WEBVTT

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Everyone is both a learner

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and a teacher.

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This is me being inspired

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by my first tutor,

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my mom,

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and this is me teaching

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Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

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to 200 students

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at Stanford University.

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Now the students and I

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enjoyed the class,

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but it occurred to me

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that while the subject matter

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of the class is advanced

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and modern,

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the teaching technology isn't.

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In fact, I use basically

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the same technology as

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this 14th-century classroom.

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Note the textbook,

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the sage on the stage,

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and the sleeping guy

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in the back. (Laughter)

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Just like today.

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So my co-teacher,

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Sebastian Thrun, and I thought,

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there must be a better way.

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We challenged ourselves

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to create an online class

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that would be equal or better

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in quality to our Stanford class,

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but to bring it to anyone

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in the world for free.

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We announced the class on July 29th,

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and within two weeks, 50,000 people

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had signed up for it.

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And that grew to 160,000 students

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from 209 countries.

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We were thrilled to have

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that kind of audience,

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and just a bit terrified that we

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hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter)

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So we got to work.

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We studied what others had done,

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what we could copy and what we could change.

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Benjamin Bloom had showed

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that one-on-one tutoring works best,

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so that's what we tried to emulate,

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like with me and my mom,

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even though we knew

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it would be one-on-thousands.

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Here, an overhead video camera

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is recording me as I'm talking

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and drawing on a piece of paper.

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A student said, "This class felt

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like sitting in a bar

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with a really smart friend

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who's explaining something

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you haven't grasped, but are about to."

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And that's exactly what we were aiming for.

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Now, from Khan Academy, we saw

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that short 10-minute videos

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worked much better than trying

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to record an hour-long lecture

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and put it on the small-format screen.

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We decided to go even shorter

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and more interactive.

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Our typical video is two minutes,

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sometimes shorter, never more

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than six, and then we pause for

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a quiz question, to make it

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feel like one-on-one tutoring.

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Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses

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the grammar of English

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to parse sentences, and here,

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there's a pause and the student

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has to reflect, understand what's going on

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and check the right boxes

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before they can continue.

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Students learn best when

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they're actively practicing.

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We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple

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with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize

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the key ideas themselves.

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We mostly avoid questions

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like, "Here's a formula, now

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tell me the value of Y

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when X is equal to two."

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We preferred open-ended questions.

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One student wrote, "Now I'm seeing

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Bayes networks and examples of

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game theory everywhere I look."

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And I like that kind of response.

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That's just what we were going for.

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We didn't want students to memorize the formulas;

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we wanted to change the way

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they looked at the world.

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And we succeeded.

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Or, I should say, the students succeeded.

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And it's a little bit ironic

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that we set about to disrupt traditional education,

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and in doing so, we ended up

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making our online class

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much more like a traditional college class

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than other online classes.

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Most online classes, the videos are always available.

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You can watch them any time you want.

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But if you can do it any time,

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that means you can do it tomorrow,

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and if you can do it tomorrow,

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well, you may not ever

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get around to it. (Laughter)

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So we brought back the innovation

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of having due dates. (Laughter)

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You could watch the videos

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any time you wanted during the week,

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but at the end of the week,

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you had to get the homework done.

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This motivated the students to keep going, and it also

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meant that everybody was working

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on the same thing at the same time,

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so if you went into a discussion forum,

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you could get an answer from a peer within minutes.

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Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which

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were self-organized by the students themselves.

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From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned

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the concept of "flipping" the classroom.

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Students watched the videos

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on their own, and then they

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come together to discuss them.

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From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction,

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that peers can be the best teachers,

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because they're the ones

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that remember what it's like to not understand.

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Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that.

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Of course, we couldn't have

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a classroom discussion with

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tens of thousands of students,

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so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums.

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And finally, from Teach For America,

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I learned that a class is not

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primarily about information.

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More important is motivation and determination.

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It was crucial that the students see

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that we're working hard for them and

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they're all supporting each other.

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Now, the class ran 10 weeks,

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and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched

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at least one video each week,

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and over 20,000 finished all the homework,

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putting in 50 to 100 hours.

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They got this statement of accomplishment.

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So what have we learned?

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Well, we tried some old ideas

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and some new and put them together,

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but there are more ideas to try.

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Sebastian's teaching another class now.

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I'll do one in the fall.

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Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx

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and others have more classes coming.

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It's a really exciting time.

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But to me, the most exciting

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part of it is the data that we're gathering.

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We're gathering thousands

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of interactions per student per class,

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billions of interactions altogether,

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and now we can start analyzing that,

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and when we learn from that,

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do experimentations,

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that's when the real revolution will come.

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And you'll be able to see the results from

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a new generation of amazing students.

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(Applause)