Peter Norvig: The 100,000-student classroom

97,625 views ・ 2012-06-18

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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Everyone is both a learner
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and a teacher.
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This is me being inspired
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by my first tutor,
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my mom,
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and this is me teaching
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Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
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to 200 students
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at Stanford University.
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Now the students and I
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enjoyed the class,
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but it occurred to me
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that while the subject matter
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of the class is advanced
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and modern,
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the teaching technology isn't.
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In fact, I use basically
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the same technology as
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this 14th-century classroom.
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Note the textbook,
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the sage on the stage,
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and the sleeping guy
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in the back. (Laughter)
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Just like today.
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So my co-teacher,
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Sebastian Thrun, and I thought,
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there must be a better way.
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We challenged ourselves
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to create an online class
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that would be equal or better
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in quality to our Stanford class,
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but to bring it to anyone
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in the world for free.
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We announced the class on July 29th,
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and within two weeks, 50,000 people
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had signed up for it.
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And that grew to 160,000 students
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from 209 countries.
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We were thrilled to have
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that kind of audience,
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and just a bit terrified that we
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hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter)
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So we got to work.
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We studied what others had done,
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what we could copy and what we could change.
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Benjamin Bloom had showed
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that one-on-one tutoring works best,
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so that's what we tried to emulate,
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like with me and my mom,
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even though we knew
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it would be one-on-thousands.
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Here, an overhead video camera
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is recording me as I'm talking
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and drawing on a piece of paper.
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A student said, "This class felt
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like sitting in a bar
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with a really smart friend
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who's explaining something
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you haven't grasped, but are about to."
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And that's exactly what we were aiming for.
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Now, from Khan Academy, we saw
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that short 10-minute videos
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worked much better than trying
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to record an hour-long lecture
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and put it on the small-format screen.
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We decided to go even shorter
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and more interactive.
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Our typical video is two minutes,
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sometimes shorter, never more
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than six, and then we pause for
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a quiz question, to make it
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feel like one-on-one tutoring.
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Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses
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the grammar of English
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to parse sentences, and here,
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there's a pause and the student
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has to reflect, understand what's going on
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and check the right boxes
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before they can continue.
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Students learn best when
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they're actively practicing.
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We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple
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with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize
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the key ideas themselves.
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We mostly avoid questions
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like, "Here's a formula, now
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tell me the value of Y
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when X is equal to two."
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We preferred open-ended questions.
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One student wrote, "Now I'm seeing
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Bayes networks and examples of
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game theory everywhere I look."
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And I like that kind of response.
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That's just what we were going for.
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We didn't want students to memorize the formulas;
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we wanted to change the way
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they looked at the world.
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And we succeeded.
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Or, I should say, the students succeeded.
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And it's a little bit ironic
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that we set about to disrupt traditional education,
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and in doing so, we ended up
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making our online class
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much more like a traditional college class
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than other online classes.
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Most online classes, the videos are always available.
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You can watch them any time you want.
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But if you can do it any time,
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that means you can do it tomorrow,
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and if you can do it tomorrow,
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well, you may not ever
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get around to it. (Laughter)
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So we brought back the innovation
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of having due dates. (Laughter)
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You could watch the videos
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any time you wanted during the week,
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but at the end of the week,
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you had to get the homework done.
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This motivated the students to keep going, and it also
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meant that everybody was working
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on the same thing at the same time,
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so if you went into a discussion forum,
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you could get an answer from a peer within minutes.
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Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which
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were self-organized by the students themselves.
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From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned
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the concept of "flipping" the classroom.
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Students watched the videos
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on their own, and then they
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come together to discuss them.
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From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction,
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that peers can be the best teachers,
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because they're the ones
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that remember what it's like to not understand.
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Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that.
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Of course, we couldn't have
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a classroom discussion with
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tens of thousands of students,
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so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums.
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And finally, from Teach For America,
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I learned that a class is not
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primarily about information.
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More important is motivation and determination.
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It was crucial that the students see
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that we're working hard for them and
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they're all supporting each other.
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Now, the class ran 10 weeks,
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and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched
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at least one video each week,
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and over 20,000 finished all the homework,
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putting in 50 to 100 hours.
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They got this statement of accomplishment.
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So what have we learned?
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Well, we tried some old ideas
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and some new and put them together,
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but there are more ideas to try.
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Sebastian's teaching another class now.
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I'll do one in the fall.
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Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx
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and others have more classes coming.
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It's a really exciting time.
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But to me, the most exciting
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part of it is the data that we're gathering.
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We're gathering thousands
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of interactions per student per class,
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billions of interactions altogether,
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and now we can start analyzing that,
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and when we learn from that,
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do experimentations,
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that's when the real revolution will come.
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And you'll be able to see the results from
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a new generation of amazing students.
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(Applause)
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