2015-08-24 • San Jose

Paco Nathan, @pacoid Director, O’Reilly Learning

Data Science Reinvents Learning? Beyond Gutenberg and Erasmus

meetup.com/SF-Bay-ACM/events/221693508/

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Some Background…

• O’Reilly Learning: you may only hear about us in a few instances, if we do our job well; ACM is a great forum for this discussion

• prior: built-out the community evangelism and training program for Apache Spark at Databricks

• prior: led Data teams for several years, working on large-scale ML apps in industry, including: one of the largest Hadoop instances running in AWS (2008); one of the first 100% AWS system architectures (2006)

• …

• ancient prior: Stanford CSD teaching fellowship (1984-86, Alice Supton, Stuart Reges) peer-teaching CS course which later became Residential Computing

WWSVD?

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Intro

Quite candidly, the one common catch phrase in Silicon Valley that I find most terrifying:

“It’s like Uber, for ___”

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Intro

Ostensibly that leads to a question, how might an “Uber for Education” look?

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Intro

Ostensibly that leads to a question, how might an “Uber for Education” look?

a) Similar to Cthulhu, we might regret actually seeing that

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Intro

Ostensibly that leads to a question, how might an “Uber for Education” look?

a) Similar to Cthulhu, we might regret actually seeing that

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Intro

Ostensibly that leads to a question, how might an “Uber for Education” look?

a) Similar to Cthulhu, we might regret actually seeing that

b) Would we really need that anywho?

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Intro

Ostensibly that leads to a question, how might an “Uber for Education” look?

a) Similar to Cthulhu, we might regret actually seeing that

b) Would we really need that anywho?

c) Uber itself might not take that approach …

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Intro

Ostensibly that leads to a question, how might an “Uber for Education” look?

a) Similar to Cthulhu, we might regret actually seeing that

b) Would we really need that anywho?

c) Uber itself might not take that approach …

Perhaps “Uber for Learning” might be somewhatmore apt?

In any case, what comes after Books, Kindle, MOOCs?

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Some Definitions…

“Learning”

ergo…

“Education”

ergo…

“School”

“Learning”

ergo…

“Education”

ergo…

“School”X12

Some Definitions…

Schools are great to have…

If you need a school, pick a good one and go

To be clear, we’re not a school

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Some Definitions…

Even the best schools these days questionwhat they will become in 5-10 years

Not-so-best schools are perhaps questioning much more than that

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Some Definitions…

Oh BTW, too many (funded) teams seem to have this mediocre idea for “education”:

1. assessment: collect test scores ➜

2. define “quantified student” ➜

3. reuse online marketing funnel ad-tech ➜

4. invoke agile coding teams ➜

5. ship mobile/cloud-based SaaS platform ➜

6. ...

7. profit

Oh BTW, too many (funded) teams seem to have this mediocre idea for “education”

1. assessment: collect test scores

2. define “quantified student”

3. reuse online marketing funnel ad-tech

4. invoke agile coding

5. ship a mobile/cloud-based SaaS platform

6. ...

7. profit

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Some Definitions…

LMS

K-12 not so much, except perhaps in the case of Safari for Schools

undergrad textbooks?

graduate textbooks, conferences?

professional focus of our audience

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Some Definitions…

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• vocational: making a career move

• aspirational: improvement within a career path

• proficiency: has a specific pain-point, needs to resolve it

• familiarity: wants to join in a team dialog about a topic, e.g., conversational programmer

Learner Personas for professional category

What about MOOCs?

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What about MOOCs?

Massive Open Online Courses – seven year trend, beginning with:

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge George Siemens, Stephen DownesUniversity of PEI (2008) http://cck11.mooc.ca/

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What about MOOCs?

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What about MOOCs?

Anthony Joseph UC Berkeleyearly Jun 2015edx.org/course/uc-berkeleyx/uc-berkeleyx-cs100-1x-introduction-big-6181

Ameet Talwalkar UCLAlate Jun 2015edx.org/course/uc-berkeleyx/uc-berkeleyx-cs190-1x-scalable-machine-6066

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What about MOOCs?

Pros:

• cost-effective to reach a large audience

• popular with students

• ¿ addresses “train the trainers” bottleneck ?

Cons:

• expensive to produce and curate

• most students are sampling

• low completion rates

• somewhat chaotic

• lecture fatigue• ¿ reinforces advantage of the elites ?

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What about MOOCs?

Online education: MOOCs taken by educated fewEzekiel Emanuel, Nature 503, 342 (2013-11-21)

• 80% students already have an advanced degree

• 80% come from the richest 6% of the population

Michael Shanks @Stanford: retrenchment around traditional disciplines will make disparities even more pronounced

An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online CoursesGeoffrey Fowler, WSJ (2013-10-08)

Amherst, Duke, etc., have rejected edX

see: Open edX Universities Symposium @GWU, 2015-11-11

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• search engines surface too many choices among the available learning content

• we must get people wanting to interact with the material – generally due to social context

• academe strives to decontextualize, which is the opposite of learning in context

• how do we recognize that learning has occurred?

• what is the learning promise?

What about MOOCs?

Examples for Consideration

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Introduction to RoboticsPeter Corke @QUThttps://moocs.qut.edu.au/learn/introduction-to-robotics-august-2015

• effective use of peer review for scaling

• worked well reaching into Africa, India

Peer Review

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Effective Thinking Through MathematicsMichael Starbird @UT/Austinhttps://www.edx.org/course/effective-thinking-through-mathematics-utaustinx-ut-9-01x

• getting students to articulate their epiphany moments is more interesting than other results – Donna Kidwell

Epiphany Moments

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Caltech Offers Online Course with Live Lectures in Machine LearningYaser Abu-Mostafa (2012-03-30)http://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-offers-online-course-live-lectures-machine-learning-4248

• significant improvement through the use of “flipped” a.k.a. inverted classrooms

Inverted Classrooms

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Scalable LearningDavid Black-Schaffer @UppsalaSverker Janson @KTH SICShttps://www.scalable-learning.com/

• active learning: Flipped Classroom and Just-in-time Teaching

• exams built directly into specific diagrams within videos

• metrics for where in video+code that students get stuck

• instructor can customize subsequent classroom discussions (active teaching phase) based on stuck/unstuck metrics

Inverted Classrooms

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How to Flip a Class CLT @UT/Austin http://ctl.utexas.edu/teaching/flipping-a-class/how

1. identify where the flipped classroom model makes the most sense for your course

2. spend class time engaging students in application activities with feedback

3. clarify connections between inside and outside of class learning

4. adapt your materials for students to acquire course content in preparation of class

5. extend learning beyond class through individual and collaborative practice

Inverted Classrooms

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Learning programming at scalePhilip Guo O’Reilly Radar (2015-08-13)http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/08/learning-programming-at-scale.html

• PythonTutor• Codechella

Tutors could keep an eye on around 50 learners during a 30-minute session, start 12 chat conversations, and concurrently help 3 learners at once

Collaborative Learning

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Data-driven Education and the Quantified StudentLorena Barba @GWUPyData Seattle 2015https://youtu.be/2YIZ2SY9mW4

• keynote talk: abstract, slides• homepage

If you study just one link in this entire talk…

Project Jupyter

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If by some bizarre chance you haven’t used it already, go to https://jupyter.org/

• 50+ different language kernels• new funding 2015-07

• UC Berkeley, Cal Poly

• nbgrader autograder by Jess Hamrick• jupyterhub multi-user server

• curating a list of examples• repeatable science!

see also: Teaching with Jupyter Notebooks http://tinyurl.com/scipy2015-education

Project Jupyter

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Deploying JupyterHub for Education Jessica HamrickRackspace blog (2015-03-24) https://developer.rackspace.com/blog/deploying-jupyterhub-for-education/

Project Jupyter

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Literate ProgrammingDon Knuth Univ of Chicago Press (1992) literateprogramming.com/

Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do

Evoking some earlier works…

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Most definitely check out CodeNeuro, both online and the conf/hackathon…

Some great examples:

Jeremey Freeman, HHMI Janelia Farm http://notebooks.codeneuro.org/

Matthew Conlen, NY Data Companyhttp://lightning-viz.org/

Olga Botvinnick, UCSD http://yeolab.github.io/flotilla/docs/gallery/

Great Examples

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http://mybinder.org/

turn a GitHub repo into a collection of interactive notebooks powered by Jupyter and Kubernetes

Launch Vehicles

Jupyter, Thebe, Atlas, Docker

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Embracing Jupyter Notebooks at O'Reilly Andrew Odewahn O’Reilly Media (2015-05-07)https://beta.oreilly.com/ideas/jupyter-at-oreilly

O’Reilly Media is using our Atlas platform to make Jupyter Notebooks a first class authoring environment for our publishing program

Jupyter, Thebe, Atlas, Docker, etc.

Content Toolchain

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Embracing Jupyter Notebooks at O'ReillyAndrew OdewahnO’Reilly Media (2015-05-07)https://beta.oreilly.com/ideas/jupyter-at-oreilly

O’Reilly Media is using our Atlas platform to make Jupyter Notebooks a first class authoring environment for our publishing program

Jupyter

Content Toolchain

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On Demand Analytic and Learning Environments with Jupyter Kyle Kelley, Andrew Odewahn lambdaops.com/jupyter-environments-odsc2015/

Exploring a couple themes, in particular:

• computational narratives- exploratory data analysis- software development/collaboration- API exploration- technical papers- reports, exec dashboards

• code-as-media- Thebe project, etc.

Content Toolchain

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Personal experiences during 2012-2015 as an author and instructor…

Just Enough Math Paco NathanO’Reilly Media (2014) http://justenoughmath.com

Content Toolchain

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Learnings based on working on this project with Kyle and Andrew…

How to transit from roles of data scientist, software developer, engineering director – into roles of author, teacher – and vice versa

Content Toolchain

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Interactive notebooks: Sharing the codeHelen ShenNature (2014-11-05)nature.com/news/interactive-notebooks-sharing-the-code-1.16261

Content Toolchain

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Content Toolchain

Atlas is our content platform backed by Git, for project collaboration among authors, editors, et al.

https://atlas.oreilly.com/

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Content Toolchain

Thebe (a moon of Jupiter) provides a layer atop Jupyter that is needed for publishing, white-labeled content, etc.

https://github.com/oreillymedia/thebe

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Content Toolchain

Beta is our new site design:

https://beta.oreilly.com/learning

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Content Toolchain

Contrast our current talent workflow and this new world of Jupyter+Docker+Thebe+cloud …

How would it work with known successes such as Head First?

production presentation

Thebe:player

Jupyter:notebook

Docker:container

web page:interaction

Git:versioning

Atlas:publications

various formats

authoring

cloudinfra

Does Science begin with Phenomenology?

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Audience Patterns for Learning: ad-hoc

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Audience Patterns for Learning: architecture

events inverted on-demand

MostlySynchronous

MostlyAsynch

InvertedClassroom

Paywall

Subscription

Free

Content

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The Learning Architecture: Defining Development and Enabling Continuous LearningDavid Mallon, Dani JohnsonBersin (2014-05-06)http://www.bersin.com/Practice/Detail.aspx?docid=17435&mode=search&p=Learning-@-Development

This report is designed to help leaders and talent development and learning professionals to take positive steps toward understanding and implementing learning architectures

Sidebar: Learning Architecture

Think of a favorite open source framework … who (or where) are the experts in this graph?

Sidebar: Innovators vs. Experts

Diffusion of Innovation Everett Rogers (1962) http://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/SB/SB721-Models/SB721-Models4.html

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Building Blocks

In software engineering, we rarely hand a developer the spec for some app and say “Start from scratch, then come back when you’re done.” Instead:

• focus on MVP• leverage APIs, libraries, microservices, etc.• iterate on small, incremental changes• this allows for TDD, CI, etc.• plus, customer experiments ➜ data science

Compare/contrast that with how publishers approach authors, speakers, instructors?

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Building Blocks

Proposing a new format spec to replace EPUB, MOBI, etc.:

• video segments + transcripts• notebooks in Jupyter+Thebe+Docker• metadata (persona, topics, cues, etc.)• links to Git repos, Dat data• annotations atop existing content• webcast/livestream• social interaction (TA/mentoring)• evaluation modules• discourse analytics

most reused across a spectrum of synchronous to async

instrumented for experiments, analytics, iteration

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totalnewbie

goodoverview

Do you have sufficient familiarity with the topic?

utterlyconfused

familiarterritory

Can you build on familiarity with a related topic?

must getunstuck

send pullrequest

Do you have necessary proficiency in the topic?

learner

topic

experience

concisetopic

inter-disciplinary

How many boundaries must you span to achieve structural literacy for this topic?

want tofor myself

have tofor my job

What is your primary motivation to learn this topic? bleedingedge

COBOL 2020

Where are you on the "diffusion of innovation" curve w.r.t. the topic?

on-demand

majorevent

How high is the transaction cost for the experience delivered to you?

"go readthe code"

full-teamparticipation

Does the learning experience immerse you within a diverse, supportive social context?

Dimensional Reduction

Did we mention intense needs for data analytics at scale?

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Is it possible to measure “distance” between a learner and a subject community?

From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews Julian McAuley, Jure Leskovec http://i.stanford.edu/~julian/pdfs/www13.pdf

Recommender Systems

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Back to “Uber for Learning” – approaching from a learner (audience) perspective, generally within a social context

Given that:• books aren’t used by learners as much anymore

• experts don’t have time to write books anymore

If we can:• fit learners’ needs to topics w.r.t. subject communities,

based on their S-curve positions

• personalize lectures for learners’ pain-points

• reuse containerized building blocks

Imagine the extent to which our current data science tooling and techniques can be leveraged?

Summary

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PS: If you are interested in opportunities to write, speak, teach, mentor, code, etc., based on these approaches, let us know

Get Involved!

Thank You!

and

Stay Tuned…

presenter:

Just Enough Math O’Reilly (2014) justenoughmath.com

monthly newsletter for updates, events, conf summaries, etc.: liber118.com/pxn/