Hi. The second question I want to address this week, was post by Ange Clinha, and she says we will make books be, education the future. And she says in today's busy world, we have to squeeze in time for everything, book allow people to learn at their own time If you want to view a lecture at midnight you can. If you want to take a quiz during your lunch hour you're able to do that as well. MOOCs also allow individuals from lower incomes to take classes from prestigious universities that they may not otherwise be able to do. Do you think that online education such as MOOCs are the education of the future? How do you think this will affect jobs in the education field? So, that was her question. And a variety of you posted comments like Caroline rightly summarizes that online courses have been around for quite a while. I mean, 25 years ago there were online courses. However, most of those courses were closed and they tried to mirror a classroom as much as possible and increasingly so over the years. These were kind of closed and not really open in a massive online format, more of the technology that enables you to develop these kinds of online videos has become incredibly cheap and easy to do. So that was kind of a change. And then, a few of you had questions about sustainability. Is it cheaper to make but even does it take money? And someone asked did my course itself actually take money to develop? And it did. Stanford actually funds faculty a little bit of money. Not enough to pay for anything extravagant, but enough to deal with the hardware issues, going to recording studios, to have assistants. There's a lot of things going on in this course that require help or I would have to give up everything and focus on this, and drop my other job, my real job. Which is research and teaching at Stanford. So, it does require resources. But, that was only for the initial development of the course. The The ensuing efforts to kind of improve it from all the things we learned the first time, that's been on our own dime, our own effort. So it does have sustainability issues, and I've mentioned this in prior screen side chats, that it's not feasible for me to do to give active involvement in every single course I put online, massive online context. And it's just that my time is limited, and not because I don't want to or the like. And so, I think there is some kind of issues about sustainability at the same time we'd like to make this accessible to everybody and repeatable in all the times. I run this, the more people can experience the material. So, there's conundrums there, and I'm not sure what the best way to do it is. I think what we've tried to do is, consider all these concerns and provide the best experience we can. And, we'll keep running it, and hopefully provide organizational analyse to a lot of people. That wouldn't have been able to take it otherwise. I think the summary of this thread by Henrik Bukowski is wonderful, and I don't really want to go off everything and repeat everything. But let me just quickly rattle off some of it, and he says MOOCs, the argument that you guys had on this thread that MOOCs will be the education of the future was yes. Because they're flexible, you can take them anytime, they're accessible and cheap. The democratic, meaning everybody has access, they fit the technological trend where there's increasing digitalization and virtualization of our lives. There's space for innovation and a way to teach, for example. Just posing a video allows you to go back and forth through the lectures opposed to when I do it in person, we have to move on. There's other things, like the fact that you have a thread of international kinds of individuals who can talk to each other. There's a variety of things that are coming online, the pure grading, which in the past was just me grading. And there may be cases where I'm sure it wasn't wonderfully perfect in accuracy, and so therefore this kind of pure grading has led us to be much more explicit about how we grade. And how we judge grading to be fair. So I think a lot of that has kind of come in, and it seems to have helped education somewhat. And online you can create a community and somewhat of a personalized experience. All be it probably not as much as if you show up at my office or if you're in my class. [COUGH] Excuse me. Now right you said no, and you say no it won't become the education of the future because face to face our actions always richer. And there's a missing relationship or sense of personalization that I can afford. I mean the fact that I read the lecture. Partly, that's really done because it creates a much cleaner transcript and a cleaner presentation, because my speaking here is full of clauses and dependent clauses and hanging, [LAUGH]. It's just nonsense as a transcript for people who are not native English speakers. And the hope is that by combining this kind of personalized screen side chat where I hem and haw and try to show you I am a person. And then the more scripted clean textbook and lecture, that, that combination would be the best of both worlds and give you as many options as we can that would fit you. The other thing is that might be deficient in MOOCs is not just there's a side of how I handle it to give you more personalized experience. But the other thing that might be missing is a experience. It's difficult for me to give everybody an internship or the like. It's feasible that we could use each other, on the forums we're thinking about ways to do that or alumni of this, the CTA can graduate. And they themselves can have more of an elite course of swords. Where maybe I focus on them like graduate students to make them more of an expert. To guide you and mentor you and give you internship or practical kinds of experiences. It's something we haven't figured out we're all trying to think about it. There is also uncertainty about how well on teaching it's not like I see your responses. And whether you've actually learned I have to do fact recall kinds of questions on quizzes because of the set up. Provided and the time involved in teaching so many 1,000 people. The other thing that's difficult to do is that it's not this free and cheap format people argued might be hard to sustain because it's going to undermine quite a few educational institutions possibly. And there's all kinds of legitimacy concerns from credentialing organisations like universities that MOOCs may undermine them so therefore this can't be sustainable. Knowledge economy would implode, perhaps is one argument. If we don't support production of knowledge in some way financially or through resources. And the other argument said MOOCs won't be the future because not just because of politics and other institutions, but because of the fact that most people don't finish them. That's true, overwhelmingly so. Of the 50,000 plus who are registered, I would say maybe 5000 will finish, if we're lucky, everything. I'll be at most people don't take the course to get a credit or some kind of statement of accomplishment. And it's not accredited this class. So it's not as if the statement you get can be transferable and used as some kind of good. It may work well with your employer if you agree ahead of time. If they say, look, take this course, it might help you, put it in your LinkedIn account, et cetera. I see people do that and that's fine. But I think it can only go so far until its accredited and the standards are checked and things like that. You and I, we know that it's a good course, the standards are high, but other people might not. [LAUGH] So that's the kind of argument that MOOCs are essentially the most efficient form of education. Is what Henrique argues as the summary of you thread. But it has and it has a high potential for innovations and improvements but face to face is probably the most viable and there's always going to be a constraining factor. That MOOCs will never be the only form of education. They'll be supplemental is the argument, that you guys summarized as this thread. Now my reading of all this is is that the key factor with MOOCs becoming the education of the future. It's great for continuing education. I used to read or not read. Well, we'd read as a you know, for pleasure. Various texts when I go to the library you would see them on the shelf next to it. Now we just search. We find the exact thing we want and we miss that kind of tangential search where you find something on the shelf next to it and you browse. That's kind of gone to the wayside. But we do have continuing education, that seems to continue I take great, remember there was this great courses series where people taped lectures? I would listen to those or even podcasts of National Public Radio or things like that where you feel like you're educating yourself out of an intrinsic motive, it wasn't a course though. So, I think that kind of thing is clearly life long learning through these MOOCs will be there, the use of the MOOC is supplemental to my end class course. Clearly is useful and helpful to students here like the ability to go back and review or see these materials online. They like seeing your threads, your conversations, they gain from that. And they participated some in your threads and conversations and you might've gained from it. So I think there's something nice about that the access and the quality of this format is not terrible. It has all kinds of benefits that people wrote about. The thing that I think that's going to be kind of possibly revolutionary about MOOCs is when they're accredited. And quite a few are becoming accredited as we get through the cheating issues, and plagiarism and the like, which is diminishing greatly. And we're identifying it more readily now, and it's becoming closer and closer to some kind of individually guided educational experience where you learn these things. And the accreditation of various courses is kind of, interesting in it poses a variety of new institutional concerns about legitimacy. For example, this course, could it be used in an accredited fashion for business program, as an MBA program, that introductory course on organizational analysis. It could be, and I get very nervous about it because that feasibly could put out of work, a variety of people who get PhDs who teach a great course. But for whatever reason people think a course from a Stanford professor has quality to it, and I hope that's true. But at the same time I hate to think it would ever put out of work people who were at a community college, or a large public university that wants to find economies of scale. So there is that kind of concern, but it's happening. And it's kind of a strange new world where even professional development courses, say for teachers or for managers or for computer scientists at companies go back and take these courses for credit. And they're one third the cost, and let's say they're even a third of the cost but 50% is effective. Well that's a gain right in some regard. We haven't measured it that clearly but I think the implications are there. That a lot of people don't want to go back to school. They would like to have this continuing education and accredited, and then it’s sustainable because it’s paid. And resources come in and that starts to enable an institution like Stamford that only has so many faculty to provide services to scale that competes with say other large public universities or community colleges. And can be repeatedly run at low cost. That kind of becomes a serious care of education of the future concern because that is sustainable. What I have seen that i dont know, i think the quality of the courses. The fact that very few people actually finish. Needs to be understood better and I think the question for me is for the credited courses, the people who finished, is that also as low, is the fact that if you did get a degree or if you did get credit to a degree. If Coursera has a fleet of courses that are accredited. Can they provide you with a bachelors thesis that's equivalent to what you get the University of Pennsylvania which is an Ivy League, right? And all they need is 3,000 courses that are accredited in a variety of programs. And pick and choose and pull them together into something that looks like that. And the question becomes someone who graduates from that, are they legitimate as an expert? And a variety of us have thought about this, and one of the things about the online format that's different is you lack that moral classroom collaborative feel. It's on the forum to a degree, but only if you participate. You notice we encourage that. But I think in a classroom there is this moral collective concern that you feel obliged to not violate and it makes education a little more of a moral collective experience of exchanges across everybody. Not only between me and students but students to each other. And I think in the online format, given that it's so individualized, it's left up to you. I give material and then it's all automated for the most part, and then it's up to you. And I think that's a different kind of exchange and kind of relationship with education. And it may not be as moral in a collective sense. I haven't thought through it, but its just something to think about. What kind of education in the future it would be if this was the dominant forum? Another thing to think about is that most introductory courses or we could even at Stanford end up using all these moocs as a means to kind of figure out who would be admissible. How well they did on these mooc's and how we learned about hem on the mooc's etcetera as a means of access. An initial route, a screening. There's so many things that could be talked about, about how this would become the education of the future or operationalize. It's not clear how it's going to be, but it's clear that education as an industry and as a field Is murky and ripe for a lot of entrepreneurs and innovators like yourself. Who are trying to think about it and think of ways to actually provide more efficient means of learning. And more effective means that maybe provide Some kind of experience that leads us all to have a chance to have the kind of world we'd like to be in. So there's so many dimensions to that though so I apologize if I'm all over the map. But will moocs be the future? Yes, I'm sure they'll be there. Will they dominate? I don't know, I suspect in some places they will, but in others, probably not. So I think it'll be supplemental for the time being and possibly replace some segment of the field, but not for sure the whole thing and definitely not for a while. So, that's my thoughts. Thank you for the question. And thank you, Hendrick and Angie for summarizing and for posting in.
