The 100000student classroom Peter Norvig
everyone is both a learner and a teacher
this is me being inspired by my first
tutor my mom and this is me teaching
introduction to artificial intelligence
to 200 students at Stanford University
now the students and I enjoyed the class
but it occurred to me that while the
subject matter of the class is advanced
in modern the teaching technology isn’t
in fact I use basically the same
technology as this 14th century
classroom note the textbook the sage on
the stage and the sleeping guy in the
back just like today so my co-teacher
sebastian throne and i thought there
must be a better way we challenged
ourselves to create an online class that
would be equal or better in quality to
our stanford class but to bring it to
anyone in the world for free we
announced the class on july twenty ninth
and within two weeks 50,000 people had
signed up for it and that grew to
160,000 students from 209 countries we
were thrilled to have that kind of
audience and just a bit terrified that
we hadn’t finished preparing the class
yet so we got to work we studied what
others had done what we could copy and
what we could change benjamin bloom had
showed that one-on-one tutoring works
best so that’s what we tried to emulate
like with me and my mom even though we
knew it would be one on thousands here
an overhead video camera is recording me
as I’m talking and drawing on a piece of
paper a student said this class felt
like sitting in a bar with a really
smart friend who’s explaining something
you haven’t grasped but are about to and
that’s exactly what we were aiming for
now from Khan Academy we saw that short
10 minute videos work much better than
trying to record an hour-long lecture
and put it on the small formats
we decided to go even shorter and more
interactive our typical video is two
minutes sometimes shorter never more
than six and then we pause for a quiz
question to make it feel like one-on-one
tutoring here I’m explaining how a
computer uses a grammar of English to
parse sentences and here there’s a pause
and the student has to reflect
understand what’s going on and check the
right boxes before they can continue
students learn best when they’re
actively practicing we wanted to engage
them to have them grapple with ambiguity
and guide them to synthesize the key
ideas themselves we mostly avoid
questions like here’s a formula now tell
me the value of y when x is equal to 2
we preferred open-ended questions one
student wrote now I’m seeing Bayes
networks and examples of game theory
everywhere I look and I like that kind
of response that’s just what we were
going for we didn’t want students to
memorize the formulas we wanted to
change the way they look at the world
and we succeeded or i should say the
students succeeded and it’s a little bit
ironic that we set about to disrupt
traditional education and in doing so we
ended up making our online class much
more like a traditional college class
than other online classes most online
classes the videos are always available
you can watch them anytime you want but
if you can do it anytime it means you
can do it tomorrow and if you can do it
tomorrow well you may not ever get
around to it so we brought back the
innovation of having due dates you could
watch the videos anytime you wanted
during the week but at the end of the
week you had to get the homework done
this motivated the students to keep
going and it also meant that everybody
was working on the same thing at the
same time so if you went into a
discussion forum you could get an answer
from appear within minutes now I’ll show
you some of the forum’s most of which
were self organized by the students
themselves from Daphne Koller and Andrew
Inge we learned the concept of flipping
the classroom students watch the videos
on their own and then they come together
to discuss them from Eric Mazur I
learned about peer instruction that
peers can be the best teachers be
because they’re the ones that remember
what it’s like to not understand
Sebastian and I have forgotten something
of course we couldn’t have a classroom
discussion with tens of thousands of
students so we encouraged and nurtured
these online forums and finally from
teach from America I learned that a
class is not primarily about information
more important is motivation and
determination was crucial that the
students see that we’re working hard for
them and they’re all supporting each
other now the class ran ten weeks and in
the end about half of the hundred sixty
thousand students watched at least one
video each week and over 20,000 finished
all the homework putting in fifty to a
hundred hours they got this statement of
accomplishment so what have we learned
well we tried some old ideas and some
new and put them together but there are
more ideas to try Sebastian’s teaching
another class now I’ll do one in the
fall Stanford Coursera Udacity MITx and
others have more classes coming it’s a
really exciting time but to me the most
exciting part of it is the data that
we’re gathering we’re gathering
thousands of interactions per student
per class billions of interactions all
together and now we can start analyzing
that and when we learn from that do
experimentations that’s when the real
revolution will come and you’ll be able
to see the results from a new generation
of amazing students
you