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Disruptive Activities in Learning

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Disruptive Activities in Learning

Internet based learning will be viewed as one of the most significant disruptive forces for the human race. For our purposes here I am going to suggest it started with Salman Khan and his Khan Academy. In 2008 a not for profit educational organizational organization was started with the aim of providing free world class education to anyone, anywhere.

Move forward a bit and we find Udacity a learning business funded by Sebastian Thrun. Udacity is the result of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford. These were classes that Thrun offered on line which became Udacity. He has been called the “Godfather” of Free Online Education.

One day in 2011 he sat down in his living room and started to create an online class. He begins “Welcome to the first unit of Online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Over the next three months the Professor offers the same lectures, homework assignments and exams to the masses as he does to the Stanford students. A computer handles the grading and students are steered to web discussion forums if they need extra help.   Some 160,000 people signed up for those classes.

Higher education is an enormous business in the US – we spend about $400 billion annually on Universities. Suddenly, something that had been unthinkable, that the internet might put a free, University caliber education within reach of the poor seems tantalizingly close. This information is available from Wikipedia.

But this is not the end of the story. Only 10% of the students actually finished the learning. Thrun calls this a painful moment. He is currently pivoting to a position that involves charging money for classes and abandoning academic disciplines in favor of more vocational focused learning.

The Time is Now.

Teaching on the Internet

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Teaching on the Internet

Early in my career I taught education classes at McGill University in the Physical education Faculty. I was teaching potential coaches and teachers on how to teach. Obviously, it was about teaching to a curriculum but in my mind, teaching people has always been about helping people understand how to teach themselves. That is a lifelong activity and one that I believe we could all learn to do better.

In classrooms, teaching working adults around the world over the past forty plus years has been a true joy. I love seeing the lights go on in people’s eyes when they “get it.” But it is extremely difficult to be able to constantly understand where each student is on the understanding scale.

In the past decade “learning management software” systems have come a long way. With good course design and careful learning path development we can understand the level of learning for each individual student with a high degree of confidence. This makes the learning programs much more effective that at any time in the past.

At Learning Without Scars, we have created learning paths which cover preparatory reading, pre-tests, multiple video segments with assessments at the end of each, a final assessment and a student survey. This is our Learning On Demand products – our LOD’s. We have designed them to be able to earn Continuous Education Units – CEU’s. However, the primary objective is to be able to provide education and learning to our client students. In our recent blogs we have touched on the Science of Learning which proves how to create lasting knowledge from learning events. Our learning is based on a safe assumption. It is that one only has to go on collecting more and more information for it to be able to sort itself into useful ideas.

Employee development: assisting with personal growth is our driving compassion. I hope it is yours as well.

The Time is Now.

Badges, the Computer, and College Everywhere

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Badges, the Computer, and College Everywhere

Last week, we left off with Patrick Suppes and his realization that students learning online were receiving modestly better results than those in the traditional classroom.  This week, we continue with his journey and conclude our discussion.

In 1972 Suppes taught a class on the Introduction to Logic. He created a wholly automated computerized version of the class. He introduced the class on the first day and from that point forward he did not attend any lectures. The students did all their learning in the educational laboratory. Then he computerized his Axiomatic Set Theory course.
This created the important concept in learning science of “transfer” which is the process which people apply patterns and concepts learning in one context to another. Strengthening transfer is the goal of all good education programs.

The next step in this process brings us to Sebastien Thrun. His specialty is Artificial Intelligence. Carnegie Mellon hired Thrun as a professor in 1995 where he also worked on how computer science, statistics and machines interact. In 2003 Stanford hired him back as head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. IN 2005 the pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency held a contest to see who could build a car that used AI to drive itself across treacherous desert terrain. Thrun was part of the team that build the winning Volkswagen SUV. Google hired him to work in its research laboratory while he continued to teach as a tenured professor at Sanford. In 2011 he was viewed as a rock star in Silicon Valley. He gave a TED talk describing how he and his colleagues had built the self-driving car. Afterward Thrun watched an energetic former hedge fund analyst named Salman Khan. Kahn was the creator of the Kahn Academy, famous for instructional videos for elementary and high school students. Thrun thought the same could be done for college.

Thrun worked with Peter Norvig who was Google research director and they created a graduate course called CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence: principles and Techniques. The course consisted of lectures and reading assignments and problems to solve followed by exams to certify what was learned. They put the videos and problems sets and emailed them to members of the global AI community to let them know that anyone could take the course for free. Within two weeks there were 58,000 people signed up for the class. This was when the administration caught wind of what was going on. Then the lawyers got involved. However, a New York Times reported heard about what was happening and wrote a story about the course. Enrollment quickly reached six figures and continued to rise. This was the beginning of the education revolution.

Thrun didn’t start any of this. There were others already doing many of the same things. Notably two professors at the university of Manitoba named George Siemens and Stephen Downes. What Thrun had done was call it a “course.” There were no caveats assigned to it. It was a course. He soon found out that his Stanford students started to take the class like everyone else and they got better grades than when they attended live lectures. BUT Stanford was disrupting the one thing about Stanford that mattered above all else; its name. Thrun gave the students a test to certify what they had learned and that is when Stanford stepped in. Thrun was giving away something for free for which Stanford charged $50,000 a year. The compromise was that Thrun could not issue college credits he could only issue a “Statement of Accomplishment.”

When the university said no to credits Thrun finished out his course and walked away. Then he started Udacity. Another start up aiming at University education online is Coursera. And there will be many more.

The problem is the recognition and the certification. That is why we are working with IACET: the International Association of Continuing Education and Training to obtain certification. This will allow our students to earn CEUs which translate into college credits.

Then Socrates will issue badges along with a “Certificate of Completion.” The badges will represent specific areas of learning: selling, operations, finance and leadership.

The Time is NOW.