CS73N Meeting 09 Notes: The Internet and Education

Started by Avron Barr, based on class notes from Friday, 5 May 2006.

 Professor Jeffrey Ullman gave a presentation about his startup company, Gradiance , which offers on-line homework services to college-level computer science faculty. A great deal of cleverness has gone into the software for grading students' work and giving the right kinds of on-line help. The benefits to the student include immediate feedback vs. waiting a week for a TA to grade the problem set. The benefits to the TA are obvious.

It takes about 2 hours to author one question completely, and a complete course contains 100-200 questions, plus time for review and checking. So there is a considerable investment in creating each course.  Several courses in different areas of CS have already been created and can be used for both introductory and advanced CS classes. The same paradigm could be applied to other subject areas where students do problem sets, like math and science courses.

After an unsuccessful approach to sell the products to CS faculty directly, Gradiance has made a deal with Pearson Eduction, a major college text book publisher, to have them sell the course, along with appropriate textbooks. 

The class was particularly good at generating questions for Prof. Ullman and we had a nice discussion after his presentation.

After Prof. Ullman left, we had time for four students to present their project outline ideas to the class: Nathan, BJ, Bryce and Rohan. Again, the class had good questions and there was a lively discussion of each of the topics presented. Four more students volunteered to present next Thursday, Fah, Doug, Mike and Andrew. All students are expected to present their project to the class by the end of next week, Friday the 12th.