In this talk, Niema Moshiri talks about his experience as a student in a massive classroom, and how this to his goal of rethinking education. As classroom sizes continue to increase, he illustrates the benefits of adaptive online education as a replacement for the traditional classroom.

Alexander Niema Moshiri is currently a Ph.D. student in the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology program at the University of California, San Diego. He works on computational biology, with a research focus on phylogenetics and phylogenomics. Aside from research, Niema places a heavy emphasis on teaching, namely on the development of online educational content, primarily Massive Adaptive Interactive Texts (MAITs). For the past few years, he has worked with Dr. Pavel Pevzner and Dr. Phillip Compeau in the development of the Bioinformatics Specialization Track on Coursera, and has separately co-authored a free online MAIT on Data Structures that is being used at UCSD and USD.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx