Marketplace: College for all

Will first-rate online pedagogy save cash-starved Israeli universities?

By SHLOMO MAITAL
Daphne Koller: Two years ago she co-founded Coursera, which now has 8.3 million users enrolled in 673 courses (photo credit: COURTESY COURSERA)
Daphne Koller: Two years ago she co-founded Coursera, which now has 8.3 million users enrolled in 673 courses
(photo credit: COURTESY COURSERA)
“College,” Humorist Mark Twain is alleged to have remarked, “is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.” As a 47-year veteran of college teaching, I find this quip painfully accurate, even if humorist Twain, himself, did not really say it.
Almost every university teaches innovation, especially those with business schools. Yet, very few actually practice it. In Harvard Yard there is a statue of John Harvard, the clergyman whose deathbed bequest in 1638 established the university named after him.
If the statue were to come to life and visit my own classroom, he would feel right at home nearly four centuries later.
He might wonder about the PowerPoint, the white boards and students’ noses buried in their cell phones. But he would instantly recognize the droning lecturers reading from their notes while the students diligently write down their instructors’ words in their own notebooks or tablets.
That is why I listened avidly to a recent talk given at the Technion on “The Online Revolution: Education for All” by Stanford University Professor Daphne Koller, an Israeli computer scientist. Her talk was sponsored by the Technion’s Center for the Promotion of Teaching.
Two years ago, together with her colleague Andrew Ng, head of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence lab, Koller, 46, founded Coursera, today the world’s largest provider of “MOOC’s” (massive open online courses).
After her talk, I had the opportunity to chat with her, together with other Technion faculty members. All of us were eager to learn how to mobilize digital technology to provide college for all.
By the time she was 18, Koller, had earned BSc and MSc degrees at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, subsequently completing a PhD at Stanford. She did path-breaking work on applying machine learning to systems biology and personalized medicine, won a MacArthur Fellows “genius grant” and was named one of Newsweek’s top 10 most important people of 2010.
Coursera currently has 8.3 million users enrolled in 673 courses from 110 partner institutions.
Each course is organized and approved by a university or college – a majority of which are outside the US. Lecturers from the Hebrew University, the Technion and Tel Aviv University offer nine Coursera courses in all.
Technion Prof. Hossam Haick’s Coursera course on nanotechnology and nanosensors is offered in both Arabic and English. Some 35,101 students have taken the English version, and 6,628, the Arabic version. Some students submitted a final project (graded by their peers), involving design and construction of a nanosensor. Haick, himself, is a top authority having developed a nanosensor able to “sniff” cancer molecules.
Coursera’s students are about evenly split between the US, other developed countries and emerging countries. Some 600,000 students are from India, 530,000 from China and 48,000 from Israel. According to Koller, so far 10,000 years of video have been watched, 44 million quizzes administered, 4 million peer-graded sessions and 1.25 million courses have been completed. A significant part of Coursera accessing is done through smartphones or tablets and the rest on laptops and desktops. Of the students enrolled, 70 percent are adults over 30.
“In 2011, we did an experiment at Stanford,” Koller recounted. “We made a few computer science courses open to all on the Internet. We expected a few thousand to enroll. But in a few weeks, over 100,000 students enrolled! Previously, the largest course at Stanford had about 400 students, in an auditorium. So, it would take us 250 years to teach conventionally the number of students we taught in a few weeks online!”
It was this experiment that led her and Dr. Ng to co-found Coursera. It showed dramatically how the Internet could deliver quality education at a scale inconceivable in conventional classrooms. Coursera began with four partner universities – Pennsylvania, Stanford, Michigan and Princeton – and 37 courses. It has grown exponentially since.
Coursera has been attacked in the media because only some five percent of students who enroll in a course actually complete it. But, Koller said, many students don’t intend to complete the course – they simply want to sample it, to see what the course is about.
Another survey shows that of students who three weeks into the course declare an intent to complete it, 63 percent do so. For those who also choose to purchase the right to earn a verified certificate, completion rates climb to 88 percent.
Some 59 percent of Coursera courses are in science. But physics and chemistry need lab exercises. How can you offer labs in an online course? Incredibly, you can.
Georgia Tech Prof. Michael Schatz offers, on Coursera, a popular introductory physics course, including a lab. Here is how the online lab works. “Each lab session (one approximately every two weeks) will typically (but not always) begin with observation and video capture of a particular type of motion in one’s own surroundings,” Schatz explains online. For example, “Throw a basketball, at a given angle, velocity and trajectory.”
“You will need to use a smartphone camera or a webcam to capture video,” students are told. “The ‘lab’ involves filming the tossed basketball and analyzing its trajectory. We will then use video analysis software to extract motion data.”
Schatz, himself, built the software that computes the trajectory of the thrown basketball.
“Fundamental principles will be applied to construct models (including computer models) of the observed motion.
Every student will record a video lab report comparing these observations and submit it for peer review. Course participants will evaluate the video lab reports submitted by peers.” Schatz’s course, when completed and verified, provides high school physics teachers with credits for continuing education requirements.
“Traditional on-campus labs in introductory courses [not just physics] are ripe for some radical rethinking,” Schatz claims. “Dull, cookbook instructional labs are widespread. Such labs discourage and bore vast numbers of students during the early collegiate years – at precisely the time when student experiences with introductory science can be life-changing. The ‘your world is your lab’ physics labs are a big improvement because they provide authentic experiences with applying science concepts to real-world problems in one’s immediate surroundings – a good thing for all students, on- and off-campus.”
Schatz uses a powerful Coursera concept called “the flipped classroom.” “In our flipped physics course,” he explains, “the lectures and most lab work are done out of class. The in-class time is focused on small group work – problem-solving and science communication.”
Learning and problem-solving are “flipped” – learning, out of class, and problem-solving, in class. In this model, students view video lectures, freeing in-class time for students to interact and communicate with other students. It is one way online learning blends optimally with the classroom and makes the latter far more productive.
How do you grade 100,000 homework assignments that cannot be marked by computers? This is one of Coursera’s cleverest inventions. Course instructors set up a template, or framework, for grading and evaluating homework. They provide it to all the students.
Each student is told, if you want your own work to be graded, you have to evaluate five other students’ homework. Thus, every student gets five evaluations, not one, of their problem sets. Koller notes that students are tougher than lecturers, giving somewhat lower grades. And the beauty of it is that students apparently learn as much from grading other students’ homework as they do in preparing their own.
We live in an age when, paradoxically, college degrees are becoming increasingly essential for finding employment, much as high school diplomas once were, yet college education is providing skills that are less and less relevant for what employers seek and need.
A 2011 study by the Institute for the Future, an American forecasting research group, lists 10 key skills needed in the future workplace.
They include novel and adaptive thinking, social intelligence, cross-cultural competency, design mindset, virtual collaboration, and “cognitive load management” (my favorite – meaning, filtering information, discarding the useless, saving the useful, and knowing which is which).
Very few of these skills are specifically taught today, either in high school or college.
In contrast, Coursera puts courses onto the Web and students “vote” by enrolling. Half of the enrollments, noted Koller, deliver career-relevant skills. For example, a highly popular course is one that teaches how to develop software applications for Google’s android cell-phone operating system.
One of Israel’s great global managers, Israel Makov, once defined innovation as “first to imagine, first to move, first to scale.”
For MOOCs, the hard part is “first to scale.”
How in the world do you provide a quality, personalized interactive college education online? It turns out that, ironically, online courses can be far more interactive than classroom lectures where, if students talk to one another and discuss the lecture, lecturers tend to toss them out for disrupting the class.
The largest Coursera course, on social psychology, is taught by Wesleyan University’s Scott Plous. Last fall it had 250,000 students enrolled! (The next round of the course begins July 14.) How can you interact with a student body equal to the population of Haifa? If each of the quarter million students submitted an assignment on one sheet of paper, the stack would be eight stories high! Rather daunting for a poorly paid teaching assistant.
“Several homework assignments will encourage you to experiment with your life, observe the results, and analyze what took place,” Plous tells students. Students interact through the Social Psychology online network.
The final assignment of Plous’s course is called “The Day of Compassion.” Students are asked to live for 24 hours as compassionately as possible and to analyze the experience using social psychology. Roughly 700 students received a perfect score (peer graded) on the assignment, each captured in a video film or a written narrative. The whole class then voted on which of these 700 students deserved a Day of Compassion Award sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE).
The winner was Dr. Balesh Jindal, a physician and artist from a rural area near New Delhi, India. She won the grand prize by finding a way to address the problem of sex-ual violence towards girls in her community.
During the Day of Compassion, she visited a local school with more than 2,000 female students, ages four to 17, from poor backgrounds.
Jindal taught each of five separate age groups about inappropriate touching and how to report incidents of abuse. These talks uncovered multiple cases of abuse by neighbors, brothers, cousins, and even fathers.
After the Day of Compassion, Jindal invited the mothers of abused girls to her nearby clinic for free counseling. She decided to set aside one day each week to help these girls and to work on reducing child sexual abuse.
In reading this inspiring account, I was struck by how a single creative teacher like Plous can touch the lives of a quarter of a million students all over the world who, in turn, change the world for countless others using online technology.
Thomas Malthus once “proved” the law of diminishing returns by arguing that if there were no diminishing returns you could grow all the world’s wheat in a flower pot. But for online teaching, there are only increasing returns to scale. This means a single gifted teacher like Plous, in theory, can teach all the world’s social psychology students and none need suffer teachers less gifted. Dinosaurs like myself will become obsolete unless we learn to improve quickly.
Suddenly, with online courses, my competition in teaching innovation is not a handful of local colleagues but every single instructor in the world. “Winner takes all” means that, ultimately, courses may be taught by only the very, very best in the world. This is the competitive model taken to the extreme.
Koller tempered my excessive enthusiasm by rightly noting that “different students often benefit from different learning styles”– so I might escape the brontosaurus’s fate after all, but only if I learn and improve a great deal.
Internet services scale massively through four magic words – anyone, anywhere, anytime, free. Google, the world’s leading search engine, has a vision of offering all the world’s information to everyone, anytime, anywhere. Google is now seeking ways to provide Internet access to the world’s 4.5 billion people who lack it, perhaps through drones or even helium balloons.
Coursera, too, has an anytime-anyone- anywhere vision. Coursera offers college education to everyone, everywhere, anytime, and, increasingly, in any language.
A team of 25,000 volunteers now form an “international translating committee” that is generating courses in languages other than English.
But what about “free”? How can you sustain a huge operation like Coursera with no revenue? The solution: Verified certification, which provides students with a certificate assuring completion of the course and all the course assignments for a token fee of $50. Coursera keeps $35 and the university providing the course gets $15. This should be enough revenue, Koller hopes, to sustain Coursera for years to come, especially since it is run extremely frugally.
For college students, the word “anytime” is magic. Massachusetts Institute of Technology once offered students a choice – take a conventional lecture course or take the same course online, with videotaped lectures available from a Website. The students, overwhelmingly, chose the online course, attracted by the possibility of viewing lectures at 3 a.m. after a heavy date.
In 2014-15, Israel again faces a budget crunch. A slowing economy and rising government spending may again require an austerity program and budget cuts – even though Finance Minister Yair Lapid insists he will not comply.
For the current academic year, Israel’s higher education budget is 8.9 billion shekels ($2.5 billion) – barely the rounding error in the defense budget. That sum supports seven research universities and 21 teaching colleges that get government funding.
(There are many more private colleges that do not receive any government funding at all.) Of that $2.5 billion, $1.5 billion goes to cover the universities’ operating costs, $388 million for colleges’ operating costs, and the rest for research and other funds. Of the total of 237,000 undergraduate students, twothirds study at colleges, and only one-third at research universities.
The higher education budget cost per research university student is about $20,000.
The budget cost per college student is a fifth of that, or about $4,000. This makes it hugely attractive for the Finance Ministry to expand the colleges, at the expense of the research universities, to save money. Indeed, the academic colleges’ enrollment grew in the current academic year, while enrollment in universities shrank.
This is an exceptionally dangerous, short-sighted policy. Israel’s growth engine is its hi-tech start-ups, driven by innovative technology. How will graduates deliver technology-intensive innovations if they are not taught by those who helped invent those technologies through their research? At present, the massive wave of Russian engineers and scientists who came to Israel in the 1990s is aging and many will soon retire.
The seven research universities do not produce nearly enough engineers to replace them. Israel’s population of 80,000 lawyers shows that many young people have opted for law rather than engineering. Lawyers clog the courts, rather than create jobs and exports.
What all this means is that universities in Israel must heed the adage, “Physician, heal thyself” and begin themselves to use the technologies they teach. They must do more with less – produce more and better graduates with fewer resources.
This is already occurring in the US. One American college student in seven is learning primarily through online courses. A decade ago that figure was one in 16. Online programs are highly cost effective. The University of Massachusetts (Amherst) online MBA enrolls only one MBA student in every four, but generates 40 percent of the business school’s revenue. What is emerging is that the “hybrid” combination of blended learning – online learning coupled with in-person learning – is ideal.
“We [Coursera] don’t want to replace universities,” Koller said. “We want to transform them!” It’s about time.
Perhaps the combination of Finance Ministry penury, global competition and the availability of free first-rate online courses will drag our universities kicking and screaming into the online pedagogy of the 21st century.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the S. Neaman Institute, Technion