So, how fast will these studies trickle to improvements on
the MOOC format, or even improvements in education in general?
Well, pretty fast, I would say.
To explain this, I'll need to describe how startups work.
Here's the startup iteration cycle.
We see that we have a product, such as the Coursera portal for Coursera.
It can be used to measure all kinds of data.
That could be via A/B testing, for instance,
as I just explained, or maybe using other
metrics, enrollment in a course or the click-through
on emails that have been sent to the students.
Armed with all this data, the startup
engineers can learn about areas that would need
improvement, and they can generate new ideas and things to do and build that in.
The whole cycle is not groundbreaking, sure.
I'm not claiming it is.
The difference is that this cycle is not bothered
by the usual very slow methodology of education research.
Sure, this data can be spun off into papers, and that's what education
researchers have to do, are currently doing, because that's what their job is.
But, by the time those studies are
published, the engineers will have already gone
through several iterations of this cycle, and
the newly published results will already be obsolete.
They'll, they will already have improved the platform.
The big, big, difference with five years ago is that now education is the next area
where software engineers can make an impact, and
hundreds are working on making it more efficient.
This is completely new, and you can expect it to show effects very, very fast.
Just as for many other industries that you know of,
such as the book industry, the travel industry, et cetera.