Watch this exciting talk about the future of technology and college learning that will motivate you to learn with all of the forthcoming possibilities for online education. Stanford professor Andrew Ng provides a lot of the new ideas in the talk as he discusses the online education platform he co-founded called Coursera. Through this platform of massive open online courses (MOOCS), Coursera has provided free courses from leading universities to over 1 million people from 196 countries.
In this talk U.S. Department of Education Chief of Staff Joanne Weiss provides some unfortunate statistics about the lack of young adults pursuing and completing post-secondary education, and also about the rising costs of tuition which make the traditional college experience increasingly hard to afford. She expresses the need for a more accessible and affordable form of post-secondary education.
Ng addresses many of the challenges facing online education and how companies like Coursera are trying to tackle these issues. He discusses accreditation, certification, and the ability of these courses to influence potential employment. He also talks about the interaction between teachers and students and how questions and discussions can be fostered online. And he addresses the importance of grading and how students can be effectively evaluated in a massive online learning environment.
While online education is still in its early stages, this talk provides us with a glimpse of what college can be in the digital age. This one hour talk is available from FORA.tv on streaming video.