Online education: Many of the people who actually do it are very few

The paper is the founder Danfriedman of the network Open Course learning platform thinkful. In the online education boom today, he opened the false prosperity behind the industry's hidden hidden deep concerns. Although there are many applicants, few people actually complete the course. How to improve the participation of online education, the author puts forward three kinds of models that can be used for reference. Three years ago, Sebastianthrun recorded an AI course at Stanford University and uploaded it to a network platform for up to 180,000 students to study online, and Sebastianthrun himself on his "higher education reform" path. Soon after, Coursera, a free large web-open program run by two computer science professors at Stanford University, the private education organization Udacity, which aims to achieve democratic education, and other similar institutions have also said they will provide free high-priced courses to address the problems of serious student indebtedness and economic hardship. Since then, over 8 million students have enrolled in online courses. Three years later, this vigorous reform is naught: only half of the enrolled students are at the class rate, some of whom have even listened to only one course, and only 4% of them keep on studying and graduating. Moreover, many of the audience for the large online public course (MOCC), who have obtained college degrees, have made the promise of "changing the Status of higher education" an empty word. MOOC's curriculum provider explained that the completion of free courses was not an accurate indicator of the success of the reform. But an experiment conducted by San Jose State University, a for-profit university, also shows that the teaching efficiency of the web-based curriculum model is actually lower than the traditional model. But then again, the results are not surprising. The online learning model solves the problem of learning Channel in the early period: 8 million people enrolled in the online public class, plus more than 1 billion downloads of Itunesu, we can really feel the need of people on the course. But what we don't feel is whether these nets can be as effective as traditional teaching, or even more effective than tradition. What lies behind these problems is a more difficult problem to solve: the degree of participation. If you are an online student, you may also find it difficult to stick to it: After a long day of exhausting work, "I want to learn new skills!" The sacred goal is often followed by the shutdown of the Web page being shelved. Online learning also requires students to take part in and pass the test: But this kind of test needs not only to be beneficial to students, but also to be enjoyable for students. Now, some internet companies, big businesses and institutions of higher learning are finally figuring out which way online education really should go: to move forward on substantive learning at a reasonable price level. As far as this development goal is concerned, there are three ways to promote it: Tutorial system, retention marketing and new forms of practical teaching. First of all, it has long been found that a one-to-one tutor teaching model is farMore efficient than collective teaching. Concentration in the teaching of a mentor, can make a person's energy in the right time to focus on the right issues, so as to speed up his learning process, and the same mentor to establish a real teaching relationship can give students a sense of responsibility. In the personalized online education platform Thinkful, students will have a peak in their study day before the tutor's class. It is because of this one-to-one teaching relationship that students want to achieve more learning goals, and this desire is converted to more efficient learning. Thinkful is also trying to apply this social pressure to every week of teaching so that it can be applied to all the learning time in the future. In fact, sometimes, all we need is a respectable person to remind ourselves: learn this bone, it's hard to chew it. Second, learning also needs to retain marketing. There are a number of methods, such as sending emails, calling reminders, and pushing messages, to ensure that existing students can continue to participate in online learning. Networked Storage online application Dropbox is worth learning in this respect. When the user opens the Dropboxforteams page of the Enterprise Cloud Service application, Dropbox sends a message to the user: "Thank you for using dropboxforteams! but you may not fully understand the following Dropboxforteams features ...". In the time for the user presented a network course products, online learning platform can help users to gradually develop good learning habits. Sometimes we just need to remind ourselves that we should spend more time studying. Thirdly, the new technology of "practice teaching" can not be talked about until the Web class platform helps users to realize immersion learning experience in their computers and mobile phones. In the the 1960s, Jeromebruner, a famous psychologist, advocated an educational theory called Constructivism, which suggested that students should grasp the complex theory intuitively through investigation and learning under the guidance of teachers. But this kind of attempt, the failure then by the tutor to guide the correct direction The teaching method, has proved is one kind of drive student to continue to study the effective way. What we do not know, however, is whether the "old wine" can be harvested 10 times times or even higher after it has been put into a "new bottle" such as a sandbox game Minecraft or a Oculus display. In fact, the practice of Minecraft applied to learning has begun to bear fruit; At the time of the publication of this article, Thinkful also procured the Oculus equipment in order to use it to promote practical teaching. This new immersion virtual learning environment can hold the attention of students tightly, which is not possible for traditional textbooks. Finally, there is a "good way" that educational institutions often use, but in the long run it is fatal: reducing the difficulty of the course. Companies operating the network platform found that the rate of completion of the courses was low, and then the "expedient" of cutting important textbooks was taken to increase the completion rate. UdacAt the beginning of the ity, its initial disciplinary difficulty remained at the same level as that of Stanford, which now has many disciplines that take only 40 hours to complete. Just imagine that taking a week of Kung Fu will give Stanford credit for a subject, where does the head of a prestigious college leave? In the near future, we may indeed be able to hear "good news" such as the completion rate of the net class, but no one will mention the low degree of difficulty behind the high completion rate. To a certain extent, this so-called "progress" on the whole industry is a kind of injury, because not learn the real skills, the job is not to find a job, the time is still not get promotion, low productivity staff or improve the efficiency. While we do not want to see the decline of for-profit colleges, the hype in the report is not going to save much in the long run. As I said before, the channel is no longer a problem for future online learning: The real problem is how to use what you already have to do what you can do offline, and combine the content that can only be done online to create the most reluctant learning experience. However, no matter how the mixture, the most essential factors are always the same: from the way of practical exploration, thoughtful human experience, strong support of teachers.