EDXCEO: Network Open Class model is at the edge of the 2.0 era

MOOC (The big Open Web course) will be "the next big event", but not as much as it used to be. But for Annant Agavar (Anant AGArwal), Mooc's brilliance has just begun. Agarwal is a professor of computer science at MIT and CEO of EDX, a non-profit organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Agarwal is a fathers in the Mooc field, and edx offers free online courses to anyone or an elite university in the world through MOOC. The sudden rise of MOOC, 2 years ago, is now gradually declining in public perception, even though the most famous supporters are beginning to give up, but Agarwal is still holding on. Agarwal that it is only the beginning of effective use of the MOOC model. The number of EDX courses doubled in 2013, and Agarwal that we were on the verge of the MOOC 2.0 era. "We are still growing when others are in the towel," he said. "Agarwal is not the only one who is optimistic about the MOOC model. This week, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Tsinghua University in China reported that students who attended MIT's online physics program had the same effect as those who actually attended classes. "This is a very controversial issue," says David Pritchard, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (David Prichard), and many prominent educators believe that not too many people learn MOOC. Even if there are, many are those who have received a good education. "Rise-decline-the rise of the 2012, the MOOC has become increasingly popular," The New York Times called the year as "Mooc," almost no day without edx or Coursera, Udacity and other similar companies, they want to fundamentally change education, to achieve democratization of education. But this trend is inevitably frustrated. Critics pointed out that the companies exaggerated their potential. They cite the fact that the number of students completing MOOC online courses is very low, and that the MOOC model has fundamentally failed. Even Mooc's earliest supporters, Udacity chief executive Sebastian Teren Sebastian Thrun, abandoned the model, turning udacity into online vocational schools for various technology companies. In an interview last year, Trent said of the change: "I realize that we don't educate people as other people expect, we have a bad product." But people like Agarwal, who are learning at MIT, are offering new fuel. They are proving that you can also receive high quality college education without high tuition fees. At the same time, Agarwal says, MOOC can offer more advantages. Recently, Mooc, who is most interested in Agarwal, has the "flip side", which he and his colleagues have just discovered Mooc unexpected usage. In fact, he has started using edx Open source Platform Open Ed for many countries, Agarwal said.X is alarmed that these platforms allow anyone to use the EDX infrastructure to launch their own MOOC. Now, including France, China and even Saudi Arabia and other countries, have launched EDX-supported local education platform. In Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Labor is even using open edx to educate more women, people with disabilities and rural citizens. Agarwal said: "This is what I never dreamed of." "The big MOOC on campus to attract more people to the education online, MOOC also began to take action on campus, such as MIT and other universities are using the so-called hybrid learning model." In a mixed-learning environment, students can receive new knowledge through instructional video in order to use the class time to complete the work at hand. At MIT, two-thirds of students use edx as a way to complete a school curriculum, Agarwal said. Mooc Another surprising result is that they get a lot of data on how best people learn. For example, EDX has found that the longer the instructional video is, the less time the student has to watch it. So if the video lasts for 40 minutes, students may only look at half. If it is only 6 minutes long, the student may read it all. Understanding these issues is important for designing college courses, as university professors can often talk about more than one hours on a topic. "This means that students just want to learn in one mouthful," Agarwal said. "Now, EdX has launched a A/b test on the Web site, allowing professors to try different teaching methods and compare teaching results." "It's a process in which professors begin to understand what teaching methods are effective, what works, and how to improve teaching," Agarwal said. "Recently, edx also found another application of its curriculum: college prep." In order to cut the budget, the country's various campuses have canceled the skip course, even if the students pay more attention to these courses, they see it as a way to cut tuition fees. EdX now wants to fill this gap and allow students to study these courses online. Not only that, EDX also provides university entrance guidance courses, and students and their parents can learn a lot about things like how to get financial aid, how to write a thesis, etc. These skills have also fallen victim to budget cuts, as schools have reduced the number of school counsellors. Agarwal said: "Now, you don't have to go to the rich campus to get better guidance." "Mooc needs to evolve. Of course, MOOC is not without flaws. Agarwal admits that as long as MOOC remains free, the number of students who have completed all the courses may be low. But as long as there are bad teachers, there must be bad lessons. But condemning MOOC's overall model is as if condemning Uber could lead to bad drivers, condemning Airbnb and causing guests to spoil the house. In dealing with these problems, these companies need to be free to play. Perhaps more importantly, these companies need space to find out what they really serve. This patience will allow Uber to grow from a taxi service company to an on-demand giant, allowing Airbnb to become a comprehensive hotel brand, rather than a simple search for cheap sofasTools。 It is not appropriate to judge a breakthrough technology only through the first exposed flaws, perhaps we should give it time to gain trust.