Blog #9 TED:Peter Norvig "The 100,000-student classroom

Hello this is shoko. TED has many attractive lectures and I personally think watching TED talks is so much better way than watching boring TV programmes to kill your time. Today, I would like to introduce you this lecture:"The 100,000-student class" by Peter Norvig. This short lecture is about an online education system which was filmed Feb 2012 and posted Jun 2012.

I choose this lecture because I am interested in education and its effect on people. I am taking teacher training course and studying lots of things about teaching and learning. I actually knows online education has a huge possibility to change the current education system and there are already various online education courses which are provided by many education companies.  However his system is different from those ordinary ones and it actually seems an interesting way. So I would like to share his idea with you.

 

 

Peter Norvig is a computer scientist and currently the Director of Research at Google Inc and he used to be a teacher at the Stanford University. Through his teaching experience, he noticed that even contents of each lecture have been improved, the way of teaching has not changed at all for long long time.  In the fall of 2011, he started to change the way of teaching and learning: he made a  free online education system. People can watch the high level lecture movies on the web. In addition, in his system, he gave students homework and decided due date so that students can study as if they actually take this course in class. After student completed their course and if they pass them, they can receive an actual certification.  

 

Online education system is no longer interesting and new thing. What attractive thing in this lecture is his original ideas. He tried to make online web course more real: he gave small quizzes during a video and homework assignments.  Also he changed the way of teaching: he adopted man-to-man teaching method. In order to make a content easier to grasp, he divides a long lecture into small 2~6 minutes video. Those characteristics are really effective to motivate students to keep studying. Because an online course does not have a class, students have to study by themelves and in that situation, they often lose motivation easily and quickly. Therefore, this difference from other online lecture courses amazed me.

 

Free online education system has huge possibility. It enables poor and busy people to learn high quality contents whenever they want and gives opportunity to people all over the world.  However, only people who have a computer can do this program and other the poorest people cannot. This is obviously an attructive education system. However, we also have to think about people who really cannot study in their life. More than 160,000 students from 209 countries enrolled Norvig's web site so this system actually does work. This system can be impoved more and more in the future for people who need it.