The 100 000-student classroom

In 2011 Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, decided to open up their Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to the world.

In a sense, all roads had been leading to this Rome, with enthusiasts of open learning at Stanford University like Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng having championed its potential in the previous years. Having made the announcement that the beginners AI course would be available free to anyone who wanted to access it, the sign-up started. Within days, more than 100 000 people had registered.

The bell rang and eager students from 130 countries around the world and many different time zones tuned in to hear the streamed lectures and participate in the Q and A sessions.

Recalling the class later, Norwig wrote: ‘What kept me most engaged throughout the course was the attitude of the public students, conveyed primarily through emails and posts on the Q&A Forum. They were unabashedly, genuinely, deeply appreciative. Many said the course was a gift they could scarcely believe had come their way. As the course came to a close, several students admitted to shedding tears. One posted a heartfelt poem’ (http://wp.sigmod.org/?p=165).

Now, artificial intelligence is a rarified subject, and yet 100 000 people signed up. Imagine the potential in other areas.

Although participants did not receive a Stanford-endorsed certificate, they learned the same information as those who were formally enrolled in the course. This potential for restructuring paid education business models is being closely examined. Few can afford an education at Ivy League universities, yet everywhere around the world people are willing to invest in their education, which many see as a ticket out of poverty.

If 10 students pay $50 000 a year but hundreds of thousands of students are willing to commit themselves there may be a way to monetise these in the future. Of course, just how to certify that the person who is doing the course is who they say they are and finding ways to prevent cheating will be challenging. But technology is getting smarter at recognising patterns in the way we think and write, so this may soon be possible.

Although the course was dominated by participants from (in descending order) the USA, India and Russia, it attracted people from every continent. Their ages and occupations varied, but most were professionals seeking to sharpen their skills. Check it out at db-class.org.

Soon other prestigious universities, such as MIT, followed suit and there are now numerous free online education platforms around the world.

One of my favourite stories, though, brings us back to Khan Academy. I love its serendipitous roots and the focus on making maths and science, such critical skills in a technology-driven age, accessible to all.

Khan Academy

Salmat Khan used to tutor his cousins in maths and science. One day he couldn’t make it so decided to video the tutorial instead. What he learned, he would later joke, is that they preferred him on video than in person. Not only did they learn what they needed to learn but they were able to share that video with friends who also needed the additional output. And in one of the happiest accidents of modern times, Khan Academy was born.

Khan Academy is a non-profit educational website that aims to offer a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Like the MOOC it includes content, interactive challenges, assessments and videos, but the focus is on science and maths.

What I love about Khan Academy is the principle-based approach. Learning is self-paced and students are able to repeat a class as often as it takes them to learn the principles. It’s also possible to generate different exercises so you can approach the topic from a number of angles.

Why is this so important? We live in a world where, rightly or wrongly, intelligence is equated with fast learning. And our education systems are set up to privilege those who learn fast. Students who learn slowly or struggle with a certain concept can be disadvantaged when a teacher needs to move on. The problem with subjects like maths is that one principle builds on another. You’re not going to understand calculus if you failed to understand multiples. There’s no blame around this; teachers are under huge pressure to move through curriculum material at a pace that suits the majority of the students. But being able to access these materials anytime, and progress at your own pace, without anyone thinking you’re dumb, raises the bar.

Some poor rural states in India that cannot afford teachers and textbooks have partnered with Khan Academy so the educational material matches the school syllabus. (These can be found on an affiliated website, teachersofindia.org.) Attendance rates soared at schools once the video material became available.

But affluent and poor alike are using Khan Academy in blended learning arrangements or for professional development.

As a parent, I find that my maths knowledge is seriously outdated. If my boys ask me a question I will often sit down with them to watch a Khan video so we can learn together. I can then reinforce the learning by asking them questions or working through problems together with them.

Professional development

Although MOOCs and learning academies like Khan were established to level the playing field, the reality is they have become one of the most important vocational training tools.

Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and published in the journal Nature shows that some 80 per cent of MOOC users around the world already have an advanced degree, with up to 80 per cent of students coming from the richest 6 per cent of the population.

This means the skilled are becoming more skilled.

It’s still early days for online learning and, as with all innovations, we are likely to learn by getting things wrong as well as getting things right and making continual iterations. However, the experiment to date combined with the Penn research reinforces the conclusion that access to computers and the internet is critical for countries to remain competitive. All sorts of projects to increase connectivity are underway.

Raspberry Pi is a credit card–sized computer that costs between $25 and $35, and plugs into your TV; a keyboard can boot into a programming environment. Project Loon involves a network of balloons travelling on the edge of space connecting wirelessly to the internet via a handful of ground stations, and passing signals to one another in a kind of daisy chain. The aim is to help fill coverage gaps, provide internet access to rural and remote areas, and bring people back online after natural disasters. But that’s another story, for another day.

MOOCs are accepted by many employers as providing legitimate training. Employees are posting the accreditations they receive at these course on their LinkedIn profiles or showing certificates at their job interview, and employers generally regard them highly.

Paid crowdsourcing

There are now plenty of online platforms that connect employers and freelancers. You can work with a freelancer on a discrete project (designing a logo, say) or in an ongoing capacity by outsourcing website management to a platform such as Tweak. These are the equivalent of the specialist guns for hire that organisations used extensively in the past — without needing to account for a position on payroll. Here are some examples:

• Freelancer and eLance are online job marketplaces that bring together employers and freelancers. If you need short- or long-term help on a project you post the job and freelancers submit bids. One benefit is immediacy. Employers can also avoid costs associated with advertising, office space, insurance and so forth.
• 99 Designs is a marketplace for graphic design. Submit a brief and hundreds of freelancers join in a competition to present the design that you ultimately purchase.
• Elto helps you to implement multiple improvements to your website. They break down the list you submit into tweaks and charge you a small amount for each. This has been a godsend for many people who are not technologically savvy but who need small improvements to their sites. They may not have a full-time webmaster and many web developers will not take on this sort of work because it’s too small.
• Similarly, Fiverr helps you to find experts to take on (for as little as $5) those small, unusual tasks that need doing and for which you definitely do not need a full-time role — recording a voiceover, designing a corporate Christmas card or giving you five ideas for your blog.

People use crowdsourcing because the strong competition can result in much lower prices for products of equal quality. From a global perspective it can be a win–win situation. You might pay $500 for a logo that would cost thousands if you commissioned it locally, at the same time paying someone in a developing country a hundred times the standard monthly wage. There can be costs to the local market (companies like Sidekicker aim to overcome these). Some professionals refuse to work on crowdsourced sites because the effort put in to win competitions is not always rewarded. However, they are great for startup companies that are not well resourced but still need the same collateral as more established businesses.

As a professional this opens up lots of possibilities:

• If you’re prepared to work virtually you can source specialist expertise from anywhere around the world, rather than just locally.
• You can also sell your skills globally by working full time as a freelancer or supplementing traditional work. I know of several people who left the traditional workplace and are earning as much or even more money working this way.

Unpaid crowdsourcing

The time and effort that unpaid citizens are putting into hobbies they love that are being coordinated by organisations with a purpose is contributing significantly to the global brain and what is commonly referred to as the ‘knowledge economy’. Businesses are also using the crowd to source customer research and feedback, or even to come up with names and designs for new products.

Crowdsourcing for business

• Madrid crowdsourced the logo for its 2020 Olympics bid in a country-wide design contest. The London Olympics’ 2012 logo cost £400 000; Madrid’s cost just €6000.
• Chip company Frito-Lay asked consumers to help come up with a new flavour in the ‘Do Us a Flavor’ campaign, awarding $1 million to the winning entrant.
• Google relies on the collective intelligence of billions of webpage links. In 2012 it launched the Consumer Insights tool, which helps businesses gather opinions from the crowd for 10 cents a pop.
• Budweiser crowdsourced its new beer, Black Crown, through Project 12, which asked 12 brewers to come up with a new product. Consumers were then asked to pick the one they liked best. A whopping 25 000 consumers voted, and the majority chose the Black Crown beer.

Citizen science

The old saying that ‘information is power’ meant just that in the past. Organisations believed their data provided strategic advantage and protected it tightly. The internet has led to a radical shift in thinking on this, because it has shown that when you make data openly available, people can use it in constructive ways that benefit not only you but the world more broadly. Open data is the idea that certain data should be available for people to use however they like without copyright or patent restrictions, and there are now huge open data movements (see, for example, data.gov and data.gov.uk).

Here are a few of the amazing things that people have been able to contribute by using other people’s data.

Citizen journalism

Paul Lewis is a multi-awarded journalist from The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. He is famous for using social media to investigate deaths that have been wrongly attributed. In 2009 he became interested in the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests. Reports claimed Tomlinson died from a heart attack, but Lewis was suspicious. After he wrote about it in his newspaper and reached out through social media, more than 20 witnesses came forward in just six days.

As is the nature of global social media networks, this information found its way around the world, and it wasn’t long before a New York businessman brought it to the attention of his investment fund manager colleague, who had been in London on business at the time. As it turned out, by chance he had recorded the event on his digital camera. The material collected showed Tomlinson being assaulted by police, who later issued an apology to Tomlinson’s family and publicly admitted that his death was not the result of natural causes.

Kiva

You may not have heard of the online microfinancing site Kiva. If you click on the Home page you’ll see photos of people in developing countries around the world looking for loans to set up a business. You give $25, which is returned to you over time. Let’s face it, even if the borrower defaulted, most of us would be happy to contribute $25 — we probably spend as much a week buying coffee. But as an active Kiva supporter I receive ongoing repayments. I love the idea of Kiva because it’s more than a charitable donation. It’s that whole sustainable ethos of teaching someone to fish so you can feed them for life.

According to its website Kiva was founded in 2005 and can boast of:

• 1 046 375 lenders
• who have given $525 399 650 in loans
• with a 98.96 per cent repayment rate
• working with 240 Field Partners and 450 volunteers in 73 different countries around the world.

But the really interesting part of this story is that microfinance was once the exclusive domain of banks. Platforms like Kiva are carving out a niche that was inaccessible only a decade or so ago. Established players should not take their territory for granted.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform for, broadly speaking, creativity. So far $220 million has been pledged and 61 000 projects launched.

It’s often difficult to fund the arts, particularly in countries that do not have active arts philanthropists. Even when governments offer grants there can be only a few winners. By allowing individuals to contribute small amounts to projects they genuinely believe in, far more artists have a chance of getting their work off the ground.

Singer Amanda Palmer broke records last year by raising well over a million dollars via crowdfunding to pay for the recording of her new album. At the time, it was the biggest sum raised by any musician through a Kickstarter campaign.

There are now crowdfunding sites for every kind of project. There are also signs that crowdfunding could be used in the future for investment. This will be a big issue for lawmakers and regulators.

Governments are also using crowdsourcing, in particular for community projects. The New York City Council created an official page on Kickstarter that is a hub for community projects in low-income areas. In the English Midlands, Mansfield District Council successfully used Spacehive to raise over £36 000 to install free WiFi in the town. Bristol City Council crowdfunded grants for local charities and social enterprises that work with disadvantaged youth.

All this has led to all sorts of discussions, including whether there should be tax breaks for those who contribute to community projects.

Typically people who choose to crowdfund projects receive a reward, such as early access to a software program, and all the platforms take a percentage of what is raised in fees. However, the increased use of crowdfunding is causing some regulators to rethink their approach.

In the US the Securities and Exchange Commission has tabled rules that would help guide a new investment strategy known as equity crowdfunding. Regular investors would be able to invest in startups via crowdfunding in exchange for company equity, previously available only to accredited investors. The new rules would allow startups to raise up to $1 million from donors online over a 12-month period.

A competitive advantage

Companies like Deloitte use gamification techniques as part of executive development. At NTT Data the use of gamification to develop leaders is also showing business results. Using the Ignite Leadership game, NTT Data leaders learn key leadership skills such as negotiation, communication, time management, change management and problem solving while collaborating with each other and receiving immediate feedback from their peers.

But the value of gaming is only just starting to be understood. Combined with crowdsourcing, it’s proving to be a powerful source of answers to some of life’s most difficult questions.

Games can solve wicked science problems

Recently a couple of scientists joined forces to develop a game to solve a tricky biochemical problem — protein folding. Conquering it could support the development of drugs for some of today’s incurable diseases.

It’s essential to know the stable shape of a protein if you want to create a drug that can interact with it, say in disease. But proteins can fold in multiple and complex ways. So complex that even powerful computers like the Rosetta program developed by Professor David Barker have achieved very limited results.

Barker and a colleague from the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science, Professor David Salesin, believed that bringing people with excellent spatial reasoning and problem-solving skills together with the computer program would achieve a better result. By appealing to gamers they believed they could tap into that mindset. So they created a protein folding game called Foldit and released it to the world.

Foldit presents users with a simulated structure of a protein. The player ‘folds’ the protein (rearranging its shape) until it achieves a unique and stable structure. Gamers using Foldit recently helped unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme that the scientific community had been puzzling over for a decade. Two papers have been published in the prestigious science journal Nature drawing on Foldit discoveries. The creators have now brought together scientists to try to find a cure for sepsis, or blood poisoning. Sepsis causes the body to become inflamed after an infection. There are more than 100 million cases of the disease each year and it can be fatal. Crowdsourcing could generate more solutions in a more efficient way.