Distance Education

“Better Education for Everyone”--what will happen after initial scaling

In my latest post, I mentioned an idea of a Chinese version of Coursera, which is entirely based on Chinese language and education resources from Chinese top universities. In that post, I imaged a little bit of its near future, thinking that the long term outcome is hard to predict. Until now I still feel that envisioning what it looks like in 3-5 year is beyond my ability. However, I would like to further explore potential ways of raising fund. One of my biggest concern about "Better Education for Everyone" is that, it will be harder for this project to raise enough capital, comparing to Coursera. As an experimental education revolution, Coursera received a lot of donation from top universities, which are also interested in exploring online education practice. As a for-profit, Coursera also receive significant amount of investment from venture capital. For "Better Education for Everyone", it would be an entire different story. Either way Coursera proved successful here in the U.S. is less likely to work in China, at least now. Then, how could my project achieve break-even?

After careful consideration, I came up with following long-term fund raising/capital acquisition strategies, all of which are based on an assumption that “Better Education for Everyone” could be kicked off successfully in the first place and embrace a user population of at least 100, 000 by the year end of its first year.

 

• Issuing course certificate

Taking courses at “Better Education for Everyone” will be completely free, and this won’t change not matter how far this program goes in the future. However when there is enough recognition of our education quality from society, we might want to begin issuing certificate to those who successfully complete all the quiz and homework, and pass all the tests of a certain course. The certificate would be optional and not for free, and it might come in multiple format like a formal pdf documentation, or a badge which could show on Weibo.com or Zhihu.com, where some professionals (in industries like IT, designing, data analyzing etc.) are actively networking for better job opportunities (China does not have well-localized LinkedIn). The certificate might be useful in other scenarios as well. For example, if a Chinese student wants to apply for a graduate program, yet he or she does not fulfill all the prerequisite of that specific program, probably a certificate would be a good proof of completing relevant courses. The certificate won’t guarantee any job, nor could it be transformed to formal school credit (at least not for every universities our users comes from), however the value and credential of the certificate would definitely rise with the scaling of our program and benefit the certificate holders more and more.

• Advertising for some relevant recruiters and standardized test training companies

As “Better Education for Everyone” grows, there would be more and more serious and self-motivated learners, many of whom are driven to further their careers. As a result, placing related recruiting information as well as advertisements for companies that provide specific training or self-learning materials for standardized-test would be a revenue generator. For example, one concentration of our course delivery would be finance. We could put recruitment message of finance companies and also advertisement for CFA training class or CFA-related booksellers at the corner of the Blackboard, and a reasonable fee would be collected accordingly.

• Providing head-hunter service and well-tailored advertisement service

This capital acquisition method relies heavily on the great power of massive data. On “Better Education for Everyone”, every time you work on a problem or watch a video, the site remembers what you’ve learned and where you’re spending your time. It keeps all of this data private but exposes powerful statistics to each user. It would just completely change our ability to extract meaningful conclusions from the data. Because this teaching platform can gather so much data about learners, a company could hyper customize its recruitment searches--to find, say, a Python programmer who can learn new languages quickly and is good at interacting with his or her classmates on discussion board. We would have well-rounded data about one person, not only his or her ability in one specific area, but also his or her general behavioral pattern and personal characteristics (for example, does this person has great leadership or not), since on our platform people would engage themselves in a lot of interactions more than just acquiring new knowledge. This kind of information would be very useful for company who is looking for a perfect match. Similarly, thanks to all the data collected from users’ day to day online behavior, we would be able to send them a package of tailor-designed purchasing recommendations (like related books etc.) and collect fees from companies.  

What need to be mentioned here is that those data would only be available to outside companies with the authorization of users. We will not “sell” their data or trash their email box against their will. Our every endeavor would aim at benefiting our users (refer them to good job opportunities) instead of hurting them.  

• Premium service for companies and individuals

Since “Better Education for Everyone” has abundant professional education resources, it would be a great idea for some small to medium sized companies to outsourcing its employer training program to us. We could work with them to develop tailor-designed course package, which could best serve its requirement. We could try to open new mini-courses specifically catering to a certain companies needs, and also create more opportunities for their employers to interact with course instructors. We will try to make this happen by show them how much money they could save for using our service instead of developing an entire internal training system of their own. Similarly, we could also provide premium service to individuals with a small fee as well, like guarantee certain period of communication time with instructor, or highlight their names in the list we give to potential employers.

 

• Donation from previous alumni

Last but not least, we would encourage and expect some donation from previous alumni. It won’t be as much as the amount people donate to Yale if they spent 4 years in the yard, yet we believe the 5% people who benefit the most, getting a satisfying job for instance, would be willing to donate some money with our encouragement and invitation.

 

 

Best Education for Everyone

posted by Juanjuan Wang

After spending half a year observing and writing about distance education, I feel tempted to talk about my own idea, which is still very early stage. In the beginning, when I was first introduced to Coursera (which has been mentioned a thousand times in my previous blogs), I felt very excited. First thought came to me was: I hope everybody could get access to it. Another thought quickly followed: what about my Chinese peers who are not used to learn in English, or those who could not understand English at all? Those thoughts made me unpleasant, even though I was so grateful to see Chinese subtitles for some course. As explained in my last post, only subtitles for the course video is far from enough. After using (on and off) for several months, I discovered another fact that even make me more frustrated: even I myself find it sometimes tiring, confusing, and overwhelming to learn in English, although I have been studying in the U.S. for almost two years. I have to admit that reading in Chinese is so much easier and faster than reading in English, for output the disparity is even more. As I perceived, my English is not bad than my Chinese peers who studies in the U.S. What a disappointing fact! Even students who have studied in English (as their second language) intensively for 2 years would still consider language as a barrier, when using mainstream online education platforms (almost all of them are in English). 

Something needs to be done, for those who do not have English as their mother tongue.  

Specifically, I want to see a project for Chinese people. 

My idea is a platform similar to Coursera, which is called “Better Education for Everyone”. It will deliver best higher education from Top Chinese Universities. As mentioned in my last post, it is important to lower the threshold for students to effectively use online education resources, yet most Chinese students would find it hard and discouraging to study in an English environment. As a result, a Chinese-languages based online open course platform might have the capability to meet great potential demand. This website, “Best Education for Everyone” , would have very similar model and functions as Coursera. The major two differences are:

1) Language setting: It would be all in Chinese.

2) Education resource: Courses on “Best Education for Everyone” are given by professors at famous Chinese universities.

In order to make it up and running, I initiated a two-stage strategy. It is only for the first year, because I assume that this project might undertake drastic change in years after. As Beth (@bethnoveck )mentioned in one class, if we teach the same class (Gov 3.0, a class given at NYU Wagner School of Public Service, focusing on open government and most recent web-based tools to deliver public service) several years later, we would be laughed at.

Stage 1: a quick start within the first 3 months

• Establish primary relationship with schools: Have deep and thorough conversations with administrators of Peking University and Tsinghua University (top 2 universities of China) to require support and/or partnership; approach at least 20 professors from those two universities and have 5 of them promise to open a class in the following 6 months.
• Website prototyping: Have 1-2 experienced web-developer to draft the website; finish paper prototyping for major user interface.
• Initial fundraising: Raise at least 100, 000 RMB 100 (approximately $15, 000)
• Social media marketing:
  • Open an account in Weibo.com (Chinese version of Twitter, the most popular Social Network Service in China); start putting on all the achievements and milestones from the very beginning; attract at least 2000 followers by the end of the first 100 days.
  • Open an account in Zhihu.com (Chinese version of Quora, most active users of which are practitioners and experts in media, neo-media, and Internet industry who are also active life-learners. It is a perfect platform for “Better Education for Everyone” to collect prompt feedbacks and suggestions in its every developing stage and also build within-industry network). Raise 5-8 high quality, web-based education related questions to gain more visibility.
• Demand analysis: Conduct surveys and interviews with 50 typical large and medium-sized enterprise about a) how their current training program looks like; would they be interested in encouraging their employee to take some of our featured courses; b) would them be interested in co-developing a tailor-designed training course package for their employees with our program; 3) do they have underserved need of finding the perfect match for some of their crucial positions; if so, would them be interested in paying a certain amount of fee for matching service similar to existing head-hunter yet with more thorough and well-rounded data about potential match.

 

Stage 2: from the fourth month to the year end

• Fundraising from government (Department of Education)

 We could approach the Department of Education by addressing how our program would help delivering higher education as public goods. China’s higher education system has long been under criticism because of limited educational resources and also unequal distribution of those resources. For example, high school graduate from 1-tier cities generally have a better chance to go to Better universities Better Education for Everyone” could help alleviate the above-mentioned problem by making Better courses available to people who do not get a chance to go to top universities in person.

 

• Applying for National Higher Education Innovation Research Fund. 

Instead of standing on the opposite side of traditional offline higher educational institution and “steal” student from their paid courses and services, “Better Education for Everyone” will help improve classroom experience of universities.  This is actually an experimental and revolutionary attempt to transform previous higher education delivery pattern. “Better Education for Everyone” enables students at the university to view all lectures as well as complete quizzes and homework on their own time. The change would free up the in-person classroom for projects, discussions, field trips, and other interactive learning. If successful, “Better Education for Everyone” would free Better professors from pure knowledge transfer, and give them more time and opportunities to guide students with real-world problems. With a proper approach and research proposal, “Better Education for Everyone” is very likely to be eligible for China’s National Higher Education Innovation Research Fund.

 

We could work harder on it, yet we also want it easier.

Last time we discussed about 

whether users has enough motives to use online education services. A quick conclusion is, a lot of people have the interest in obtaining new knowledge and in self-improvement, however, many lack the strong motive and self-disciplinary to hold on to entire learning process. 

How could deal with this? Apparently there is a disparity between how much willpower the learning process requires, and how much most of us could provide. One way to handle this is to work from the users' end: either to strengthen our willpower or to talk ourselves into stronger motives.

How to obtain more self-control and be able to accomplish something harder than one could handle before? This is definitely an entire whole different task, which is as hard as becoming an intensive online education users. This is not the main topic of the current post, yet there are several credible books in this area, that I want to quickly recommend:

1) Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength; 

2) The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It, which is based on Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal's wildly popular course "The Science of Willpower," and

3) The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business 

How to produce stronger motive? Sometimes external pressure could be utilized. Image that the "Introduction to Python" has been lying in your "shopping cart" of a certain online education platform for a really long time. You first put it in because your career goal is becoming a product manager in a software company. You always feel that, it is important to learn some basic programming skills, even through it is not required in many product manager job descriptions. However, one day when you are searching for new job postings, a very attractive position jump in to his eyes. It fits perfectly your every hope and desire, and you are qualified for every required skill, except for only one: basic Python knowledge.

Bang! How you wish that you had already completed that online course! Good news is, the application deadline is two months from now. It is highly possible that you would leverage this month and work on that course intensively. This time it feels easier to start and continue than before, for two main reasons:

1) you could see a very specific external incentive (a dream job) which is directly linked with whether you could accomplish the task at hand (quickly absorb fundamental knowledge about Python) or not.

2) There is a clear deadline ( one month later).

However, most of the time we need to learn something, which is not urgent in the short term, but would be important in the long term. How could we transfer experiences like the "Python" story to deal with this kind of situation? If there are no external events, probably we could create one. It should have the two basic characteristics: 1)an external incentive directly linked with the task that need to be done; and 2) a clear deadline. Here I will share a real experience of my friend to elaborate this method. 

That friend is a management consultant at XXX, one of the first-tier consulting firms. He always wanted to improve his PowerPoint and presentation skills. After trying and failing for several times, he had an idea. He contacted the business school he graduated from, saying that he was interested in sharing his experience as a consultant XXX. The school agreed because XXX is the dream company of many of its students. As he suggested, the lecture was scheduled 28 days ahead.  Suddenly, he felt extremely under pressure, because he certainly did not want to lose face at his university. Then in the following month, he made the best use of every minute of his spare time to polish his PowerPoint and presentation skills, using tones of free resources online. He finally did pretty well at that lecture, and bought himself an iPad 2nd generation as a prize, for successfully pushing himself to achieve significant improvement. 

Previously we mentioned that, one way to handle the disparity is to work from the users' end. The other way, without doubt, is to work from the service providers' end. The current practice, like Coursera, is already very user-friendly, much better than our previous generation could get. However, is it possible, in the ear future, to make the learning experience even easier, and smoother?

I'd like to say yes. For example, one possible solution is to make the learning process more fun and more integrated into people's daily online activities. For example, if a website like Coursera could have a one-click share function, to share most wonderful videos, one's learning process, thoughts and experiences to Facebook and Twitter, it will be easier for users to carry on. Image that when I feel very frustrated at learning Java, instead of just quit learning, I could share the course page and complain on my Facebook page. What is likely to happen is, many friends would left me comforting and encouraging messages. If I am lucky enough, I might also find someone who has similar Java pain start to help each other out. It feels much better than sitting there along with nothing but just some bugs to fix.

Another possible way, is to design specific service to a target group. Let's still take Coursera as an example. A lot of people all over the world have benefitted from Coursera, however in my country, China, not everyone could benefit from it, because of the language barrier. Those currently underserved group should not be held back from better higher education just because they are not fluent in English. Someone might argue that as long as some volunteers would offer to put Chinese subtitles for each courses, as how previously those most popular open courses were introduced to China. However, no one could ever bring the entire learning experience at Cousera (including all reading materials, lecture Power Point slides, all discussions, assignments, and tests) to people who are not comfortably learning in English just by translation. In order to enable more Chinese students and also professionals to be actually engaged in a very interactive learning experience, a Chinese-based online higher education platform, similar to Cousera, is necessary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Distance Education: do users have enough motives?

As mentioned in one of my previous blog, last September, a friend of mine recommended Coursera to me, an online higher education platform that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.  

I've always been interested in online higher education. One important reason is that I came from China where good higher education resource is scarce and severe education inequity exists. With limited seats in high quality university classes, virtual learning might be a complementary solution. Lucky enough, I myself was able to get in one of the best universities in China yet it shuts down doors to tremendous students who are also eager to learn. Also, from a more practical point of view, the quality of higher education one receives is one of the important determinants of their competitive strength in the job market.

In recent years, Chinese students are getting more and more access to the best online education resources all over the world. Earlier we could obtain knowledge from open courses on iTunes U and some 1-tier universities' websites; most recently, 

 Coursera, Udacity , Stanford Venture Lab and similar websites and apps also become available. Great! Isn’t it? With much more high quality, free courses online, it is almost for sure that numerous students could benefit a lot.

 

Almost, but not. Previously we are hungry for knowledge and education yet there is severe “food deficit”. Now we have a tree full of juicy fruits in front of us, however most of us just do not bother reach out our hands. Taking my experience for example, when Coursera was first introduced to me, I quickly fell in love with this easy-to-use, highly interactive platform. I recommended it to everyone I know as a life learner, saying that “this is so different from previous online open course, and it is much easier to stick to your learning plan without easily dropping out in the middle”. That is partly true. For previous open courses, I could hardly finish a single course. At the beginning, the videos are very exciting and attractive, and the feeling of learning something is fairly fulfilling. However as time goes by, course itself becomes less novel thus less appealing. I usually postpone learning for other “more urgent” issues such as a school deadline, or a job interview. Then one day, I recognize that I haven’t been learning that course for over a month (or a even longer time). At that point, I just do not want to look at this course again (it would remind me of how unsuccessful I am, in achieving my goals). I quit.

Coursera is another story. I registered for 5 classes and only get through one. Do not get me wrong, for that one, I do not accomplish all the assignments and exams; I just finished watching all the videos. Well, not quite different. Right?

 

This is not just the story of mine. Although, I have to admit that I know several people who have great persistence in completing all the courses they chose and benefited a lot from them; more people I know are just like me. Does it mean that we lack enough motives to get us through the end?

The answer is quite complicated. On one hand, on Renren.com (Chinese version of Facebook), links to a great TED talk or a serious of lectures would easily be shared 40,000 times. That certainly reflects great interest and enthusiasm. On the other hand, however, of the 40,000 people who share it, only few could really benefit from it. Long story short, the majority of us are willing to get some self-improvement, yet lack enough motives to get to the end.

The story is not unique. Look at those best-seller self-improving or self-helping books. They become best sellers because a lot of people have the motives to better off their situation. However, among 100 that purchased the book, 50 get to the back cover and think it is “so revolutionary and life-changing”, 20 actually try the tips suggested in the book, and only 5 persist to see significant difference in their lives. This is already an optimistic estimate. It seems that people who are more determined and more persistent always benefit, and we ordinary people are always stuck in current situation for not working hard enough. Then we blame those books and online courses for over-promising and under-delivering.

A following question emerges: how could we, as the mass, to really benefit from online education?

Online education in the era of social media: more accessible, more entertaining, more diverse, yet shallower?

 Posted by Juanjuan Wang

I am a big fan myself of both social media and online education. When we talks about how social media influence the online education, a very tricky tendency is to use the term of social media in general, without analyzing the different roles of different major social media platforms. For example, the most popular three: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube play very different roles.

The inception of YouTube, as a very important channel, has been playing a big role in displaying wonderful educational materials. First of all, it serves as a huge archive. If I want to spend my afternoon by watching a TED video, an episode of Machine Learning course provided by Coursera, and another episode of Harvard’s popular open course on happiness, I could stay on YouTube the entire time, and easily find them all using the search tool bar, instead of going to three individual websites and using their own directories. Secondly, it encourages amateur users to generate their own education practice as well. The most famous example here would be Khan Academy, now a library of over 3000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, all of which are stored on YouTube. Khan Academy was created by Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics. When other relatives and friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube. Soon those trail videos became so successful that he quit his job and started work full-time on this. Without YouTube, it would be much harder for people like him to create and maintain a website that could store and display all those wonderful videos, and attract so much attention in a short period time.

Different from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter mainly play the role of marketing, as regards to online education. If one is a highly motivated user of online education services, he or she might be actively seeking for all available materials online and would like to take the extra step to go to different websites. However, it is not the case for most of us. Instead of actively seeking for educational resources, most of us would more likely to click on a Twitter or Facebook video link that is in our news feed, which seems to be interesting. That is to say, Facebook and Twitter news feed bring good online education videos to people who are not typical consumers of online education products previously. The difference between Facebook and Twitter is that, on Facebook we are more connected with family and friends, while on Twitter, we might follow people of certain expertise to obtain domain-specific information. As a result, videos shared by your Facebook friend might be more general, more entertaining, and less professional (what people will passing on to friends), while videos shared by people you follow on Twitter could includes more serious and domain-specific information, if you are using Twitter as a subscription tool.

As I understand it, online education here is a broader definition; it includes not only well-structured, academic-oriented courses, which has similar topics as offline school courses, but also other kinds of educational resources. For example, TED, as mentioned above, is a great source of inspirational theories and ideas from a variety of disciplines and topics. Another good example is a personal Youku (Chinese version of YouTube) channel owned by a well-known media expert in China, named Zhenyu Luo. This channel is aimed at delivering basic education on civilized society. Videos are released once per week with a specific topic for each one. This personal channel, as an experimental we-media practice, has won increasingly amount of attention in China. This is a great example to show that, like Khan Academy, the lower threshold of producing and storing educational materials enables more people to generate their own videos, which add great diversity to the resources available online.

Despite all the abovementioned positive influence social media has on distance education, there might be a potential negative effect that worth paying attention to. Social media does not just help store and distribute existing materials, but has influence on the quality and characteristics of materials to be produced. In today’s eyeball economy, with people’s attention span is shortened more and more by social media and information fragmentation, serious (thus boring sometimes) videos is less likely to be generated. People are more motivated to create and distribute videos (and other forms of educational materials as well) that are eye-catching and fun to watch. This phenomenon, in the long run, might cause a decreased proportion of serious knowledge, comparing to “something fun to learn” on the web.

Open data and education: the present and the possible future

        According to wikipedia, Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. Although the term of open data is new, the philosophy behind that, which I think is sharism, transparency, and alleviating information asymmetry, has long been established. For example, there is always some data and charts available in previous government reports or consumer reports. In the past, the public might not obtain full access to the complete data set. What is in front of them is just partial data with fixed, single interpretation without giving alternatives or the right to directly play with data.  This pre-selected disclosure approach might introduce ambiguity and bias. With the advance of technology, civic awareness, and public engagement, nowadays there is much more data available online which belongs to a variety of industries and policy areas. A simple question is, is it good enough? Let's take education, especially higher education as an example. 

1. Examples of current practice in the U.S.

• The MyData Initiative, which is part of Ed.gov, seeks for every student (or parent of an underage student) to have access to his or her own academic data in a machine-readable format.
• College Affordability and Transparency Center, initiated by the U.S. Department of Education, which mainly presents data on the financial side of pursuing education
• NCES, The National Center for Education Statistics, the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education. It has a section called College Navigator, which has data of nearly 7,000 colleges and universities in the United States. Especially, it has various search criteria to help users find "the right college" for themselves. 

Basic searching function contains location, institution type, etc.

The advanced search contains much more detail information such as Test Scores – 25th Percentile, % of Applicants Admitted, Housing, etc. 

2. Examples of current practice in China

        In China where I come from, open data and open government is on its way to more public attention. On February 1st, Minister of Education Yuan Guiren said on the National Education and Scientific Research Conference that, we should make more data accessible to education and scientific research institutions, to enable a better environment for education and scientific researches. 

• Research Database of Higher Education in China is an online database initiated by Higher Education Development Center of Xiamen University. It contains survey data from 11 province over 5 years of undergraduate students.
• Chinese Higher Education Information Searching System is a platform initiated by one of the biggest and most powerful Internet company in China: Tecent. It has similar searching tool bars as shown above. High school graduates could put in some of their personal information (like their estimated score in National University Entrance Examination) and choose some filters to get a recommended school and/or major.
• Chinese Higher Education Student Information System is an active online achieve of university students' information since the year 2001. One way to use the website is for the students to testify their degrees and important national certificate information to their potential employers.

3.  An imaginary searching engine in the future

        Previously we took a look at the current practice of two countries. Although the U.S. has more advanced practice and more transparency in general, there is still a long way for both to go. Having a personal tracking system which records one's education performance information from the very beginning, which could also provide timely feedback and generate periodically reports might be a good goal.

        However, here in this blog I do not intend to write too much about how open data could potentially help improving education quality and assessment methodology. Instead, I am trying to envision the future from another perspective: looking at education especially higher education as an investment. If people are investing 4+ years of their time and plenty of money on getting higher education, how could they make more informed decision with the help of open data?

        From Joel Gurin's presentation on how to use open government data to empower consumers, one of the three principles of smart disclosure design is that, the data should be as usable as possible.  However, different people have different standard when it comes to "usable". Data that a scientific researcher or a graduate student takes as usable might seems still hard to make sense from, for a high school student or their parents who have not stats background yet want to choose a university program wisely. 

        In my opinion, one solution is to leverage the power of crowd sourcing. Either the government or certain big education institution could encourage people who have statistic skills and have passion for improving education as a whole, to contribute in interpreting the huge volume of data sets published online. Charts, PowerPoint slides, infographics, data visualization...all kinds of tools that could make the data easier to understand for choice makers are warmly welcomed. Of course with one more step of interpretation between raw data and consumption, it is inevitable that some personal perspective or bias might generate. However this kind of problem would be much less significant comparing to the situation in the past.

        In the past, the situation is:

            Raw data (not available) —> data owners interpretation which might be biased or even misleading —> the public

        Now the situation is:

            Raw data (open online to everyone) —> data volunteer's alternative interpretations which might also be biased yet could be cross-checked —> the public

        Especially, the mechanism of crowd sourcing would also largely alleviate the risk of manipulating data interpretation by a certain relevant organization which could benefit a lot financially from misleading data. Education, although is a personal choice, could has great positive externality on our society. Thus it is better for us to avoid it being under entire control of money and market power. 

        Imagine one day in the future, a high school student is deciding which university to apply to. He or she will go to a special searching engine where all sources of higher education related data is well-interpreted and integrated. With basic information input, he/she could know which school is financially affordable; which major is more tailored to his/her interest, or his/her learning style/cognitive traits; what kinds of career is lying ahead of certain school/major choice; if he or her is interested in life in a specific city, which school has strongest alumni network in that city...all information is presented in such a user-friendly way that no one would suffer from blind choice caused by failure of searching for and reading data. How wonderful is that!

 

 

 

 

Data communication, adaptive learning, big data and better online education

 

 

Posted by Juanjuan Wang

Last September, a friend of mine recommended Coursera to me, an online higher education platform  that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.  After trying 30 minutues, I quickly fell in love with this easy-to-use platform. Soon after that, I discovers several other similar platforms which offers highly interactive university level courses, such as Udacity  and Stanford Venture Lab. Among all those website, I like Coursera the most. I would like to call those website online higher education 2.0, because comparing to the open courses you could find on iTunes U and some 1-tier universities' websites, these recent adventures give a well-rounded learning experience including pre-reading, class discussion, real-time quiz, assignment and test. It provides a whole learning environment, which highly imitate that you tranditionally get from offline classroom.

What is more exciting is how programs like Coursera could leverage the power of big data. Big data, according to wikipedia, is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. Coursera already hit one million students in 196 couturiers world wide last August, which means that every second there are students conducting all kinds of activities on their website. This certainly generates enormous scale of data which we could draw insight from.

According to a post on Fast Company website:

"When a student takes a Coursera class, the system tracks the learner's every move. The typical educational study has 20 students; the big ones have 200. Here we have 20,000, or even 200,000, and it just completely changes your ability to extract meaningful conclusions from the data. We can see every single click: pausing, rewinding, the first and second try on the homework, what they did in between."

For example, while reviewing answers of an assignment of Machine Learning, one of the earliest, most popular courses at Coursera given by one of its co-founder Andrew, Andrew noticed that 2,000 users submitted identical wrong answers. Further analysis revealed that the student errors originated with switching two lines of code in a particular algorithm. 

Analyzing big data enables more accurate and insightful observation, which could help improving education delivery little by little. In the student forum for Ng's machine-learning class, they found that a particular post helped a lot of students find the correct response to a question on one of the quizzes. According to the post mentioned above, in the next round of the course, Ng might include that information in an FAQ or address it directly on the video.

Big data could help online education in more way than one. Recently I had a very informative interview with Aaron Schumacher, who has worked as an analyst at the NYC Department of Education and is now with NYU's Data Services as Senior Data Services Specialist. In that conversation, Aaron introduced a lot of useful information and websites on how technology and computer could help improve education, some of them would be included in later posts. One of the website he mentioned is Knewton's adaptive learning, which seems really exciting because it makes a big step further in using big data to make real-time individualized education. According to its website, "Knewton is a technology company that uses data to continuously personalize online learning content for individual students. Knewton analyzes data about the performance of each student and similar students on the platform, as well as the relevance of the educational content, in order to serve up the best activity for each student at a particular moment in time."

In specific, Knewton's model is called "Continuously adaptive learning". "The platform is continuously adaptive, meaning it responds in real time to each student’s activity on the system and adjusts to provide the most relevant content". Previously, a lot of practices in education field could serve as an example of the "black box" theory. Although education and psychology experts conducted many researches on learning mechanisms, there is still great uncertainty in which actually works better, what actually influence the learning outcome and how. This is certainly an area where data could jump in. According to a post on Inside Higher Education named "Pearson and Knewton: Big Data and the Promise of Personalized Learning", "the promise of digital content is, in part, the promise to be able to glean more insight into learning.  Being able to provide solid data about student progress -- what they understand, what they don't -- in real time and not just at the beginning or end of the semester, being able to provide remediation aimed at those strengths and weaknesses… these are powerful, powerful offerings."

The above mentioned practices remind me of a core idea Viktor Mayer-Schonberger mentioned in his recent book "Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think", that "within this Big Data era correlation seems far more important than causation. Figuring out what variables are predictive gets you far better and rich results than figuring out which ones are truly causal".

Notwithstanding the rising role big data is playing in improving education in this technology era, there is still some lower hanging fruit, which could be achieved with simpler methods. In our conversation, Aaron provided a very good example: Assistments, which is an an online tutoring program that gives immediate feedback to teachers, students, school administrators, and parents created with.

How it actually works? First of all, the teacher assigns a problem set to the student:

(Note: all the pictures here are taken from the website of Assistments)

Then, students could get quick feedback,  teacher gets immediate evaluation on how the student and the class performed like below, and as Aaron mentioned, parents could also access data on how their children perform. 

What shows above is not comprehensive big data analysis; Assisstment proves that even simple data analysis and data communication could largely benefit all stakeholders and improve the outcome of education. 

In this era of technology, there is certainly more to expect. Let's witness it together and hopefully become part of the revolution sometime in the future. 

 

 

Russia’s plan for Open Government: Let's add some fun!

 

 

First thought on Russia’s plan for Open Government? I would say it looks great. Why?

1) It provides ways for the citizens to be heard.  For example, "Russian Public Initiative" is a creation of technical and organizational conditions for public submission of proposals.

2) It encourages the development of a healthy and constructive public sphere. In their plan, there is development of a system for expert discussion of effectiveness of development and implementation of socially and economically important decisions.

3) It gives sufficient public disclosure, financial wise. For example,  "Electronic Budget".

4) It makes data easily accessible. The government aims for a structured database with a multi-criteria search option (by types, recipients, administrators, constituent entities of the RF, etc.) 

5) The government leverages the power of crowdsourcing, for example, for development of the two national web-projects for approbation.

However, something is missing here, something at first glance might not be relevant, something...fun.

According to Transparency and Open Government, an article on the White House's website, "Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government's effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions." Proper public disclosure, well-established, easy-accessible online database, and encouragement for public discussion as well as non-profit development——all of them are good and fundamental. Yet are those good enough to encourage active engagement of the public? Not necessarily.

In the famous TED speak of  Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy, he states that we live in a world that "actively discourages engagement by constantly putting obstacles and barriers in our way". 

 

He uses an example of a newspaper ad. of City Hall. " It's a notice of a zoning application change for a new office building so the neighborhood knows what's happening. " As you might feel, it's very hard to read. "You need to get halfway down to even find out which address they're talking about, and then farther down, in tiny 10-point font, to find out how to actually get involved".

                   

If the private world were doing thing in similar ways, it would like the picture below:

                                   

Ridiculous. Right? Public fields as well as the government always borrow best practices from the private world. Yet sometimes, the content is borrowed yet the frame is still old. Why not include vivid pictures, visible headlines, interactive tones and all the fun and positive feelings as well? That's what usually in the commercial ads and websites, which effectively encourage us to take an act.

 

So instead of the painful long reading material, why not re-design the City Hall ad like this:

                    

My suggestion to the Russia's plan for Open Government is similar: try to include more fun and lower down the threshold for the citizens to engage. One general method could be, to integrate the plan into people's existing behavior pattern, instead of forcing them to form a new habit. This could be done with at least two approaches: 

a) Better utilization of social media. Russia's plan for Open Government does not mention how the government is going to use social media. Yet it is easier to get more attention if the government could have a presence in most popular social medias. People does not have the habit of going to a certain governmental website for information. Usually, they have their own source of information, basically through RSS in the era of blog, and now more through social media like Twitter or Facebook.  Also, people are used to making comments on those platforms, while generally more reluctant to directly leave a message on the government’s official website. If a report is published both on the government’s homage and its Facebook homepage, it would definitely receive more attention and feedback. What is more, real-time online interaction between the government and the public would really be more exciting and attractive. 

A interest fact worth mentioning is that: "Facebook and Google are by far not the key players on the market". According to the article How do people use social media in Russia, "Yandex is the most popular search engine in the Russian Internet space, has a market share above 60 percent, more than three times that of Google’s. The most popular social networks are: Odnoklassniki.ru with 73 percent of Internet users’ registrations, vKontakte with 62 percent, MoiMir with 31 percent, followed by Facebook with 18 percent". So integrating Odnoklassniki.ru into the net step of action plan might be a good idea.

b) Better utilizations of smartphones and the tablets. Nowadays, smartphones and tablets are competing with traditional PCs, to be the most recent tool people use to surf the Internet. More and more people are using their smartphones for daily online activities since it is more convenient for them. Useful and fun apps makes people addicted to their phone. How could the government deal with this trend? How to be part of the fun people are having with their phones? Jennifer Pahlka answered that question in her TED talk named "Coding a better government":

Here is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston, which would not function normally when covered with snow.

                                            


Then a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober wrote an app to adopt fire hydrants. "If you agree to dig it out when it snows. If you do, you get to name it, and he called the first one Al. And if you don't, someone can steal it from you."

                                           

Really fun. Isn't it? It is such a creative way of solving public problems with modern trends of technology. Speaking of technology, let's take a quick look at Denmark's Open Government Partnership National Action Plan of 2012. It stats that "Danish primary and lower secondary schools already use digital learning tools and processes". I am not sure what the exact form of digital learning this refers to. However, something Russia could possible borrow here, is that with the magic power of smartphones and iPads and some combined effort of education specialists and programmers, distance massive online education might also be an alternative choice for Russia's delivery of public service, as well as ways of collecting feedbacks on educational policies. 

 

Let's add some fun!