Cassidy: Coursera class offers peek into determination of
student body
By Mike Cassidy, Los Angeles Newspaper Group
My first attempt at taking one of those new online college
courses was even more like my real college experience than I ever imagined.
With the class still in the early going I was about a week behind on my
assignments, nearly flunking my first quiz and seriously contemplating dropping
the class.
So much for the old college try.
But two things made me stick with it (at least up until now,
with two more weeks to go) -- one a little embarrassing and the other somewhat
profound.
First the embarrassing: My Coursera class called
"Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies" comes with a promise:
If I can finish the course work and score at least 70 percent on my
assignments, I'll receive a statement of accomplishment. I want that statement.
But more important than that, were the classmates I've
encountered. Yeah, classmates. I've got a few, like 85,000 by the instructor's
count in week two of the course. Let's just say the lecture hall would have
been a little crowded in pre-Internet days. No we don't gather together
physically, but we are able to socialize, commiserate and help and encourage
each other on a series of message boards. And it is from those message boards
that I've found both my inspiration to press on and a spirit that points to the
powerful potential these new courses have.
The courses are known in the industry as MOOCs -- massive
(as in 85,000 students), open (as in to anyone) online (as in Web-based),
courses (as in college). Almost all of Coursera's classes are free, though the
company is working on a track that for a price will provide rigorous
verification that the student who signs up for a particular class is actually
the person doing all the work.
My fellow students are living in South Africa, Bangladesh,
Algeria, the Philippines, Iran, Portugal, Peru, Amsterdam, Madagascar, Greece,
Pakistan and on and on. Our teacher, James V. Green of the University of
Maryland, told us in the second week that he found 20 countries represented
that started with the letter B alone.
Nearly two-thirds of the students were taking their first
entrepreneurship class and 45 percent of the students, who skewed on the young
side, intended to start a business soon. In other words, the class represented
the future and not just any future, but in many cases the future of the
developing world.
"I have seen and encountered my fair share of human
suffering," Yusuf Abdulrasheed Alimi, a veterinarian from Nigeria, wrote
in a thread asking students to introduce themselves. "That is my chief
motivation for wanting to start my own business; to empower myself and my
community."
The posts are full of dreams and determination, though often
thin on details of the poster's fledgling business. (These students might still
be learning, but they're smart enough to know you don't give your ideas away.)
When I talked to Andrew Ng, the Stanford computer science
associate professor who helped launch the for-profit Coursera not quite a year
ago, he said that providing the developing world with potential was one of the
most satisfying aspects of the company so far.
"When everyone in the world has access to a great
education, it really means we can move forward to a world where there is an
equality of opportunity," says Ng, who was inspired to start Coursera in
part by an online Stanford Machine Learning course he offered that attracted
100,000 students worldwide who were interested in that branch of artificial
intelligence.
That course showed Ng almost immediately the sort of reach
online education can have. He was taken by the stories of his many students --
from a poor man in India with a passion for machine learning to a single mother
in the United States who had a long-standing goal.
"There was a single mother that had been working to go
back to school and for whom an online class really gave her her first
opportunity to do so," Ng says.
Green, the University of Maryland lecturer who teaches my
class, says part of the appeal of teaching a MOOC is that you are faced with a
class of students who bring with them a nearly limitless variety of life
experiences, including those not found on U.S. campuses.
"I have University of Maryland students that are going
to miss class because they have an interview with Google (GOOG)."
"In our course," he says of the innovative ideas class, "I had a
student who emailed me because he was late with a submission, because the
Internet was spotty in a refugee camp in Thailand, I think it was."
The accessibility and flexibility of the online classes
appear to be a winning combination. What started as a research project run by
Ng and four students is now a massive venture-backed online university offering
more than 300 courses from 62 schools and serving about 2.7 million students,
according to Coursera. All of which leaves its founders slightly stunned.
"The progress of Coursera, and the MOOC adoption more
broadly, has greatly exceeded my wildest expectations," co-founder, Daphne
Koller says in an email.
No doubt that is a good thing for those rooting for the big
online classroom model. Even better for the rest of us is the fact that because
of the idea's early successes, the expectations for the way the world gets
educated are being rewritten on a daily basis.
Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or
408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.
Copyright ©2010 Los
Angeles Newspaper Group.
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