So, how fast will these studies trickle to
improvements on
the MOOC format, or even improvements in
education in general?
Well, pretty fast, I would say.
To explain this, I'll need to describe how
startups work.
Here's the startup iteration cycle.
We see that we have a product, such as the
Coursera portal for Coursera.
It can be used to measure all kinds of
data.
That could be via A/B testing, for
instance,
as I just explained, or maybe using other
metrics, enrollment in a course or the
click-through
on emails that have been sent to the
students.
Armed with all this data, the startup
engineers can learn about areas that would
need
improvement, and they can generate new
ideas and things to do and build that in.
The whole cycle is not groundbreaking,
sure.
I'm not claiming it is.
The difference is that this cycle is not
bothered
by the usual very slow methodology of
education research.
Sure, this data can be spun off into
papers, and that's what education
researchers have to do, are currently
doing, because that's what their job is.
But, by the time those studies are
published, the engineers will have already
gone
through several iterations of this cycle,
and
the newly published results will already
be obsolete.
They'll, they will already have improved
the platform.
The big, big, difference with five years
ago is that now education is the next area
where software engineers can make an
impact, and
hundreds are working on making it more
efficient.
This is completely new, and you can expect
it to show effects very, very fast.
Just as for many other industries that you
know of,
such as the book industry, the travel
industry, et cetera.