philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The Cleverest Business Model in Online Education

Multiple students translate the same sentence; software compares those results to settle on a final translation. After many sentences are put through this process, they are combined to create a translation of an entire document. The results, says von Ahn, are better than an automated translation but typically just short of professional quality.

There’s a “groundswell” in online education, says Weld. “But a lot of it is prepackaged video clips and other things we tried a long time ago that didn’t go anywhere. We need more power and personalization.” Achieving that solely with software is unlikely, he says, but properly directed crowds could provide the necessary intelligence.

Von Ahn has his own ideas along these lines. For example, he hopes to use the work of students who are learning computer languages online at places like Codecademy (see “Startups Aim to Make Coding Fun”). “You could imagine something with programming, maybe finding bugs in software as part of a course,” he says. “We may try it.”

Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506656/the-cleverest-business-model-in-online-education/