How many students can you satisfactorily teach in an online class? Well, most people would say about 20-25 students is the maximum for most online classes, but what about 160,000 students in one class? Well, that is exactly what Sebastien Thrun did in his online class at Stanford University in fall 2011. As part of Stanford's initiative to put Thrun's course online, he decided he would open his class to anyone anywhere in the world who wanted to take it along with the 200 or so students in his face-to-face class. Online students would cover same materials and take same exams and assessments as F2F class. Of the 160,000 students, Thrun reported 248 students passed with a perfect score. And while the completion rate was about 12 percent, his face-to-face class dropped from 200 students to 30 because students left the F2F classroom for the online version because they felt it was more intimate and better than the live classroom version. Thrun has now started a new online called Udacity and he hopes to enroll 500,000 students in his next course offering on building a search engine. Thrun feels this is portent of the future of higher education wordlwide and the demonstrable proof of the relevancy and enormous potential of online education. Read more Here.
Watch Sebastien Thrun talk about this experience Here.
