Andrew NG at #GMIC2013

Yesterday I found this post about Andrew Ng #GMIC2013, in my blog's dashboard saved as a draft, so I decided to finish it and publish it.

Enjoy!!

Apart from Paul Graham, another talk that I enjoyed a lot was the one that was given by Andrew Ng. For those who don't know this guy, let me introduce him to you. Andrew Ng is the co-founder of a MOOC site called Coursera. According to Wikipedia, Coursera is a for-profit company offering massive open online courses (MOOCs) founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University. Coursera works with universities to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses of a variety of specialities such as physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, and other areas in different languages. Moreover Coursera has it own mobile apps.

Andréw Ng stated that there are three key things they could identify in Coursera:

The fact that they allow speed video management
• Crowd source languages
• English captions, used mainly by non-native English speakers 

Regarding the correction system, Andrew sustains that the crowd source grader works really well. In order to prove this, he showed a chart which contrasted the grade given by a real teacher and the grade given by the crowd source system. The results were amazing because of the precision of the grader system!!

Talking about the future, particularly about the business model, Andrew says that Coursera is trying to implement a sustainable way to earn money. In addition, continuous education will be the target market. Nowadays all courses are offered for free.  However in the future (when this post was written) Coursera wants to implement a paid system capable of validating your identity. Using this system Coursera will give an additional validation to the certificates so it would be legal to present those certificates to an external institution, like a job. Andrew explained that the validation system uses a combination of factors in order to determine the person's identity.  One of the factors is the way the student makes the keyboard keystroke.

Andrew believes that if we can provide all the world with a shot to middle class education, we will be able to change it.

Regarding the future of education, Andrew said that big institutions like Stanford won't disappear, they will become mainly interacting places between students.  Formal education will be taught through MOOC or a mixed approach where the theoretical part will be virtual and the student will go to classes for the practical work.

Whatever the future of education is, it is nice to see how these initiatives that seek to give the whole world education are able to prosper.

@sdemians