Timer starts now.
Ok, great.
I'm here to tell you about MOOCulus.
Which is really a part of course that me and my team launched on Coursera about a month
ago.
The course is Calculus One.
We have the requisite lecture videos that you might come to expect, we have a free open
source textbook that you can download, we have weekly quizzes.
The weekly quizzes have 10 questions per quiz, which raises a question about questions, how
many questions should there be on this quiz?
And the problem is that depends on the student.
Some students should have more questions on their quiz than other students.
So to make this possible we have developed another website.
mooculus.osu.edu.
Which might leave you wondering, what is MOOCulus.
MOOCulus is not Calculus, it is really an online homework system that we have built,
but unlike other online homework systems, MOOCulus comes backed with a hidden Markov
model.
It is also Open Source, you can download it right now on GitHub and install it on your
own computers and if you were to do that this is what you might see.
You might see an exercise computing the derivative of a polynomial, and there is a polynomial
there.
And in order to facilitate you know questions about randomly generated polynomials we have
built a computer algebra system in JavaScript.
We have also got a hint system, there is a button there that you can click on to get
help and if you click that button you will start being lead to the problem.
It will explain how you do the problem.
We have this progress bar, this is the hidden Markov model.
The problem is that student understanding is invisible.
I'm fairly certain that attaching the brain scanners that I would like to put on my students
is a FERPA violation, what is visible is the hints and answers that they submit, whether
they are correct or incorrect.
The hidden Markov model takes that visible data and produces data and estimate of student
understanding.
So the students get a page that looks like this with green bars that filled on tasks
that we think that they understand.
Yellow bars that they should do more work on.
And these red bars that they seem quite confused.
What is the real benefit to something like this?
Well part of it is that you might think that this is cheaper.
Now we don't even need TAs, but it is more than that.
It's really supposed to be better.
We have already commoditized education right; this is not the world's educational experience.
It is a lot better if we get more people doing mathematics.
That is a better experience for the student, I would much rather that they would just do
more problems.
So if we are truly trying to personalize their education, so that leads to the question.
If I want this to be about 1 on 1 education what is so massive about this experience.
People have this mistaken idea that the M in MOOC stands for huge enrollment numbers,
but I guess it does, but the enrollment isn't really the big deal the point is that is only
a means to an end and the end Data!
A lot of data.
In the last ten weeks, 10 person years have been sacrificed to MOOCulus.
And people have submitted two million correct answers on our system and this lets us produce
histograms and covariant matrixes where you can kind of see certain problems, if you interpret
this appropriately, are really more important in some sense or better predictors of overall
performance than other problems.
That is really interesting data.
So what are we going to do with all of this data?
The point is that we can now start to try to evolve better classes.
This stuff is providing a fitness function that tells us when education is working.
The problem is that education also requires some sort of heritable variation and that
is not something that I can get with a regular, but a with a MOOC which fixes the form of
the interactive experience, I can now have something that is evolvable.
I fix the form of the classroom, which means that it is the sort of thing that you know
that evolution can act on.
If this doesn't make a lot of sense here is a soft of analogy.
Here is some random walk and you can do lots and lots of random walks, and my claim is
that teaching is lot like this random walk.
Every year I'm slated to teach another course which is very similar course that I taught
last year and I do it slightly differently for no go reason.
And contrast this with if I actually an honest feedback mechanism, a very small amount of
feedback makes me get better.
You know.
And the point here is not emphasize that MOOCS are massive or that they are online, the point
is that MOOCs are for data-driven feedback, which actually might improve education in
the long run.
So we are really are at some fort in the road, one of those is that MOOCs.
MOOCs might not be great right now, but they are rigged to get better, because they have
got this feedback mechanism in place.
The question is where or not the rest of the university is going to get on board with that.
And if you think about 50 years from now, my grandchildren will have some very exciting
choice.
They will either be taught by a human being or they will be taught by a Cylons.
And the Cylons will have some sort of hidden Markov model and the best cognitive science
available to really understand how to teach effectively.
And I much rather, that my great-grandchildren be taught by the Cylons.
So, thank you.