[Music] half a dozen professors of computer science and engineering at UC San Diego have become Pioneers in the world of online learning developing courses for the two largest online learning platforms corsera and edx the specialization that we have on corsera is called interaction design and it spans a number of short courses covering different parts of interaction design uh it grew out of a class that I've offered on corsera since the spring of 2012 called human computer interaction and it's based on the course materials I've been using teaching at Stanford and UC San Diego to to students uh at the University for a number of years I have a series of seven courses that form bioinformatic specialization at corsera we also develop a new course called biology meets programming and this course is developed for incoming students it's even for high school students Learners and universities came to online education for different reasons I was driven to online courses because was suddenly unrealized that the way I taught for two decades is wrong it is an inferior way of teaching and there is a better way to teach we are probably the last generation of professors who are using traditional classroom as a teaching technology I think that the most important factor for a university and considering how much and how to engage in online learning has to do with exposing their strengths as an institution and meeting their particular missions and needs that's one of the reasons that many courses uh from UCSD have been as popular as they are because they reflect the very specialized but useful Knowledge and Skills that people out there looking to supplement their Advanced degree really do need for their work there's so many companies out there there's so much stuff happening where there's this great need for people who are very skilled and so when you have a need for that many people it's just more people than you can educate in these traditional ways and you can reach a diverse set by kind of opening up the field wide and kind of saying anyone out there can come to us cuz we're everywhere so I think that's the real need in this space just how popular is online education for faculty accustomed to teaching small classes or even hundreds of undergraduates in an inter Rory computer science class the online numbers are massive as in massive open online courses or muks Ravi ramam Mori developed the first computer Graphics Muk for edex the course has had a rich history so we've offered it I think about half a dozen times at this point more than 100,000 people have registered and 500,000 people have watched the video lectures we've seen it translated into uh man most of all we've reached out to a whole body of students interested in computer science and interested in computer Graphics who would otherwise not even have been in the community and would not be doing computer computer science or know anything about computer Graphics the number of people who continue to enroll absolutely amazes me I never thought there would be a quarter million people in the world who were hungry for more interaction design work it's really cool but it's a field that there's a huge amount of interest and opportunity and excitement right now I mean there's multiple Hollywood movies coming out about design uh there's a lot of job opportunities there's great opportunity for impact and so we have lots of people who are interested but not a lot of background historically and I think that's one reason why we've seen so much interest in in this class both domestically but also around the world over the last two years we had over 250,000 enrollments in our courses we've had over 300,000 visitors to the course uh of those um almost a thousand have completed all five big projects that are associated with a course so that's a tremendous accomplishment and then we've had oh tens of thousands um complete various courses so each component of the specialization so it's been a great turnout there are good reasons for students to take online courses particularly in certain Fields computer science is a very special discipline because it has unique way to test students knowledge you can give a student a programming Challenge and you can test whether student understand material or Not by checking whether students solve the programing challenge people who are essentially looking for continuing education and in many cases a working professionals are quite motivated to do so and in fact this is a huge untapped Market that there are people who are just interested in continuing their education and I really think that the power of technology to bring uh allow faculty to engage much more uh oneon-one through video or through assignments that are autog graded to give a more personalized experience through online materials is really something that we are excited about and and are looking into unlike the traditional classroom a challenge for online education has been grading for classes of thousands even hundreds of thousands of students but in recent years faculty researchers have found Solutions in tools such as peer instruction and Grading one of the things that enabled this class to happen online is that our HCI class was the very first of the mukes where we used we developed in fact a system for peer review so that students do creative work and then with the assistance of rubrics they evaluate each other's projects you learn a ton by evaluating somebody else's work when we've surveyed students and asked them about different aspects of the course one thing that lots of people mention is the act of evaluating other people's work is a real uh learning benefit peer instruction has been researched extensively and there's been a lot of work showing how effective it can be for student students learning in the classroom research has shown that hearing other novices talk about the concepts um in novice language is very effective to uh retaining the concepts and to learning them more deeply we are not just doing a multiple choice rather than you submit the assignment when it's due the TA takes couple of weeks to return it to you here you can submit inst and instantaneously get feedback by which you can improve your program and that was really motivated by this necessity of finding a feedback system for Rich type of assignments in online courses our talk about system is one example of this it it's built on top of Google Hangouts and so it uses video chat for students to be able to discuss things with each other our teaching consistent don't spend a minute checking homeworks because all our homeworks are programming assignments as a result my teaching assistants have time to interact with students our background in computer science education and computer science education research really influenced our design a lot it's behind many of the design aspects design decisions that we made when we were designing these courses uh things like the fact that every course is grounded in a cours project that we start with that project from the very beginning and every single thing we teach to our Learners comes right back to that project according to Christine Alvarado and Mia minis who jointly developed corsair's intermediate software development courses with fellow teachers Professor Leo Porter having a large number of students in an online course does not mean giving everyone the same content our course explicitly tries to engage people who have different experience levels and different backgrounds and we do this through things like providing multiple tracks for our Learners to go through if you need a little more support then there's a little more support for you if you're pretty Advanced you can just kind of Advance along the advanced track so we didn't take for granted that just because the schedules flexible that would mean we'd get a bunch of different Learners we actually engineered for those different learning styles I think the at its best online learning goes beyond being there and given that it's delivered through computers I think we have tremendous opportunity for using computation to make a more Interactive Learning Experience that opportunity for Rich synchronous peer learning experiences uh for me is something I'm really excited about online has a very powerful benefit of helping us to serve the students who come into our program from exceedingly diverse backgrounds helping us to level the playing field for students who maybe really have no background or need extra support in terms of moving at the pace that our oncampus courses need to move to help students get done and graduate and be prepared in four years Beth Simon took a 2-year leave of absence to work at corsera to learn more about the world of mukes she recently returned to UC San Diego moving from computer science to education studies to help the campus adopt new technologies one of the things that I got most excited about through my experiences working with multiple instructors on mukes at corsera was the ability to utilize online tools technologically enabled tools to support teaching not just in the Muk format not just in a purely online course format but but to really benefit and supplement the on campus or in-classroom content there's so many different ways that we could be using technology to essentially allow us to have far more one-on-one style interaction with our students even if we have 200 of them in the room in another directions that we pursue for integrating online and offline classes is the new biological data science specialization in our Compu computer science master program and in this specialization students may take some courses online courses taught by UCSD professors they now can get master degree in just one years because they work hard preparing uh for classes even before they arrive to ussd we have a sequence of videos called when I struggled where we share and also our students uh share times that they had diff uh that we had difficulty with the material that we're covering and then also strategies that we have for overcoming those difficulties and the Learners have responded really well to this more computer science professors are now developing new courses they include Professor Daniel Cain one of the creators of a series on data structures and algorithms launching September 19 on the corsera platform looking to the Future you see San Diego professors who ventured into the world of mukes are optimistic but warn that to be successful universities must get get behind its faculty in this field there is a new realization that courses of the future are very polished Hightech products not unlike modern movies a budget for high te M would be at least 300 500,000 the leader on online education George te that has been very successful invested on the order of 300,000 500,000 in each of their 21 courses and of course an individual Professor normally canot generate this amount of funds unless University steps in and start supporting these developments the university can take a leadership role in online courses and in developing educational leadership in particular subjects that's a very relevant place to be our work can also be adopted in classrooms across the country and the world so we can really influence the way things are taught uh at other universities and uh across uh the globe 35 universities adopted them in their classroom that is something that is very important for the University of California and San Diego the University of California as a whole to be perceived as an educational leader within computer science according to Scott clemer High Cal C online courses promis to yield benefits for all Californians and even the state's economy California's long had an incredible ecosystem for entrepreneurship uh I think that that online education enables that California's long had an incredible community college system uh that I really hope will continue and I think online education can augment that for people who whose schedules don't line up with you know the Community College semesters or you live far away from the place where that's offered or or whatever and so I think there's a a big value for California to invest in online education [Music] [Music]