Thread: Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up

Interesting article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

I love it!!! Thank you for posting this article. Kind of reminds me of Sal Khan.

I love it. Teachers one day will be a thing of the past. They will be replaced by mentors like I have at NCU.

Originally Posted by ryoder

I love it. Teachers one day will be a thing of the past. They will be replaced by mentors like I have at NCU.

There are some teachers that are so great that they shouldn't be replaced - those are the ones that we need to capture on video and allow their lessons to go viral and spread all over the world to any learner that needs help.

I agree. Maybe 1 in 50 teachers is great. The rest are so so. Some of those 1 in 50 may only be great for a few years before burning out. If we can condense their brilliance into videos and training materials for the world to enjoy, we could educate millions and bring them out of poverty.
I posted the Stanford video on my facebook page. I love alternative education and education powered by technology.

One cool thing about the Star Wars world is the holocron. The holocron is a device used by the ancient Jedi to distill knowledge from once powerful Jedi masters. Students can use the holocron to learn how to build a light saber or how to channel the force. This type of technology is not too far off. Cisco is investing millions in holographic telepresence technology to bring sales people closer to their customers and to reduce costs for diplomatic conversations. If we combine holographic technology with artificial intelligence and massive data stores, maybe we can create a virtual teacher experience. Imagine having an Albert Einstein or a Socrates in a box for every child to learn from.

Interesting related bit. Stanford ran a free online class in database design Oct - Dec 2011, with graded assignments, a midterm, and a final. The stats are amazing.

A note for anyone who's joined us recently--

This course was offered in a structured fashion from October-December 2011. Over 90,000 accounts were created, 25,000 students submitted at least some work for grading, and 6,500 students did well enough to receive a statement of accomplishment at the end of the course. All of the materials that were used for the 2011 course offering are still available on this website. So feel free to browse around and take any or all of the course in its current "self-serve" mode.

We're continuing to improve the course content, so don't be surprised if you see some changes week to week. We're adding some new videos and exercise sets for additional topics, revising some existing ones, and upgrading to the new framework that all of Stanford's free courses will be using this year.

If you prefer a more structured course with clear deadlines and many other students to help you out via our student-networking forum, then you may want to wait until the next official offering, likely in the latter part of 2012.

I'm enjoying the relational algebra videos right now. Periodically the video will stop and a quiz will pop up. And the questions aren't easy. Finding the one relational algebra statement that is different from the rest is kind of pain.