The biggest obvious flaw with online education, from what I can tell, is that it's harder to keep people motivated when they're doing their work from their living room, and/or aren't literally surrounded by peers working on the same projects, and don't have as personal a connection with their teacher.
What existing tools do we have to combat this and how well do they work, and are there alternatives in development?
I'm no Peter Norvig, but this is the discussion section after all....
One tool that may or may not have a place in online education is gamification. To put a long story short, the gaming industry has gotten plenty of practice motivating people to keep going, even at tasks that wouldn't necessarily be the most interesting. Other industries have finally noticed this, and started trying it out to see which concepts from gaming carry over well to other fields. I don't personally know of any research specific to education, but would be interested if anything relevant was found
An enthusiastic, low-level introduction to gamifying education: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/gamifying-education
Perhaps it would be good to remind people that "learning online" is not a synonym for "learning alone". There are a few ways to learn together. The difficult part is to find people who want to learn the same thing at the same time.
1) People can watch the online lessons together; literally in the same room, looking at the same computer screen. If the computer gives you questions, first write your answers on a piece of paper, and when everyone has an answer written, show each other your answers, optionally discuss, and then write some result on a computer.
2) People can agree to do one lesson online alone, then meet and discuss that one lesson together. Or they can have one meeting per N lessons, or simply meet when necessary -- but at least once, at the end of the course. (You could use a Google spreadsheet to write who has completed which lessons, and who wants to discuss which lesson.)
For small children, parents can do (1) with them, or arrange (2) with other parents.
No question just a comment: I took their AI class and dropped it in short order. Norvig and Thrun are seriously fucking awful teachers. The guy who did the machine learning class was quite good, however.
Norvig and Thrun are seriously fucking awful teachers.
I enjoyed the AI class a lot, possibly just because I find Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun fucking awesome in general or because it was my first exposure to AI in general. Though yeah Ng's class was better done overal, his experience with giving online lectures showed and the programming exercises where great.
A week ago Google launched an open source project called Course Builder it packages the software and technology used to build their July Class Power Searching with Google. The discussion forum for it is here. Tomorrow is the first live hangout where he will be answering questions about MOOC design and technical aspects of using Course Builder. The live hangout will is scheduled for the 26th of September.
A small group of us has been working on related matters but we are far from done reviewing the relevant literature. Not having any good questions yet, I thought what harm might there be in asking for the broader community to come up with a few questions! If Norvig has answered your questions in some of his other existing material that I've reviewed I'll respond with a link.