wisdemy

Introducing Mechanics Academy

Harish Narayanan — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 11:11:21 +0000

(This piece is a repost of my first article on Medium. Fans of elegant typography would perhaps prefer reading it there.)

From improving our understanding of the dynamics of atmospheric circulation to aiding in the design of life-saving coronary stents, mathematical and computational sciences are playing an ever increasing role in a range of applications that are extremely relevant to industry and society. Even so, as soon as they’re old enough to make such choices, many students start shying away from learning advanced math and science. And they’re doing this for flawed reasons we’ve all heard:

“It’s just so hard”
“All that theory is so boring”
“Why do I need to know any of this?”

It is my attempt to improve this state of affairs in some tiny way that defines my two-fold mission:

To motivate students to learn applied mathematics and physical sciences by highlighting applications that communicate how relevant and integral these fields are to our lives.
To teach students exciting blends of these fields, especially emphasizing computational methodology pertinent to real-world application.

Prompted by my years of training in applied mechanics, I thought I’d start close to home with a resource called Mechanics Academy. The effort—motivated in no small part by the Khan Academy, Code School and edX—aims to use video lessons and interactive, application-relevant simulations to engage and teach students topics in mechanics, applied mathematics and computational science. These simulations run right within the web browser, allowing students to learn by doing, without the hassle of installing complex mathematical and scientific software on their own devices.

I have been working on this project in earnest for the past eight months or so. In this period, I’ve created a web-based scientific computing service to drive the simulation-based demonstrations and exercises on Mechanics Academy. I’ve arrived at a combination of recording technology that I am happy with, and have begun using it to record lectures for my first complete course. I’ve also made a simple content management system to house this original learning material, alongside related Open Educational Resources of high quality.

While quite some progress has been made, the journey has just begun. There is plenty I could use help with, including:

Cataloguing existing and creating new learning material
Information architecture, to optimally present the material
User-experience and visual frontend design, to create an engaging and unintimidating learning experience for challenging material
Refining and improving the functionality of the content management system
Testing and helping spread the word

So please do get in touch if you’re interested in working with me on the project or if you’re interested in contributing to it financially. Even if you just want to chat about this sort of thing, I’d be delighted to hear from you!

MOOCs, now with formal degrees

Harish Narayanan — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:09:59 +0000

We’ve all witnessed many significant events in the online learning space over the past couple of years. From coordinated plays by prestigious universities to tiny groups springing up around niche subjects, there exists a plethora of wonderful material out there today to learn from. For free. For anyone with access to a half-decent internet connection.

And being the curious and self-motivated learner that I am, I’ve already started to pick up a great deal on a variety of subjects of interest to me from what’s already out there. And as an adult who already has a few academic degrees, I don’t need anything more to show for my learning.

But yesterday’s announcement from Udacity and Georgia Tech that they were going to unite to offer an accredited, fully online Master of Science at a fraction of the cost of the traditional on-campus program, is a big deal.

As the video above suggests, is this going to be perfect and wonderful and mirror all aspects of a traditional Master’s program at a decent brick-and-mortar school? Quite unlikely, at least initially. But I think a better question to ask, is whether this move will reach a whole new crop of students, who otherwise might not have had access or motivation to learn, and provide them a certificate of their learning that they can use to confidently take out into the world to get gainfully employed. And I think we all know the answer to that.

I wish I were a young student again.

Class2Go is dead, long live edX!

Harish Narayanan — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:52:06 +0000

Two significant and related stories have been popping up repeatedly in my different news feeds over the past 24 hours.^[1]

The first of these is that Stanford University is going to collaborate with edX on the future development of edX’s open source platform. In practical terms, this means that the engineering team focusing on Stanford’s current open-source platform for online courses, Class2Go, will put this project into maintenance mode and shift its attention to the open-source platform underlying edX.

Even though it will collaborate on the platform, Stanford will not be offering its online courses under the edX moniker. Instead, the university will offer them through a Stanford-branded and hosted version of the platform, as well as through its existing partners like Coursera.

The second bit of news is that the source code for the (combined) open-source edX platform will be available for download on the project’s GitHub account by June 1, 2013. This includes the code for the learning management system (LMS), the course authoring tool (Studio) and application programming interface for third party content (XBlock). The edX platform is built atop the Python web framework Django and other open source tools, and will be released under the GNU AGPL. (In contrast, Class2Go was earlier released under the Apache license, Version 2.0. I am still researching the implications of this.)

These bits of news are extremely exciting to me and here’s why:

I am personally on-board the online education train. Ever since I’ve learnt a ton taking multiple classes (across Coursera, edX, Udacity, Code School, Stanford’s iTunes U etc.), I’ve become obsessed with the idea of using realistic simulations to motivate and teach students advanced topics in applied mathematics and physical science online.

In my attempts to make this a reality, I’ve been working hard on taking research-level simulation code and presenting them online using an easy-to-use interface. Most recently, I’ve been playing with and evaluating Class2Go and XBlock to see how to fit my simulation technology into a broader course platform. Now I don’t have to pick between them or duplicate my efforts to effectively interact with them separately. Here’s to a stronger, more unified future for online learning!

Footnotes:

1. Isn’t the filter bubble a wonderful thing?

The internet and the future of learning

Harish Narayanan — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:25:23 +0000

In this fascinating video, world-renowned experts and educators talk about how advances in communications technology is allowing us to shift away from traditional methods of learning based on memorization and repetition, to more holistic approaches that focus on individual students’ needs and self expression.

Is algebra necessary?

Harish Narayanan — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 14:01:20 +0000

Queens College political science professor Andrew Hacker poses this question yesterday in an opinion piece on The New York Times:

“Yes, young people should learn to read and write and do long division, whether they want to or not. But there is no reason to force them to grasp vectorial angles and discontinuous functions. Think of math as a huge boulder we make everyone pull, without assessing what all this pain achieves. So why require it, without alternatives or exceptions? Thus far I haven’t found a compelling answer.”

He feels this way because:

“… a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above.”

To this line of reasoning, I ask: Couldn’t the same query be posed of other subjects too? Why should everyone be forced to learn some of the arts, history or a foreign language?

I feel children are made to learn a broad spectrum of things because no one knows what is going to be truly useful to a given child after they’ve grown up. And if you’re one of the 5% (to quote the statistic above) who needs to use any more abstract mathematics than arithmetic in your life, you’re sure glad you were exposed to it in school. I know I am.

I’m sure this is also the case for the 5% (making this number up) who need to be reasonably versed in poetry or or chemistry or history or dodgeball or whatever when they grow up.

The Khan Academy goes to camp

Harish Narayanan — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 14:27:40 +0000

This free camp is an experiment by Khan Academy founder Salman Khan to test the possibilities of both online and offline education. Mr. Khan says he’s going to be documenting his experiences, so that he can share whatever works with other teachers to try out in their own classrooms.

The camp runs for two weeks long, and the participating students of different ages get to collaborate on fun learning tasks such as taking apart household electronics, building robots and learning about probability by making bets in a make-believe casino!

Doesn’t that sound like a blast?

Apple now lets any teacher publish to iTunes U

Harish Narayanan — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 13:22:52 +0000

Summarising a report on AllThingsD, The Verge writes:

“Along with today’s update for iTunes U, Apple has made it easier for instructors to create courses and share them with students. As AllThingsD points out, any teacher can now sign up without going through a verification process and create and share private courses, which let students view lectures and supplementary materials. These courses won’t show up in the iTunes U catalog, though—teachers will still need to go through a school portal to post them publicly, and their accounts will need to be verified. The options are also slightly different for unverified teachers, who are limited to 20GB of space and 12 courses with no more than 50 students apiece.
This option will likely be most useful to teachers at smaller primary and secondary schools, which have relatively small classes and are less likely to have a central iTunes U portal. iTunes U was opened to K through 12 teachers and students earlier this year, but it’s dependent on students having iPads, ruling out its use for many.”

Oh that, and the fact that iTunes isn’t easy to use.

Udacity is helping students land dream jobs

Harish Narayanan — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 12:45:03 +0000

In the following video, one student talks about how the Artificial Intelligence course at Udacity helped him grow as a programmer, and how this eventually led him to landing his dream job at Google.

As moving as Sam’s tale is, his is just one story. Every day, more and more of Udacity’s students are gaining technical skills, building confidence, and being helped by the Career Team to advance their careers.

I leave you with a sprinkling of blog posts which share other heartwarming anecdotes, and provide some details on the partnerships Udacity is forming with potential employers around the world—all to help fulfil their students dreams.

UC Berkeley joins edX!

Harish Narayanan — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:36:45 +0000

The New York Times is reporting some exciting news!

“In the scramble to stake out a leadership role in the world of online education, the University of California, Berkeley, is announcing on Tuesday that it is joining edX, the free nonprofit online learning venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Berkeley will be offering two courses, contributing new open-source technology and heading a soon-to-be-formed consortium of universities joining edX.”

This news is interesting, not only because of the prominence of UC Berkeley, but also because some of its professors have already been offering free courses online through the competing for-profit platform, Coursera. We will see how this shakes out in the near future. Another interesting part of this story is that while Harvard and MIT have both committed $30 million each to the project, Berkeley is not contributing monetarily. Instead, it will supplying a new online-education platform that engineers at the university had already been working on.

The first two courses offered by the university through edX this fall are Artificial Intelligence and Software as a Service.

I will leave you with some other sources to digest this news:

Reading list for Week 29

Harish Narayanan — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:40:00 +0000

A hand-crafted collection of links for your perusal.

Anant Agarwal believes an online education from MIT and Harvard should be available to all
Stanford’s Next Lesson — Free online courses for credit and degrees?
Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads — Can’t we all just get along?
Overblown-Claims-of-Failure Watch — How not to gauge the success of online courses.
On Leaving Academia — One man’s journey.

How does Coursera plan to profit from free courses?

Harish Narayanan — Sat, 21 Jul 2012 13:29:24 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education attempted to answer this question in an outstanding piece of journalism:

“Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world’s best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free, how will the company—and the universities involved—make money to sustain them?
Some clues can be found in the contract the institutions signed. The Chronicle obtained the agreement between Coursera and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the first public university to make such a deal, under a Freedom of Information Act request, and Coursera officials say that the arrangement is similar to those with the other partners.
The contract reveals that even Coursera isn’t yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled “Possible Company Monetization Strategies,” lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone.”

This piece has been met with a myriad of reactions around the web. Some more positive than others.

I leave you with the eight revenue-generating ideas under consideration:

Charging for university-branded certificates.
Providing secure assessments for a fee.
Charge employers for the ability to reach a subset of students.
Charge employers or universities for the ability to screen students.
Charging for personalised tutoring and grading.
Charge universities and companies access to an enterprise version of the platform to distribute their own learning material.
Display “non-intrusive” advertisements on the interface.
Charge tuition fees for certain courses.

The next generation of Lore

Harish Narayanan — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 12:43:53 +0000

Big Think reports:

“On Monday, the social LMS (Learning Management System) Lore launched its entirely redesigned platform. It is not just a brushed up version of what is was before but a complete rebuild of the product which the team has worked on in the past four months.
Besides a new feature that enables instructors to open their courses to the public, similar to platforms like Udacity, Coursera or Udemy Academic, the new profiles are the thing that excites me the most. With the new version each instructor and student gets an individual profile on Lore, showcasing what he/she is learning/teaching, their achievements and aspirations as well as links to personal websites, resumes and such.
The design, like the rest of the platform, is very modern and minimalist which is still noteworthy as most products in education tend to look like they’d come from the dotcom era.”

I think it looks beautiful. And you can hear Lore’s CEO Joe Cohen talk about it on Market Watch.

STEM Ph.D. students have declining interest in research

Harish Narayanan — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 10:43:17 +0000

Being extremely curious about the world around me, I excitedly entered graduate school a decade ago to train to become a scientist. In the ten years since, I’ve completed a Ph.D. (in not one but two programs), and have had a few years under my belt as a research fellow. This decade has been great for me in terms of how much I’ve grown intellectually, but the more time I’ve spent on this path, the less enticing high-end research has become to me. The reasons for this are many, and I leave you to a tragicomical piece from a long time ago by Washington University physics professor Jonathan Katz to highlight why grad school in science might not always be your best bet.

This is why I’ve been trying to explore other options, ones that deemphasize abstract research. For instance, I love to teach. I enjoy making websites. In the next months, I am going to complete my research responsibilities for now and focus full-time on connecting these dots through my mechanics education website.

But enough about me.

Recently, a story in Inside Higher Ed pointed out that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way. It summarises the results of a recent study that found that STEM doctoral students have declining interest in research:

“Scientists-in-the-making in research university graduate programs are growing less and less likely to want tenure-track jobs, and even when they do want an academic job, many of them might be more inclined toward teaching than research.
Connolly has a list of reasons: Tenure-track faculty are being asked to do more with fewer resources, there are only a few faculty members whose lives represent the work-family balance that doctoral students might aspire to, and there are fewer available tenure-track positions. The challenge is even greater for an academic couple looking for jobs, he said.”

I can recommend that you spend some time pondering this piece as well as the original study if you’re in this business. They’re enlightening, if sobering, reads.

Twelve more universities join Coursera!

Harish Narayanan — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 20:03:11 +0000

Coursera just announced that 12 more universities will be joining their effort to offer world-class courses to everyone for free. With this significant expansion, Coursera now offers a selection of courses from:

In addition, Coursera announced $6 million in new funding—which includes $3.7 million from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, and $2.3 million from current funders New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. This brings its total funding to $22 million.

Times just got a lot more exciting!

Further coverage: Slate, GigaOM and Marketwire.

Lessons learnt from MITx’s prototype course

Harish Narayanan — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:09:04 +0000

Larry Hardesty from the MIT News Office writes:

“In March, MITx debuted its first course, 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics. In May, MIT and Harvard University joined forces to create edX, an organization that aims to further the MITx platform and enable other universities to use it as well.
As MIT and Harvard prepare to offer new courses in the fall, the team behind MITx is taking stock of its initial experiences with 6.002x and incorporating what they’ve learnt into the new courses.”

Below, I’ve summarised a few of their observations that I found interesting. But head on over to the full piece to learn more.

Though the attrition rate for 6.002x seems high (155,000 students registered for the course and 7,157 students passed), the absolute number of students completing the course is impressive.
The team plans to reduce the attrition rate in advanced courses such as this by offering other courses (e.g. physics, calculus and differential equations) that provide necessary background material for students.
The edX development team will work to make it easier for students to customise their course content and manage their workload.
edX is as much a platform for educational research as it is a means for educating students. For example, the choice to use hand-drawn figures instead of slick presentation slides was based on previous usability studies which indicated students greatly prefer hand-drawn figures.

Reading list for Week 28

Harish Narayanan — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 19:21:58 +0000

A hand-crafted collection of links for your perusal.

This week, I’m cataloguing links that I think will be particularly interesting to those looking to start their own technology-enhanced education company.

Udacity announces a challenge for high school students

Harish Narayanan — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 18:48:36 +0000

This summer, Udacity is running a competition for high school students to see who can recruit teams that complete the most number of courses on the platform. The winners will get an all-expenses paid visit to Silicon Valley, and Professor Sebastian Thrun will be welcoming the winners personally and showing them around!

Head on over to the challenge page for more details, and good luck!

Video lectures are effective teaching tools

Harish Narayanan — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 19:20:11 +0000

In yesterday’s article, I argued that education technology is much more than just content delivery. Today, I point you to an article which finds that online lectures are an effective means of delivering content.

Describing a small study involving students taking an online course, Debbie Morrison writes on her Online Learning Insights blog that 100% of the students indicated some level of agreement with the statement: “The instructor-made videos helped me understand the material better.”

I leave you with a summarising quote from her article, and encourage you read the complete piece for more insights from the study.

“… not to be ignored is the value the video has when the course instructor is featured and ‘speaks’ to the student. It is a visual image which makes the instructor a real person—a person that the student is able to make a connection with. Research does support the effectiveness of the video in creating a sense of presence, which further supports social and cognitive presence which are critical components to a successful learning experience.”

Education technology is more than content delivery

Harish Narayanan — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:38:32 +0000

Audrey Watters posts on her Hack Education blog:

“Khan Academy proudly states on its website “168,382,612 lessons delivered,” something that always reminds me of the slogan that used to accompany McDonalds’ golden arches: “over 200 billion served.” (I hope) We know better than to equate the billions of Big Macs sold with billions of healthy bodies or a well-fed world. Yet we still often equate “lessons delivered” with “learning,” as though their delivery necessarily offers a substantive intellectual nutrition.
Education as a “content delivery system” is a formulation that fits nicely into Silicon Valley’s larger vision about what Internet technologies offers the world—the tubes are designed for delivery after all. And it dovetails too with the all the recent claims that technology is poised to “disrupt education” just as it did other content industries.”

I don’t agree with this assessment at all (and neither do most of the commenters on the original blog post). Firstly, Khan Academy is a valuable store of information that is available for free, while McDonalds makes money serving unhealthy food that’s addictive. But even this is besides the point, which is that the technologies being developed by the new crop of online learning initiatives go so much beyond just content delivery. As I’ve mentioned before, they incorporate:

High-quality, interactive content delivered with the help of equally polished web user interfaces.
Avenues for student-student and student-professor interaction.
Scaleable grading systems which work even with hundreds of thousands of students. This includes both automatic grading systems for objective questions and peer-based grading for open-ended questions.
Collection of a lot of granular data on usage patterns, and plans to systematically analyze all this data to improve the learning experience.

and much more. So I think there’s a lot more to education technology than cheap fast food analogies.

Some interesting courses in mechanics

Harish Narayanan — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:16:04 +0000

While digging for information about the intersection of education and technology, I often stumble upon specific courses and other learning material that I find fascinating. The following is just my attempt to remember that these resources exist, for when I have the time to sit down and actually learn.

This time, I focus on some interesting material on mechanics and its applications.

(MIT) Physics I: Classical Mechanics — A dynamic introduction to many aspects of classical physics.
(MIT) History and Philosophy of Mechanics: Newton’s Principia Mathematica — A wealth of wonderful directed reading.
(MIT) Mechanics Online — Designed as a second course in introductory Newtonian mechanics.
(Yale) Fluid dynamics, statics and Bernoulli’s equation — If you like this lecture, check out others by the same professor.
(MIT) Numerical computation for mechanical engineers — For when you’re ready to solve more applied problems.
(Oxford) Quantum Mechanics — For when you start to get tired of classical Newtonian mechanics.

Snarky criticism sure is easer than offering solutions

Harish Narayanan — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 17:34:50 +0000

This has become a big story over the past few days. Let me try to summarise things somewhat before getting to my own opinions on the matter.

It all began when two teachers, John Golden and Dave Coffey, created a snarky video critique (reminiscent of MST3K) of a lesson on Khan Academy:

The story up to this point was covered quite nicely by Slate. Soon after, Salman Khan responded to the critique and redid the video lesson under question.

In the interim, the original critique video had gone viral and spawned the Mystery Teacher Theater 2000 (MTT2K) contest. This was an opportunity for others to point out pedagogical and factual errors in the lessons on Khan Academy through the creation of snarky videos of their own:

Teachers who didn’t create videos started to pile on with critical blog posts. News outfits eager for clicks started publishing pieces alternatively critical and defensive of Khan Academy. The Washington Post has been particularly determined not to let this story die. This controversy has reached such a fever pitch that the discussion has now spilled over into other communities such as Slashdot.

And that’s the story so far.

Now here’s my take on the matter, directed toward the teachers:

Much of the mathematics curriculum for young kids is procedural. There is more procedure than deep concepts for topics like arithmetic. Stop complaining that “all Khan Academy focuses on is mechanics without deep understanding.”
Don’t forget that different people learn differently. Some people prefer being exposed to the abstract concept first while others like specific examples before moving towards generality. Just because you don’t learn a certain way doesn’t mean that the material is useless to all students.
Sometimes precision is important, sometimes hand-waviness is exactly what is needed to make a point. Stop complaining about the lack of precision before considering the context.
Once you make it past these first three points, I think it is a good idea to critique lessons with the aim to improve their quality. But there is no need to be snarky about it.
If possible, see what you can do beyond critiquing things. How about recording more accurate versions of the content you find so offensive and actually help out?

Snarky criticism sure is easer than offering actual solutions.

Reading list for Week 27

Harish Narayanan — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 20:30:47 +0000

A hand-crafted collection of links for your perusal.

Instructor Presence in the Online Class—Key to Learner Success
Do we need “social butterflies” in Online Learning Communities?
Critical thinking in the Online Classroom?
MOOC Mythbuster—What MOOCs are and what they aren’t
How Will Student Data Be Used? — A pertinent question to ask given the amount of data collected.
Online Learning is where Online Music was Five Years Ago
Is Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity the future of higher education?

Does peer grading in online classes work?

Harish Narayanan — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 19:47:30 +0000

Most online courses that incorporate grading have tended to rely on robo-graders. These can work well for fields such as math and programming—for which one can devise tests with easy-to-verify objective answers—but don’t extend easily outside the “hard” sciences. Coursera is working around this by using peer grading (students grading other students) for some of their courses, such as Introduction to Sociology and Human Computer Interaction.

The obvious question that pops up at this point is: “How well does this work?”

In an interesting article on her online learning blog, Debbie Morrison relates her recent experience with peer grading in the introductory sociology class on Coursera. The following is a summary of her findings, but I encourage you to read her complete article along with the comments from her readers.

Overall, peer grading works reasonably well and is reasonably accurate.
Grading the work of their peers’ enhances students’ own learning.
In order for peer grading to work well, it needs detailed scoring standards and clearly explained instructions.

And so this is how you scale a non-technical class to hundreds of thousands of students at a time. Ladies and gents, the future is now.

BenchPrep raises $6 million to win over students

Harish Narayanan — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 19:25:50 +0000

GigaOM reports:

“The battle over students’ time and attention is heating up. Chicago-based education technology startup BenchPrep today announced that it has raised $6 million to bring personalized and interactive test prep materials to students via the internet and mobile.
The funding round, which was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Revolution Ventures, follows a $2.2 million investment last year from Lightbank.”

BenchPrep licenses textbooks from more than 20 publishers and then re-organizes the content into interactive courses for high school, college and professional certification students tailored to their learning needs. It also provides flashcards, games and other engagement-oriented features based on the textbooks, as well as reports and analysis on student performance.

Eventually, it wants to build on its adaptive learning platform to become a general learning platform that also enables social networking between students and teachers.

Scott Cook on technology and education

Harish Narayanan — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 15:37:08 +0000

In the following video from the Revolutions in Progress session at Techonomy 2011, Scott Cook (founder and chairman of Intuit) discusses how technology can revolutionise education in the same way it has transformed the music and entertainment industries.

Digital technology has given musicians and artists a global reach that was unfathomable 100 years ago. In a similar manner, Cook suggests that new technologies should give students today access to the best teachers and lessons available.

You can find the complete transcript on Forbes.