Let's make an U-CEP course based on MIT's edX or on Udacity

[rainer93138]

Last December, MIT announced the creation of MITx http://mitx.mit.edu/, an ambitious project to recreate the MIT classroom experience online. In March, the MITx prototype course — “Circuits and Electronics,” (6.002x) — debuted.

In May, MIT and Harvard University jointly announced the creation of edX http://www.edxonline.org/, an organization that will further develop the MITx platform and enable other universities to use it as well.

As MIT and Harvard gear up to offer new edX courses in the fall, the edX team is taking stock of its experience with 6.002x and beginning to incorporate what it learned into the system’s design http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/mitx ... -0716.html.

155,000 students registered; 7,157 passed

Some days before in October 2011, Udacity was founded by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford in connection with Google http://www.udacity.com/.

It might be a nice working group of EP-TS http://www.ep-ts.com/ or of what ever to develop such a U-CEP course viewtopic.php?f=13&t=276, it could also be a workpackage of a project like uCepCortex viewtopic.php?f=13&t=319.

If we cannot make it via the Framework Programme of the European Commission, we might ask a patron respectively a Maecenas. Any ideas?
See http://www.udacity.com/hschallenge to democratize education. "We firmly believe education is a basic human right, and it should be available for free."

[rainer93138]

Virtual university classes come up massively in the meantime:

12 new universities join Coursera, now offering more than 100 courses

Coursera has announced that 12 universities — including three international institutions — will be joining Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, and University of Pennsylvania in offering Coursera classes, according to the Coursera Blog.

On Coursera, you will now be able to access world-class courses from:...
http://www.kurzweilai.net/12-new-univer ... dium=email

Some years ago, I discussed this with Opher Etzion and what Bill Gates has forecasted
http://epthinking.blogspot.de/2010/08/o ... grams.html

[rainer93138]

http://www.kurzweilai.net/uc-berkeley-j ... dium=email

[rainer93138]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneywisewo ... education/

[rainer93138]

I like this idea of Udacity and virtual university classes, as far as I can see it from the web. I had a similar idea some years ago and tried to realize it with some colleagues (see below).

I'm one of the first founding members of the Complex Event Proessing community. Since 2005 I work a bit closely with Prof emeritus David Luckham from U Stanford as one of the main inventors of CEP. We believe that David's forecast of Ubiquitous CEP until 2060 viewtopic.php?f=13&t=315 will be the basis of tremedous technology ideas of the future in a lot of different areas, because the universe is actually a universe of events.
http://www.complexevents.com/

For some time we think about the developing of our courses for the Web:
viewforum.php?f=13

For instance, we also try to realize CEP concepts with driverless or even more intelligent cars by adding more event types and accordant processes, and we could develop a course on top of Sebastian Thrun's
http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/ ... ev/apr2012

Some time ago, I suggested our community to realize a course or project what we could adapt for Udacity
http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/In ... stract.pdf
This is the thread on our discussion forum
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=252

As an EU project proposal (because virtual university-stuff was already part of the European Framework Programme 7), we also developed a Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) based course of study with a curriculum for Event Driven Business Process Management
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=280&p=1213&hilit=TEL+based#p1213
http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/__ ... -edBPM.pdf

At present, I work on another idea we could also make a course (a whole Master course of study actually)
http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/Bo ... essing.pdf
It's already around 3 years old and must be updated a bit, because a lot happened in the last years, e.g. in epigenetics, neuroscience, brain computer interfaces.
We could develop the curriculum within the next days.

[rainer93138]

http://www.zeit.de/studium/hochschule/2 ... rnet-kurse
Students will acquire the first fifteen minutes of learning about the content of videos, then discuss them online with other students and review their learning progress based on self-tests and exercises.

"Online courses are there for a long time, but in the past ten years, their quality improved dramatically," says Kevin Carey, higher education expert at the Research Institute of Education Sector in Washington.

"There's a tsunami up to us," warned the president of Stanford University, John L. Hennessy recently his colleagues.

[rainer93138]

I'm not sure whether they are looking for colleagues from the States only http://www.udacity.blogspot.de/p/career-team.html. Are they also interested in team members from Africa for instance? And how to solve the problem there with the Internet access and high speed you need for the courses? Perhaps Google could a bit sponser the idea and the needed infrastructure, or Bill Gates is also interested in this kind of teaching as he told one or two years ago and could help to make it possible? http://www.kurzweilai.net/bill-gates-in ... dium=email No infrastructure, no education, no democratic right...

[rainer93138]

Bring together ideas about teaching in the fields of Cognitive Systems and Robotics?

http://www.eucognition.org/index.php?pa ... objectives
Should we bring together these ideas about teaching in the fields of Cognitive Systems and Robotics from EUCog and Udacity, Coursera, MIT's edX, HPI, and some more in the near future? I'm a member of EUCog nowadays and I would like to contribute to such an initiative.
It could help to speed up EUCogIII, started in November 2011 - 2014, and vice versa, as a global international initiative.

[rainer93138]

Coursera Hits 1 Million Students, With Udacity Close Behind

Coursera, an upstart company working with selective universities to offer free online courses, announced this week http://blog.coursera.org/post/290627367 ... -countries that it had reached one million registered students. A rival company, Udacity, which also offers what have become known as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC’s, says it has more than 739,000 students.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/ ... hind/38801
Also the appending controversal discussion is interesting.

"The numbers, however, are more symbolic of interest in free online courses than indicative of the amount of learning taking place. For instance, a co-founder of Coursera, Andrew Ng, noted in an e-mail interview that the number of active students is significantly lower because many registrations are for courses that have not yet begun. And many people sign up for the free courses but don’t end up following through by doing the coursework."

Also another article is interesting, written by a fresh assistant professor:

Why Online Education Won't Replace College—Yet
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Online ... nt/133531/
Actually the appending discussion is the interesting part, because the author's theses are well responded.

Or this, also written by an professor:

Don't Confuse Technology With College Teaching
http://chronicle.com/article/Dont-Confu ... th/133551/
"As someone who spends time with students in directed conversations on difficult subjects, I'm sure this method won't work." But the comments don't agree with her.

[rainer93138]

I.B.M. Adds an African Lab to Its Growing Global Research Network

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/1 ... hoofinance

Tebogo Moima from South Africa and I will try to join this idea and to bring together such IBM initiatives with those of SAP or Hasso Plattner Institute, Udacity and Coursera viewtopic.php?f=13&t=322 as well as with EUCogIII http://www.eucognition.org/index.php?pa ... objectives and ISAB http://www.isab.org.uk/ISAB/ . There are a lot of opportunities to use our technology and concepts of Ubiquitous Complex Event Processing, and we will address and gather subjects where we could use them, e.g. viewtopic.php?f=13&t=319&p=1450#p1450. We will also propose this as a special working group of the Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) and of its restart with new topics and a new organisation and new members.

"... In Africa, the problems — and opportunities to solve them — would seem in greater abundance than computer science expertise. And indeed, the Nairobi lab is intended as a hub for nurturing home-grown skills. I.B.M. plans to build the lab up to 50 researchers within five years. In addition, it will be the center for a “resident scientist program,” which will bring in researchers from Nairobi and elsewhere in Africa to collaborate with I.B.M. scientists. The candidates can come from universities, government or industry, typically for one-year stints.

The I.B.M. lab is seen as a step toward reversing the tradition of bright young Africans’ departing for the West, in search of advanced education and jobs..."

Typically there are no initiatives of Udacity and Coursera in whole Africa so far, because of different reasons, one is the infrastructure/high speed internet we need to participate in such courses. As mentioned viewtopic.php?f=13&t=322&p=1452#p1444 "No infrastructure, no education, no democratic right..."

Tebogo Moima is working on a report based on the course of Sebastian Thrun about Driverless Cars respectively Artificial Intelligence and how we could use such initiatives like Udacity in Africa. We will publish it in this thread. If you search in the Web, you can follow interesting discussions about the concepts like http://www.aiqus.com/questions/37512/co ... vs-udacity.