
And because we will have all this data on how students actually use our materials, there are opportunities for research on learning. We can watch how many attempts students made before they got an exercise right, and if they got it wrong, what they used to try to find a solution. Did they go to the textbook, go back and watch the video, go to the forum and post a question?
Our goal is to change the world through education.
Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/education/edlife/anant-agarwal-discusses-free-online-courses-offered-by-a-harvard-mit-partnership.html?ref=education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
The Odyssey of Learning
The Odyssey of Learning.
"When this old world starts getting me down," as the old song goes, and the usual antidotes -- family, friends, writing, and music -- can't soothe my soul, I take comfort in knowing there's one place I can always go that's akin to being "Up on the Roof." And that's my annual engagement with the inspiring students enrolled in UW-Madison's Odyssey Project. While I'm typically there with my colleague and collaborator, Professor Craig Werner, to talk about music and the Vietnam War, I always come away from those evenings awed and stimulated by the students and their insights. My encounter this past week was no exception.
Craig and I have been giving this talk to Odyssey Project students for years, but no two presentations are ever the same because the Odyssey students are so genuine and candid. They bring their own life experiences to the conversation, and that makes the dialogue rich and powerful -- and unique -- every year.
Plus, thanks to Odyssey Project director Emily Auerbach and her co-pilot Marshall Cook, there's not the usual distance between teacher and student, nor is there the hierarchical posturing that often gets in the way of learning.
And what learning there is.
We talk a lot about race during our presentation on music and Vietnam, using songs like "Chain of Fools," "What's Going On," and "Dock of the Bay" as touchstones. Even though we're more than 40 years removed from that time and these songs, and many/most of the students in the room weren't even born, they cut to the heart of the matter faster than you can say Marvin Gaye.
And why shouldn't they? These are folks from our own community whom we've marginalized. They regularly confront Vietnam-like challenges of survival, stereotyping, misunderstanding and injustice. They know what we're talking about because they've lived it. As one female student told us last Wednesday, "'What's Going On' would be a hit today because it's telling the truth about what's going down."
The UW-Madison Odyssey Project was inspired by the work of Earl Shorris, an educator who began the Clemente Course in the Humanities in New York in 1995. Now in its tenth year, it brings about 30 adult students together for three hours every Wednesday from September to May. They hear from a number of committed and celebrated UW faculty as they read and discuss everything from Shakespeare and Sojourner Truth to the Federalist papers and Vaclav Havel's 'Essay on Civility.'
All Odyssey participants are enrolled as "Special Students" at UW-Madison and receive six college credits through the English department when they complete the course. The Project also provides these adult men and women with a variety of support services, including bus transportation, childcare, counseling, and guidance on post-project applications and financial aid.
Although many of the Odyssey students are confronting very difficult circumstances -- some live at the local Salvation Army, some have lost their homes, and others are dealing with tough personal and medical crises -- their spirits, and their energy, are always high.
"They are somehow managing -- despite all of these obstacles -- to get to class with their work done," Emily Auerbach told a local newspaper last week. "I find it incredibly moving and inspiring."
There's probably nothing more inspirational than the annual Odyssey graduation ceremony. This year's is slated for May 9. Laughter, tears, and shouts of joy fill the room, and you realize that lives have indeed been changed. As Denise Maddox, one of the first Odyssey Project graduates, told her teachers and fellow graduates: "I would never have thought that classes in the humanities would change my life forever. I mean 'forever' without exaggeration because Writing, Art History, American History, Literature, and Philosophy transported me into a new world, where written words came alive and made magic inside my heart."
And that's exactly the kind of magic that education should be all about.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bradley/odyssey-project-wisonsin_b_1442553.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
"When this old world starts getting me down," as the old song goes, and the usual antidotes -- family, friends, writing, and music -- can't soothe my soul, I take comfort in knowing there's one place I can always go that's akin to being "Up on the Roof." And that's my annual engagement with the inspiring students enrolled in UW-Madison's Odyssey Project. While I'm typically there with my colleague and collaborator, Professor Craig Werner, to talk about music and the Vietnam War, I always come away from those evenings awed and stimulated by the students and their insights. My encounter this past week was no exception.
Craig and I have been giving this talk to Odyssey Project students for years, but no two presentations are ever the same because the Odyssey students are so genuine and candid. They bring their own life experiences to the conversation, and that makes the dialogue rich and powerful -- and unique -- every year.
Plus, thanks to Odyssey Project director Emily Auerbach and her co-pilot Marshall Cook, there's not the usual distance between teacher and student, nor is there the hierarchical posturing that often gets in the way of learning.
And what learning there is.
We talk a lot about race during our presentation on music and Vietnam, using songs like "Chain of Fools," "What's Going On," and "Dock of the Bay" as touchstones. Even though we're more than 40 years removed from that time and these songs, and many/most of the students in the room weren't even born, they cut to the heart of the matter faster than you can say Marvin Gaye.
And why shouldn't they? These are folks from our own community whom we've marginalized. They regularly confront Vietnam-like challenges of survival, stereotyping, misunderstanding and injustice. They know what we're talking about because they've lived it. As one female student told us last Wednesday, "'What's Going On' would be a hit today because it's telling the truth about what's going down."
The UW-Madison Odyssey Project was inspired by the work of Earl Shorris, an educator who began the Clemente Course in the Humanities in New York in 1995. Now in its tenth year, it brings about 30 adult students together for three hours every Wednesday from September to May. They hear from a number of committed and celebrated UW faculty as they read and discuss everything from Shakespeare and Sojourner Truth to the Federalist papers and Vaclav Havel's 'Essay on Civility.'
All Odyssey participants are enrolled as "Special Students" at UW-Madison and receive six college credits through the English department when they complete the course. The Project also provides these adult men and women with a variety of support services, including bus transportation, childcare, counseling, and guidance on post-project applications and financial aid.
Although many of the Odyssey students are confronting very difficult circumstances -- some live at the local Salvation Army, some have lost their homes, and others are dealing with tough personal and medical crises -- their spirits, and their energy, are always high.
"They are somehow managing -- despite all of these obstacles -- to get to class with their work done," Emily Auerbach told a local newspaper last week. "I find it incredibly moving and inspiring."
There's probably nothing more inspirational than the annual Odyssey graduation ceremony. This year's is slated for May 9. Laughter, tears, and shouts of joy fill the room, and you realize that lives have indeed been changed. As Denise Maddox, one of the first Odyssey Project graduates, told her teachers and fellow graduates: "I would never have thought that classes in the humanities would change my life forever. I mean 'forever' without exaggeration because Writing, Art History, American History, Literature, and Philosophy transported me into a new world, where written words came alive and made magic inside my heart."
And that's exactly the kind of magic that education should be all about.
Read more at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bradley/odyssey-project-wisonsin_b_1442553.html?ref=education&ir=Education
http://www.languagecorpsasia.com
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