Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured the spirit behind Coursera, the next generation of online learning. He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. Education. Affordable, accessible higher education is desperately necessary. Let’s look at what’s suddenly possible.
Andrew Ng teaches one of the most sought after Stanford classes. It’s a Machine Learning class, and it has 400 students enrolled every time it is offered. When he offered this class to the general public he received over 100,000 registrations. To meet demand he would have to teach his class for 250 years.
Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller needed to scale up the delivery of his course, to bring the best quality of his teaching to thousands of students. So they formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for nominal fees. Unlike the first generation of online lectures, Coursera aspires to deliver interactive, self-paced courses that keep each student engage and challenged to master the content.
Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free — not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. With Coursera, each keystroke, quiz, peer-to-peer discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed.