Online education website coursera:280 million students ' free University

Is it a pioneer experiment or a profound educational change? The educational tsunami that Coursera led has surged. Guiyun this spring Festival, in Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, Microsoft Research Asia Vice Dean Zhang Yi side while waiting for luggage while using mobile phone to watch "The United States Contemporary Poetry" course, this lecture on William Carlos Williams, he is one of the 20th century most famous poets in the United States. The video is full of beard Professor Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania and several students, sitting around a wooden round table, Professor Filreis on the various parts of the poem to each student questions, students one by one give his opinion. Zhang Yi in the ears of the classroom to listen to such intense discussion, but now is a circle of shiny metal belt rotation, which makes him a kind of fantasy, for a moment do not know where the body. Zhang Yi, who is currently in charge of systems and Web research in Microsoft, laughs at his "age, which has been in academia for quite a few years", when he last formally became a student 16 years ago, when he received his Ph. D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 16 years later he became a student again, and the school was named Coursera. The Free University of 2.8 million students was enrolled in three courses in 2012, the probabilistic graph model of Stanford University, the neural network by Professor New Ton of the University of Toronto, and the American contemporary Poetry of the University of Pennsylvania (Zhang Yi). None of these courses are provided by prestigious universities in the United States. He doesn't have to quit his job, get a visa, or even spend a few seconds on a Coursera to sign up for an account, and he can take a course of interest wherever he wants. Coursera is an online education website that has just finished its one-year-old birthday. Recently, Professor Andrew Ng and Professor Daphne Koller were selected in Time magazine's 2013 "The world's most influential 100 people." "Coursera broke the old model of education," Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a magazine recommendation. Online education has gone through many wrong attempts and seems to have finally found the right path. ”。 Ezekiel Emanuel, a biologist, opened a health policy and Affordable Care Act on Coursera. He said he had received an e-mail from Sri Lanka, which was a postcard of thanks to him, and he thought it was amazing and wonderful, "I never thought my student union would be in these places before." Currently, there are 2.8 million students in the Coursera, which are spread over 196 countries, China is the fourth largest "source of land", after the United States, India and Brazil. The magic of Coursera is that it allows people to spontaneously talk around their courses. Watercress has a Coursera Learning Platform group that already has 6000A number of members, every day, people post to discuss learning problems. Nutshell NET has a specialized MOOC (large-scale on-line open course) self-study classroom, Coursera is one of the three mountains of Mooc course, now this self-study classroom already has more than 15,000 "students". These people are free to study science, courses in business, economics, arts, literature, and law, which are offered by 62 prestigious universities around the world, including Stanford University, Princeton University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, and the new Chinese language courses provided by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the National University of Taiwan. "It's like a tsunami," said Professor Richard DeMillo of the Georgia Institute of Technology in an interview with the New York Times. "It has so much potential that I can't imagine any research university wanting to be involved." "Why is Coursera so fascinating?" he commented, "This is a great step in bringing the university curriculum to the Internet, and technology is starting to change the rules of the game and need more pioneers like Coursera." "So, what is the vanguard of Coursera?" Ailsa is one of the millions of students in Coursera. She is 18 years old, a freshman at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, majoring in computer science. Every night after class she would go to Coursera a section of the Calculus One course offered by Ohio State University. After a few weeks in a row, she laments on Weibo: "We are 3 hours a week, the teacher only told us to remember the formula can be, Coursera curriculum, the teacher put all the mentioned formula proved!!" And the teacher is super cute!! This is a good math class!! "It's not hard to see her excitement from the exclamation point," she said. In the same class, compared to the college class, she felt that Coursera's courses were more free and could be paused at any time. "The classes in the college class have to take care of most of the students ' feelings, and the tempo doesn't fit my requirements," Ailsa said. In fact, compared with the ordinary domestic universities, she is in the University of Nottingham in Ningbo is a small class teaching. In addition to lectures, there are only 10 or so people in a class, but she does not feel as free and personalized as the online curriculum. This kind of individuation is the advantage of Network course, make the ideal "one-to-one teaching" really have possibility. There is no limit to the time and place of study, except that it can be paused at any time. Zhang Yi said he would take the phone, tablet or laptop he had with him in his spare time of more than 15 minutes to take the time to class. The course itself is no longer subject to a 45-minute limit, but can be divided into videos that allow students to selectively watch and learn according to their actual needs. Mark Twain once said that college was a place where professors ' notes were transferred directly to students ' notebooks and did not linger in any of their brains for a moment. He criticized the teaching method,It is also the most popular and most widely used one. In this mode of teaching, the teacher stood on the podium and said, students sit down to listen, a class down, students in the end to learn how much, the teacher knows nothing. Coursera is trying to solve the problem with technology. For example, in the "Base Rate Bias" course, every few minutes, the video will be paused, a small problem will bounce out, if not answer the correct video will not go down. This will test whether the students understand what the teacher said before, but also let the students focus. Ailsa also has a deep understanding of this. She said there were no regular assignments in the College class, and Coursera had homework after each class. "So that you can check if you have learned," Ailsa that the effect of having a problem is better than before. With homework, not only students can know how they learn, teachers can also know how they teach. For example, in Professor Andrew Ng's "machine learning" course, thousands of people gave the same wrong answer to the same question, which he had to pay special attention to, analyze the causes of the error and provide targeted counseling to the thousands of students who made mistakes. However, the Coursera of a class is still good tens of thousands of, hundreds of thousands of people together, homework how to correct? The science courses are slightly better, and some fixed-answer questions can be corrected by computer. Especially the humanities subjects, homework is to write articles, how many teachers can be changed to come over? Coursera's solution is to use the characteristics of human assuming, so that students to correct each other. Take Zhang Yi of the "American Present and contemporary poetry" class, the article submitted to see the score, you must first give the other 4 students to write comments, to see other students to give you a hit score. And how to score, the teacher will give a few judgments of the basis. Does this correcting method guarantee accuracy? Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller showed a curve and found that students ' grades were close to the teacher's grade. Zhang Yi also thinks the scoring system is fair. "Every click, every video, every job submission is data," Daphne Koller said in a Ted speech. She describes that Coursera use these data to monitor teaching results and make improvements in a timely manner. The traditional teaching model is a black box, we do not know what happened in the inside, also have no way of knowing the effect. And technology is expected to break the black box for the first time. Daphne Koller said, "This is also a study of the process of human learning knowledge." Once the learning process is digitized, the invisible hand of large data and cloud computing can know where students learn poorly and what needs to be strengthened to improve their learning efficiency. But for this, Zhang Yi does not fully agree that "unless we have a deeper understanding of the cognitive process of the human brain, this ambition is premature." "For the present Coursera, ZhangZheng thinks its approach has been very comprehensive. With the "Neural network" course, he has tried a lot of learning methods and learning materials, "but did not learn so smoothly in Coursera." Zhang Yi completed most of the tests and assignments for these courses, but because he didn't care about scoring, submitting assignments just wanted to assess whether he had mastered the knowledge, and since most of the tests and assignments were submitted after the deadline, the courses were not divided. He described the experience like this: "This is a bad score, but I'm happy to learn." He even felt that if the contents of the current American contemporary literature were different, he would not even want to pass, so that he could go on. He compares this kind of study with the previous study, thinks before all is for the examination, but in the Coursera, "the study is one kind of continuous state, naturally must like the air". This year Zhang Yi also enrolled in several courses, of which "natural language processing" is half the course, "Impromptu music" course will be started in the near future, he and his daughter together to learn "song creation", with his son finished "How they work" course. When the pioneer encounters traditional education not everyone will be like Zhang Yi only for the interest to learn, in education has become a huge industry background, as a pioneer of Coursera in addition to do "applause" more to consider how to "draw", only more in-depth understanding of people's demand for education, Coursera can make himself no longer stay in the pioneer experiment, but through the offline education resources of the industrial chain, more profound change of society. For example, many people in Coursera learning will be very concerned about whether the social recognition of these practical problems, more people are involved in this prestigious courses as a way to make up for their inability to study in the University of a regret, Coursera also began to explore the certification of qualifications. In January this year, Coursera announced that 5 courses had been certified by the American Council of Education (ACE) for credit equivalency. This means that students who have completed these 5 courses will be able to convert them into real credits at universities that receive ACE recommendations. Coursera continues to work with Ace, hoping to get more certification. At the same time, Coursera also cooperates with universities to provide certification for their courses. For example, if you take a course at Stanford University, you will get an official certificate from Stanford University and Coursera, and Coursera will charge a fee. Now that the first batch of students has been certified, more than 700 students have been certified by the nutrition for Health promotion and disease prevention of the University of California, San Francisco, and more than 200 students have received the An introductory course in genetics and evolution, certified by the University of Illinois's Microeconomics principles course. In addition, CourseRA also seeks recognition in the enterprise. It has provided employment services since last December, a bridge between students and businesses to help businesses find the right people. The service is free for students, but employers need to pay for the information provided by Coursera. Currently, companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Appdirect have signed deals with Coursera. As Coursera through the links with businesses and schools, it seems that the future of college education can be accomplished through online learning, Coursera has the opportunity to become one of the world's largest university classrooms. Google engineer Adam Fletcher studied all the courses on Coursera and, based on these courses, developed a 4-year complete university curriculum plan. This means that it is possible to complete the entire university education free of charge at home. On this point, Wang Zeqi, a professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said, "Our syllabus and books are available online." In fact, most of the better courses have detailed content. There are better videos and teaching materials on the Couresera. If you read the book, practice it yourself, the knowledge and the money to study the difference is not too far. "It seems that the dream of founder Andrew Ng is not so far away," he said. "I want to live in a world where everyone can enjoy free education." "So if Coursera can realize its dream, does it mean a revolution to existing university education?" Or, in the face of the Coursera tsunami, where will traditional college education go? Wang Zeqi that most of the traditional courses in universities do not necessarily exist. "The basics of the course, already have a good online version of the curriculum should be redesigned." The tuition section lets the students watch the video themselves. University classes, repetitive and repetitive lectures and notes should be minimized, not even. The school should pass the weekly exam to ensure that the students read it. But besides exams, schools should provide other useful added value. "In Wang Zeqi's view, the so-called university preaching, lectures are only part of it, for example, through the experimental training team spirit, finance and other courses through practical operation to understand the connotation of the subject, these are online education can not be replaced, Coursera high quality online courses are also forcing universities to think carefully about what their core strengths really are, and the added value of what they can provide to students, and from this perspective, the more pioneer revolutionaries like Coursera, the better.