Amherst College says "no" to edX, but how about Google MOOCs?

The Amherst College faculty voted 70 to 36 with five abstentions against joining edX, MIT's MOOC consortium, but they did not dismiss the idea of MOOCs. They passed a motion proposing that Amherst explore online teaching technology outside the context of the major MOOC groups.

The major MOOC platforms in the US -- edX, Udacity and Coursera -- are trying to build their brands by offering courses from "elite" universities. Most faculty senates will not have to consider the question of partnering with these organizations because they will not be invited in.

Furthermore, few universities have Amherst's $1.64 billion endowment, -- they could not afford edX even if they were invited to become a partner. EdX charges $250,000 to initiate a course and $50,000 each additional time the course is offered. They also take a cut of any revenue the course generates.

Does that mean that all but rich, elite universities are shut out of the MOOC game?

No.

A university can develop and experiment with MOOCs or using a MOOC platform for smaller online classes or to supplement or flip face-to-face classes using open source software. Stanford and edX have combined their MOOC platform software in an open source project and Google also has an open source MOOC platform, Course Builder.

Amherst, or any other university, can explore online teaching by becoming familiar with these open source programs and providing a MOOC platform for use by their faculty. Many professors would ignore the resource, but others would begin using it. The university would gain experience with MOOCs and the way a MOOC platform can be used in a smaller class.

Even better, a university or university system could host a MOOC platform and offer accounts to faculty on multiple campuses. From there it is a small step to a public MOOC platform.

But, a public MOOC service would involve significant expense for servers, bandwidth and staff. How might it be funded? One could argue that such a platform should be funded by government as part of its education mission. Failing that, the usual advertising-based or "freemium" business models might support an open MOOC service.

How about Google? Google is fond of "moonshots" like self-driving cars, and any Internet use benefits their advertising business. For example, they may (or may not) be planning to expand their Google Fiber project and become nationwide Internet service providers. If the ISP venture broke even, Google would still make money by increasing the good-will value of their brand, improving their advertising quality and increasing advertising revenue.

Does that apply to MOOCs as well? Google has their own MOOC software, which they have field tested in running their own MOOC. They also have experience running very large services like Gmail and Google Docs, which are free for individuals and generate revenue from organizations.

How about adding Google MOOCs to the list?

Blaise Pascal argued that a rational person should believe in God because the cost of not doing so and being wrong was infinite while the cost of doing so and being wrong was small. The same goes for MOOCs. If MOOCs are the Next Big Thing, Amherst will be ready. If not, they will not have lost much. They may not even have to invest in their own MOOC platform -- their faculty might just open free accounts at Google MOOCs.  Think of it as YouTube for classes.

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Update 5/1/2013

Inside Higher Ed ran an article on the edX discussion within the Amherst faculty (http://bit.ly/10s3Z4R).  It gives the pros and cons as seen by a number of faculty members.  It's based on an internal Amherst report that is not publicly available.  Also has quite a few comments.

Charlie Rose roundtable discussion on online education and MOOCs

Charlie Rose moderated a worthwhile round-table discussion about online education and MOOCs with Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX; Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania; Joel Klein, former New York City Schools chancellor and CEO of Amplify and Tom Friedman of the New York Times.

The panelists are all MOOC enthusiasts and the discussion is uncritically optimistic. They tout the upside and brush difficulties under the rug, but don't let that put you off.

As the panelists point out, today's MOOCs and Internet technology are still version 1.0. Regardless of today's MOOCs, they, like the Wright Brothers first airplane, are attracting attention, capital and smart people. I think MOOCs (and modular courseware in general) have kicked off a wave of innovation that will transform Internet-based teaching. We are beginning to depart from traditional online teaching that was modeled on the classroom and lecture hall.

(The roundtable video is 38 minutes long. If you would rather just listen to the .mp3 audio while working out at the gym or washing dishes, you can download it here).

The tactics and cost of the US telecommunication cartel

For a quick (six minute) summary of the cartel's tactics and their cost to the nation, listen to Brooke Gladstone's interview of David Johnston, author of the book "The Fine Print: How big companies use plain English to rob you blind."

Gladstone is co-host of OnTheMedia, an award winning NPR program that covers the Internet and other media.

(I've been ranting about the excesses of the telecommunication cartel for several years).

Grading the MOOC University

Maria Montero sent me a link to A. J. Jacobs' student-centered review of MOOCs, which appeared in the New York Times. Jacobs enrolled in 11 highly diverse MOOCs and finished 2 -- a typical browse/complete ratio.

Jacobs was also interviewed on NPR's Talk of the Nation (transcript and audio recording).

Jacobs "graded" MOOCs as follows:

The professors: B+
Convenience: A
Teacher-to-student interaction: D
Student-to-student interaction: B-
Assignments: B-
Overall experience: B

Jacobs' conclusion:

As these online universities gain traction, and start counting for actual college course credit, they’ll most likely have enormous real-world impact. They’ll help in getting jobs and creating business ideas. They might just live up to their hype. For millions of people around the globe with few resources, MOOCs may even be life-changing.

As for whether MOOCs will ever totally replace colleges made of brick, mortar and ivy, however, count me as a skeptic. A campus still has advantages for those lucky enough to afford the tuition — networking being one. (Even dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg made key social connections at Harvard.) And an online college will never crack Playboy’s venerable annual list of top party schools.

Google Fiber plus ubiquitous, free WiFi -- an offer your mayor cannot refuse

Google Fiber started in Kansas City. Based on that experience, they expanded to nearby Olathe, Kansas and hi-tech cities Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah will be next.

There has been a lot of speculation about Google's intention. Is Google Fiber just a proof of concept designed to spur the incumbent ISPs on? Were they picking hi-tech cities hoping to see some futuristic application development? Or, were they planning to become a nationwide ISP?

We got a hint when Eric Schmidt said Google Fiber was a "real business" and we read estimates of the cost of the Kansas City network and of a nationwide build-out.

Jason Calacanis has no doubt about Google's intention. His latest blog post is entitled "Google's Fiber Takeover Plan Expands: Will Kill Cable & Carriers."

You should read it for yourself, but I want to focus on one claim he makes:

More importantly, every Google Fiber home will have a public wifi component. In order to get Google Fiber, you’re going to have to agree to put a router in that lets anyone use a portion of your bandwidth.

That’s not announced, but it’s gonna happen.

His contention is bolstered by the fact that Google is an investor in Fon. I wrote about Fon a few years ago in a post about people owning their own Internet infrastructure and providing decentralized backhaul for Wifi. Fon gave users free, open WiFi routers, but there were two problems.

For Fon to succeed, the open modems had to be ubiquitous. I was an original "Fonista," but there were only a few others in my part of Los Angeles. The second problem was backhaul speed. I had a slow DSL connection at the time. If a lot of neighbors and passersby had connected to my Fon router, it would have impacted my connectivity.

Those problems disappear if Fon is tied to Google Fiber. Google Fiber is such a good deal that it would become ubiquitous and, if you have gigabit service, you won't notice the load imposed by WiFi users.

Google needs cooperation with cities if Google Fiber is to succeed. One "carrot" they have been offering is free connectivity for community sites like libraries and hospitals. What if they sweeten the pot with ubiquitous WiFi? That is an offer the mayor cannot refuse.

Google has another asset. Recall that the decision to start in Kansas City was based on a proposal from the city. I don't know how many proposals Google received or what the cities offered, but Topeka joked about changing the city name to Google and Kansas City offered significant subsidies. I bet Google got some sweet offers.  I know they got a sweet sales-lead list.

If Jason Calacanis is right, and I do hope he is, this is the beginning of the end of business as usual for wired and wireless ISPs (aka cell phone companies).

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Update 4/26/2013

Time Warner Cable says they will offer free Wi-Fi in Austin (http://bit.ly/Y1vSUX).  It seems they got Google's message.  That being said -- I wonder whether they will be able to deliver.  What will be their backhaul strategy?

Lies, damn lies and open data -- Reinhart and Rogoff challenged

This is one of several cool XKCD cartoons on
statistics. See http://bit.ly/XGLLju for others.

In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published "Growth in a Time of Debt." They analyzed national income statistics from 44 nations over a span of as much as 200 years. Their dataset incorporated over 3,700 annual observations.

Their main conclusions were:

• Above 90 percent debt/GDP, median growth rate falls by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more.
• In emerging markets, "When external debt reaches 60 percent of GDP, annual growth declines by about two percent; for higher levels, growth rates are roughly cut in half."
• For the advanced nations as a group, there is no apparent contemporaneous link between inflation and public debt levels, but in emerging markets inflation rises sharply as debt increases.

The study was influential. It has 450 Google Scholar citations and was widely quoted by Paul Ryan and other politicians arguing for austerity.

But, a new paper by University of Massachuets economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin analyzes the same data and comes to different conclusions.

This does not mean Reinhart and Rogoff are charlatans or Ryan and other politicians are liars. Ryan (hapilly) accepted Reinhart and Rogoff's conclusions as fact and Reinhart and Rogoff built a number of questionable assumptions into the spreadsheet they used to analyze their data. They were also careless, evidently not catching a spreadsheet coding error.

But, there are many ways to analyze any multivariate dataset. Data analysis is like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant while touching different parts. A study like this does not give The Answer, it gives an answer.

The best way I can think of to cope with such complexity is to let many people analyze the same data. As the open source software aphorism states "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

While I may not agree with the assumptions they made in their analysis, I applaud Reinhart and Rogoff for publishing their data and spreadsheet. You can download them and do your own analysis.

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Updated, 4/21/2013

Paul Krugman has weighed in on the Reinhart and Rogoff affair, commenting on its practical political and economic influence in a column on "The Excel Depression" (http://nyti.ms/14IrRd5). I typically agree with what Krugman writes, including this column, but its title is a bit over the top.

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Updated 5/31/2013

Reinhart and Rogoff have come in for more criticism -- does debt cause slow growth or vice versa? See details of the data analysis in this paper by University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube.

One might also compare recent performance of the Japanese and pro-austerity European economies.

Presidential science initiatives (including the Internet)

President Obama has called for initiatives to map the human brain and bring an asteroid to Earth for study.

What a breath of fresh air to see a president who is thinking beyond today's simple-minded political jousting -- even if the proposed budgets are just a down-payment for planning and design. It is reminiscent of President Kennedy telling Congress:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.

(I get kind of misty typing that quote).



Of course there have been other noteworthy presidential efforts -- check the "Progressive Professor's" list of the top 15 presidential science investments, starting with Thomas Jefferson's sponsoring of Lewis and Clark.

Although no single president can take the credit, I would add a sixteenth to the professor's list -- the funding of the research and development that led to the Internet. The US taxpayers got quite a bargain -- this is what it cost us:

One can argue that this $124 million was only for research and development and we should also count the money spent on government procurement -- most notably SAGE, a networked early warning system for manned bomber attacks (video), which cost an estimated $8 billion. (The SAGE video is a bit off topic for this post, but it highlights technical progress beautifully .  Even if you include SAGE and prototypes like MIT project Whirlwind, the networking investment has paid off handsomely.

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Update 4/9/2013

Prominent scientist thinks the brain map should have more funding.  Harvard professor George Church, a veteran of the human genome project and an advocate for this study says the project should start small and have funding from several agencies. be ambitious and focus on developing new technologies from the start.  Lots more ... this is a recommended article.

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Update 8/13/2014

For Vint Cerf's description of the ARPA/Internet project, see this post.

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Update 4/27/2015

In this video of his keynote presentation at the SCI Institute, Alan Kay describes the ARPA funded research that led to the development of the Internet and the personal computer. The talk begins with the visions of people like Vannevar Bush and JCR Licklider and runs through the years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

Kaye concludes that the work at PARC cost Xerox about $40 million in 2012 dollars -- funds for around 30 researchers for four years. He estimates that Xerox made 300 times its that through sales of laser printers, even though they failed to capitalize on other PARC inventions. He estimates that the payoff to the US and world from all the PARC inventions was around $33 trillion by 2012.

The entire talk is over and hour, followed by questions and answers. The portion in which he talks about PARC and estimates the return on investment, begins at the 1 hour, 1 minute point.



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Update 10/22/2015

The US National Economic Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy have published a Strategy for American Innovation.

It is a long document with both strategic and specific points. This is one paragraph from a section on the Federal Government’s Foundational Role:

When U.S. companies develop a breakthrough product like a smartphone, it is appropriate to celebrate American firms and workers. But it is also important to recognize the value of the decades of Federal investment in R&D that provided these new products’ scientific and technological foundations, such as the Internet, the Global Positioning System, speech recognition, electronic design automation for advanced microprocessors, and artificial intelligence for virtual assistants. Although companies must ultimately invest a great deal to commercialize emerging technologies, the new insights, early prototypes, and the first markets for them are often supported by the Federal Government. Absent Federal investment, many new products would not ever reach the market, let alone reach world-changing scale.

The smartphone example is taken from Mariana Mazzucato's “The Entrepreneurial State," and provides a good example of the role of the Federal Government in research and procurement of early, limited-market products.

Combined Course2go and edX platforms will lead to hosting services

When MIT announced the creation of edX, they promised to open source their MOOC teaching platform.  Last September, both Stanford and Google open sourced their MOOC platforms, Course2go and Course Builder.

Stanford and edX have announced that they are merging their platforms.  Stanford's Course2go is now in maintenance mode and its features will be moved to edX by June.  I wonder what Google plans to do.

This is good news -- it means schools will be able to offer MOOCs without using the services of a commercial firm like Udacity or Coursera.  A school or a system like the California State University could host MOOCs using the edX platform.

The next step will be hosted services open to any teacher or anyone else who wants to teach a class -- MOOC or other.  A thousand flowers will bloom.  How will this affect course management systems like Blackboard and Moodle?

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Update, May 30 2013

The Stanford/edX MOOC platform source code will be posted tomorrow.

We have a few hints: developers have the source code for the edX learning platform, including code for its Learning Management System Studio, a course authoring tool; xBlock, an application programming interface (API) for integrating third-party learning objects; and machine grading API's.

That will be the second major open source MOOC platform -- Google's Course Builder is already open source (http://bit.ly/ZmhRyy).

Will this lead to the democratization of MOOC and MOOC module development? Are you planning to test either of these platforms? Will Google or edX make hosted versions available at some point in the future? Will someone else?

Is there a place for online training companies in the MOOC discussion?

My daughter teaches an upper division finance course, in which spreadsheets are an important tool. In order to take her class, the students must have passed two classes -- an introductory information systems course, which includes learning to use Excel, and a prerequisite finance class.

She tells me that a number of her students do not understand that you can enter a formula into a spreadsheet cell. Others may understand that they can enter formulas, but lack basic arithmetic skills like understanding percents and rates or converting from one unit of measure to another.

It turns out that they do gain rudimentary skill with Word and PowerPoint in the introductory course (or before they get to college), but we are doing a bad job of teaching rudimentary spreadsheet skills.

What can we do? One approach is to put off the introduction to spreadsheets until they are needed in an accounting or finance class, and present them there, but that would lead to curricular redundancy.

How about a short course on spreadsheets that focused on just the features needed for subsequent classes? That sounds like a good idea to me, but it is less than a typical college course -- perhaps one unit. That would be administratively awkward and, more important, we do not seem to be capable of teaching spreadsheet skills to a significant number of our students.

How about a spreadsheet MOOC? That would pay off in terms of economy of scale, and we should be able to spend the resources on it to become really good spreadsheet teachers. We could even make the course modular so a given school could elect just the spreadsheet features they wanted their students to master.

Cool, let's do a MOOC, but who should teach it? Today's MOOCs are offered by university professors, but would it make more sense to turn to an organization with expertise in training?

I Googled around and found two organizations with Excel training online, Udemy and Lynda.com. Would they be better candidates for teaching a spreadsheet MOOC than a university? Would they be willing to sell wholesale to a university -- giving us reduced prices for, say, 100 students and tailoring the course to the features we want covered?

Udemey charges $99 for unlimited lifetime access to their 16-section Excel course. What would they charge for, say, 100 students who had access to only 8 of the sections for one semester?

Lynda.com charges $25 per month for access to all of their training material. What would they charge for, say, 100 students who only had access to their Excel course for three months?

Universities around the world are beginning to offer MOOCs and we are thinking about giving credit for completion of MOOCs offered at other universities. Perhaps we should also think about giving credit for or requiring completion of courses taught by training companies.

Can we grade and give feedback on college essays automatically?

I am skeptical, but a New York Times article says the folks at edX will be doing just that using "artificial intelligence." They also say students will be able to improve their essays using feedback from the system. EdX promises to open the grading platform to others -- presumably as a Web service.

EdX has hired Vik Paruchuri to work on the service, which he developed for an automated essay grading contest sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation. The contest results are reported in a paper by the contest organizers, which concludes that automated essay scores correlate well with those of human readers. (Before you settle for that, read this critique of those results by MIT professor Les C. Perelman).

The Times article does not contain a link to a service and I can't find one on the edX web site, so I will remain skeptical. Grammar checking? For sure. Meaningful feedback? Show me the API or URL.

Could we afford a full-time teacher for one course?

We've heard suggestions that MOOCs might enable us to take courses offered by all-star professors at elite universities. Why take a course from a professor at a local state university when you could take a course from a renowned Harvard scholar?

But, would that be a good use of resources?  Albert Einstein was too busy to teach a physics MOOC.

Government subsidizes education for the benefit to the society and economy.  If we assume that MOOCs work well for some courses and some students, government should be willing to foot part of the bill.

In an earlier post, I did a back-of-the envelope calculation speculating that a MOOC might generate annual revenue of, say $200,000. In my estimate, most of that revenue would come from students seeking entertainment and enrichment, not certification.

What if the government would match that, allocating another $200,000 for a MOOC. At that level of funding, could we cover the overhead -- management and administration, production, software refinement, community facilitation, hosting, bandwidth, etc. -- and have enough surplus to hire an outstanding, motivated teacher and perhaps a TA to spend full time presenting and improving a single course?

If you are a good teacher at a state university, community college or high school, think of how well you could teach a course you were interested in if that one course were your full time job and you had support staff.

MOOC monetization -- a free sample strategy

The high cost of education has been one of the drivers of interest in MOOCs, and nearly all MOOCs have been free up to this point. We are in the "invest to get users" stage.

I've heard speculation on ways to monetize MOOCs, and would like suggest one I've not encountered -- the free sample model.

We are starting to get some data on MOOCs. For example, Katy Jordan pulled together completion rate data on 26 of the MOOCs that have been offered by Coursera, EDx and Udacity:



MOOC critics point to these low completion rates as evidence that MOOCs are a Bad Idea, but those large enrollment numbers are still encouraging, so let's look further. Here is a plot of the number of views of the first and last videos each week in the Bioelectricity course at Duke University:



As you see, it is long-tail, y=1/x type graph. One way to look at the long tail is to conclude that the majority of enrollees were dissatisfied and the course was a failure. But an alternative explanation is that the folks were not really enrollees, they were browsers, and, like shoppers in any situation, most decide not to buy.

We can also think of their motivation. Maybe some were not interested in "completing" the course and getting "credit" -- they wanted something less complete, less formal. We have data on that from the Duke course as well. As shown here, fun and enjoyment was the strongest motivator.



Similar motivation was reported by students in a programming class. Sixty four percent of the students said they were interested in the course out of personal interest and curiosity, 33% for professional advancement and only 3 percent for university studies.

These three studies are small and limited, but perhaps we should be thinking about MOOCs as entertainment and lifelong learning as well as for formal education and vocational training, which brings us to free sample pricing. We can view enrollment over time as follows:



The spike in the first few weeks is mostly browsers -- people who want to see what the course is like and what the workload is. They would be getting a free sample.

After a few weeks, the enrollment decline slows and we are left with the students who are interested in completing the course. As we have seen, some are seeking formal credit and others entertainment and the joy of lifelong learning. Those people would presumably be willing to pay for the course. How much?

San Jose State University is currently running a trial in which students will get credit for Udacity courses for $150. The results of that pilot study are not yet in, but $150 is less than the University price.

How about the non-credit students? Let's say a typical MOOC runs 10 weeks and the first three weeks are free. What would people pay for seven weeks of entertainment or lifelong learning? Would it be as much as a movie? A hardback book? A steak dinner?

We can noodle around with a simple spreadsheet and get some napkin-sketch revenue estimates. For example, let's assume a for-credit price of $50 for a certificate of completion and a non-credit price of $20. The median number of students completing the MOOCs shown above was 2,777. Assuming that ten percent of those are for-credit students and the MOOC can be offered four times a year, we get annual revenue of $214,000. If we use the mean completion rate of 4,447, the revenue estimate increases to $343,000.

Note that under these assumptions, the bulk of the projected revenue is from the entertainment students, not for credit students.

If an organization offers several courses, are numbers like that sufficient to cover the overhead of management and administration, production, software refinement, community facilitation, hosting and bandwidth, etc. and pay a teacher who is full time on a single course?

A question for any good teacher reading this -- how effective a teacher would you be if you only taught one course and spent full time delivering and improving it?

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Update, 4/17/2013

Coursera revealed that they had revenue of $220,000 in the first quarter after starting to charge for verified completion certificates (http://bit.ly/12nd8Rb).  The income was from students paying between $30 and $100 per certificate.  Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller said prices were "around" $50.

This gives us a first cut estimate of what someone hoping to get job or school credit for a course might be willing to pay.  No doubt, the going price for certified completion will be higher than the price for un-certified completion for entertainment and curiosity.

(Coursera uers who pay for certification have to submit a photo ID of themselves to the company and are also tracked based on their “unique typing pattern” to ensure that people who take tests or turn in assignments are who they say they are).
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Update 5/23/2013

I posited a simple characterization of people signing up for MOOCs as either "browsing" or "enrolling." Phil Hill presents a more nuanced characterization in his blog post on blog student types, classifying students as no-shows, observers, drop-ins, passive participants and active participants. Details are presented in the paper called Deconstructing Disengagement: Analyzing Learner Subpopulations in Massive Open Online Courses.
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Update 11/27/2013

This post in the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that MOOCs have failed in higher education, and are better suited to vocational training and lifelong learning.
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Update 12/1/2013

Prominent MOOC provider Udacity has shifted emphasis from college credit courses toward vocational training and lifelong learning.
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Update 12/9/2013

A University of Pennsylvania study of a million enrollees in 16 MOOCs shows they have relatively few active users and low completion rates.

• Course completion rates are very low, averaging 4% across all courses and ranging from 2% to 14% depending on the course and measurement of completion.
• Across the 16 courses, completion rates are somewhat higher, on average, for courses with lower workloads for students and fewer homework assignments (about 6% versus 2.5%).
• Variations in completion rates based on other course characteristics (e.g., course length, availability of live chat) were not statistically significant.
• The total number of individuals accessing a course varied considerably across courses, ranging from more than 110,000 for “Introduction to Operations Management” to about 13,000 for “Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources.”
• Across all courses, about half of those who registered viewed at least one lecture within their selected course. The share of registrants viewing at least one lecture ranged from a low of 27% for “Rationing and Allocating Scarce Medical Resources” to a high of 68% for “Fundamentals of Pharmacology.” 

Two MOOC case studies and some completion rate data

Here are links to case-study descriptions of two MOOCs. They are both informative, interesting descriptions of the projects, students and outcomes. For example, one thing that caught my eye was the fact that a significant number of participants in both classes were motivated by personal curiosity. (You will have to read them to see what catches your eye :-).

1. Functional Programming Principles in Scala: Impressions and Statistics

2. Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach Duke University’s First MOOC

IEEE Spectrum Podcast interview of Professor Roger Barr, who taught the Bioelectricity course (13m 42s).

3. Katy Jordan has compiled MOOC completion rate and assessment type data and displayed it in an interactive graph. (Be sure to visit the interactive graph -- you can filter it in several ways).

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Update 3/31
Jordan looked at 26 MOOCs, and using her data, I put together this completion rate table:

The average lifespan of canceled Google services and APIs is 4 years

A lot of people, myself included, are upset at Google's decision to eliminate their RSS reader, Google Reader. Perhaps Charles Arthur was one of them, because he has just written an article reporting the lifespan of 39 canceled Google services and application programming interfaces (APIs).  It turns out that the mean life span of canceled projects is 1,459 days, just under four years. The article has a table listing the start and end dates of the 39 services and APIs.

I use Google Reader in my work and, until now, have been having my students use it.  We use other Google services even more -- Google Docs, Blogger, Google Plus and Hangouts are central to my teaching and other work. I would be happy to pay a reasonable fee to use those services, but would think twice about requiring my students to do so.

Google had their reasons to shut Reader down -- it saves them some (very small) percent of their infrastructure cost and frees up some people for other work, but it harms their reputation. The folks who are now having second thoughts about relying Google services and APIs tend to be active -- educators, journalists, IT professionals, application developers, etc. Alienating one of these folks is a bigger loss to Google than losing a casual user.

IP TV is taking off -- which organizations will run the next global "networks?"

I recently wrote a post on Netflix's made-for the Internet series, House of Cards, saying that I did not like it as much as the HBO series The Sopranos. I've since finished watching House of Cards, and, even if I did not find it as compelling as The Sopranos, I was hooked and enjoyed watching it.

I ended that review by saying I hoped House of Cards would succeed and Netflix would give us more high production value entertainment online. It did succeed -- as you see here, it has an average rating of 4.6 stars.

In retrospect, that is not such a surprise. As David Carr points out, Netflix's use of big data pretty well guaranteed them a hit. Before starting production of the series, they knew that people liked the movies of director David Fletcher and star Kevin Spacey as well as the British version of House of Cards, upon which this series was based. Given that history, they were confident the series would be a success, so they produced 13 episodes without a pilot test.

As you see here, the episodes vary in length from 46 to 56 minutes -- the writers were freed from the constraint of broadcast television episodes, which must fit into time slots.

Having 13 episodes recorded ahead of time, meant that viewers, including me, could watch two or more together. We were freed from the weekly release schedule of broadcast television. The season constraint is also gone -- it could have been 12 episodes or 14 -- whatever the writers felt worked well.

We were also freed from commercials, which I really hate now after a year or two as a cord cutter.

They could have also dropped the episode constraint. One can think of House of Cards as a 661-minute movie. A viewer could pause whenever he or she felt like it and resume later or the writers could have inserted suggested pause points. I am not sure how well that would work out for viewers or how the writers would have handled the 11-hour format, but it would have had one positive advantage -- the viewer would not have to watch the series introduction and credits 13 times.

Netflix has committed to more Internet production, and they are not alone. YouTube is bankrolling productions and their audience exceeds 1 billion views per month.

The BBC has announced plans to produce Internet programs, and they are experienced content producers. Netflix jumped out to an early lead, but the BBC commitment reminds us that the Internet is global and we will see global productions as well as global audiences.

The times they are a'changing. The situation is well summarized in a quote by Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos, who said "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." Will Netflix, YouTube, the BBC and others become HBO-like content producers before HBO is freed of contractual obligations and moves their content to the Internet?

Historians look back at movies like Birth of a Nation, with its use of panorama shots, panning, night photography, a musical score and a large battle scene, or The Jazz Singer, with its sound track, as production technique breakthroughs. We may one day look back on House of Cards as a distribution breakthrough.

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Update, 3/28/2013

Amazon has committed to production of five children's programs in addition to six comedies they announced earlier.

Netflix is not standing pat -- they announced an 8-episode series to be called, Sense8, by the creators of the Matrix movies and Babylon 5. As with House of Cards, they are betting on a near-sure thing.

Update, 4/22

Even Twitter wants in on the video goldrush. Next week, Comedy Central will host a comedy festival on Twitter. That sounds like a long shot, but I love comedy, so will give it a shot. The hashtag is #ComedyFest.

Update, 4/29

Amazon has debuted pilots of their initial productions (http://indy.st/11doxAs). Netflix accurately predicted the success of House of Cards using past history and was confident in producing 13 episodes at one time. Amazon will use the public as a very large "focus group" in deciding which shows to produce and which to drop.

Netflix has released its second complete series, Hemlock Grove (http://nflx.it/14HdTIg). It has a four star rating -- Netflix mitigates their risk by mining their Big Data before producing the episodes.

Netflix and Amazon have an advantage over traditional producers in their ability to predict the likely success of new productions.

Update, 7/18

House of Cards was nominated for best drama for the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards.  The series earned nine nominations overall, including lead acting nods for Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright.

Update, 7/27/2013

Netflix profit grows but stock dropped because the number of subscribers was disappointing.  Subsequently, they got a big boost in trials when Google bundled a 3-month subscription in with their new Chromecast device.

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Update 10/7/2013

HBO is offering access to seven series in the Google Play store. They cost between $2 - $3 per episode and $19 - $29 for a full season. They say more will come.

Netflix said they wanted to become HBO before HBO became Netflix -- the race is on. (This looks good for Google too).

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Update 10/23/2013

As we see above, Netflix's chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, said "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us." It seems the race is getting close and hot. Consider these recent developments:

• You no longer have to be an HBO subscriber to see HBO programs -- you can order individual episodes or full seasons ala carte from Google. (Individual episodes cost between $1.99 and $3.99 and full seasons are between $14.99 and $38.99, depending upon the show and the video quality.) The selection is limited today, but HBO says they will add more -- this must be a delicate marketing and contractual issue with their cable and satellite carriers.
• Bloomberg projects that Netflix is poised to pass HBO in paid subscribers and is in talks about offering their content through cable providers like Cox Communications.

Consumer choice is growing and we are seeing more and more content on the Internet, but, will we settle into the usual ologopoly pricing situation?

Today, we notice some pricing differences and some similarities. HBO charges for episodes or seasons. Amazon offers current season releases for $1.99 (or $2.99 for HD). Amazon offers their Prime customers a lot of free content, but it is limited. A Prime subscription costs $79 per year, but it also includes fast shipping on things you purchase from Amazon. Netflix offers all you can stream for $7.99 a month, but its streaming service is limited -- for example they offer movies on DVD that are not available for streaming.

Amazon and HBO charge an additional dollar per episode for high definition video, and my guess is that is a lot more than the extra bandwidth cost and that difference will drop as bandwidth becomes cheaper. It will be interesting to see if they keep that differential. (That may seem like gouging, but it is nothing like the phone company pricing for text messages).

It would be cool if you could get any content from any "channel" and they were all competing on price, but with a relatively limited number of channels and production companies, I expect the market will eventually settle into a comfortable oligopoly/oligopsony.

Update 11/13/2013
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Netflix rolls on:

• Netflix introduces a new user interface -- it shows how their recommendation algorithm came up with suggestions for you.
• Netflix and YouTube combine for over 50% of North American traffic.
• Netflix added 1.3 million new US subscribers in Q3 and is now larger than HBO

Update 11/13/2013
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HBO Go shows up as a supported Chromecast app in the Google Support page.

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Update 10/15/2014

HBO CEO Richard Plepler announced that the pay-TV channel would launch a stand-alone, online streaming version of its service next year.

This move was predicted by Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos, who, nearly two years ago, said "The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us."

This will make cord cutters happy, but, Plepler made the announcement at a Time Warner Cable meeting. As long as ISPs maintain their monopoly/oligopoly market positions, they will be able to raise their Internet service prices as consumers shift away from bundles of TV channels toward Internet streaming.

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Update 7/11/2015

Linear TV viewing is down 15% over last year and Netflix is the number three broadcaster in the US.

Carna, a benign Internet census botnet

This map shows the locations of 460 million pingable IP addresses identified between June and October 2012 by a benign botnet called Carna:

My first reaction -- wow that is cool -- I like global visualizations of the world and the Internet -- check out the hot spots in Silicon Valley, Southern California, back east and in Asia. Look at India and China.

My second reaction -- aren't botnets evil?

Not this one. Follow the link above and you will find a full description of this ethical, benign botnet. It gathered interesting information and did no harm.

This map is only one Carna botnet result. For example it found 141 Million firewalled IP addresses and 729 million more with reverse DNS records for a total of 1.3 Billion used IP addresses.

Another example -- Carna counted the number of hosts in each top-level domain -- here are the top 20:

(Domain host counts are also reported in the Internet Systems Consortium survey, which they have run since the beginning of the domain name system. For you old folks -- ISC used to be called "Network Wizards.")

You can see all that and more in the Carna paper, and all the data is available for download.

The author does not identify him/herself for reasons of modesty and perhaps fear of upsetting people, but, whoever you are, thanks for your effort and it would be great if you would it on a regular basis.

Google fiber will expand to Olathe, Kansas

Google chose Kansas City for its first gigabit fiber network, and they just picked the second city, nearby Olathe, Kansas.

Google skipped over Kansas City suburbs like Prairie Village, Mission, Shawnee and Overland Park to bring their gigabit fiber to Olathe, a separate city with 125,000 residents. I lived in Prairie Village while in high school, and at the time, Olathe was way out in the sticks. Times have changed.

Does this portend more Google Fiber cities? Are they just trying to make a point to get the incumbent cable companies off the dime? Time will tell.

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Update 4/9/2013

As rumored for some time, Google has announced that they will extend Google Fiber to Austin Texas.  Austin is about the same size as Kansas City and it a hi-tech hotbed.  Google will gain insight into future applications of high speed networks and it will not cost them much.  In the wake of the Austin rumors, we also saw speculation on the cost of the Kansas City networks and of a nationwide buildout.  Eric Schmidt has been quoted as saying that gigabit Internet is a real business.  Maybe they will focus on somewhat small, hi-tech cities??

Chronicle of Higher Education survey of MOOC professors

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published the results of a non-scientific survey of professors who have taught a MOOC. The online questionnaire was sent to 184 professors in late February, and 103 of them responded.

My favorite result was the answer to the question "Has the experience of teaching a MOOC inspired you to change the way you teach the traditional classroom version of the course" -- 73.7 percent of the respondents answered "yes."

Even if MOOCs are a flash in the pan, they trigger innovation in pedagogy, technology and certification, just as online teaching material will take us beyond the traditional textbook.

I was also struck by the completion rate. The median number enrolled was 33,000 and the median number who completed the course with a passing grade was 2,600. This was achieved by a median of 1 teaching assistant and 8 hours per week of the professor's time.

In a recent blog post, I asked whether a MOOC with 700 active students was a bad deal. If we can teach 2,600 students, we can justify a full time professor and production costs -- what could you accomplish if you worked full time on teaching one class and had good support?

Check the Chronicle article to see the rest of the results, and be sure to note that there are three tabs at the top of the page -- an article, the survey results and quotes from eight of the professors.

The California legislature may endorse credit for MOOCs.

Governor Brown is following in his father's footsteps.

Governor Pat Brown is remembered for developing the California master plan for higher education in 1960. His son, Jerry Brown, the current Governor of California, may be remembered (for better or worse) as an Internet-era reformer of higher education.

Last fall, Governor Brown signed a bill designed to generate open text books, in order to alleviate the rapid rise of textbook prices compared with consumer prices, shown below. (Click images to enlarge).

This spring, San Jose State University is running a trial offering of credit for massive online courses from Udacity, a private company. The hope is that this will reverse the rising cost of tuition and fees.

Now the California legislature is considering a bill requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to give credit for faculty-approved online courses taken by students unable to register for oversubscribed classes on campus.

For a glimpse of the thinking behind these measures, this is what the Governor had to say higher education in his January State of the State speech:

With respect to higher education, cost pressures are relentless and many students cannot get the classes they need. A half million fewer students this year enrolled in the community colleges than in 2008. Graduation in four years is the exception and transition from one segment to the other is difficult. The University of California, the Cal State system and the community colleges are all working on this. The key here is thoughtful change, working with the faculty and the college presidents. But tuition increases are not the answer. I will not let the students become the default financiers of our colleges and universities.

And, it's not just California. In the supplemental notes to President Obama's State of the Union speech, under the heading "Holding colleges accountable for cost, value and quality," we read a call for revision of the federal student aid system, allowing for new measures of value and new system of accreditation:

The president will call on Congress to consider value, affordability, and student outcomes in making determinations about which colleges and universities receive access to federal student aid, either by incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system; or by establishing a new, alternative system of accreditation that would provide pathways for higher-education models and colleges to receive federal student aid based on performance and results.

If you want to dig deeper, you can see the text of the ambitious bill introduced February 21 and some March 8 amendments.

Tuition and fees

Textbook prices

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Update 4/6/2013

The California State Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 520, authorizing the granting of credit for courses taken online. The bill now goes to the Assembly.

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Update 8/2/2013

California puts SB 520 on ice. State Senator Darrell Steinberg, who introduced the bill, has put it on hold in the face of faculty opposition and to take time to evaluate new online programs proposed by the University of California, California State University and California Community College system. For example, the California State University will offer 35 online courses statewide.

Google Glass -- why just capture reality when you can mediate and improve it?

There is a lot of hype surrounding wearable computing these days and Google Glass gets a lot of that attention with demonstrations of video and image capture and augmented reality, as shown in this video, which has been viewed over 16 million times.

But University of Toronto professor Steve Mann has been wearing electronic glasses and working with mediated reality for over 30 years. Mann differentiates between "augmented reality," where text or graphics are displayed over your normal vision and more general "mediated reality," in which vision is improved -- for example, detecting infrared radiation to see temperature differences, zooming in on distant objects, or extending the dynamic range of a photographic image by combining various exposures. He discussed these applications and more in an recent Techwise Conversations podcast interview.

Mann has pioneered mediated reality, but he is not alone in the field. For example, professor Gabby Sarusi and his colleagues at the at Ben Gurion University of the Negev are working on a nano layer coating for detecting infrared radiation in night vision goggles. Work on high dynamic range photography has also been with us for some time.

Journalists are beginning to report on initial experience with Google Glass prototypes and Google is fishing around for a killer app, but I suspect that Google Glass will turn out to be a niche product. We will not be wearing them 24-7, but some of us may put them on for special tasks -- like a surgeon entering the operating room.

That being said, research prototypes and high-value niche applications have a way of turning into ubiquitous, game-changing products, but it takes a while -- as you see in this photograph of Ivan Sutherland, inventor Sketchpad, the first object oriented computer graphics program, which he developed more than twenty years before MacDraw came out. (Ditto, any early prototype).

What about fifty years from now? Will Google Glass 2063 interface directly with the retina?

The access and bandwidth divide in online education

What if online classes and MOOCs really do take over the world? Will that exacerbate the "digital divide?" Will poor and rural US students have to seek out public libraries and other public access spots? An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education focuses on that question.

What about students in developing nations? Good luck taking a Coursera course in, say, Myanmar or Cuba. In much of the world, Internet access is too expensive for the average person and, even if they can get online, too slow to effectively use a modern Web site.

As online courses increase in sophistication, bandwidth will become an even greater impediment to participation.

The Guinean students shown here are studying under street lights (click to enlarge). Will they have access to global online education?
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Update 3/6/2013

A followup article talks about the impact of data caps for online students in the US. Again, the situation is much worse in developing nations.
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Update 12/8/2013

A University of Pennsylvania study of a million users who signed up for one of 17 courses they offered through Coursera showed that few were from developing nations.

Survey of employer hiring criteria for bachelor's degree graduates -- internships pay off

The Chronicle of Higher Education and NPR Marketplace have reported results of a survey they commissioned of employers of college graduates.

They found that where a student goes to school is not as important as you might think. Graduates of "flagship" state universities are only seen as a little more "preferable" (on a 5-level Likert scale) than private or regional public campuses.

They also reported that, with the exception of education majors, the perceived value of a bachelor's degree was somewhat lower than it was five years ago.

Online degrees were rated "undesirable" (2.84 on a 5-level Likert scale), but I suspect that is based online private schools like the University of Phoenix.

Universities are moving increasing numbers of their classes online and that trend is stronger in public than private schools Will employer's perception of their graduates decline? What of fully online public programs like Calstate Online?

For me, the most interesting result was that internships were rated as more important than where one went to college, their major or GPA. Completing an internship was reported to be the most important credential for recent college graduates.

A related survey of 2012 college graduates reinforces the value of internships. They found that 55% of the students had internship and/or co-op experience and 51% of interns were offered jobs. Payed interns fared better than volunteers. They did less busy work and 63% got at least one job offer, compared to 41% of unpaid interns.

The Chronicle/Marketplace survey was conducted by Maguire Associates, but I could not find a report of it on their Web site. I would like to see the actual survey questions and analysis, but this article is worth reading. You should also listen to or read the transcript of the Marketplace podcast (2m 46s) on the study.

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Update 3/8/2013

College students or even high school students planning their college career should crawl around the NACE Web site. There is a lot of useful information there, including a salary calculator for many different jobs in many different locations, based on your background.

Actually, the NACE calculator is hosted on the Web site of their partner Jobsearchintelligece.com. JSI maintains a database with salary data for up to 1,000 occupations in 560 regions of the U. S. - with a minimum of 25 respondents for each occupation in each region to ensure statistical significance. You can easily query the database to find, for example, starting salaries for specific full time jobs given specific majors along with salaries for those same jobs ten years after graduation.

I decided to goof around with an example, and searched for data on modeling jobs. I said I was a recent grad with a GPA between 3.5 and 3.9 who had gone to CSUDH and majored in language and literature.

I learned that there are 60 persons employed as models in the Los Angeles area, and starting, median and top salaries are $27,120, $43,810 and $72,290. Based upon the background I provided, they estimated my starting salary at $38,900, but after looking at their overall employment picture for models, shown here, I decided to look for a different career.

Remember that college is about a lot more than hoped-for jobs and salary. The best thing that can happen at college is not finding a major that leads to job offers with good starting salaries, it is finding something you are passionate about. That is way more important -- put your energy there.

Columbia University study slams traditional online classes -- we need to move beyond traditional

Researchers at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center have released a working paper "Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas", based on a study of nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State. The study was based on traditional online courses, which typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. (I will return to this point below).

Here's the bottom line -- the study concluded that “the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses.”

This is consistent with the anecdotal reports of my colleagues who teach online -- they have much better experience with masters level classes than undergraduate.

Let's drill down a bit.

The study found that the negative results for online classes held across the board, but the effect was stronger for some subgroups – “males, Black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grade.”

They also note that "performance gaps between key demographic groups already observed in face-to-face classrooms (e.g., gaps between male and female students, and gaps between White and ethnic minority students) are exacerbated in online courses."

They found that older students adapted more readily to online courses than did younger students. (Again, consistent with my colleagues' observations).

The study also found that "the relative effects of online learning varied across academic subject areas ... two academic subject areas appeared intrinsically more difficult for students in the online context: the social sciences (which include anthropology, philosophy, and psychology) and the applied professions (which include business, law, and nursing)."

The authors of the study went on to suggest policies to cope with the problems they identified:

• Screening: Only allow certain students to take online classes, for example those with a 3.0 or better GPA or those who successfully complete a workshop on online learning skills.
• Scaffolding: Incorporate the teaching of online learning skills into online courses in which less-adaptable students tend to cluster.
• Early warning: Identify and intervene with students who are having difficulty adapting.
• Wholesale improvement: Improving the quality of all online courses taught.

The first three feel like fingers in the dike to me, but how about wholesale improvement? At the start of this post, I noted that these were traditional online courses. They are often quick makeovers of classroom courses -- using standard textbooks and ancillary materials, but substituting threaded discussion for classroom sessions. Old wine in new bottles.

This is understandable when there are, say, 25 students in a class. There is no time for "wholesale improvement."
However, if we scale the online class up, say enrolling 500 active, for credit students, we can afford to create "new wine."

We see experimentation along these lines in MOOCs -- highly modular, interactive presentations created specifically for online delivery, peer interaction, instrumentation of material, crowd-sourced feedback from students, high production values, frequent revision of teaching material, etc.

None of this is affordable if we are teaching sections of 25 students, but for 500 students, we can afford full time staff producing and maintaining a single course. Hey, with 20,000 students we can afford Disney Studios.