In 2012, education startups attracted millions of students—and a surge of interest from universities and the media—by offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Now some core features of these wildly popular courses are being dissected, enabling the course providers to do some learning of their own. As these companies analyze user data and experiment with different features, they are exploring how to customize students’ learning experiences, and they are amassing a stock of pedagogical tricks to help more students finish their courses.Andrew Ng, a cofounder of MOOC provider Coursera and an associate professor at Stanford University and other major figures from the MOOC world have long foreseen that MOOCs would provide a wealth of data about how students actually learn. However, until recently these small companies have been too preoccupied with scaling up their infrastructure in order to meet exploding demand.
Since MOOCs first appeared, bite-sized videos have provided the bulk of the teaching, accompanied by online assessments and exercises to help cement the content in students’ minds. However, both Coursera’s data and Udacity’s reveal a large subset of students who prefer to skip videos and fast-forward as much as possible. “We’ve been starting to restructure our courses to have much less video, and to rerecord some videos,” says Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford robotics professor, a vice president at Google, and cofounder and CEO of Udacity. “Our popular courses are really changing a lot based on our data.”
Much of the performance research is motivated by a desire to increase course completion rates, which hover around 10 percent, according to most MOOC providers and figures from academics who have taught using the courses.a methodology common at Internet companies
It’s unclear whether the laundry lists of refinements that result from A/B testing will add up to a grand theory of learning and teaching that challenges tradition. Ng says he doesn’t think a grand theory is needed for MOOCs to succeed. “I read Piaget and Montessori, and they both seem compelling, but educators generally have no way to choose what really works,” he says. “Today, education is an anecdotal science, but I think we can turn education into a data-driven science, where you do what you know works.”
Source: MIT Technology Review
Since MOOCs first appeared, bite-sized videos have provided the bulk of the teaching, accompanied by online assessments and exercises to help cement the content in students’ minds. However, both Coursera’s data and Udacity’s reveal a large subset of students who prefer to skip videos and fast-forward as much as possible. “We’ve been starting to restructure our courses to have much less video, and to rerecord some videos,” says Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford robotics professor, a vice president at Google, and cofounder and CEO of Udacity. “Our popular courses are really changing a lot based on our data.”
Much of the performance research is motivated by a desire to increase course completion rates, which hover around 10 percent, according to most MOOC providers and figures from academics who have taught using the courses.a methodology common at Internet companies
It’s unclear whether the laundry lists of refinements that result from A/B testing will add up to a grand theory of learning and teaching that challenges tradition. Ng says he doesn’t think a grand theory is needed for MOOCs to succeed. “I read Piaget and Montessori, and they both seem compelling, but educators generally have no way to choose what really works,” he says. “Today, education is an anecdotal science, but I think we can turn education into a data-driven science, where you do what you know works.”
Source: MIT Technology Review
