Reading the core issues of online education from Coursera

In the past two years, China's online education boom can be described in a jaw-dropping: The capital market is very active, such as the net in 2014 to obtain from Baidu's 100 million dollar investment, business areas from language learning, K12, vocational education to MOOC have been covered; There are also many business closures to stop operating. But what is the core of online education? Or, what are the key industries that online education needs to address? There is a lot of disagreement about this, but: at least the clear answer is not to replace the educational institutions and teaching methods that many people seem to be a bit stiff and outdated. This time in San Francisco, following Baidu hundreds, in the big talk Silicon Valley special, Coursera chief business officer Lila Ibrahim in the speech of some of the views, I think for the thinking of the online education in China is helpful. "The computer is not a magician, the teacher is" this is Lila Ibrahim in the beginning of the speech mentioned a word. The core value of education in the teacher, this point, since the teacher this profession, has not been overturned. One of Coursera's founding intentions was to help university professors spread their knowledge from hundreds of students to tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of of students. Teacher, preaching, tuition, dispel doubts, in the Confucius Professor 72, teachers and students of Knowledge professor, whether in the interactive mode or the scale of teaching, has not been able to have a big change, know Mooc (large-scale open curriculum) the emergence of educational technology. So the core of online education, whether it is language learning or K12, or vocational education, its core problem is to solve the problem of teachers, these pain points, in the author seems to be typical of: 1 through the digital tool to assess students ' learning ability and knowledge Mastery Level 2 through digital tools, Understand and record students ' learning behavior 3 through digital tools, develop and optimize their own teaching programs, improve teaching methods and improve students ' satisfaction 4) through digital tools, to spread knowledge to students in a larger space and time range 5 through digital tools to learn new knowledge and improve their teaching ability 6) Through digital tools, reduce duplication of standardization work, reduce labor intensity so, the teacher is the core of online education, the teacher's problem is the core of education needs to be solved. For example, in a speech, explain the example of reducing teacher duplication: Coursera, in collaboration with Princeton University, has developed an auxiliary scoring system that addresses the scoring of 100,000 or even 220,000 articles in the Coursera system. Coursera's solution is for students to rate each other by teaching the overall scoring principles and methods, scoring a quiz, an article, a piece of music, or a design project, and putting the scoring method into the online video. Then three or five students rated each other according to these principles, as if the TA were doing this thing. Theyfound that if an average of five people in all the students rated your homework, this is similar to the effect of the teacher scoring. If you remember that the teacher is the engineer of the human soul, you should not disagree with me on this point. The core competence of the online education platform is to collaborate with the quality schools in the past two years, Coursera has been able to become an online education platform because: we work with 115 top universities, whether in the United States of Yale, Stanford, Michigan or Duke, or London University, and 6 Asian universities--Peking University, NTU, National University of Singapore and so on--taught in Chinese. This is a figure that Ms. Ibrahim mentioned in her speech. No matter how advanced technology is announced, it cannot solve the problem of the production of knowledge, and the teachers or educators are still firmly in control of the production of knowledge. Schools, beyond doubt, remain the best quality knowledge and the most systematic knowledge of the producers. Recognizing this, the core problem for online educational platforms is that if they want to be a meaningful and valuable online education platform, they must collaborate with enough educational institutions, especially schools, including quality vocational education institutions. It's not an easy thing to do, it takes patience and time. At least a few problems need to be addressed: 1 through the convenient, but also with the professional level of digital tools to solve the teaching content of education digital problems 2) through data analysis tools to help educational institutions to identify and attract quality students of the problem 3 through digital tools, The issue of expanding the global influence of educational institutions facing students and solving students ' interests is also the core of online education as adults, we sometimes regret that we chose the wrong School of Science and Arts, and chose the wrong profession. An important problem here is that before we make a choice, most of us are not exposed to what we are about to learn, and we can only use our parents ' friends or hearsay. Online education can solve this problem. The two cases mentioned by Ms. Ibrahim in her speech were very enlightening. One is that she believes Coursera's greatest contribution to K12 is to work with educators to provide more than 60 courses on early education. In addition to universities, it works with museums to improve teaching content. "A lot of students are confused about what they will be doing in college." If you can learn some professional courses online, middle school students can understand their interests of the major, such as finance, engineering, programming or history, and so on, but also in the well-known professors in the classroom learning, self-confidence will be greatly improved. Ibrahim said in the speech. This is also a panacea to avoid blindness and regret. Another anecdote about MIT may be more interesting: "A 15-year-old Mongolian student has a better online academic record in computer science than a global student, including MIT itself." Rafael Reif, the headmaster, called him himself and enrolled him in a computer science major. His parents are now accompanying them at MIT. "John was in the interview.Example in our country, when it comes to the needs of students in online education, we are always accustomed to the need to help him improve the ability and level of mastery of knowledge. You are welcome to say that this is the thinking of exam-oriented education. Let the students find their interests, let the school find interested students, so that teachers find the successor of knowledge, perhaps this is the online education should use the technology dividend of information technology, should solve the core issues.