On-line Learning: A Story and an Invitation

[Andrew Crapo]

I saw an article a while back suggesting that on-line learning had peeked and was on the decline. I would like to share some interesting things that have happened recently, in case you're not familiar with them, and then extend to you an invitation.


In the fall of 2011 Stanford University offered CS221, An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence [1], a course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, to anyone with Web access. You may recognize Thrun as the leader of the Google self-driving car project. Norvig is the director of research at Google.


In late July they announced the course in an email to 1000 members of AAAI. By the next morning 5,000 people had signed up. In a few days it was 10,000. After 2 weeks 58,000. In mid-August the New York Times wrote-up the class and enrollment passed 100,000, eventually reaching 160,000 [2]. The students came from 144 countries and only about a third were from the US. Volunteers signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages. When the professors decided to drop the programming exercises, an 18-year-old high school senior from Toronto created a Web site where people could practice coding the algorithms studied in the class. Other participants provided other impressive contributions such as organizing 1000s of questions and answers and associating them with the course videos. Students helped each other on-line in near real time. The course was completed by about 20,000 students [3]. Incidentally, most of the 200 students actually enrolled in the class stopped coming to lectures. They preferred the multimedia presentations with pause and rewind capability. Thrun says learning improved. In past years the mid-term average had been 60. In this class it was 83 and he claims it was the hardest he'd ever given.


Using $300,000 of his own money, followed by 10's of millions of venture capital, Thrun with some colleagues formed Udacity in 2012 [4]. It currently offers about 15 on-line courses. The courses are free but student may pay for final testing to certify mastery of course material. For example, one course final exam offered by Pearson costs $89. Udacity is working to lower the cost for students.


Udacity is not without competition. EdX was formed in the fall of 2012 by MIT and Harvard with each contributing $30M [5]. Several other universities have joined and they currently offer about 2 dozen courses [6]. The Floating University was formed in fall of 2011. Coursera was created shortly after Udacity by Stanford computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller and has an enrollment approaching 2,000,000 [7].


And now the invitation. A colleague at work invited some friends to join him in taking a Coursera course starting in January. When I took a look at course offerings I was intrigued by one entitled “e-Learning and Digital Cultures” [8]. It starts on January 28 and is 5 weeks long. All my friends at work are taking STEM classes like robotics. It's always fun when you have some class mates close to home, so I invite anyone in the SGCSD community who might be interested in experiencing a Coursera class to join me. “This course has been developed collaboratively by a team of experienced teachers and researchers in online education, who run the international MSc in E-learning distance education programme at the University of Edinburgh.” [8] Expected effort is 3-5 hours per week. Any one interested? Let me know (acr...@earthlink.net) and we can collaborate!

Andy Crapo


[1] http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs221/

[2] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ff_aiclass/all/

[3] http://www.scoop.it/t/digital-education-1/p/3034380601/moocs-and-the-ai-stanford-like-courses-two-successful-and-distinct-course-formats-for-massive-open-online-courses-european-journal-of-open-distance-and-e-learning

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udacity

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdX

[6] https://www.edx.org/

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

[8] https://www.coursera.org/course/edc