UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Computer Science & Engineering
COLLOQUIUM
SPEAKER: Daphne Koller, Stanford University
TITLE: The Online Revolution: High-Quality Education for Everyone
DATE: Tuesday, May 8, 2012
TIME: 3:30pm
PLACE: EEB-105
HOST: Ed Lazowska
ABSTRACT:
Last year, Stanford University offered three online courses, which anyone
in the world could enroll in and take for free. Students were expected to
submit homeworks, meet deadlines, and were awarded a "Statement of
Accomplishment" only if they met our high grading bar. Together, these
three courses had enrollments of around 350,000 students, making this one
of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. In the
past few months, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture,
Coursera, a social entrepeneurship company that partners with top
universities to provide high-quality content to everyone around the world
for free. In this talk, I'll report on this new experiment in education,
and why we believe this model can provide both an improved classroom
experience for our on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as
well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students
around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of
this quality. I'll describe the pedagogical foundations for this type of
teaching, and the key technological ideas that support them, including
easy-to-create video chunks, a scalable online Q&A forum where students
can get their questions answered quickly, sophisticated autograded
homeworks, and a carefully designed peer grading pipeline that supports
the at-scale grading of more open- ended homeworks, such as essay
questions, derivations, or business plans.
Whereas technology and automation have made almost all segments of our
economy---such as agriculture, energy, manufacturing,
transportation---vastly more efficient, education today isn't much
different than it was 300 years ago. Given also the rising costs of
higher education, the hyper-competitive nature of college admissions, and
the lack of access to a high quality education, we think there is a huge
opportunity to use modern internet and AI technology to inexpensively
offer a high quality education online. Through such technology, we
envision millions of people gaining access to the world- leading education
that has so far been available only to a tiny few, and using this
education to improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the
communities they live in.
Joint project with Andrew Ng, Stanford University
Bio: Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer
Science Department at Stanford University and the Oswald Villard
University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Her main research interest
is in developing and using machine learning and probabilistic methods to
model and analyze complex domains. She is the author of over 180 refereed
publications, which have appeared in venues that include Science, Cell,
and Nature Genetics (her H-index is over 80). She also has a long-standing
interest in education. She founded the CURIS program, the Stanford
Computer Science Department's undergraduate summer internship program, and
the Biomedical Computation major at Stanford. She pioneered in her
classroom many of the ideas that are key to Stanford's massive online
education effort. She was awarded the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship
in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early
Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI
Computers and Thought Award in 2001the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in
2004, the ACM/Infosys award in 2008, and was inducted into the National
Academy of Engineering in 2011. Her teaching was recognized via the Cox
Medal for excellence in fostering undergraduate research at Stanford in
2003, and by being named a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate
Education.
Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk.
*NOTE* This lecture will be broadcast live via the Internet. See
http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html for more information.
Email: talk-info@cs.washington.edu
Info: http://www.cs.washington.edu/
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