Teaching 100,000 Students

The best teaching method uses a one to one tutoring personal touch.  The problem is that if you are teaching 100,000 students geographically and temporally separated in different parts of the world, your options are pretty limited.  Peter Norvig, renowned expert in Artificial Intelligence and current Director of Research for Google, taught a Distance Learning Artificial Intelligence class for Stanford University utilizing techniques that simulated the one on one learning environment.  In the video below, Mr. Norvig discusses the motivation, method, and results of this distance learning experiment.  The most innovative aspect of his method was combining different interactive techniques to keep students engaged and breaking down lessons to very small vignettes that allows students to fully absorb smaller bits of information rather than conducting very long lectures where students get lost as they are being pounded by tomes of information.