A Happy Experience, with Tremendous Empowerment for Their Students and Completely Adorable by All?

    
     Universities, centers of knowledge have been created many years ago. They have for missions to spread, among other virtues, wisdom and true in their communities. There have been many philanthropists that are or were sharing their wealth to create these fascinating places. All of them have rules, timelines, and costs. Some of them are created by national systems and there is no tuition involved, or is just symbolic.

  The poor, the isolated, and the minorities have to struggle with all the deficiencies that their trades have, before they can join without stress the full experience of higher education. Some people can deal with a big amount of stress, others don’t and that has nothing to do with their wealth, gregarious personality, or if they are part of the general population, or normal people (statistically speaking). Nevertheless it helps to have enough money to have acquired a good basic education to pursue a higher one. To be connected to find out the easiest path with the best results, and to be part of the group to work together and enjoy the synergy of learning as part of a team.

   How to know if the course, courses you are taking are going to enrich in an effective way your career? Wow! For that, I have heard so many opinions; you almost can have a book of them. Just some of them are; it doesn’t matter what courses you take as long as you know, you have connections, you must be part of the people with influences so, go to institutions where the children of the top society are. Another opinion is; go where you know the institution has more successful and prestigious alumni and/or professors. Go where you can have personalized guidance and mentoring. Go where you can have the most diverse community, go where you are the opposite of your family values, go where you can afford it, go where moral and religion is first; go as far (or as close) as your parents are. Go where they value the people’s voice. Go where you have the most parties, best installations, best dorms etc, etc, etc… When you are there;

    as a student sometimes you get into the stressful facts of a) a great deal is expected of you and b) you have no control over whether you will perform well; according to Martin Seligman. And well, that is not nice.

  Oh no! What are all those aspects, why is not simply, what are the institutions of knowledge doing?

   Besides the campuses, and personal, they have a master plan for each career. They got into that plan with some key elements; the industry, the government, the professors, and students. They plan for the future, they analyze trends, market, necessities and the most probable scenario that can occur when people graduate.

   As you can see, it is a combination of facts that can be target with accuracy, if you know your data, and you have a good stochastic method to apply; the outcome will have a reasonable, hopeful outcome. We can use the term believe in many statements explaining why an institution decides something over many options. The truth is that there is the technology and mathematical methods to be more precise than ever if we can simulate with enough and correct numbers. The future can be known with a narrow clearance; to a scale so narrow that we can almost said that we are certain of a successful career. And that is why I totally know that the technology used in Udacity to choose the classes, the professors, the amount of time expending, and the grading system is the best. Just take the class of Artificial Intelligence with Sebastian Thrun.

    As a new way of learning, or new system, data is needed. It is not sprouted randomly, they have to collect enough information to create a model, which by this time, it is very optimistic to say but perfectly reasonable to think they do.

    So, Udacity is a center of knowledge, they have rules, timelines and costs. They have philanthropists, a mission, and a virtual campus that is composed by the forums, coffee breaks, hang outs, contests, and other beautiful and useful things, to interact with their community.

     Udacity have the collaboration of not only one university but several, and the industry has a vital presence. They have a verify certification which is a key factor to acknowledge the rigor and recognition of a learned skill.

    When you are a student, you are the product of an educational institution, one of the most stressful things for a mentor, teacher, professor, or educator is the idea that…” The ability of a student to do well in a class has something to do with their class”… a quote from the book Brain Rules by John Medina.

    To solve this anguish statement people go to the statistics and if they have, like at Udacity, a pass rate of 83% surpassing many of other classes in other campuses; it is when we can dance in the rain because we know, they conquered a storm. That is a huge achievement! As a student your concerns of performance are gone, and yes, a great deal was expected from you; you have sweated it and earned it; in a controlled, wonderful, and nice environment; with an assertive amount of stress. Because think of it, you know you did it, and you feel it in your brain, nothing can change that inner satisfaction, that helps to go on and on.

    So, who are the clients in a center of knowledge? Students, their families, communities, countries, and the world are. The students have the duality of being the product and the client, this paradox come from the bare nature of knowledge which is part of the unique trait of being humans and have fun learning and developing our cortex during our existence.

   Many of these thoughts have been evolving in me for many years, due to my experience as a professor of Industrial Engineering, and as an Educator and Tutor; I think this is the time to put them down as a response to a call by Sebastian Thrun for a public discussion about Udacity offerings, and the future of higher education. For the enrolling of many, we can see it as a happy experience, with tremendous empowerment for their students and completely adorable by all Udacian’s Communities.

My Thoughts A Year Ago…

In August 2012 I was writing my thoughts while eating, and getting ready for my computer class. It was a sunny day as almost all days in OC California… I had worked in my online courses and I had this vision about what I wanted to have in the near future.

First  I imagined myself composing images, movies, songs, blogs with the perfect fit of my way of thinking. Second, I had thought that most of the time you do not see what is behind  the screen or how the traffic  in the internet is moving or if you can see who stopped by your things, besides the people that you know and commented or sent a signal that they where there. It was like a mysterious box of limited information in plain sight. Also I wanted to share with the internauts, in general, the brands, institutions, organizations, places, that wowed me to glorify and perpetuate their existence. My apps I imaged could be like my personal assistant, trainer, tutor, planner… I wanted to have my special robot to remind me, to advice me , to be my special tool for all the things I knew I will required  precision and accuracy; let’s say my Swiss Army knife of the 21 Century.

Huy! I wanted something that can count and check my calories intake; my weights, and my burning calories, predict my perfect next meal. And do the same counting and checking and predicting for all my activities; the mental and the physical ones. My robot is for me so different as it is portrayed everywhere, it is not an entity but a series of devices, or a device that can include for my body to have my vitals, and for my exercise to record my position, effort and precise movements to induce the maximum potential of my health and brain.

I went farther, while I was typing I wrote, why the typing? When it could be a device which can fetch my thoughts… all my thoughts… the deepest ones… the ones that I don’t even know I have… (Very controversial  now I see) I went on; How about if I can have a conversation with somebody else in my mind… the energy that we can save, the waist that can be avoid… We can be all so synchronized that, we actually can have space for the wilderness, time to restore Nature and pursue the evolution of societies… Well that was then. From a year to today I am totally amazed of how much it has been accomplished!

At my online school, Udacity; I just read an article where the goal is going to be, and I quote; “…the creation of  a piece of artificial intelligence that sits there, watches you learn, and helps you pick the right learning venue or task, so you’re more effective and have more pleasure.” (Sebastian Thrun)

The number of applications downloaded just in December was two billion; the most popular were Google Maps, Facebook, and You Tube. So people, like to know where they are, and where are they going. People like to socialize and communicate with friends. People like to watch videos, to learn, to buy, to entertain, to send messages, and more.

Our phones are our agendas, portal to games, music, movies, conference rooms, learning environment, physical trainer, animate our household, monitor rooms, experiment, situations… This is now; it is a huge non stopping trend. Our watches can have our vitals. Apps can take a pic of a portion of skin and send it to be analyzed for possible cancerous cells. Yes, indeed we are making progress. Maybe I have the same thoughts of many more persons that I had imaged. But I know that we are living in a singularity, so this is what we are expecting according to the analysis of trends… It is fascinating to see what we have foreseen just some months ago.

Tutor planned for Udacity

most-used-smartphone-apps

Sebastian-Thrun-on-the-future-of-learning

Drop outs in online classes

The Drop-outs!!!

The great argument, the huge worry, the reason why.... I don't think so... In other forums my attention has been redirected to some talks about drop outs in online classes... So, here are some thoughts....

Online courses have had high rates of drop-out no matter if they pay or not for them, or any other circumstance, occurrence. Natural disaster, you name it... It is hard. You are not in contact with humans. You see people in the past. They are not with you. We are fragile; our human nature needs to exercise all their senses to communicate, and to feel the entire experience of learning. I have hearing some comments about persons thinking that the computer voice is actually a real person talking to them when they learn a language and having feelings for the computer voice. Yes, it is deceptive if you are looking for human contact. To isolate your brain and accept knowledge in its pure form takes time and self training, if you are used to read, study, or listen to audio books by yourself it is easier. It is like training people to drive cars for the first time, it took time, and a whole support system to develop humanity capable of detached themselves from the technologies before the cars. The answer you know it. It is going to take time and the ability with real inventiveness to move entire societies to this new way of learning. That is why we need a robot to follow the learning experience of every single student, and to catch up with our natural detachment from the learning machine. The technology is there. Udacity is putting it together. Have you noticed it? It is all around you, the messages, the forums, the announcements, the meet ups, the challenges. I know there is people that has been evaluating this in other ways than the expected, and that is because values, and culture differs from the main idea of Udacity, and also because  it is an experiment with incredible results right now that needs to be adjusted as it evolves. I have seen other online things going on, and clearly for me they have not  what Udacity has, but that is another theme to talk about.

Being Grumpy…

Being grumpy when your environment is changing and your routines are challenged is normal; everybody wants a peaceful invariant set of rules, traditions to follow, in person reassurance. I agree with you, sometimes when you sign to an online course seems really impersonal. Where am I? How come a person is just saying something without looking at me, at my reactions? So impersonal, but nowadays we need to do things in a very impersonal way, like buying clothes online… There is nobody telling you, wow! You look fantastic, but then you interact with people, you know that your online buying has an effect. It is the same with education; you know the effect of your learning, and knowledge, when you take decisions, when you get a job, when you create!
Are you worried about the drop-out rates? I encourage you to take a statistics class at Udacity, so you can measure, correlate, and have an ample perspective of a normal phenomenon.
Start with an experiment is the way science has advanced. So what is wrong with the word experiment? The freedom to stay in a class or to leave is linked to the survival state of a person, we have known of people struggling war, pregnancies, isolation, and many other extreme circumstances, while taking an online class that makes entirely successful the idea that free online education is there for humanity, it gives hope and confidence… It is for you at any time, and whenever you can.
What is the purpose of learning? Have you accomplished your dream job? Do you think that you need to improve your intellectual acumen? There are many fast ways to know if a person is learning, like quizzes, and so on. At the end of each course in Udacity and in Coursera you fill a questionnaire. So they are asking, they know your score, and maybe they know how you are learning. And that is personal, very personal. Change is scary but Nature changes. Don’t worry and embrace the change, at no charge
And BTW there are specific causes for drop outs in traditional education institutions, but that is another theme to give it a thought some other time.

D A T A

Collecting data is the thing  this time, the more data you have, the more powerful you look to others. Information is a very useful thing. It is like a miracle fertilizer for business. How do you reach your clients, how do you find friends? How do you find your treasures, or your bargains? How do you find your ambiance, your mood like place, site? How and what do you learn? For what?
 Google has its searching machine and it is 10 times bigger than Facebook. But Facebook has 900 million members with tons of data of  people. We can see data business blooming, the trade of edata has begun, not recently but it seems like it is in vogue now. How the big collectors of data businesses are going to use the public data, or kept the private, private? It looks like all contenders are in their marks ready to sprint for a race of huge proportions. I read three articles about the same topic. One from technology review from MIT about Facebook, another from Scientific American about  Artificial intelligence. Also one from Gabriel Weinberg's Blog: Moving the needle. And one from Udacity... all of them talked about data.
The big questions are how is Facebook going to use all data to improve advertisements without upsetting users and regulators? Google had already deal with the same questions. People is talking about the powerful tools of Artificial Intelligence to manipulate large quantity of data if you have it or have access to it. Others give you the critical steps to build your own search engine or Internet business and the tools to use specific data. The pioneers in massive education are talking about how people acquired knowledge, in other words organized data in the human mind that is going to produce new data. This last one is the most innovative.
The Like button, the search browser, the specially custom site for you, the sophisticated one that is willing to give you extra super useful information with good taste or scandalous flavor. All of them marvelous practical things we are using and relying on them.
Are we going to be able to predict trends, originate changes, promote good causes, be really informed? Or are we going to be manipulated, summoned, carry on, extrapolate to extremes? The engineers, the scientists, the mathematicians, the statiscians, the computer savvy are the ones with that power... no the politicians, or the religions, or the philosophers like in past times. So it is time for the other side of the hard core thinkers to make humanity to evolve.
Even now, just writing  blogs, uploading images, sharing music, watching videos, voting, posting coments, sharing email without direct intent all of us are promoting the ideas mentioned in the articles, there is people that don't realize that every time we communicate, we are advertising something or someone. Sometimes when people realized that; they don't like it. The social nature of humans make us be in a constant state of communication or socializing, it is part of us. We trade every single time. We are social entities that even with our appearance we are saying something. Now the data is there, we are able to make learning machines that are going to give us the target with all the accuracy, with all the precision to reach anything we want.