This is intriguing:<p>Professors have access to the classes' data to learn how their students learn. We will facilitate experiments. For example, we intend this to be the best plaform for running A/B/N tests to measure the impact of different teaching methods on student outcomes<p>That they're giving data driven decision making such a prominent place is great. I would like to know more, though.<p>Having taught before at the University level I know it's a ton of work. It's even more work if you're developing parallel versions of a course for testing purposes. So the A/B feature had better be really easy to use.<p>There is also the ethical issue of giving students a worse performing variant of the class. The solution here is to use a bandit algorithm or an early stopping method to find the best variant as quickly as possible.<p>Finally, I think the Coursera model where everyone runs through the course on the same schedule is not optimal for experimentation. It doesn't allow for a tight feedback loop, because you have to wait N weeks before you can experiment with changes on the next cohort.
Stanford is hosting the Intro to Databases class [1] on class2go, while the previous run was hosted on Coursera.<p>[1] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4880112" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4880112</a>
The main objects in the code base can be examined here:
<a href="https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go/blob/master/main/c2g/models.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go/blob/master/main...</a>
It looks like nice functionality that any online educational product could use. I certainly hope to use<p>Also of interest is the urls.py which shows you all the different aspects of the web application. <a href="https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go/blob/master/main/urls.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go/blob/master/main...</a><p>Good stuff.
We were able the 'main' app booted after adding a requirements.txt: <a href="http://class2go.a.pogoapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://class2go.a.pogoapp.com/</a><p>It would be nice if you could separate out the ops infrastructure from the actual application, to suit a wider variety of deployment scenarios.