Degree at Stanford? Harvard? MIT?... let's hook up into the net.

(Fot. NOAH BERGER NOAH BERGER/The New York Times/R)  
Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are among world's
best AI specialists.They founded Know Labs.

Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are among world's best artificial intelligence specialists. Both are connected to Silicon Valley's Stanford University. Thrun is known for creating the Google's self-driving car. Norvig is a Google's Distinguished Software Engineer and heads one of Google's R&D department.

They have made something incredible last autumn: invited users from all over the world to join free, web-based artificial intelligence classes. They were held like a standard university classes - lasted a whole semester, had home-works, deadlines, tests... Attendees had to show their activity and self-motivation in learning and solving puzzles prepared by the two teachers. At the end there was a difficult exam to pass. Sebastian Thrun often emphesized that is main goal is spreading knowledge.

Despite all these obstacles their class has been warmly welcomed. They has 160.000 enrollments! Those who made it to the final exam were given a statement of accomplishment signed by both scientists. It might be thought as not as prestigious as a Stanford's university diploma, however finishing the whole semester supervised by Thrun and Norvig is quite an accomplishment.

How they got the idea?

Sebastian Thrun gave a talk at TED talking about driverless car he helped to create in Google. 

During the same conference he saw a talk given by Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy. 

Khan Academy is a popular web page with hundreds of video lessons, explaining different school subjects. It's very popular not among pupils in the USA, but also worldwide.

Thrun was so excited about the idea that he began to think about creating a parallel educational center for adults. His idea was to create an open university where everyone could find free courses from best scientists.

Many universities record lectures and publish them on-line, however what Thrun imagined was far beyond only providing recordings. He wanted to include everything that you can find on a standard university: seminars, exercises, teamwork, deadlines, exams and diploma.

His ideas was put into action - while with Norvig - he started Know Labs (investing his own $300.000, on multimedia studio). Then he begun the enrollment for first test semester of Artificial Intelligence classes. What he was expecting was a about a thousand students...

What a class, tremendous response.

There were around 10 thousands volunteers a week after enrollment started, a month later the number grew to 50.000. Just before the beginning of the classes there were over 100.000 students enrolled. One in eight student finished that first semester - it was over 20 thousand people!

It was a great success - another two classes proposed by Know Labs attracted 68 thousands participants worldwide. Thrun named the project Udacity, which is a combination of audacity and university. This autumn there are eleven classes to choose from.

What is worth noticing Thrun thinks that normal universities are still not replaceable, mostly because they offer creative atmosphere - which is created by people interactions during classes and face-to-face contact with pedagogues. Both are not possible in a web-based Alma matter.

Other universities don't let grass grow under their feet

There are many other to follow the path... one of them is the Coursera page. They started around autumn 2012 with a couple of classes.

Harvard is another one to follow with their EdX project.

What they offer is a simillar portfolio of MIT and Harvard classes with additions of self-paced learning, online discussion groups, wiki-based collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses through a course, and online laboratories. 

Brave new world

There was a slang name created for such web-base university classes. They are called MOOC (massive online open course). MOOCs became possible with the advance of the web and lowering the entrance barrier to cloud computing power. Virtualization provided an easy way to scale a web-based services to being accessible for a varying number of participants - which can be uncommonly high - counted in hundreds thousands - who knows when they hit the first milion...

Update with new perspective - it's a platform!

Just recently I stumbled upon a very insightful post concerning the evolution of MOOCs. The main idea is that MOOCs are basically... a platform. They also cite Phil Hill, who they see as an early and constant  voice on the subject from his recent post:

When analyzing the disruption potential of MOOCs, it is easy to forget that the actual concept is just 4 or 5 years old. Furthermore, the actual definition of the concept has undergone a significant change in the past 12 months as an entirely new branch has emerged.

Phil gives a detailed diagram to show the evolution of different MOOCs:

Marc Bousquet gave a post about good vs. bad MOOCs:

Well, the good intentions and featured best practices of Siemens and Downes exist in political and institutional realities. If institutions really wanted to sustain participatory learning, they would already be doing so, for instance, by reducing lectures and high-stakes testing, investing in teaching-intensive faculty and the like. Instead, driven less by cost concerns than a desire to standardize and control both faculty and curriculum, administrations rely more than ever on lectures and tests.

These two posts gave a much more perspective towards MOOCs. We will see how these different approaches to this subject will evolve in the near future.