Julia Stiglitz Got Education Game
Coursera was a very integral part in growing the gamification community in 2012, largely due in part to Kevin Werbach’s class on gamification. However, Couresera’s ability to have effectively delivered a strong massive open online course (MOOC) is a testament to its ability to appeal to everyone’s intrinsic desires to learn. Its hard to believe how a system could appeal to 12 thousand students interested in gamification and have them complete 7 weeks of lectures, homeworks, and testing to receive a small certificate of completion. Coursera is doing something right and Julia Stiglitz is part of that team making it happen.
Before having gotten into Coursera, Julia’s humble roots as an educator began with her work as a fouurth-grade teacher through Teach for America and eventually became a Teach For America program director in the bay area. Her work would eventually lead into a management position in the Google Apps for Education and successfully growing the division to reach over 18M active students.
In other words, Julia knows to make you want to learn.
Julia’s education expertise comes into her work with Coursera and the ability for the MOOC to get these online students to desire more knowledge and mastery. while not derailing them from their day to day lives. This is engagement science at its finest; the ability to engage with students so much that they’re willing to give up their downtime to learn more and improve as a person.
Come see Julia’s session at GSummit, where she will share Coursera’s insights about the need for progress, what drives user behavior in a lifelong learning context, and how to deliver this sense of achievement intrinsically.
And as always, none of our speakers come without a bit of fun mystery and whimsy. See if you can guess which one of these facts about Julia is false:
- She’s climbed Mt. Everest.
- In second grade she tried to convince a major publisher to publish a shoebox full of her poetry.
- She caused a security alert at the White House.
