Center for LifeLong Learning & Design

Meeting 5/15/2012: Education for Everyone: Hype or Reality?

One of the “hottest” topics these days is based on reports (from  Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Michigan, Penn) that over 100 000 students sign up for classes taught about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, etc.. This is advertised as follows (from https://www.coursera.org/):
Education for Everyone.

We offer courses from the top universities, for free.

Learn from world-class professors, watch high quality lectures,

achieve mastery via interactive exercises,

and collaborate with a global community of students.

Our Research

The L3D/CU community has been discussing these ideas for a long time and we have done our own research and/or observed efforts at other places including:
  • Tammy Sumner’s & Clayton Lewis’ experiences with the Open University (this was discussed in a number of L3D meetings in the late 1990s)
  • Walter and Eileen Kintsch’s efforts with summary street (using an LSA-based environment to grad and assess student’s homework automatically)
  • Mike Eisenberg’s analysis of iTunesU and his interactions with President Benson
  • Jim Martin’s analysis of the Stanford’s approaches (based on his interactions with Dan Jurafsky and Peter Norvig)
  • Alex Repenning’s initiative about  “scalable game design”
  • Gerhard Fischer’s explorations of concepts such as: core competencies of residential, research based universities; “gift-wrapping” approaches; courses-as-seeds
  • CU students’ experience reports who have taken some of the Stanford’s classes and can give a first-hand account of their experiences
    • are these developments a fad or will they revolutionize learning and universities as learning institutions?
    • how interactive are these sites / lectures?
    • for which type of learning are these approaches a good fit?
    • why are some of them successful and what does success mean?
    • why should we pay attention to these developments?
    • what can we learn from these efforts for our own activities?
  • https://www.coursera.org/  — Stanford’s alternative to Udacity
  • http://www.udacity.com/  — Udacity: the company formed by Stanford people (Thrun)
  • http://www.edxonline.org/index.html — advertised as: EdX is a joint partnership between MIT and Harvard to offer online learning to millions of people around the world.
  • http://www.khanacademy.org/  — advertised as: “Watch. Practice. Learn almost anything for free; over 3,100 videos
  • http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/  — learn anything, anywhere, any time

Objective of the meeting:

·       the meeting will serve primarily as a catalyst for further conversations rather than as a road map for the future
·       there will be brief introductory remarks by  the researchers mentioned above
·       all participants will engage together in a discussion of topics including:

Some interesting websites to look at before the meeting:

Hal Eden