Communications - August 2012

on the Course

Thrun and Norvig were strong teachers. They thought through excellent ways of explaining the ideas and quizzing the in-lecture comprehension checks. They often brought fun props or showed research projects in the video recordings.

Thrun and Norvig were only a week or so ahead of the course delivery, and they paid close attention to students’ progress. There was a lot of activity on the Web forums. They recorded several “office hours,” where students submitted questions and voted on their favorite ones, and then they picked questions and answered them on camera. In this way, the course was like a typical class—it was not “canned.” Thrun’s and Norvig’s enthusiasm was infectious. Collectively, the real-time nature of the experience made it a lot like a well-taught conventional course.

My Role at uMass Lowell

frames from DavID CormIer’s youtube vIDeo “What Is a mooC?”

Students registered for my department’s regular AI course, which requires a project. They knew when signing up that I expected them to complete both the Stanford course and a directed project. As mentioned earlier, I had 16 students. We met once weekly for a 75-minute session in a roundtable format. We talked about the Stanford material after each week’s assignment was already due. Because of this, I did not have to present the course material in a lecture format. When we met, most of my students had worked through the lectures and the homework. So I did not have to explain things to students for the first time. Instead, we used in-class time for conversations about material that people found confusing or disagreed upon. We had some great discussions over the course of the semester.

A similar approach was developed by Day and Foley in their HCI course at Georgia Tech. 2 They recorded Web lectures, and then used classroom time for hands-on learning activities. Daphne Koller, a colleague of Thrun’s at Stanford (and founder of Coursera), has called this “the flipped classroom.” She reported higher-than-usu-al attendance in her Stanford courses taught this way: “We can focus pre-

cious classroom time on more interactive problem-solving activities that achieve deeper understanding—and foster creativity.” 7

What Does it Mean?

The success of the fall AI course and the bloom of new ones this spring and summer puts real pressure on conventional, lecture-and-test university instruction. Thrun is quoted in several reports as noting that attendance at his face-to-face AI course at Stanford in the fall dropped precipitously. From the 200 registered, after a few weeks, only 30 continued to attend. 8 But this really speaks to the failure to have the in-person time deliver anything different from a lecture. In many ways, the carefully crafted online lectures, peppered with probing questions that are autograded for correctness and then explained further, are indeed an improvement over a conventional lecture.

There are many initiatives to improve the quality of face-to-face time in lectures. When used creatively, clickers can be a valuable modification. But more fundamentally, active learning approaches hold much more promise.

Robert Beichner has developed a classroom approach called “SCALE UP” for active learning in the classroom. His work started in physics education, but years of development and collaboration broadened it to many fields, including the sciences, engineering, and the humanities. 5 In SCALE-UP, faculty engage students in a structured activities and problem-solving during classroom time. Students work in teams of three, and faculty mingle with them, engaging them in discussions. (The SCALE-UP acronym has had several meanings, including “Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs.”)

Eric Mazur, also from the physics education community, has developed a related approach that he calls “peer instruction,” in which students work in small groups to answer questions posed in lectures. Like Beichner, Mazur is active in disseminating this method.