On-line Education?

I have last term completed the on-line module in Artificial Intelligence offered by Stanford's Sebastian Thrun and Google's Peter Norvig–both top-academics and experts in their field. I guess it was successful, as I received a grade of 79% (a 'first' in UK terms, but I have the suspicion it doesn't work like that). Given the minimal effort I put in (mainly due to lack of time) I could very likely have achieved a better result with some extra work. But with a full-time job it's not so easy to put aside 10 hours a week for doing so, which was the amount of time recommended by the course leaders.

So I got 79%, but did I learn anything? And do the 79% reflect my achievements? And what was the overall learning experience like?

First, the learning experience: the module was delivered as a series of short low-tech video lectures, interspersed with multiple-choice or number-entry quizzes. Then there was homework (multiple-choice and number-entry quizzes) and a mid-term and final exam (both multiple choice and... you get the idea).

The lectures were interesting: it was a camera view top-down on a piece of paper on which the lecturers would (hand-)write, not just a filmed 'lecture'. The tone was informal and friendly, and Thrun's charming German accent made me almost feel at home. And I also learned–from the few head-shot video sequences–that Peter Norvig likes colourful shirts.

The quizzes, however, were rather limited. There was the problem of turning quite complex material into a simple format, and also (which I found hardest) missing context. As a result the questions were often trivial side-aspects, or impossible to answer due to ambiguity (judging from the few forum posts I looked at, many other people had the same issue). You can interpret a question in many different ways, especially if you need to take into account external constraints which have not been clearly specified.

Quite often you get an answer wrong, and then look at the explanation of the proper outcome, and you think "oh right, that's how they meant it".

I quite struggled with Bayes networks, and I consistently got the wrong answers when asked how many independent parameters I would need to describe one. To this day I do not know why I need to know this. I can guess, but it wasn't really explained. Formal logic was one of the things I felt very comfortable with, as I had covered that in my own UG studies as a computational linguist, but I only got 1 out of 4 points in the final exam question, as I made one small error; based on that the subsequent answers were also wrong.

My best results were in computer vision–100%. And that's even though I'm short-sighted! But do I really understand computer vision so much better than all the other areas of AI? No. Thing is, all that was asked in the relevant quizzes was basic maths. There was a simple formula, relating various parameters such as focal length and distances to each other, and all you had to do was resolve the equation for different values and work out the result. I would have been able to do this beforehand, and didn't even learn that in the course. Still, I was assessed on it and scored 100%. But anybody with basic maths would have been able to do that, even without watching a single minute of any of the class videos.

So my first criticism is: the quizzes were not designed properly. There is a lot more one can do with multiple choice question, but Thrun and Norvig didn't do it. The assessments felt like an ad-hoc addition, along the lines of "I need a quiz now, so what could I ask?".

My second criticism is the way the scoring worked. One slight mistake, nil points. In a real exam you would get points for results which are wrong, but only because of a mistake in an intermediate step. An all-or-nothing approach is not very helpful.

Is this the future of education? Are on-line classes like this all we need? I don't think so. Apart from the implementation–it'd be easy to come up with some better quizzes–it's also quite detached. There is little direct interaction (impossible with 140,000+ students), and at times you feel a bit lost. It is obvious that this was an experiment, and as such it is not possible to expect wonderful and perfect results, but there is still a long way to go.

Did I learn anything I would not have learned from reading a book? Probably not. The main advantage for me was to have the pressure of getting through the weekly session before the hand-in date, which makes you put aside time you would otherwise spend on something else. So in that respect it is alright; and the fact that it was delivered on-line was convenient as you could choose the time when you wanted to study it. But while this is good for a supplementary course, I am glad I did have proper seminars and lectures when I went to university.

While you can't argue with a free course (you did get more than you paid for!), there is still a lot of scope for improvement for this particular type of course, an on-line distance course, and I cannot see it replacing 'proper' seminars any time soon. But it was overall an interesting experience, if only to find out what 'real' teaching should be like.

The Business of Learning

I just spent almost an hour watching a video from a presentation at the Business of Software 2009 conference. Why? I have a pile of unmarked essays on my desk.

The real reason was that the speaker is Kathy Sierra, who has a very good approach to teaching programming concepts & looking at things from different angles. I used to read through her "Creating Passionate Users" blog, which she unfortunately discontinued. In this presentation (see below) she discussed how you can make your users feel good about using your products. Users don't want to view your company or your product as 'awesome', they want to see themselves as great. And good products make the user feel awesome.

That clearly has applications to teaching. I always try to answer the question "so what?", to give the students some motivation for why they're sitting in a seminar looking at a text. I think next year I will try even harder with making the students feel awesome...



I do not yet know how many students will be in my modules next year, but I'm already thinking hard about how to change them further. My impression is that my modified teaching style has been very successful, only some things did not work out as well as I had planned them - mainly those which required student participation. I guess the way to get students to participate is to make them more motivated. Or to use a stick instead of a carrot?

Catching up...

The last few weeks have been very busy. Nothing like a bout of marking to mess up your basic schedule! Now that marking is out of the way, normality is slowly returning. Still, there are things to do, and blogging tends not to be the one with the highest priority.

In my Frameworks module, the podcasting was the thing to suffer most from marking. A colleague told me that one of her AST students was sad about it, and I feel somewhat bad myself. I will try and get another podcast put together this week. In the meantime I set the students a task that involved them making their own podcasts, and slowly the results are coming in. Some are really good! They will be made available on the course blog, finally a way to get some activity going there. With any luck, students will not only post their podcasts, but also listen to each others and comment on them.

Language Foundation is slowly ticking along, and finally we're getting to the point where students feel it making 'click' during the grammatical analyses. They are hard work, but by constantly practicing them I believe students will better understand how they work, and feel more self-confident. Only the exam will tell, of course!

Then, almost out of the door is a research project proposal. Only a few things to sort out, and then the big question will be if there is enough money still around within the AHRC to fund it. This leads me back to my main gripe with the current model of research funding: the effort that has gone into this project proposal could have been spent on doing quite a lot of the actual work. Add to that the time spent by university admin people checking the figures, and by the AHRC administrators, and the academic reviewers, etc, and you will find that you probably have spent more money altogether on that proposal then it would cost to just do it. And that is assuming it will get funding, otherwise all that money would simply be wasted.

I can see that this doesn't work with your average science project, even if not all of them cost as much as the Large Hadron Collider, but many smaller humanities projects should just be funded directly. Cut the red tape, avoid the frustration of having your proposals rejected, and put some trust in your academics!

Enough ranting for today, still some things to do before today's list is empty.

The Future of Learning?

Unlike some people, I am quite excited about the iPad, which was announced yesterday. A tablet computer with a touch screen will have many uses, even if it seems to be somewhat awkwardly positioned in a strange niche between laptops (more powerful, but cumbersome) and smartphones (lighter & smaller, but smaller screen). I think where it will be really useful is in education.

The iPad seems to me to be an ideal device for students: you can easily keep notes, check email, have textbooks accessible, look things up, check your schedule with the calendar, etc. You can even write essays on it. And then, because of wifi, you could submit them with the touch of a button.

So far the biggest obstacle with electronic essay submission for me has been the marking. Marking an essay electronically on a computer just does not work for me. You cannot easily scribble comments on the margins, and annotating a text file like you would a submission to an edited journal is just too much. But if you had a large touch screen on which to read the essay, you could just swipe over a stretch of text, it gets selected and a comment box appears, together with the keyboard. You quickly type your comment, the keyboard disappears again, and the annotation sits on the margin. Back to normal reading. You don't even have to sit at your desk. You can mark a pile of essays easily, even on a cramped train.

I think the universities should set up a subsidised scheme where each student gets an iPad - this would probably push the costs even lower than the current $499 for the basic model (due to bulk buying and/or educational discounting). Teaching staff would also get one, and then we will all sit in the seminars, iPad on lap, looking at texts or media together, sharing group work live on wikis, and have more interactive lectures. This would also save a lot of money currently spent on paper and toner - all hand-outs would be electronic, in colour, and multi-media capable.

This of course is all a bit speculative, as anything regarding the iPad, as I've only seen a video and some photos of it; but if it is anything like a bigger iPhone, I think this should work. But I am rather pessimistic. Such a scheme might be set up at Harvard or Stanford, but Birmingham is so deeply committed to Microsoft software and PC compatible hardware, that I don't see much of a chance for the iPad becoming the learning and teaching enabling tool it could be.

Shame, really.