Dec. 15, 2014
Education researchers are still just beginning to mine all the data that MOOCs generate about how students respond to the material. Researchers like Pritchard can track every step of every student through a MOOC; he says that for him to study his traditional students that way, “they’d have to carry a head-cam 24-7.” Eventually, such data should yield insights about the best ways to present, sequence, and assess particular subjects. Kevin Carey, who has researched MOOCs as director of education policy at the New America Foundation, points out that today’s MOOCs haven’t even begun to make serious use of artificial intelligence to personalize courses according to each student’s strengths and weaknesses (a surprise considering that pioneers like Thrun and Coursera’s Daphne Koller came from AI backgrounds).