Mother of the Bulbul Returns

 

Cheating on online exams

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn

COVID-19 has made in-person exam proctoring impossible and so normal safeguards have disappeared. My inbox is full of anguished emails from university students across Pakistan bewailing the use of unfair and unethical means by their class fellows. Upon combining these complaints with those of my colleagues in various universities, and adding in my own online teaching experience, a frighteningly dismal picture emerges.

Almost every university student in this country cheats. Perhaps the actual figure is lower (80-90 per cent?) but it’s hard to tell. Many students say they are reluctant and would opt for honesty if there was a level playing field. But exercising virtue brings bad grades or even failure. Rare is the student with strong moral conviction — or perhaps lack of opportunity — who is not complicit.

A system full of holes is easy to beat. Not regarded as a significant moral crime, cheating was plentiful even in the days of in-person classes. But with online exams, the bottom has dropped out. Knowing their paychecks will be unaffected, many teachers don’t care what their students do. If one is somehow caught, cheating can always be deemed to be that student’s fault. After all, the pathways to cheating are so many. 

Consider: while taking an exam the home-bound student supposedly sits facing his/her laptop camera without access to books, notes, or smartphone. Correspondingly, the teacher is supposed to be eagle-eyed, watching many students simultaneously on Zoom or MsTeams. Neither supposition is true. For example moving slightly out of the camera’s field of view allows the student to copy the question and insert it into the Google search bar of that laptop or a hidden smartphone. The answer pops up even before he/she fully finishes typing.

What of a question which Google cannot answer? Such slightly clever questions can indeed be devised by a conscientious professor. One shared with me how that worked out with her class of 30. In an exam none of her students got any question right. But, upon inspection, it turned out that every wrong answer belonged to one of six near-identical sets. Conclusion: the students were either sitting in the same room or had created WhatsApp groups with members messaging each other during the exam.

From a frustrated student who emailed me from an engineering university in Karachi, I learned something brand new after which I explored the matter further. Fact: there exists a plethora of commercial companies that will get you the required answer for almost every exam question. Among them are study aids Chegg, Quizlet, Course Hero and Brainly.

The ones I tried out with physics and math problems give instant answers. All you need to do is cut and paste the exam question into the indicated box. These answer services use artificial intelligence and operate without human intervention. While not cheap, they are affordable. According to my informant, students pool in to buy a subscription and then share answers over WhatsApp. More expensive are answer services staffed by human expert essay writers. The student need provide only basic information such as the topic and some course materials.

Special automated proctoring services, hired by overseas educational institutions, can catch cheaters who are taking their exam at home. These services block browsers from accessing forbidden websites, check to see if the student has contacted a friend or answer service, verify identity and geographical location, and see if the student is looking at flash cards or boards, etc. Some can even detect Bluetooth devices and suspicious movements of the test-takers’ head, keystrokes, and eyes.

Although such proctoring services probably have some value overseas, their utility in Pakistan is doubtful and they are not used. Apart from the cost, they also assume that a student has a quiet room, wide-angle webcam, and stable internet connection. This excludes rural areas but even in cities the last condition is not easily fulfilled.

Can any online exam work in these circumstances? The answer is: yes. A one-on-one oral exam over Skype or Zoom is the only totally safe method. But this is tedious for large classes and checks only a small aspect of his or her learning. To my knowledge, only a few university teachers use it.

Despite difficulties in evaluating students, online university education has worked reasonably well in some countries. Indeed, there are distinct advantages in going digital: an instructor’s recorded lectures can be rewound and reviewed at will for self-paced learning, students can ask questions online without feeling intimidated, and learning is available 24 hours a day. Additionally, a wealth of information and knowledge is just a click away and helps a student understand difficult points.

Why then is online learning failing so miserably in Pakistan? Why has fancy 21st-century education gadgetry not excited our students’ imagination? Why don’t our academic environments sparkle with energy? Two obvious reasons stare at us. First, the generally uninspiring online lectures delivered by teachers. Second, most students and many teachers have insufficient mastery over English to usefully engage with internet learning materials.

But a more serious, much deeper reason underlies this failure. Pakistan’s education system gives importance only to getting high grades, not to actually learning a subject. Even a good teacher — and these are few and far between — cannot make a student study, read books, meet schedules, and take responsibility. Real learning is purely voluntary. Largely a result of childhood training, it cannot be forced upon students. There is an age-old adage: education is all about learning to learn. The internet and Google have made this clear as never before. Every student today has good grades but only a few actually learn while in college or university.

Although our student body is hyper religious and regular in prayer, almost all are perfectly comfortable with cheating. But online testing cannot work unless cheating is viewed for what it is — a white-collar crime. Students willing to experiment, question, model, and wrestle with a problem alone can benefit from 21st-century online education. The bottom line: Pakistan’s education system must change direction. It must seek to create a proactive mindset and an ethical community.

Fake five-star reviews being bought and sold online

Dan Box and Sachin Croker BBC Technology

Fake online reviews are being openly traded on the internet, a BBC investigation has found.

BBC 5 live Investigates was able to buy a false, five-star recommendation placed on one of the world's leading review websites, Trustpilot.

It also uncovered online forums where Amazon shoppers are offered full refunds in exchange for product reviews.

Both companies said they do not tolerate false reviews.
'Trying to game the system'

The popularity of online review sites mean they are increasingly relied on by both businesses and their customers, with the government's Competition and Markets Authority estimating such reviews potentially influence £23 billion of UK customer spending every year.

Maria Menelaou, whose Yorkshire Fisheries chip shop is the top-ranked fish and chip shop in Blackpool on several review sites, said the system has replaced traditional advertising.

"It brings us a lot of customers ... It really does make a difference. We don't do any kind of advertising," Mrs Menelaou said.

While three quarters of UK adults use online review websites, almost half of those believe they have seen fake reviews, according to a survey of 1500 UK residents conducted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and shared with BBC 5 live Investigates.

Some US analysts estimate as many as half of the reviews for certain products posted on international websites such as Amazon are potentially unreliable.

"Sellers are trying to game the system and there's a lot of money on the table," said Tommy Noonan, who runs ReviewMeta, a US-based website that analyses online reviews.

"If you can rank number one for, say, bluetooth headsets and you're selling a cheap product, you can make a lot of money," he said.

'5 star is better for us'

In 2016, Amazon introduced a range of measures prohibiting what it called "incentivised reviews", where businesses offered customers free goods in exchange for positive reviews.

Mr Noonan said this effectively drove the problem underground, leading to the emergence of Facebook groups where potential Amazon customers were encouraged to buy a product and post a review in return for a full refund.

BBC 5 live Investigates identified several of these groups and, within minutes of joining, was approached with offers of full refunds on products bought on Amazon in exchange for positive reviews.

"5 star is better for us" said one person making such an offer, in an exchange of messages with the BBC. "We value our brand, will refund you as we promised ... All my company do in this way."

It was not possible to identify the people making these offers, nor contact the businesses whose products they were seeking reviews for.

"We do not permit reviews in exchange for compensation of any kind, including payment. Customers and Marketplace sellers must follow our review guidelines and those that don't will be subject to action including potential termination of their account," Amazon said in a statement.

Responding to adverts posted on eBay, the BBC was also able to purchase a false 5-star review on Trustpilot, an online review website that describes itself as "committed to being the most trusted online review community on the market".

"Dan Box is one of the most respected professionals I have dealt with. It was a pleasure doing business with him," this review said - word for word as requested by 5 live Investigates.

Trustpilot, whose platform allows anyone to post a review, said they have "a zero-tolerance policy towards any misuse".

"We have specialist software that screens reviews against 100's of data points around the clock to automatically identify and remove fakes," the company said.

In a statement, eBay said the sale of such reviews is banned from its platform "and any listings will be removed".

Outrage and opposition are not the same

Tabish Khair in The Hindu



I cannot say this online, I am sure, but I do not believe in getting publicly outraged. This does not mean that I do not feel privately outraged at times. I do. When one hears of a woman being raped, one feels outraged. When one hears of the most powerful man on earth reportedly discussing nuclear war options, one feels outraged.

And yet, it is one thing to feel outraged and another to act from outrage or even cultivate that self-righteous feeling of outrage. Because outrage is not opposition. Actually, it is not even rage. It is an ‘outing’ of rage.

Rage versus outrage

Rage is a problematic word: its etymology connects it to madness, violence, passion and fierceness in battle. Its uses, if they can be justified, are hazardous, and pertain to extreme circumstances. In Greek mythology, the consequences of human or semi-divine rage tend to be disastrous, even when the act of rage is seen as justified. However, rage has one purpose in extreme circumstances: it can get things done.

Outrage is not like rage: it is a venting of rage. When we are outraged, we basically let off steam. This is more so online. Its primary purpose is to make us feel good about ourselves. Unlike rage, it might not even get anything done. Because once we get outraged and post a few things or espouse a list, our attention wavers, and soon we have another matter to get publicly outraged about.

Like rage, outrage often leads to hasty action. In India as well as in Europe, people got outraged at the rumour of some women putting spells on their cattle or their person, and proceeded to burn the women as witches. Racists in the American south are known to have become outraged at some real or imagined slight by African Americans and lynched them. The list of innocent people persecuted, killed, burned, or lynched because otherwise decent people got publicly outraged is pretty long.

Unfortunately, outrage is particularly adaptable to online culture, where the dominant ethos is that of self-indulgence rather than an engagement with the other. By getting outraged, we signal to ourselves and others that we have the right views. We might also, by the very level of our outrage, absolve ourselves from a close examination of the matter and an organised effort (with others) to tackle the matter. Outrages tend to lead to nothing at all — or to witch-hunts.
By moving on from one outrage to another, we might also make it more difficult to address the root causes of the injustice, if it exists, behind our outrage. Outrage is expressive, reactive, wordy, fleeting. Opposition requires physical action, thought, organisation and perseverance. It is a major mistake to confuse the two.

Opposition needs a considered evaluation of evidence and possibilities; outrage tends towards self-centred and sweeping pre-judgment, usually passed without deep thought to the matter or comprehensive collection of evidence. It is worth remarking that ‘prejudice’ basically means ‘prejudgment,’ from the Latin words prae and judicium.

The general flow of outrage is towards a kind of fascist violence: it assumes guilt unless the victim is proved innocent, and moves too fast for sufficient proof to be collected. Opposition is a democratic construct: it accepts that you are innocent unless proved guilty.

Dismissing opposition

Unfortunately, given our hyperventilating cybercultures, outrage has become synonymous with opposition. Apart from the problems outlined above, this has another serious drawback: in an atmosphere of frequent outrages, it is possible to dismiss legitimate opposition as outrage. This, as we know from places like India, Turkey and the U.S., is the usual policy of the parties in power.

Because all opposition is increasingly wrapped in verbal and digital forms of outrage, this is easy for people in power to do. Online postings, TV shows, etc. consistently assume the registers and pace of outrages, so that the pith of the matter is often lost in the smoke, and even necessary acts of opposition can be dismissed as just the hyperventilation of easily outraged groups.

It is sad that this has happened even in India, where Gandhiji set a very rigorous example of calm and collected opposition, even, I would say, a slow and forbearing opposition. He knew that any true opposition — he would have called it a just opposition — needs thought, time, slowness and perseverance. These are not characteristics that outrage respects.

I find it troublesome that we have entered a phase of public discourse where, on the one hand, outrages erupt one after another and then evaporate in the desert sands of usual practice, and where, on the other hand, genuine acts of opposition are dismissed by people in power as just fleeting outrages.

On the one side, there are people yelling at us to be outraged, without considering evidence, context or effective responses, and on the other side, there are people telling us that we are just acting outraged when actually we are opposing something that needs to be opposed. How does one negotiate a public space like that? Your answer is as good as mine. But I think slowing down just a bit before passing judgment and looking more deeply at matters might not be such bad ideas.

Online political advertising is a black box and democracy should be worried

Jasper Jackson in The Guardian


As your mind wearily contemplates being exposed to yet another political campaign, are your dreams haunted by battle buses, billboards and TV debates? Or is it Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google?

On the evidence of last year’s EU referendum, much of the campaigning, and much of the money spent on political advertising, will be online. And it will happen in a way that will be largely hidden from scrutiny by either the public or regulators.

During the referendum, Vote Leave spent £2.7m with one small Canadian digital marketing firm that specialises in political campaigns – Aggregate IQ. The sum was well over a third of Vote Leave’s total budget.

Two other campaign groups – both of which received large donations from the Leave campaign - gave Aggregate IQ a further £765,000, taking the total pumped through the company to almost £3.5m. Vote Leave director Dominic Cummings is quoted on the company’s website saying “We couldn’t have done it without them.”

Yet the invoices for the money they paid to Aggregate IQ, which were handed to the Electoral Commission, list vague jargon-filled specifications with little indication of how the ads were delivered. It may tell us Aggregate IQ were running a “targeted video app installed and display media campaign” but gives no clue about where those ads appeared or who saw them. Did most of the money go on Facebook or YouTube? Did they spend more money on reaching under 45s in Hull or pensioners in Canterbury? There’s no way of knowing, not least because the Electoral Commission doesn’t ask for the information.

Meanwhile Cambridge Analytica, the digital targeting experts part-owned by US billionaire Robert Mercer, were credited with super-charging the Leave.EU campaign, even getting a mention in a book about campaign by its chief funder Arron Banks. Yet according to filings with the Electoral Commission there was no paid relationship with the firm at all. The Electoral Commission is currently investigating, as is the Information Commissioner’s Office over the company’s use of data.

These two companies promise to sway the electorate using high-tech targeting of voters, yet not only does the Electoral Commission have little idea of how the money is being spent, but many of the different messages those campaigns show chosen sets of targets are hidden from the rest of us.

An ad in a newspaper or magazine, a billboard or tube poster, can be seen by anybody who happens to come across it. They are targeted in a blunt way, by location, readership etc, but who they are appealing to, the messages used and the money spent is clear for all to see.

But online, ads are directed at far more specific target groups, and shown only to them. Suspect someone is a bit racist? Show them pictures of dark skinned migrants lining up at a border. Know someone regularly visits Spain? Emphasise how much longer it will take to go through airport security.

Just as importantly, you can make sure that you don’t show the wrong ads to the wrong people. The racist dog whistle doesn’t get pushed at people likely to be from, or comfortable with, ethnic minorities. The lengthy customs checks don’t get shown to those with an all-consuming fear of terror attacks.

Of course, people will see ads that aren’t aimed at them online – the targeting is far from perfect - but the digital world allows paid-for political campaigning to split into numerous conversations that rarely overlap.

This combination of digital marketing firms that are required to reveal little about what they do, and digital ads that are different for each segment of the population, make political advertising online opaque in way traditional ads were not.

And the approach seems to work. A more sophisticated digital strategy is regularly cited by Cummings and other Leave campaigners as as example of how they outsmarted Remain. If you were planning how to win June’s election, you’d be mad not to pay close attention to how they did it, and do your best to replicate it. And that means as we approach yet another nationwide vote, it will be harder than ever to see what impact money and the political advertising it pays for is having on the result.

List of 40 free educational websites

1. ALISON –  over 60 million lessons and records 1.2 million unique visitors per month
2. COURSERA – Educational website that works with universities to get their courses on the Internet, free for you to use. Learn from over 542 courses.
3. The University of Reddit – The free university of Reddit.
4. UDACITY – Advance your education and career through project-based online classes, mainly focused around computer, data science and mathematics.
5. MIT Open CourseWare – Free access to quite a few MIT courses that are on par with what you’d expect from MIT.
6. Open Culture – Compendium of free learning resources, including courses, textbooks, and videos/films.

7. No Excuse List – Huge list of websites to learn from.
8. Open YALE Courses – Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University All lectures were recorded in the Yale College classroom and are available in video, audio, and text transcript formats. Registration is not required
9. Khan Academy – Watch thousands of micro-lectures on topics ranging from history and medicine to chemistry and computer science.
10. Zooniverse – Take part in a huge variety of interesting studies of nature, science, and culture.
11. TUFTS Open CourseWare – Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online. Tufts’ course offerings demonstrate the University’s strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.
12. How Stuff Works? – More scientific lessons and explanations than you could sort through in an entire year.
13. Harvard Medical School Open Courseware The mission of the Harvard Medical School Open Courseware Initiative is to exchange knowledge from the Harvard community of scholars to other academic institutions, prospective students, and the general public.
14. VideoLectures.NET – the title says it all – amazing video lectures on many topics.
15. TED – Motivational and educational lectures from noteworthy professionals around the world.
16. Shodor – A non-profit research and education organisation dedicated to the advancement of science and math education, specifically trough the use of modeling and simulation technologies. Included in this site are instructional resources, software, interactive lessons, explorations and information about workshops for students, teachers and learners of all ages on mathematics and science. Make sure you check Shodor Interactive – a great collection of interactive math, geometry, fractal, probability, algebra and statistics activities.
17. Udemy FREE Courses – hundreds of experts teach on Udemy every month including New York Times best-selling authors, CEOs, Ivy League professionals and celebrity instructors. Courses include video, live lectures and tools to help teachers interact with students and track their progress. There are many free courses that can teach you business online, law, programming, design, mathematics, science, photography, yoga and many more.
18. Maths & Science – Courses, tests and learning materials about mathematics and science for students from 1 to 12 grade.
19. edX.org – Free courses designed specifically for interactive study via the web, provided by MIT, Harvard, Barkley, Georgetown, Boston University, University of Washington, Karolinska Institute, Kyoto University and many more.
20. iTunes U – Apple’s free app that gives students mobile access to many courses. It offers many free video courses, books, presentations and audio lectures.
21. Liberty Classroom – Owned by bestselling author Tom Woods. Offers some free courses in history and economics, but at the price of one movie ticket a month you can gain access to a lot of useful information. Not completely free, but totally worth it…
22. Drawspace – Hundreds of free drawing lessons.
23. Codeacademy – Easy way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun and you can do it with your friends.
24. Duke U – Duke offers variety of free courses on iTunesU.
25. Scitable – A free science library and personal learning tool that currently concentrates on genetic, the study of evolution, variation and the rich complexity of living organisms.
26. My own business – Offers free online business administration course that would be beneficial to new managers and to anyone who is interested in starting a business.
27. Kutztown University’s free courses – The Kutztown University of Pennsylvania’s Small Business Development Center offers more than 80 free business online learning. Kutztown’s courses are individualized and self-paced. Many of the courses feature high-end graphics, interactive case studies and audio streams.
28. Open Learn – Gives you free access to Open University course materials.
29. Free Computer Books – Free computer, mathematics, technical books and lecture notes.
30. Academic Earth – Free video lectures from the world’s top scholars.31. American Sign Language Browser – Teach yourself sign language online
32. BBC Languages – Teach yourself a new spoken language online.
33. unplugthetv – Randomly selects an educational video for you to watch.
34. Lifehacker – Learn to hack life! Tips and tricks for improving all areas of your life.
35. JustinGuitar – Hundreds of free guitar lessons as well as some basic music theory.
36. DuoLingo – Learn a new language for free while helping to translate the web.
37. Layers Magazine – Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, Premiere Pro, In Design and After Effects tutorials.
38. Creative Flow – list of OVER 950 Photoshop tutorials to keep your skillset up to date.
39. Open2study – Open2Study delivers free, high-quality education online. You can study subjects with real value, and in just four weeks you can learn something new, explore the next step in your career, challenge yourself or simply satisfy your curiosity. These subjects are provided by leading Australian institutions, and are taught by academics and leading industry professionals who love to teach. All you need is an internet connection and the desire to study.
40. OEDb – Choose from over 10,000 free online classes

Do online courses spell the end for the traditional university?

Publishing, music, shopping, journalism – all revolutionised by the internet. Next in line? Education. Now US academics are offering world-class tuition – free – to anyone who can log on, anywhere in the world, is this the end of campus life?


Carole Cadwalladr

The Observer, Sunday 11 November 2012



A thing of the past? University graduates at Cambridge. Photograph: Trigger Image/Alamy

Two years ago, I sat in the back seat of a Toyota Prius in a rooftop car park in California and gripped the door handle as the car roared away from the kerb, headed straight towards the roof's edge and then at the last second sped around a corner without slowing down. There was no one in the driver's seat.



It was the prototype of Google's self-driving car and it felt a bit like being Buck Rogers and catapulted into another century. Later, I listened to Sebastian Thrun, a German-born professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University, explain how he'd built it, how it had already clocked up 200,000 miles driving around California, and how one day he believed it would mean that there would be no traffic accidents.



A few months later, the New York Times revealed that Thrun was the head of Google's top-secret experimental laboratory Google X, and was developing, among other things, Google Glasses – augmented reality spectacles. And then, a few months after that, I came across Thrun again.



The self-driving car, the glasses, Google X, his prestigious university position – they'd all gone. He'd resigned his tenure from Stanford, and was working just a day a week at Google. He had a new project. Though he didn't call it a project. "It's my mission now," he said. "This is the future. I'm absolutely convinced of it."



The future that Thrun believes in, that has excited him more than self-driving cars, or sci-fi-style gadgets, is education. Specifically, massive online education free to all. The music industry, publishing, transportation, retail – they've all experienced the great technological disruption. Now, says Thrun, it's education's turn.



"It's going to change. There is no doubt about it." Specifically, Thrun believes, higher education is going to change. He has launched Udacity, an online university, and wants to provide mass high quality education for the world. For students in developing countries who can't get it any other way, or for students in the first world, who can but may choose not to. Pay thousands of pounds a year for your education? Or get it free online?



University, of course, is about so much more than the teaching. There's the socialising, of course, or, as we call it here in Britain, drinking. There's the living away from home and learning how to boil water stuff. And there's the all-important sex and catching a social disease stuff. But this is the way disruptions tend to work: they disrupt first, and figure out everything else at some unspecified time later.



Thrun's great revelation came just over a year ago at the same TED conference where he unveiled the self-driving car. "I heard Salman Khan talk about the Khan Academy and I was just blown away by it," he says. "And I still am." Salman Khan, a softly spoken 36-year-old former hedge fund analyst, is the founding father of what's being called the classroom revolution, and is feted by everyone from Bill Gates (who called him "the world's favourite teacher") down.



The Khan Academy, which he set up almost accidentally while tutoring his niece and nephew, now has 3,400 short videos or tutorials, most of which Khan made himself, and 10 million students. "I was blown away by it," says Thrun. "And frankly embarrassed that I was teaching 200 students. And he was teaching millions."



Thrun decided to open up his Stanford artificial intelligence class, CS221, to the world. Anybody could join, he announced. They'd do the same coursework as the Stanford students and at the end of it take the same exam.



CS221 is a demanding, difficult subject. On campus, 200 students enrolled, and Thrun thought they might pull in a few thousand on the web. By the time the course began, 160,000 had signed up. "It absolutely blew my mind," says Thrun. There were students from every single country in the world – bar North Korea. What's more, 23,000 students graduated. And all of the 400 who got top marks were students who'd done it online.



It was, says Thrun, his "wonderland" moment. Having taught a class of 160,000 students, he couldn't go back to being satisfied with 200. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill," Thrun said in a speech a few months later. "I've taken the red pill, and I've seen wonderland. We can really change the world with education."



By the time I sign up to Udacity's beginners' course in computer science, how to build a search engine, 200,000 students have already graduated from it. Although when I say "graduate" I mean they were emailed a certificate. It has more than a touch of Gillian McKeith's PhD about it, though it seems employers are taking it seriously: a bunch of companies, including Google, are sponsoring Udacity courses and regularly cream off the top-scoring students and offer them jobs.



I may have to wait a while for that call, though I'm amazed at how easy Udacity videos are to follow (having tips and advice on search-engine building from Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, doesn't hurt). Like the Khan Academy, it avoids full-length shots of the lecturer and just shows a doodling hand.



According to Brin, if you have basic programming ability – which we'll all have if we complete the course – and a bit of creativity, "you could come up with an idea that might just change the world". But then that's Silicon Valley for you.



What's intriguing is how this will translate into a British context. Because, of course, when it comes to revolutionising educational access, Britain has led the world. We've had the luxury of open access higher education for so long – more than 40 years now – that we're blasé about it. When the Open University was launched in 1969, it was both radical and democratic. It came about because of improvements in technology – television – and it's been at the forefront of educational innovation ever since. It has free content – on OpenLearn and iTunesU. But at its heart, it's no longer radically democratic. From this year, fees are £5,000.



In America, Thrun is not the only one to have taken the pills. A year on from the Stanford experiment, and the world of higher education and the future of universities is completely different. Thrun's wasn't the only class to go online last autumn. Two of his computer science colleagues, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, also took part, with equally mind-blowing results. They too have set up a website, Coursera. And while Udacity is developing its own courses, Coursera is forming partnerships with universities to offer existing ones. When I met Koller in July, shortly after the website's launch, four universities had signed up – Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and Pennsylvania.



Just four months later, it has 33 partner universities, 1.8 million students and is having venture capital thrown at it – $16m (£10m) in the first round. And it doesn't stop there. It's pretty remarkable that Coursera and Udacity were spun out of the same university, but also the same department (Thrun and Koller still supervise a PhD student together). And they have the dynamic entrepreneurial change-the-world quality that characterise the greatest and most successful Silicon Valley startups.



"We had a million users faster than Facebook, faster than Instagram," says Koller. "This is a wholesale change in the educational ecosystem."



But they're not alone. Over at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Anant Argarwal, another professor of computer science, who also cites Khan as his inspiration (and who was, in a neat twist, once his student), has launched edX, featuring content from MIT, Harvard, Berkeley and the University of Texas System.



Argarwal is not a man prone to understatement. This, he says, is the revolution. "It's going to reinvent education. It's going to transform universities. It's going to democratise education on a global scale. It's the biggest innovation to happen in education for 200 years." The last major one, he says, was "probably the invention of the pencil". In a decade, he's hoping to reach a billion students across the globe. "We've got 400,000 in four months with no marketing, so I don't think it's unrealistic."



More than 155,000 students took the first course he taught, including a whole class of children in Mongolia. "That was amazing!" says Argarwal. "And we discovered a protégé. One of his students, Batthushig, got a perfect score. He's a high school student. I can't overstate how hard this course was. If I took it today, I wouldn't get a perfect score. We're encouraging him to apply to MIT." This is the year, Argarwal says, that everything has changed. There's no going back. "This is the year of disruption."



A month ago, I signed up for one of the Coursera courses: an introduction to genetics and evolution, taught by Mohamed Noor, a professor at Duke University. Unlike Udacity's, Coursera's courses have a start date and run to a timetable. I quite fancied a University of Pennsylvania course on modern poetry but it had already started. This one was 10 weeks long, would feature "multiple mini-videos roughly 10-15 minutes in length", each of which would contain a number of quizzes, and there would also be three tests and a final exam.



It's just me, Noor, and my 36,000 classmates. We're from everywhere: Kazakhstan, Manila, Donetsk, Iraq. Even Middlesbrough. And while I watch the first videos and enjoy Noor's smiley enthusiasm, I'm not blown away.



They're just videos of lectures, really. There's coursework to do, but I am a journalist. I am impervious to a deadline until the cold sweat of impending catastrophe is upon me. I ignore it. And it's a week or so later when I go back and check out the class forum.



And that's when I have my being-blown-away moment. The traffic is astonishing. There are thousands of people asking – and answering – questions about dominant mutations and recombination. And study groups had spontaneously grown up: a Colombian one, a Brazilian one, a Russian one. There's one on Skype, and some even in real life too. And they're so diligent! If you are a vaguely disillusioned teacher, or know one, send them to Coursera: these are people who just want to learn.



Four weeks in, Noor announces that he's organising a Google hangout: it's where a limited number of people can talk via their webcams. But it's scheduled for 1am GMT on Sunday morning. I go to sleep instead. However I do watch the YouTube video of it the next day and it's fascinating viewing. Despite the time, Richard Herring, a train driver from Sheffield, is there, bright and alert and wanting to tell Noor how much he's enjoying the course.



"Richard!" says Noor. "Nice to meet you! Your posts are amazing. I often find that before I have a chance to go in and answer a question, somebody else has already answered it, and it's often Richard. Thank you."



"I just love science," says Richard. "I was never any good at school, but I've just picked it up along the way. It's a brilliant course. To get something like this without paying anything is marvellous. I'm loving it."



So is Sara Groborz, a graphic designer who was born in Poland but now lives in Britain. And then there's Naresh Ramesh, from Chennai, who's studying for a degree in biotechnology, and Maria, who lives in the US and is using the course to teach her students in a juvenile correction institute. Aline, a high school student in El Salvador, comes on. She took the course, she says, because she goes to a Catholic school where they don't teach evolution. "And you're the best teacher I've ever had!" she tells Noor.



How gratifying must it be to be a teacher on one of these courses? When I catch up by email with Noor the next day, he writes. "I'm absolutely LOVING it!" By phone, he says it's one of the most exciting things he's ever done.



What's more, it means that next semester he's going to be able to "flip the classroom". This is a concept that Khan has popularised and shown to be successful: students do the coursework at home by watching the videos, and then the homework in class, where they can discuss the problems with the instructor.



There are still so many issues to figure out with online education. Not least the fact that you don't get a degree out of it, although a university in the US has just announced that it will issue credit for it. At the moment, most people are doing courses for the sake of simply learning new stuff. "And a certificate, basically a pdf, which says this person may or may not be who they say they are," says Noor.



And while computers are excellent at grading maths questions, they're really much less hot at marking English literature essays. There's a preponderance of scientific and technical subjects, but the number of humanties courses is increasing with what Koller says is "surprisingly successful" peer assessment techniques. "It can't replace a one-to-one feedback from an expert in the field, but with the right guidance, peer assessment and crowd-sourcing really does work."



And in terms of content, the course I'm doing is pretty much the same as the one Noor's students take. At Duke, they have more interaction, and a hands-on lab environment, but they are also charged $40,000 a year for the privilege.



It's a lot of money. And it's this, that makes Udacity's and Coursera's and edX's courses so potentially groundbreaking. At the moment, they're all free. And while none of them can compete with traditional degrees, almost every other industry knows what happens when you give teenagers the choice between paying a lot of money for something or getting it for nothing.



Of course, education isn't quite an industry, but it is a business, or as Matt Grist, an education analyst from the thinktank Demos tells me, "a market", although he immediately apologises for saying this. "I know. It's terrible. That's the way we talk about it these days. I don't really like it, but I do it. But it is a market. And universities are high-powered businesses with massive turnovers. Some of the best institutions in Britain are global players these days."



Grist has been looking at the funding model of British universities, and sees trouble ahead. The massive rise in fees this year is just the start of it. "We've set off down this road now, and if you create competition and a market for universities, I think you're going to have to go further." He foresees the best universities becoming vastly more expensive, and the cheaper, more vocational ones "holding up". "It's the middle-tier, 1960s campus ones that I think are going to struggle."



When I ask Koller why education has suddenly become the new tech miracle baby, she describes it as "the perfect storm. It's like hurricane Sandy, all these things have come together at the same time. There's an enormous global need for high quality education. And yet it's becoming increasingly unaffordable. And at the same time, we have technological advances that make it possible to provide it at very low marginal cost."



And, in Britain, the storm is perhaps even more perfect. This is all happening at precisely the moment that students are having to pay up to £9,000 a year in fees and being forced to take on unprecedented levels of debt.



Students, whether they like it or not, have been turned into consumers. Education in Britain has, until now, been a very pure abstraction, a concept untainted by ideas of the market or value. But that, inevitably, is now changing. University applications by UK-born students this year were down almost 8%. "Though the number who turned up was much lower than that," Peter Lampl, the founder of the Sutton Trust, tells me. "They were 15% down."



The trust champions social mobility and nothing accelerates that more than university. "That's why we're so keen on it," says Lampl. "We're monitoring the situation. We don't know what the true impact of the fees will be yet. Or what the impact of coming out of university with £50,000 worth of debt will have on the rest of your life. "Will it delay you buying a house? Or starting a family? People compare it to the States, but in America one third of graduates have no debt, and two-thirds have an average of $25,000. This is on a completely different scale."



And it's amid this uncertainty and this market pressure that these massive open online courses – or Moocs as they're known in the jargon – may well come to play a role. There are so many intangible benefits to going to university. "I learned as much if not more from my fellow students than I did from the lectures," says Lampl. But they're the things – making life-long friends, joining a society, learning how to operate a washing machine – that are free. It's the education bit that's the expensive part. But what Udacity and the rest are showing is that it doesn't necessarily have to be."



The first British university to join the fray is Edinburgh. It's done a deal with Coursera and from January, will offer six courses, for which 100,000 students have already signed up. Or, to put this in context, four times as many undergraduates as are currently at the university.



It's an experiment, says Jeff Hayward, the vice-principal, a way of trying out new types of teaching "I'll be happy if we break even." At the moment Coursera doesn't charge students to receive a certificate of completion, but at some point it's likely to, and when it does, Edinburgh will get a cut.



But then Edinburgh already has an online model. More than 2,000 students studying for a masters at the university aren't anywhere near it; they're online. "And within a few years, we're ramping that up to 10,000," says Hayward.



For undergraduates, on the other hand, study is not really the point of university, or at least not the whole point. I know a student at Edinburgh called Hannah. "Do you have any lectures tomorrow?" I text her. "Only philosophy at 9am," she texts back. "So obviously I'm not going to that."



She's an example of someone who would be quite happy to pay half the fees, and do some of the lectures online. "God yes. Some of the lecturers are so crap, anyway. We had a tutorial group the other day, and he just sat there and read the paper and told us to get on with it."



Max Crema, the vice-president of the student union, tells me that he's already used online lectures from MIT to supplement his course. "Though that may be because I'm a nerd," he concedes. "The problem with lectures is that they are about 300 years out of date. They date back to the time when universities only had one book. That's why you still have academic positions called readers."



I trot off to one of them, an actual lecture in an actual lecture theatre, the old anatomy theatre, a steeply raked auditorium that's been in use since the 19th century when a dissecting table used to hold centre stage, whereas today there's just Mayank Dutia, professor of systems neurophysiology, talking about the inner ear.



He's one of the first academics signed up to co-deliver one of the Coursera courses come January, although he defends the real-life version too: "Universities are special places. You can't do what we do online. There's something very special in being taught by a world leader in the field. Or having a conversation with someone who's worked on a subject their whole lives. There's no substitute for this."



There isn't. But what the new websites are doing is raising questions about what a university is and what it's for. And how to pay for it. "Higher education is changing," says Hayward. "How do we fund mass global education? There are agonies all over the world about this question."



There are. And there's no doubting that this is something of a turning point. But it may have an impact closer to home too. Argarwal sees a future in which universities may offer "blended" models: a mixture of real-life and online teaching.



Coursera has already struck its first licensing deal. Antioch College, a small liberal arts institution in Ohio, has signed an agreement under which it will take content from Duke University and the University of Pennsylvania. And a startup called the Minerva Project is attempting to set up an online Ivy League university, and is going to encourage its students to live together in "dorm clusters" so that they'll benefit from the social aspects of university life. Seeing how the students on Coursera and Udacity organise themselves, it's not impossible to see how in the future, students could cluster together and take their courses online together. For free.



There's so much at stake. Not least the economies of dozens of smallish British cities, the "second-tier" universities that Matt Grist of Demos foresees could struggle in the brave new free education market world.



At Edinburgh, fees are having an effect – applications are down – but "most students seem to see it as mañana money," says Jeff Hayward. "It's still hypothetical at the moment."



But this is the first year of £9,000 fees. An English student at Edinburgh (it's free for Scottish students), where courses are four years, is looking at £36,000 of debt just for tuition. And maybe another £30,000 of living expenses on top of that.



These websites are barely months old. They're still figuring out the basics. Universities aren't going anywhere just yet. But who knows what they'll look like in 10 years' time? A decade ago, I thought newspapers would be here for ever. That nothing could replace a book. And that KITT, David Hasselhoff's self-driving car in Knight Rider was nothing more than a work of fantasy.



CASE STUDY Genetics for railwaymen

RICHARD HERRING, 45

Train driver, Sheffield



"I was on Richard Dawkins's website and I read about the course - introduction to genetics and evolution. I looked it up and saw it was being offered by a really good university, Duke, and I thought, what's the catch? And there isn't one. It's marvellous. I can't believe it's available for free. I'm absolutely loving it.



"The only qualification I've got is a bronze certificate in swimming. I left school with no qualifications, nothing. But I got interested in philosophy and then science and I just love learning about things. I've always got a book in my hand. What's great about the course is that you can pause it, and rewind, and rewatch it until you get the hang of it. I used to be a steelworker where you had to learn a lot of new things, and I find I have to keep at it, and then it eventually clicks.



"I actually paid for a home tutor a few years ago to teach me calculus and I did send off for a prospectus from the Open University, but it was too expensive. For me, it's not about getting a qualification, it's for the sake of learning. I'm really enjoying the forum. The way that Professor Noor interacts with it and that there are students from all over the world, some of them with a whole load of letters after their name. I just love the environment. I don't have that at work – it's a very northern, working class sort of place, so I'm just not pushed in that direction.



"I've already signed up to a whole load of other courses: I've enrolled on a philosophy one, and I'm going to brush up on my algebra, and there's a cell biology one which I think will be an interesting extension to this." CC