IC Seminar : The Online Revolution : Education for Everyone by Prof. Daphne Koller, Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Event details
| Date | 03.07.2012 |
| Hour | 10:15 › 11:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Daphne Koller |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
Last year, Stanford University offered three online courses, which anyone in the world could enroll in and take for free. Students were expected to submit homeworks, meet deadlines, and were awarded a "Statement of Accomplishment" only if they met our high grading bar. Together, these three courses had enrollments of around 350,000 students, making this one of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. In the past few months, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture, Coursera, a social entrepeneurship company that partners with top universities to provide high-quality content to everyone around the world for free. Coursera currently has around 650K registered students in 42 courses, and around 1.5 million enrollments.
In this talk, I'll report on this new experiment in education, and why we believe this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for our on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality. I'll describe the pedagogical foundations for this type of teaching, and the key technological ideas that support them, including easy-to-create video chunks, a scalable online Q&A forum where students can get their questions answered quickly, sophisticated autograded homeworks, and a carefully designed peer grading pipeline that supports the at-scale grading of more open-ended homeworks, such as essay questions, derivations, or business plans. Through such technology, we envision millions of people gaining access to the world-leading education that has so far been available only to a tiny few, and using this education to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.
Biography
Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the Oswald Villard University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Her main research interest is in developing and using machine learning and probabilistic methods to model and analyze complex domains. She is the author of over 180 refereed publications, which have appeared in venues that include Science, Cell, and Nature Genetics (her H-index is over 80). She also has a long-standing interest in education. She founded the CURIS program, the Stanford Computer Science Department's undergraduate summer internship program, and the Biomedical Computation major at Stanford. She pioneered in her classroom many of the ideas that are key to Stanford's massive online education effort. She was awarded the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM/Infosys award in 2008, and was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2011. Her teaching was recognized via the Cox Medal for excellence in fostering undergraduate research at Stanford in 2003, and by being named a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng
Last year, Stanford University offered three online courses, which anyone in the world could enroll in and take for free. Students were expected to submit homeworks, meet deadlines, and were awarded a "Statement of Accomplishment" only if they met our high grading bar. Together, these three courses had enrollments of around 350,000 students, making this one of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. In the past few months, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture, Coursera, a social entrepeneurship company that partners with top universities to provide high-quality content to everyone around the world for free. Coursera currently has around 650K registered students in 42 courses, and around 1.5 million enrollments.
In this talk, I'll report on this new experiment in education, and why we believe this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for our on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality. I'll describe the pedagogical foundations for this type of teaching, and the key technological ideas that support them, including easy-to-create video chunks, a scalable online Q&A forum where students can get their questions answered quickly, sophisticated autograded homeworks, and a carefully designed peer grading pipeline that supports the at-scale grading of more open-ended homeworks, such as essay questions, derivations, or business plans. Through such technology, we envision millions of people gaining access to the world-leading education that has so far been available only to a tiny few, and using this education to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.
Biography
Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the Oswald Villard University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Her main research interest is in developing and using machine learning and probabilistic methods to model and analyze complex domains. She is the author of over 180 refereed publications, which have appeared in venues that include Science, Cell, and Nature Genetics (her H-index is over 80). She also has a long-standing interest in education. She founded the CURIS program, the Stanford Computer Science Department's undergraduate summer internship program, and the Biomedical Computation major at Stanford. She pioneered in her classroom many of the ideas that are key to Stanford's massive online education effort. She was awarded the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM/Infosys award in 2008, and was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2011. Her teaching was recognized via the Cox Medal for excellence in fostering undergraduate research at Stanford in 2003, and by being named a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Links
Practical information
- Informed public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- Martin Vetterli
Contact
- Christine Moscioni