Teaching 153K+ students at a time: The PowerSearching-WithGoogle.com story
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have become incredibly popular in just the past 12 months. Many MOOCs have had more that 100K students register for their courses. Is this the future of online education? Or is it yet-another passing fancy in the educational technology parade? In the past 9 months we have run three MOOCs with more than 280K registrants. I'll talk about what MOOCs are, how they're actually run, the social community of learners that are essential for making MOOCs succeed, and what seems to work (and not work) in MOOCs. Along the way, I'll talk a bit about how people seem to actually learn how to search... and do sensemaking as a task.
Daniel Russell is the Über Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google in Mountain View. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence until he realized that magnifying human intelligence was his real passion. Twenty years ago he foreswore AI in favor of HI, and enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day. His MOOCs have helped students become much more effective online searchers.