Education on a Digital Scale
Felix Salmon provides us with an update on Sebastian Thrun’s free Stanford class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, which wrapped in last year:
Just a couple of datapoints from Thrun’s talk: there were more students in his course from Lithuania alone than there are students at Stanford altogether. There were students in Afghanistan, exfiltrating war zones to grab an hour of connectivity to finish the homework assignments. There were single mothers keeping the faith and staying with the course even as their families were being hit by tragedy. And when it finished, thousands of students around the world were educated and inspired. Some 248 of them, in total, got a perfect score: they never got a single question wrong, over the entire course of the class. All 248 took the course online; not one was enrolled at Stanford.
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And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.
With the completion of the class, Thrun declared he “can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s walking away from his tenure and starting Udacity, an online university.
Education is finally starting to fully embrace digital. Developments like Udacity, Khan Academy, Code Academy, and Apple’s textbooks look to do to college what blogging and the internet have done to publishing, lowering the cost of entry to an almost negligible point and increasing the scale of participants by several factors.
Think back to how many newspaper and magazine columnists we had in 1995. Now think of how many people are writing frequently online. Imagine if we achieved such a shift in college education, with millions of people learning how to create search engines (Udacity’s first class) and more. Thrun’s numbers above feel about right, and he’s just getting started.
The potential of a population educated on a digital scale, not just made louder with access to publishing platforms, promises to be massive.
Source: dbreunig
