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