Reinventing Education, Anant Agarwal Keynote at Sloan-C #aln13

Sloan C Friday Keynote: Anant Agarwal from edX

https://www.edx.org
a $60 million investment from MIT and Harvard

Compared to large classrooms/lecture halls, students often prefer virtual contact with instructors
-Feels more personalized, learning in a way that is customized to their needs

On campus education hasn't changed in centuries- lecture, podiums, neat rows
-30% of students routinely sleep in class

Move to blended learning and small, interactive groups

edX History
They were hoping for 2000 students. 10,000 signed up in first few hours.
Eventually 155,000 students enrolled in the first course- Circuits and Electronics

26,349 tried first problem set
10,547 made it to midterm
9318 passed the midterm
8240 took the final exam
7157 Certified

Compares the concept of the retention rate in MOOCs to the acceptance rate of schools like MIT.

United Nations has # of countries in the world as 214, and they have students from more than 217 countries.

30% of students from US
13% from India

edX is a non-profit
offers open edX code

China platform XuetangX (schoolX)
France Universite Numerique
Arab region platform Erdaak by QRF

MOOCs contribute to improving campus learning e.g. San Jose State University where course retake rates droped from 41%to 9%

Anatomy of an edX Online Class-
*Active Learning
-students go to bed dreaming of green check marks
-gamification virtual labs
-Harvard course- Science of Cooking

*Peer Learning

*Credentialing
- XSeries Certificates, sequences of courses

How long should videos be?
How does student engagement relate to video lengths?
Philip Guo
863 videos, 5,265,833 watching sessions
Compared certificate earners to all other students
Certificate earner results:
Maximum engagement-- 6-9 minutes long
40 minute video- median watch time 2 minutes

Hours spent on Homework in relation to total points in a course-- more hours spent more total points in the course

Sloan C Online Learning Conference 2013 #aln13

Attending Daphne Koller's keynote session: The Online Revolution: Learning without Limits. Koller was a member of the team who launched the Stanford MOOC experiment. She founded Coursera, the leading forum for MOOCs and a catalyst in the MOOC explosion.

https://www.coursera.org

She demonstrates an interactive method- in video quizzes- that allows every student to grapple with the questions before the smarty pants at the front of the class doing it first.

She discusses the challenge of grading 100,000 students.

Auto-graded homeworks and exercises. Even complex exercises like online labs- have students perform experiments with resources in their own environment- video and put through tools like image tracking solutions. Third-party integration through LTI compatibility.
Advantage of scalability but also a pedagogical advantage- immediate feedback. Prompts gaming, leveling mentality to resubmit and try again-- self-induced mastery. "Students who engage in mastery-based learning do better on summative exams, not just formative exams."

Peer grading. Calibrated peer review mixed with ideas from crowd-sourcing. Grading rubric designed by instructor and trained to use it. Encourages collaborative learning through peer evaluation and discussion. Pedagogical benefits- critical thinking about quality of work, reflective process. Duneier at Princeton examined whether the peer evaluations are as credible as those done by more advanced learners (TAs) -- found that raters had similar levels of consensus. This relies on having a good rubric.

This brand of online courses creates more of a sense of community feedback. Discussion boards attract experts.
Students often get their answers faster and in more depth because the work of response is distributed.
Global community offers multiple perspectives and diverse contexts for the topics and problems posed. On campus professors ask students to attend the MOOCs in order to get this exposure.

Do we need face-to-face interaction? Yes. Participants have begun meeting in local areas in tandem with MOOCs. Example: Ohio minority women in 40s-50s, unemployed or working in low-paying jobs brought together for a computer lab and chose a MOOC to take. 6 of these women pased an MBA level exam in this course. The power of combining high quality online material with local support. This prompted the launch of Learning Hubs- access to high-speed internet and facilitated learning.

Credentials
Verified certificate program- sign up 2 weeks within the course for the Signature Track- identity confirmed with web camera pic, keystroke biometrics (NEAT!!) and photo id. It costs approx $50. And it can be posted in a places like a LinkedIn profile. This effort has already raised over $1 billion. Completion rate for students who sign up for Signature Track 60%. Completion rate for those who declare they intend to finish and sign up for Signature Track 84%. GA Tech professor compared completion rate for same class on campus (74%) to his signature track MOOC students 99%.

Data Collection
Every class is instrumented so easier to measure learning activities and student behavior at large scales. This allows teachers to understand how to deliver information and design learning activities better.
 The 2 Sigma problem- Bloom 1984- achievement distribution of learners in Lecture, Mastery Learning or Individual Tutoring. Best achievement for individual tutoring, but we cannot afford this for every single student.

Key components for an effective MOOC formula
High quality online content
Produced locally or adapted
Active learning, problem solving
Personal attention to students

Where next?
MOOCs offer a brand new curve for student learning x faculty productivity
Blue ocean strategy- not competing with incumbents, improving different set of attributes, creates markets that did not exist before. MOOC market currently is often lifelong learners, not traditional students.

Friedman "Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary."