Five prestigious U.S. universities will create free online courses for students worldwide through a new, interactive education platform dubbed Coursera.
Coursera’s founders, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, are professors of computer science at Stanford University. Koller and Ng also announced that they had received $16 million in financing from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
Coursera will offer more than three dozen college courses in the coming year through coursera.org, on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to neurology, from calculus to contemporary American poetry. The classes are designed and taught by professors at Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan.
Coursera joins a raft of ambitious online projects aimed at making higher education more accessible and affordable. Many of these ventures, however, simply post entire lectures on the web, with no interactive component. Others strive to create new universities from scratch.
Koller and Ng say Coursera will be different because professors from top schools will teach under their university’s name and adapt their most popular courses for the web, embedding assignments and exams into video lectures, answering questions from students on online forums — even, perhaps, hosting office hours via videoconference.
Multiple-choice and short-answer tests will be computer scored. Coursera will soon unveil a system of peer grading to assess more complex work, such as essays or algorithms.
Students will not get college credit. But Coursera may offer “certificates of completion” or transcripts for a fee. The company may also seek to turn a profit by connecting employers with students who have shown aptitude in a particular field, a spokeswoman said.
For their part, participating universities expect to benefit by boosting their reputation overseas, connecting with far-flung alumni and, they hope, bringing in donations from grateful online students.
“It will increase our impact on the world,” said Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania.
The concept has pitfalls. Michael Winckler, a mathematician at Heidelberg University, said it’s difficult to replicate the collaborative learning that takes place in a traditional classroom. But he was impressed enough with the quality and rigor of the online class he took to let his doctoral students count it toward their required course work.
As online education matures, students may be able to build their own first-rate college education for free via sites like Coursera, said Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology. That may make it tough for some universities to survive. “They can’t assume a never-ending supply of students” willing to pay for a pricey campus education, DeMillo said.
Trial and error
In trial classes Coursera hosted this year, production values were a bit rough.
Scott Page, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, filmed his lectures for a class called “Model Thinking” in his house. A few of his online quizzes contain errors. His slides are sometimes hard to read. From time to time, his dog wanders into the frame.
Yet 30,000 people stuck with the class week after week, doing the homework, watching the lectures and chatting with one another in lively discussion forums.
“It’s awesome,” Page said. He has calculated that it would take 150 years of teaching in person for him to reach as many people as he did online.
— S.S.
Learning opportunity
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