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>> Ben Wildavsky: So one
of the most intriguing developments recently is a class
that was taught last year at Stanford: Introduction
to Artificial Intelligence.
The professors are these really well-known guys,
Peter Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.
They are computer scientists.
One of them is the Chief Scientist at Google,
and this past year they decided to do an experiment
where they made it free, and they opened it
up to anybody in the world.
Unlike some previous efforts -- like MIT had open courseware
where they made their curriculum publicly available,
but they didn't really have any instruction --
in this case, they actually made instructional kind of videos
and so forth available, and they actually let students take
tests, multiple choice tests, there was a final.
They weren't really interacting, of course,
personally with the professors --
they were all over the world --
but they were able to get tests graded and they were able
to have kind of virtual office hours.
They could post questions to kind of a bulletin board,
and the questions would be answered.
Well, so, this course normally has a few hundred students
on the Stanford campus.
140,000 students signed up around the world
to take this class, and a lot of them stuck with it.
By the time they got to the mid-term,
I think there were 40,000 students who took the class.
And there were more students enrolled in this class
in Lithuania than there are students
at Stanford entirely in the whole campus.
So at the end of it, this was basically a Stanford class,
but Stanford wouldn't give them Stanford credit;
Stanford credit is a closely guarded thing that you get
to people who have gone through the admissions gauntlet, right,
and they've been selected,
which tells you they must be really good.
Well, this is a class where you just showed
that you could pass it by passing the exams,
so you got a certificate, saying you learned what it takes,
an intro to whatever the class was,
Intro to Artificial Intelligence.
So the reason that's important and the reason I explained it
in a bit of detail, is that that suggests
that maybe you don't need that Stanford stamp of approval;
maybe you just need to know that you studied at the foot of two
of the great computer scientists in the world,
and people who would never have an opportunity
to have even halfway decent professors,
let alone rock star professors, are able to get access to that.
So I think if you sort of play that out in your mind,
we may be kind of rethinking the whole notion of credentialing.
You have University of People,
a very sort of mass access institution just starting up.
The Kauffman Foundation, where I work just gave them a grant
to help them, and they're trying to reach out to people
around the world -- very low tech;
you just need a very simple Internet connection,
no video or anything fancy.
It's all text-based --
but they're trying to really democratize education.
Most places around the world don't have any tradition of sort
of general education for undergraduates.
The idea is whatever of that you're going to do,
you've done during secondary school,
and you get to university and go study economics
or biology exclusively.
I think that's very limiting.
I think that the liberal arts tradition,
although it's not done very well in many places,
but I think it's an important part of American education.
But I think you have to go to places where they feel
like they're missing something that we can provide.
I mean, again, I keep on coming back to this notion of a market.
There's a reason that National University
of Singapore is partnering with Yale.
And yeah, that's going to be a sui generis kind of program.
It's not the norm in Singapore, where they've actually sort
of worked off the British model.
But I think that in a targeted way, if you have --
if you're kind of pushing on an open door, that's the way
to start, and then as those programs, as I would hope,
do well and produce graduates who have the kinds
of competencies -- maybe not global competencies
but just thoughtful, analytical abilities, then that's going
to encourage a spread of that kind of liberal arts program.
If Dartmouth sort of continues and maybe improves its sort
of liberal arts tradition, and I'm sure you have ideas
about where, areas where you would like to be stronger,
a lot of people are going to want to come here,
and a lot of people are going to want to create partnerships
with Dartmouth, and some professors around the world,
particularly in fields where you're strong, there may be lots
of departments that want to collaborate with Dartmouth.
These are all things where you sort of simultaneously try
and be really great at what you do,
and that will generate opportunities, and also try
and be proactive about seeing what potential partnerships
and exchanges are out there.
The whole notion
of competency-based learning is getting to be very big.
There's an institution called Western Governor's University,
started up in the late '90s by a bunch of Western Governors,
and essentially it's trying to keep more adult students,
older students, in the education system, help them get degrees
by really like for every class,
they really have practical subjects --
nursing, computer science -- things like that.
These are career-oriented subjects.
They're not studying lucidities around a conference table,
and many students don't want that.
Most students don't want that.
We also have to remember that.
But so they will basically say, okay, here's the class;
here's what you need to know for this class.
Which ones do you already know?
Take a test and show us you already know it
and then we'll tell you what you need to read and what you need
to do to take the test to show the other ones.
And so basically if you can show your competency,
you can get through more quickly,
you can get through more cheaply,
and I think for many students who are just -- they're working;
they have kids, they're older -- this is a very effective way
to try and get more students the credentials they need.
There's other kinds of experiments,
self-paced instruction, helping students use --
giving them the kind of technology that responds
to how well they will do on a certain question.
That's again something where if you have the right kind
of guidance in professors and if you have the availability
of one-on-one help, which one of the best-known programs,
the National Center for Academic Program does --
you can actually reach more students,
measure learning outcomes before and after,
and get better student learning
that in traditional large freshmen intro lecture classes,
and do it for less money.
If you do it right, you can use technology
to reach a lot more students,
and if the material is high quality -- that's an if --
and if you have good measures of student learning --
and that's an if -- but if you do both of those things,
you improve quality, you improve access,
and you've lowered costs.
And if you can do all those things you've accomplished
something really important.