The man who made robots smarter is now working on disrupting education

ORIGINAL: Venture Beat
Romain Nervil
November 20, 2013

Sebastian Thrun Wikipedia image

Sebastian Thrun has worked on making robots smarter, including “Stanley,” the driverless car that won the 2005 DARPA Challenge. Now he’s working on making humans smarter with Udacity, the online education company he co-founded in 2011.

Udacity offers affordable, accessible and relevant courses that serves hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world. Their curriculum, built together with industry leaders, bridges the gap between academia and skills needed for the 21st century tech workforce. Courses include modern programming, computer science, product design, and web development classes, as well as curriculum tracks in Data Science & Big Data.

Thrun will be speaking at the upcoming DataBeat/Data Science Summit, Dec. 4-5 in Redwood Shores, Calif., as part of a stellar lineup of data scientists, data analysts, and engineers building the next generation of Big Data tools.

So what does a robotics expert have to do with online education — and big data? 

A lot, as it turns out.

Online education might be an unusual outcome for a man whose early career was spent as a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University in the 1990′s. He blended his two subjects of expertise, computer science and statistics, to help make robots smarter and more able to learn and interact with their environment. From 2003 on, he guided the team that built Stanley, helping give vehicle the necessary sensors to “see” the road, and software to make the right decisions and complete the race.

At the same time, he contributed to the machine learning algorithms that enabled the software to learn faster by incorporating human corrections, becoming better over time. Thrun went on the become a Google Fellow and publish a book on probabilistic programming techniques in robotics.

So what does that all have to do with Udacity? 

Why would a statistics and artificial intelligence guru start such a venture, if not to apply his machine learning chops to a grand challenge such as education?

Hundreds of thousands of students working on the classes give Udacity millions of interactions, generating gigabytes of progress data to mine in order to make the system smarter and more efficient.

In other words, the kind of probabilistic data analysis that helped make Stanley so smart could soon help make our educators smarter, teaching students more effectively and adapting to their needs more quickly, based on what they are actually doing in their classes.

And that, in turn, could make all of us smarter.

Google’s Boss and a Princeton Professor Agree: College Is a Dinosaur

ORIGINAL: Bloomberg
By Peter Coy 

September 13, 2013

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt speaks during an opening ceremony for a Motorola smartphone factory on Sept. 10 in Fort Worth. Photograph by LM Otero/AP Photo

Colleges and universities are indecisive, slow-moving, and vulnerable to losing their best teachers to the Internet.

That’s the shared view of Google (GOOG) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Department of State official and until this month a tenured professor at Princeton University. They explored the problems of higher education on Friday in a one-on-one conversation sponsored by the New America Foundation, where Schmidt serves as chairman and Slaughter is the new president.

Colleges have the luxury of thorough, democratic deliberation of issues because “they never actually do anything,” Schmidt said during the event. He cited Princeton, where he graduated in 1976 and once served as trustee, which spent six years deliberating over whether to change its academic calendar—and in the end did nothing. “Don’t get me started on that,” Slaughter laughed.
STORY: Seriously, How Much Did You Learn in College?

Schmidt was more positive about the un-Princeton-like Khan Academy, on whose board he serves. He said the academy, which offers free online video tutorials on dozens of topics, has begun to analyze students’ answers to figure out which questions do the best job of assessing mastery of a topic.

The Google boss also had kind words for EdX, a nonprofit created by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that lets students take “interesting, fun, and rigorous courses” for free. Google and EdX announced this week that the tech giant will host a platform called Open EdX in a bid to make it easier for anyone to create online courses. “The fun will start,” Schmidt said, as new ventures smash up against incumbents that resist change.

Slaughter agreed that traditional colleges and universities, with their high fixed costs, are at risk. “They’re going to lose their top talent,” she said. “We can become global teachers. The best people can become free agents.”

BLOG: Wharton Puts First-Year MBA Courses Online for Free

Speaking from the audience, BuzzFeed President Jon Steinberg said he doesn’t think his young children will need to attend college. “I don’t want my kids to go to college unless they desperately want to be scholars.”

That was a bridge too far for Schmidt. He said college “just produces a better adult.” While acknowledging that Google’s college recruits aren’t equipped to contribute immediately, he said, “They are phenomenal employees after the training program.”

Schmidt said entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who pays young people to launch startups instead of studying in college, “is just fundamentally wrong. We want more educated people.”

Writing in the Sciences

ORIGINAL: Stanford



Writing in the Sciences

Date:
Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Platform: OpenEdX

This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: 

• principles of good writing, 
• tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, 
• the format of a scientific manuscript, and 
• issues in publication and peer review. 

Students from non-science disciplines can benefit from the training provided in the first four weeks (on general principles of effective writing).

COURSE FORMAT In the first four weeks, we will review principles of effective writing, examples of good and bad writing, and tips for making the writing process easier. In the second four weeks, we will examine issues specific to scientific writing, including: authorship, peer review, the format of an original manuscript, and communicating science for lay audiences. Students will watch video lectures, complete quizzes and editing exercises, write two short papers, and edit each others’ work.

COURSE SYLLABUS Week 1 - Introduction; principles of effective writing (cutting unnecessary clutter)
Week 2 - Principles of effective writing (verbs)
Week 3 - Crafting better sentences and paragraphs
Week 4 - Organization; and streamlining the writing process
Week 5 - The format of an original manuscript
Week 6 - Reviews, commentaries, and opinion pieces; and the publication process
Week 7 - Issues in scientific writing (plagiarism, authorship, ghostwriting, reproducible research)
Week 8 - How to do a peer review; and how to communicate with the lay public

PREREQUISITES
The course has no prerequisites other than fluency in English.

FAQ:
Will I get a Statement of Accomplishment?

Yes, students who score at least 60 percent will pass the course and receive a certificate.
Students who score at least 90 percent will receive a certificate with distinction.

How much of a time commitment will this course be?
You should expect this course to require 4 to 8 hours of work per week.

Any additional textbooks/software required?
There is no textbook for this course. Students who would like additional reading may enjoy:
- On Writing Well, William Zinsser;
- The Elements of Style, Strunk and White;
- Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale;
- Essentials of Writing Biomedical Research Papers, Mimi Zeiger;
- http://www.aacc.org/publications/clin_chem/ccgsw/Pages/default.aspx

Instructor(s) Kristin Sainani
Clinical Assistant Professor, Stanford University

Kristin Sainani (née Cobb) is a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University and also a health and science writer. After receiving an MS in statistics and PhD in epidemiology from Stanford University, she studied science writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has taught statistics and writing at Stanford for a decade and has received several Excellence in Teaching Awards from the graduate program in epidemiology.

Return to Stanford Online Course catalog

How Education Will Fix Itself

ORIGINAL: Big Think
by Niall Ferguson
August 19, 2013

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Let's suppose you are running the perfect state, the perfect government. You would want to go on a little world tour before you got down to business to see the best practices. What are the educational systems that really do well, that produce the kinds of things that are desirable - social mobility, innovation, creativity - but also high skill levels for the mediocre because that’s in many ways the most important thing.

That would be the first port of call. Let’s go to Finland or Singapore or pay a visit to the Shanghai Education District. They seem to be doing something right. And then take a long hard look at our system, and particularly at the high schools. I think the biggest weakness in the U.S. system lies at the level of secondary high school education where there are a great many public schools that do not deliver. And this is zip code related. It’s essentially bad schools in poor areas. I think that’s our biggest problem.

You can’t really solve this problem at the university level. You can’t say, we’ve got to redress this by making universities work differently because until you are doing a good job of secondary education, the game is already over by the time you get to SATs. So I think that would be the first part of the problem.

And then the question becomes, do you aim to produce a better system of public education, which would be a kind of Scandinavian solution? Or, do you say, that is never going to work here, we’re not Denmark. Let’s have more competition so that it’s not a monopoly of public schools, but it’s actually a competitive system. That’s the British solution, if you like. A solution where there’s a much larger private sector and in which the competition between the public and private sectors is the driver.

We’ve got that here, but only in the university sector. It’s only in the university sector that you’ve got private institutions like Harvard competing with public ones like Berkeley. My kind of preference is to explore getting more competition to percolate down into the secondary level. But there’s another way of thinking about this, which is really different. And that’s to say, this problem will solve itself. It will solve itself because technological innovation is revolutionizing how we learn so totally that the conversation we’ve just had about colleges and schools will look anachronistic in about 20 years.

The way one can learn through the internet is one of the most exciting things going on right now from my vantage point. And I believed in this from early on. I was even involved in a failed startup called Box Mind in the 1990’s that was supposed to make available the best quality academic lectures in the world to absolutely anybody. And we were ahead of our time.

We have, I think, now reached a point where that is doable and that is happening. In some ways, Big Think is part of that. One can have a tutorial with one professor and a million tutees. And that’s exciting. It’s also exciting that the textbook, in its old and tedious form is dying and is going to be replaced by eTextbooks that are interactive, web-enabled, and that is exciting not just because it’s cool and iPads are better than textbooks. It’s exciting because done right; the e-Textbook allows teachers to monitor progress of pupils much more efficiently. But once you’ve got people doing that sort of work it’s easier to monitor performance. You don’t have to check every single student; the little red light will tell you who’s really falling behind in the algebra exercises.

So I’m actually pretty optimistic about what technology can do for education. I think we know a lot more than we’ve put into effect about what works in the classroom and indeed, outside of the classroom. We’ve got a huge challenge on our hands because there’s another side to technology which creates what I call, the Attention Deficit Disorder problem where the technology is so good that the students can’t study. There’s a text every minute, there’s an email every 10 minutes that simultaneously on Facebook and on Khan Academy and on Google News and in fact they don’t learn anything. They certainly don’t read War and Peace. My test is, are you able – I mean, I ask my students this. Can you read War and Peace? Have you read it? No, of course not. Can you read it? Could you read it? Can you imagine being able to have read it by Monday?

So we’ve got to make sure that the technology enhances our learning capability, not destroys it. And we’ve tipped, finely balanced at this point. I think the opportunity’s definitely there, but right now I think it’s not working, it’s not happening. In fact, if anything, the power of technology is a source of distraction to the average student and not enhanced learning. So we’ve got to really make sure that it goes towards more efficient learning. Let’s get away from the lecture, the monologue where everybody sits and the professor bloviates for 50 units. Let’s make it interactive. Let’s recognize how long the typical attention span is. Let’s make the materials more interactive. Let’s take games and make them educational. Everybody loves to play games, especially the male of the species. Educational games are a huge part of where education is going. And we know that they work. We know that once you engage somebody in a strategy game, they learn more about history. A marketing game, they learn more about marketing.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.

Revolución educativa con sello colombiano

ORIGINAL: El Espectador
Por Marcela Díaz Sandoval

2013 Agosto 02

Más de 15 millones de personas han aprendido con TareasPlus.com, el portal que suma 80.000 visitantes al día y está en el top 20 de aplicaciones más descargadas.

Hernán Jaramillo y Roberto Cuartas son dos paisas de esos que llevan en las venas el éxito, en la mente el emprendimiento y que saben que a la cima se llega de la mano con la perseverancia. Ingenieros industriales de la Escuela de Ingeniería de Antioquia y ahora creadores de TareasPlus.com, el portal para jóvenes y adultos que está revolucionando la educación en línea de América Latina.

Por ahí dicen que de la necesidad nacen los emprendedores. Y sí, la frase toma vida en esta historia. Bajo esta premisa creció el proyecto hace 14 años en un barrio de Medellín, cuando los entonces estudiantes de quinto semestre buscaban alternativas para generar dinero extra y empezaron a hacer tutorías de matemáticas presenciales cobrando $7.000 por hora.

La amistad creció de la mano con el proyecto. “Tenía una red de estudiantes y en ciertas ocasiones, cuando no podía cumplir la cuota de demanda, lo que hacía era subcontratarlo. Ahí nació la amistad”, asegura Hernán, el socio fundador. Y fue en esa rutina temprana que les surgió una idea para que el negocio entrara en una nueva fase: “Nos dimos cuenta de que al hacer estas tutorías teníamos la posibilidad de resolver uno de los problemas más grandes de educación. La clave consistía en no restringir el tiempo en las explicaciones que dábamos, pero para lograrlo necesitábamos de tecnología”.

En esencia, TareasPlus.com pertenece al Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), las plataformas de cursos en línea diseñadas para que cualquier persona en el mundo pueda acceder a ellas a través de internet. Un fenómeno que surgió en el año 2007 y cuya filosofía es que el conocimiento traspase las fronteras.

La historia de TareasPlus.com se resume en un tablero que deja ver los tachones del ensayo y el error. Relatos, diseños y cálculos hacen parte del proyecto que nació en 1999 y que tomó vuelo hace dos años rumbo a California: “Duramos dos o tres años desde que empezamos y lo dejamos en el olvido. A pesar de que tuvimos apoyo en Colombia, las condiciones no eran propicias”, dice Hernán desde California, Estados Unidos, y en su voz entrecortada puede sentirse que echa de menos el país: “Siempre estábamos buscando este sueño y un día, con mi socio, reunimos los ahorros y nos fuimos para Silicon Valley”. Sueño que ya es realidad. TareasPlus.com tiene su equipo de desarrollo en Medellín, pero la compañía está instalada en San Francisco.

“Siempre había tenido claro que era más fácil conseguir recursos en Silicon Valley para una idea de estas características. Porque a los inversionistas de acá no hay que evangelizarlos. Fue más sencillo conseguir aquí los US$2 millones que necesitábamos”, asegura Hernán Jaramillo. Él mismo reconoce que el entorno lo ha llevado a creerse el cuento de la oportunidad: “Ahí es donde uno tiene que sacarla del estadio. Uno sale a la calle y empieza a ver que los otros emprendedores son niños de 18 años”. Después de 115 intentos fallidos, la presentación del proyecto fue aprobada en la zona sur de San Francisco.
TareasPlus.com es hoy la respuesta a uno de los problemas más grandes de educación: el tiempo limitado para aprender. La comunidad cuenta con más de 7.000 lecciones o tutoriales y ha entregado lo equivalente a cien años continuos de clases. “Roberto, mi socio, agarró su tableta y empezó a crear tutoriales de cinco y siete minutos donde se explica una materia completa como cálculo diferencial; es uno de los matemáticos más interesantes que yo he conocido en mi vida”, reconoce Hernán.

El portal comenzó con asesorías en matemáticas y ciencias, pero ahora están incursionando con negocios y tecnología. Todos los cursos y materias van ligados al mundo de los números. La idea de los jóvenes colombianos ha dado pasos agigantados en el mercado virtual y el panorama actual de TareasPlus.com se muestra así: más de 15 millones de personas han aprendido con ellos; las visitas diarias oscilan entre 80.000 y 100.000. Del total, el 30% corresponde a Colombia, y le siguen México, Perú, Chile y España. Tienen repercusión en 23 países hispanoparlantes y reciben visitas, incluso, de Brasil (aunque los cursos están en español).

Y por si fuera poco, su aplicación para ipad fue aprobada hace ocho días. “Hemos tenido resultados muy interesantes. Acompañamos a los estudiantes desde cualquier lugar”, asegura. Aunque el futuro es impredecible, ellos ya tienen en mente lo que quieren alcanzar en unos años: “La idea es que la persona que quiera obtener un título profesional vea el portal como destino. Nos queremos convertir en el verdadero Amazon del conocimiento. Lo haremos primero en español, después en portugués y, posiblemente en, inglés”.


 | elespectador.com

Introducing a List of 50 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities

ORIGINAL: Open Culture

October 15th, 2012

Earlier this year we began telling you about a potential revolution in education — the birth of MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses. As explained above, these courses let students, thousands at a time, take courses from great universities for free online. What’s more, most of these courses offer students a credential — something like a certificate of completion — if they master the material covered in the class. Some of the MOOC providers are well known: 

• Coursera, 
• Udacity, and 
• edX. Others, like
• Class2Go, 
• Google Course Builder and 
• Venture Lab, are just emerging. 

But, together, they’re producing courses at breakneck speed, and we thought it was time to start organizing a list for you.

Today, we’re rolling out a list of 50 Free Courses Granting Certificates from Great Universities. The list organizes courses chronologically by start date, and it indicates the kind of credential the courses offer — for example,

• Certificates of Completion, 
• Statements of Accomplishment, or 
• Certificates of Mastery. 

The list, which happens to include another 25 courses not bearing certificates, will be regularly updated. You can expect it to grow rapidly, and you can always access it by clicking Certificate Courses in the top navigation of our web site. Below we have listed a number of online courses starting this week:

• Finance - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (10 weeks)
• Introduction to Computer Science - Harvard on edX – October 15 (24 weeks)
• Startup Boards: Advanced Entrepreneurship - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Designing a New Learning Environment - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Technology Entrepreneurship - Stanford on Venture Lab – October 15 (9 weeks)
• Experimental Genome Science - Duke on Coursera – October 15 (12 weeks)
• A Crash Course on Creativity - Stanford on Venture Lab - October 17 (10 weeks)

Get the full list here. It includes 75 Massive Open Courses in total.