[Dialogue] Who are you in the current counter-revolution?

[Ken Fisher]

Absolutely astounding!  k


On 2012-03-03, at 11:46 PM, Walter Epley wrote:

Here's an event that just “staggered” me, and it seems like this falls in the arena of “Living in a whole new universe”. I was driving around Denver, Colorado (the website says this was aired on January 23, 2012) in my “own little world” and heard this news report on NPR about how 100,000 students had signed up for an online course at Stanford, and they were from all over the world and all walks of life. A this all happened in a matter of a few days.
I just let it pass in terms of putting it into our Dialogue, but some elements of it just keep coming up. I know several of us are working on online stuff also.
So here it is, in parts – sections copied and pasted below.
Here's the link to NPR for the whole article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/01/23/145645472/stanford-takes-online-schooling-to-the-next-academic-level

Now for some of the “clips”:
Last year, Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun — also known as the fellow who helped build Google's self-driving car — got together with a small group of Stanford colleagues and they impulsively decided to open their classes to the world.
They would allow anyone, anywhere to attend online, take quizzes, ask questions and even get grades for free. They made the announcement with almost no fanfare by sending out a single email to a professional group.
"Within hours, we had 5,000 students signed up," Thrun says. "That was on a Saturday morning. On Sunday night, we had 10,000 students. And Monday morning, Stanford — who we didn't really inform — learned about this and we had a number of meetings."
Thrun's colleague Andrew Ng taught a free, online machine learning class that ultimately attracted more than 100,000 students. When I ask Ng how Stanford's administration reacted to their proposition, he's silent for a second. "Oh boy," he says, "I think there was a strong sense that we were all suddenly in a brave new world."
Thrun's online class on artificial intelligence or A.I., which he co-taught with Google's Peter Norvig, eventually drew more than 160,000 students who received detailed grades and a class ranking.
"I think we all realized we were in uncharted territory," Thrun says. "As we move forward, it is my real goal to invent an education platform that has high quality to it, [that] prevents cheating, that really enables students to go through it to be empowered to find better jobs."
"What it will look like in 10 years or 20 years or 30 years — your guess is as good as mine," he says. "But I think the impact will be large and it will be widespread."
"On the long term, I think the potential for this to revolutionize education is just tremendous," Koller says. "There are millions of people around the world that have access only to the poorest quality of education or sometimes nothing at all."
Technology could change that by making it possible to teach classes with 100,000 students as easily and as cheaply as a class with just 100. And if you look around the world, demand for education in places like South Africa is enormous.
Trying 'Bold New Things'
Over the past six months, Thrun has spent roughly $200,000 of his own money and lined up venture capital to create Udacity, a new online institution of higher learning independent of Stanford. "We are committed to free online education for everybody."
Udacity is announcing two new classes on Monday. One will teach students to build their own search engine and the other how to program a self-driving car. Eventually, the founders hope to offer a full slate of classes in computer science.
Thrun says Stanford's mission is to attract the top 1 percent of students from all over in the world and bring them to campus, but Udacity's mission is different. He's striving for free, quality education for all, anywhere.
"How it all is going to pan out is something that I don't think anyone has a very clear idea of," she says. "But what I think is clear is that this change is coming and it's coming whether we like it or not. So I think the right strategy is to embrace that change."
Over the years, Stanford has launched dozens of disruptive technologies into the world, but now administrators and professors seem to agree that the school may be about to disrupt itself. This semester Stanford will put 17 interactive courses online for free.
"Stanford has always been a place where we were will to try bold new things," Plummer says. "Even if we don't know what the consequences would be."
 
“WOW”
Walt Epley
Walter F. Epley
Denver, CO 80220 USA
Email: wfepley at yahoo.com

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