Udac­ity and Cours­era are edu­ca­tional orga­ni­za­tions that have rev­o­lu­tion­ized the field of online edu­ca­tion (in com­put­ing pri­mar­ily) by pro­vid­ing high qual­ity courses. These courses are up to par with those typ­i­cally found at good uni­ver­si­ties, but are offered free for any­one. The more pop­u­lar courses Udac­ity offers include but are not lim­ited to Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages. Though many brick and mor­tar col­leges don’t even offer these dif­fi­cult courses. Udac­ity and other related orga­ni­za­tions have found inno­v­a­tive ways to auto­mate courses of such dif­fi­culty, allow­ing a poten­tially unlim­ited amount of peo­ple to take them for free. Both Udac­ity and Cours­era have roots from Stan­ford and offered only com­put­ing courses but have now spread out into a vari­ety of other sub­jects. The ques­tion is, can this new era of online com­put­ing edu­ca­tion be used in the K-12 (more specif­i­cally, high school) classroom?

To address that ques­tion, I will focus more heav­ily on Udac­ity, since it’s the orga­ni­za­tion I’m most famil­iar with To begin, the classes are taught by peo­ple who are actu­ally super­stars in their field. For exam­ple, Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Build­ing a Robotic Car (CS373) is taught by Sebas­t­ian Thrun, a Stan­ford professor/researcher, world-renown robot­ics expert, and a founder of Google X Lab and Google’s Dri­ver­less Car project. This isn’t the only exam­ple though, there are plenty more. Web Devel­op­ment (CS253) is taught by a co-founder of Red­dit. Design of Com­puter Pro­grams (CS212) is taught by the VP of Research at Google. Not only are the teach­ers renowned in their respec­tive fields, but the lec­tures are also nearly flaw­less, hav­ing a very high pro­duc­tion qual­ity. Each course has a stan­dard CS focus (for exam­ple AI), but within this larger topic, have a sub-focus on some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing  (build­ing a robotic car). This works very well in main­tain­ing stu­dent inter­est, they can become famil­iar the gen­eral the­o­ret­i­cal con­cepts while learn­ing a real world appli­ca­tion. This becomes evi­dent in even the very first course (CS101), which is of inter­est to the high school dis­cus­sion. This course focuses on build­ing a search engine. Stu­dents start off learn­ing the basics of Com­puter Sci­ence — adding num­bers, manip­u­lat­ing strings, and then mov­ing on to tougher top­ics — meth­ods, while loops, and objects. The final project, a search engine, demon­strates every­thing the stu­dent learned to date in the course. From my own expe­ri­ence, I found this to be more inter­est­ing than the tra­di­tional approach of learn­ing generic pro­gram­ming con­cepts with Java, and not doing any­thing par­tic­u­larly excit­ing with them/not show­ing how every­thing is applicable

The paper “A Model for High School Com­puter Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion: The Four Key Ele­ments that Make It!” pre­sented four key com­po­nents that were essen­tial for a suc­cess­ful high school CS pro­gram. These were based on analy­sis of the Israeli high school CS pro­gram. Here are the components:

1. A well-defined cur­ricu­lum (includ­ing writ­ten course text books and teach­ing guides).

2. A require­ment of a manda­tory for­mal CS teach­ing license.

3. Teacher prepa­ra­tion pro­grams (includ­ing at least a Bach­e­lors degree in CS and a CS teach­ing cer­tifi­cate study program).

4. Research in CS education.

From my expe­ri­ence, the Udac­ity CS101 course sat­is­fies all four com­po­nents. The cur­ricu­lum is very well defined; it tra­verses through all of the core intro­duc­tory CS top­ics and incor­po­rates a final project to illus­trate knowl­edge gained. The infor­ma­tion is well enough doc­u­mented and acces­si­ble in printed for­mat that there is no need for a text­book. One eas­ily overqual­i­fied teacher and one TA teach every course. . Because Udac­ity has put incred­i­ble effort into rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the way peo­ple learn CS, it eas­ily passes the research in CS edu­ca­tion component.

I have dis­cussed many pos­i­tives aspects; how­ever, there are still many rea­sons why online edu­ca­tion still can’t fully replace the class­room expe­ri­ence. Student-teacher inter­ac­tion is very lim­ited — occa­sion­ally the pro­fes­sor or TA post an “Office Hours” video respond­ing to the most fre­quently asked ques­tions. There is no peer-to-peer inter­ac­tion other than forum posts, which aren’t very per­sonal. All the prob­lems and tests are graded auto­mat­i­cally; they are either multiple-choice, exact answer, or cod­ing (for which there are test­ing scripts) prob­lems. These lim­i­ta­tions make the online learn­ing expe­ri­ence very imper­sonal. But the biggest caveat to the online sys­tem is that it’s too easy to cheat. Stu­dents can eas­ily share solu­tions with each other, and Udac­ity doesn’t have the capa­bil­ity to check for cheat­ing with thou­sands of stu­dents going at their own pace.  The most Udac­ity does to pre­vent cheat­ing is they dis­al­low post­ing solu­tions in their forums.

Though we’re not yet at a stage where online CS courses could be used in high school, I feel that they can be used in con­junc­tion with class­room learn­ing. The teacher can have stu­dents watch online lec­tures and assign prob­lems from online courses as in class activ­i­ties. Tests will have to be in per­son and teach­ers can check for cheat­ing in assign­ments. Though online com­put­ing edu­ca­tion presents so many excit­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties, unless the prob­lems addressed above are resolved, they will be unable to replace high school CS classes.