But none of those are the kinds of solutions that would allow us to support
all of the classes that we would like,
specifically when you want classes that require
something that's more critical thinking where a
student would need to write down some argument
for one thing versus another or discuss the
arguments or the causal chain behind some historical event,
or do a, a detailed analysis of a legal case or something.
You cannot do that using autograding right now.
Maybe if, maybe down the line, artificial intelligence will solve that problem
for us, but I'm not counting on it in the near future.
And so how do you do that?
And that's where, again, the social component of the platform,
which is the other big piece of it, has come to our help
because we ended up putting in place a peer-grading
pipeline where students can robustly and reproducibly grade each other's work.
And it turns out that not only that is an effective way of
grading at scale, it's also a valuable
learning experience for the students, and studies have
not, not by us, but by educational researchers, have shown that peer
rating teaches the students something, as well
as provides a scalable solution to grading.
One of the things that we try to build in is
an opportunity for students to interact with each other in meaningful ways.
And have one student help each other through the hard bits and
have the students work together to achieve a better outcome for everyone.
And so, for example, we had a question and answer forum where
students really were the primary ones
responsible for answering each other's questions.
And there was a real community built up
around that where students felt incredibly motivated to
help each other and answer each other's questions
to the point that in the fall quarter of
2011, the median response time for a question
posted on the forum was 22 minutes, which
is not a level of service that
I, as an instructor, have ever offered my students.
But because there was such a broad
worldwide community of students all working together,
there was, even if you were doing something
at 3 o'clock in the morning, chances are that
somewhere around the world, there would be somebody
who was awake and thinking about the same problem.
And so that social community was really an
essential part, I think, of the student's experience.
And critical to the engagement and retention
of students in the, in the course.
>> I just imagine these people living in Zurich
getting together in a coffee shop
and as a study group.
So what, what were some of your experiences,
or others' experiences on study groups?
>> So it turned out that study groups were something that we hadn't
built into the platform originally, it's something that we will do soon.
But it grew organically. So people basically, without even being suggested
to do that, ended up constructing study groups on the Q&A forums.
So they said that, we have a study group in London, who wants to join us?
We have an, a, a study group of, of Arab speakers or Hispanics or different
types of groupings depending on, you know,
geography or language or, or sometimes other things.
We have, in one class, a global
study group, which is specifically people who are looking
to connect to people who are not part of their local culture and geography.
And so this was really a fun thing for the students and some of them met physically,
those that had geographical proximity, and others just communicated in the
virtual space, but this organic growth was just such a powerful thing for
students that we really quickly realized that
we needed to build this into the platform.
>> You probably are so busy that you don't have any time to
think too far in the future, but I'm going to just sort of see.