Characteristics of Udacity

Absrtact: Eric Hellweg and I, editor of the Harvard Business Review magazine (Harvard Business Review), at a party at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government last weekend mentioned the experience of joining the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. Although this forum has always been the world

At a party at Harvard's Kennedy School of government last weekend, Eric Hellweg, editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review magazine (Harvard Business Review), mentioned the experience of joining the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. Although the forum has always been the world's "Big Club Feast", but he said he is most interested in not the politicians and CEOs, but a Pakistani 12-year-old girl. Her name is Hedia Nyaz (Khadija Niazi) from Lahore, Pakistan. Beside her, besides the editor-in-chief, Bill Gates, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and CEO Andrew Ng of the online education website Coursera. Nyaz has a special title: She is the world's smallest student in Udacity to complete the course and get excellent results, there is a legend behind the story, I listened to the educational revolution in the power of shock.

On September 17 last year, the Pakistani government blocked YouTube at home because it has caused many protests around the world to stop the spread of anti-Islamic films called "Muslim Ignorance". But at the same time, one of the few noticeable consequences of this decision is that 215 students from Pakistan lost their "Physics 101" Learning Opportunities on Udacity (Udacity video is embedded in YouTube) There are 23,000 students from all over the world, and Khadijah Niazi, 11, is just one of them. She was on the sixth question of the final exam, only to find that the course video was suddenly inaccessible.

So she was very sad, her 12 birthday is the biggest wish is to be able to the birthday before the end of the class, as a result, in the next week, this happened, in the Udacity forum sent a post: "I am very angry, but I will go on." Within one hours, another student from Malaysia began to send a screenshot of his own video to Nyaz, with detailed questions to explain. Another young professor of physics from Portugal tried to teach her to bypass the firewall, but without success. A 12-year-old boy from the UK has promised to help Nyaz download future course materials, but only if she doesn't write any negative information about the government online.

These students have never seen each other before, and they come from 125 countries in total. But in these weeks, the dozens of-year-old "Ben" found a piece of the library. Soon, the Portuguese young physics teacher downloaded the course video, and then the screenshot was uploaded to another photo-sharing site that was not blocked in Pakistan. In this way, Nyaz, with her help, passed the exam with the highest score and created a small record: She was the youngest girl on the Udacity to complete the Physics 100 course-a major class. Online public classes have long been a novelty. What's so unique about udacity that it can be so strongly bonded to so many students from all over the world?

A few years ago, when I was applying to an American university, I practiced English in an online public class at MIT. If really compare, that is actually whether Coursera or udacity is not really a pioneer, the real pioneer is the American universities themselves. However, the format of this online public class is more similar to the hundreds of forums, the media is relatively simple, basically a video. As a result, these course videos have been popular for years, but have not been as interactive as the Udacity model, in other words, the "user experience" is not as good as the latter.

What is the characteristic of the udacity pattern in all the nuances? Here are some of the features I've turned over in a few courses to summarize:

The place is no longer confined to the classroom, and the characters are no longer confined to the professor itself – the film is a bit closer to the documentary and the content is very diverse.

We know that most of the lessons are taught by the professors, even though in one class the professor may come and invite some guest lecturers, and only they can talk to some students on this occasion. Udacity has no such handicap, and the course choreographer can interview many people they want to interview and put them all together. At the same time, because of the virtualization of the site, lectures are completely free from the classroom. At the beginning of Physics 100, Andy Brown, a 25-year-old physics lecturer, appeared on a beach in Siracusa, a small town in Sicilia, I. Di, Italy, playing football with boys on the street. This small town is the founder of Physics Archimedes's hometown, and Udacity's journey also from Archimedes thought of the first question began, do like a good documentary. By contrast, in general, even a prestigious online course, you're beginning to see an old professor staring at the camera with a bit of formality and then starting to talk. Many students begin to doze off as they listen to the real world, which is easier on the Internet – no more reading. It has to be said that online education courses have great advantages over traditional lectures in the application of media skills, and are almost natural advantages, as many classroom education boundaries are easily broken.

The professors have become video talent.

The United States has a cultural phenomenon in recent years, called "YouTube celebrity (YouTube celebrities)", perhaps we adapt to the trend to translate it into the "YouTube talent show" more appropriate. In simple terms, many people build their brand image by uploading videos of themselves singing, playing the piano, talk shows, or making makeup, etc. on YouTube. Among my classmates). Teaching people to make up the Michelle Phan is a lot of girls in the hearts of the leader, and Justin Bieber a few years beforehand is also by uploading their own singing video was discovered by the scout.

The new generation of educational entrepreneurs, represented by Sebatian Thrun and Sal Khan, is clearly different from the old academics who do not use computers, and they can be said to embrace the Internet video culture and make themselves the star professors who belong to the "Education 2.0" era. And they are different from the superficial internet reds, they are using this new model to do the education business. Look at the video that Thrun in the Stanford online AI class earlier. He fully mastered the secret of becoming a fan of the scene: the distance between the teacher and the audience is very close, it feels like a teacher in his office to give you a separate extension, tell jokes, or take the props around to gestures, Explain a truth.

More in line with the principles of educational psychology

Thrun once said, he has learned a lot about the nature of the human brain in his research career, and is disappointed to find that the existing curriculum is not designed according to the characteristics of the human brain, but rather than the way the current curriculum is structured, these are the key points of the Udacity curriculum (even their " Product Design "Bar", just give two examples:

Studies have shown that college students can concentrate only 10 minutes to 18 minutes in class, after which time they begin to distract, so Udacity's video is rarely more than this length and, unlike many lengthy lectures, it is usually made up of a multitude of smaller videos. And will adjust the rhythm, do a difficult problem after a simple part, or tell a story, relax. This is also due to the network, in the real university is very difficult to break apart a class of talk.

The human brain wants to get instant feedback in communication, which is why we like to play games so much. Udacity's course applies this principle, it will often stop, let you answer a small question, or apply what has just been learned, rarely appear large paragraphs of the speech content. The "copy formula" style of learning is very difficult to work here, and even if the students fall asleep, their sleep will be interrupted frequently ...

Back to the beginning of the question, why would udacity be able to interact with the world's users and do many of the things that college public classes couldn't do before? After synthesizing all the new educational models and even the features of the new social media, it is no longer a simple educational website, it is educating with the law of New media , and has become a social force in the Internet to reshape the world. Years later, the story of how many of the world's few resource-starved people helped each other to acquire knowledge should be a footnote to the era, as did the Facebook group's revolt against Colombian drug gangs and Twitter to push the Arab Spring.