October 2013 – Education Online

Online masters programs might still be quite unusual, in most cases students need to be present physically at least part-time to earn a masters degree. But I feel that Online Masters Programs are only a few years away and will then be offered world wide. Alredy now there are quite a few universities that do offer Masters programs

Online Masters Programs – The Revolution

Professor Daphne Koller from Stanford University, a co-founder of Coursera, to the University of London gives a presentation about “The Online Revolution: Education at Scale” and particularly the pedagogy/platform that sits behind Coursera

Coursera offers online courses from major top universities, “for free to everyone”. Coursera partners among other with University of California, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania. The online education platform Coursera offers is designed to support millions of students on degree level units. These education units usually last for about five to ten weeks.

Take a few minutes to listen to what she has to say, her speech is a tru eye opener and shows how education will be revolutionized in the very near future.

The revolution is that the online videos that everybody can watch have now been replaced by interactive modules that students have to complete. They get acutal home work and it gets graded, just as it would in normal class attendance.

After the Online Masters Programs finish, usually about 5 to 10 weeks, students who attended regularly and finished the assignments received a certificate of attendance. This certificate in turn could then be turned in at their college or university to receive credits.

Why Online Masters Programs Are So Effective

Thus what’s new is that the acutal Online Masters Programs are now very interactive. Learning this way is much more effective. And unlike in the conventional classroom EVERY student is forced to pay attention, questions are asked about every 4 minutes. No more sleeping off a class. You don’t pay attention, you can’t answer the question, you will not finish the course and can’t get the certificate at the end….

Online Masters Programs are therfore even more effective than their offline equivalents!

A Test For Computer Science Degree Online Tuition

In autumn 2011 Peter Norvig (an American computer scientist and the Director of Research at Google), taught a class with Sebastian Thrun (a German educator, programmer, robotics developer and computer scientist and CEO and cofounder of Udacity) on artificial intelligence at Stanford. The artificial intelligence lecture was attended by 175 students in the theatre at Stanford University and by well over 100,000 students on an interactive webcast. In this video Peter Norvig shares what he learned about teaching online to a global classroom.

A computer science degree online has now become a reality and can be achieved by attending the online lectures and finally passing the exams for the computer science degree online.

Computer Science Degree Online – Short Effective Videos:

The individual learning videos are short, only two to six minutes long, and then the student is asked to answer a question about what he just learned. That’s very close to one on one teaching, the method that works best when people want to learn anything.

Leraning for your computer science degree online is highly effective and quite addictive, as students who attended the above mentioned class by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun confirmed.

Computer Science Degree Online – Due Dates To Keep Students Engaged

What Perter Norvig mentions is that conventional onlie classes might not be the best way to teach. When videos are available all the time, you might start to procrastinate, and never get around to doing some things. So they started to set due dates for home work in their computer science degree online, and that worked like a charm to motivate the students!