Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Peter Norvig Interview | Remote Learning Project

Peter Norvig Interview | Remote Learning Project

"...So, what was different?” It wasn’t information. It was motivation, determination or something like that. So I realized that you got to have a minimum floor of information and once you have that, its the determination that counts.

So I wanted to think about how you can do classes that do that better. And one thing I realized was a lot of the online classes say let’s take advantages of being online, and one of these advantages is that you can do it any time you want.

You see these ads on television showing a student that saying “I took my classes in my pajamas. Oh great. I can do my classes wherever and whenever I want.” But part of the problem is that if you can do it whenever you want you can do it tomorrow. Then you end up not doing it.

We wanted to make sure that although week to week its asynchronous (you can do it any time you want during the week), there has to be a homework assignment. Because if there is no homework assignment, you are going to push it off and not do it, at least I know I would.

So I thought that part was important. And when you ask “What works with distance learning?”, I would say it really depends on how you organize distance learning and solve these different aspects that I think are more important than whether you are in the same room or not."

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