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  • I'm here to tell you about MOOCulus. Which is really a part of course that me and

  • my team launched on Coursera about a month ago.

  • The course is Calculus One. We have the requisite lecture videos that

  • you might come to expect, we have a free open source textbook that you can download, we

  • have weekly quizzes. The weekly quizzes have 10 questions per quiz,

  • which raises a question about questions, how many questions should there be on this quiz?

  • And the problem is that depends on the student. Some students should have more questions on

  • their quiz than other students. So to make this possible we have developed

  • another website. mooculus.osu.edu. Which might leave you wondering, what is MOOCulus.

  • MOOCulus is not Calculus, it is really an online homework system that we have built,

  • but unlike other online homework systems, MOOCulus comes backed with a hidden Markov

  • model. It is also Open Source, you can download it

  • right now on GitHub and install it on your own computers and if you were to do that this

  • is what you might see. You might see an exercise computing the derivative

  • of a polynomial, and there is a polynomial there.

  • And in order to facilitate you know questions about randomly generated polynomials we have

  • built a computer algebra system in JavaScript. We have also got a hint system, there is a

  • button there that you can click on to get help and if you click that button you will

  • start being lead to the problem. It will explain how you do the problem.

  • We have this progress bar, this is the hidden Markov model.

  • The problem is that student understanding is invisible.

  • I'm fairly certain that attaching the brain scanners that I would like to put on my students

  • is a FERPA violation, what is visible is the hints and answers that they submit, whether

  • they are correct or incorrect. The hidden Markov model takes that visible

  • data and produces data and estimate of student understanding.

  • So the students get a page that looks like this with green bars that filled on tasks

  • that we think that they understand. Yellow bars that they should do more work

  • on. And these red bars that they seem quite confused.

  • What is the real benefit to something like this?

  • Well part of it is that you might think that this is cheaper.

  • Now we don't even need TAs, but it is more than that.

  • It's really supposed to be better. We have already commoditized education right;

  • this is not the world's educational experience. It is a lot better if we get more people doing

  • mathematics. That is a better experience for the student,

  • I would much rather that they would just do more problems.

  • So if we are truly trying to personalize their education, so that leads to the question.

  • If I want this to be about 1 on 1 education what is so massive about this experience.

  • People have this mistaken idea that the M in MOOC stands for huge enrollment numbers,

  • but I guess it does, but the enrollment isn't really the big deal the point is that is only

  • a means to an end and the end Data! A lot of data.

  • In the last ten weeks, 10 person years have been sacrificed to MOOCulus.

  • And people have submitted two million correct answers on our system and this lets us produce

  • histograms and covariant matrixes where you can kind of see certain problems, if you interpret

  • this appropriately, are really more important in some sense or better predictors of overall

  • performance than other problems. That is really interesting data.

  • So what are we going to do with all of this data?

  • The point is that we can now start to try to evolve better classes.

  • This stuff is providing a fitness function that tells us when education is working.

  • The problem is that education also requires some sort of heritable variation and that

  • is not something that I can get with a regular, but a with a MOOC which fixes the form of

  • the interactive experience, I can now have something that is evolvable.

  • I fix the form of the classroom, which means that it is the sort of thing that you know

  • that evolution can act on. If this doesn't make a lot of sense here is

  • a soft of analogy. Here is some random walk and you can do lots

  • and lots of random walks, and my claim is that teaching is lot like this random walk.

  • Every year I'm slated to teach another course which is very similar course that I taught

  • last year and I do it slightly differently for no go reason.

  • And contrast this with if I actually an honest feedback mechanism, a very small amount of

  • feedback makes me get better. You know. And the point here is not emphasize

  • that MOOCS are massive or that they are online, the point is that MOOCs are for data-driven

  • feedback, which actually might improve education in the long run.

  • So we are really are at some fort in the road, one of those is that MOOCs.

  • MOOCs might not be great right now, but they are rigged to get better, because they have

  • got this feedback mechanism in place. The question is where or not the rest of the

  • university is going to get on board with that. And if you think about 50 years from now,

  • my grandchildren will have some very exciting choice.

  • They will either be taught by a human being or they will be taught by a Cylons.

  • And the Cylons will have some sort of hidden Markov model and the best cognitive science

  • available to really understand how to teach effectively.

  • And I much rather, that my great-grandchildren be taught by the Cylons.

  • So, thank you.

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