years old on our platform. And so we've always had this interest in having a diverse set

of courses whether at the high school level or university level, professional education

and so on. A lot of our courses right now are university level courses and learners

are looking for more basic courses, you know, they lack many of the prerequisites. And some

of these prerequisite courses come from high schools. And so therefore it is really important

that we get the high school courses on the platform. Certainly high school level courses,

very basic courses, are more challenging from universities because universities tend to

focus on courses that are at the university level.

And so with organizations like GEMS and high schools and so on we have the opportunity

to get high school level courses that can be more on ramps, can serve as on ramps to

university level courses. The challenges that are posed with high school level courses is

that high schools very often don't have the resources or video production capabilities

and so on to create some of these quality courses. And so there tends to be more of

an issue of how do you do the production? How do you provide the support for courses

like this? So our thinking there is that edX has a services

team. We are very interested in getting what are called advanced placement level courses

in the U.S. So one example is that we could use our production team to provide support

for some of these courses. We're also looking for funding from philanthropists and other

foundations that might be able to provide the funding for these courses. We can then

partner with high schools or other organizations like GEMS that can then create these courses.

GEMS, for example, has a large cadre of teachers that are already providing, offering courses

in a number of areas. And so an organization like GEMS is a natural one to partner to get

these high school courses. We also are thinking about courses that are

before the advanced placement level. Think of pre-algebra for example. And we're also

developing a lot of tools that will enable students to do simulations and various kinds

of online laboratories. That tends to be a challenge as well and we are looking to develop

a small team within edX that can create some of these enriched content types as well.

So STEM subjects versus humanities subjects tend to have different kinds of components

that you need. In the STEM area one of the areas that tends to be challenging are laboratories.

How do you provide the kind of hands on laboratory experience. At edX we've created online labs

that we call, you know, virtual laboratories based on simulation technology. So there students

can have a game-like experience as they work with the circuits lab or as they work with

the chemistry lab. Or in physics, you know, they can work with an object like a pendulum

so they can set the object at various places and see how it moves around all through simulations.

So we're able to use simulation technology to provide a rich game-like experience for

the labs in STEM subjects. Now let's understand that, you know, not everything

is possible to do. So, for example, in chemistry it is hard to capture the smell. But you can

certainly look at color and some of the other compositional issues as you titrate different

chemicals in various quantities and so on. Now in the humanities side there are other

challenges. You may not have the laboratories along the lines of lab benches and so on but

in humanities you have other challenges that we try to address in different ways. One example

is for assessments in humanities tend to be assessments tend to focus heavily on open

responses such as an essay, for example, or a descriptive response.

That tends to be challenging. So edX addresses this challenge by developing technologies

that can automatically grade and provide feedback for essays. So we have several technologies

to do that, three in fact. One of them is called AI Assessment. This technology uses

machine learning to grade essays where the professor grades the first 100 essays, for

example, against a rubric. And then that is -- that kind of grading trains a statistical

machine learning model which can then grade a number of other essays and provide feedback.

A second technique is called peer grading where students grade each other's work. And

the third technique is called self-assessment where the students can grade themselves. So

that tends to be an issue with humanities. Another challenge with humanities is how do

you create the small group feel of small group discussions. And for that on the edX platform

we've created cohorts. Cohorts is a way for the instructor to divide a big discussion

forum into smaller fora so that students can have a more intimate group discussion feel.

We also work with a partner, Google, who integrated instant handouts into our platform that enables

students to connect with a small group of other students and have instant chat or a

video chat session with the other students. That can begin to simulate the kind of small

group feel that you might find in small liberal arts colleges.