until they get the right answer. For
humanities courses, Coursera is
testing a form of peer grading.
Having thousands of other students taking the course at the same
time is crucial, too. Students can
find each other in the Coursera
forums, where they have spontaneously formed study groups by native language or time zone. Though
not the same as a chat over coffee,
the virtual study groups can be effective and even (according to some
students) surprisingly intimate.
“Andrew Ng is the best teacher I’ve
ever had, even though I’ve never
met him,” Porios says. “He was
explaining the material very clearly,
answering every single one of my
questions only seconds after they
came to my mind. It was like telepathy.” If Porios had a question
that the professor didn’t address,
he asked a fellow student. During
the first round of Stanford open
courses, students responded to one
another’s forum posts in an average
of 22 minutes.
Those results are one reason
that Ng and Koller are so optimistic
about Coursera’s potential. The two
have been friends for 13 years, dating back to Ng’s grad-student days
at Berkeley. They moved from their
old Stanford work space this May
to a spartan and anonymous ’80s-
style, low-rise office park on El
Camino Real, the main artery of
Silicon Valley. The two make an
intriguing contrast. The lanky Ng,
self-effacing and approachable, was
born in the United Kingdom and
THE COURSE CATALOG OF THE FUTURE
Take these classes online—most for free—from professors at
top universities.
COURSERA
coursera.org
Founders: daphne
Koller of stanford
and andrew ng of
stanford and
google
Founded: april 2012
Funding: $16 million
from new enterprise
associates and
Kleiner perkins
Enrollment: more
than 100,000 in the
first courses
Format: short
videos, quizzes and
problem sets with
immediate
feedback, and a
Q&a forum.
Topics: the fullest
selection, from
poetry to
probability.
Cost: free for now.
Sample course:
model thinking, an
interdisciplinary
social-science
course by scott e.
page, a professor of
complex systems,
computer science,
and economics at
the university of
michigan.
EDX
edxonline.org/
Founder: anant
agarwal of mit
Founded: april 2012
Funding: $60 mil-
lion in pledges from
harvard and mit
Enrollment:
100,000 in the first
course
Format: short
videos, problem
sets, a forum, wiki,
and facebook
study groups. some
neat features built
by volunteers, like a
graphic that shows
your cumulative
homework scores.
Topics: they
pledge to offer
humanities as well
as the sciences.
Cost: free, with
plans to charge for
certifications.
Sample course: mit
6.002x, circuits and
electronics,
https://6002x.mitx
. mit.edu taught by
agarwal, gerald
sussman, and piotr
mitros of mit, an
entry-level electrical
engineering course.
MINERVA PROJECT
minervaproject
.com
Founder: ben
nelson, former ceo
of snapfish
Founded: april 2012;
launching 2014
Funding: $25 mil-
lion from bench-
mark capital
Enrollment: n/a
Format: pre-
recorded video
lectures and live
video chat with
classmates and
discussion leaders.
Topics:
comprehensive—
arts and sciences
Cost: up to $20,000
a year for tuition.
Sample course: as
an undergraduate
at Wharton,
nelson designed
an interdisciplinary
class that had
undergraduates
work in groups to
review the scientific
literature on obesity.
UDACITY
udacity.com/
Founders:
sebastian thrun of
google and
stanford and peter
norvig of stanford
Founded: January
2012
Funding: $5 million
from charles river
Ventures
Enrollment:
100,000 in the first
course
Format: short
videos, quizzes and
raised in Hong Kong and Singapore. Koller, who was born and
raised in Israel, is more intense and
abstracted, with a piercing gaze.
Since emigrating from Israel and
earning her doctorate at Stanford
in 1993, she has specialized in the
study of how to analyze large volumes of complex information. In
2004, while working to unlock the
secrets of the human genome, she
earned a MacArthur “genius” grant.
About four years ago, Koller
recalls, she had become interested
in how artificial intelligence might
be used to improve student engagement. At around the same
time, Ng was building a software
platform for online courses. He
used a simple setup that would let
professors make videos of themselves while they marked up course
notes with a tablet and stylus, as
if in front of a blackboard. The two
started to talk. They agreed on the
potential of combining these technologies in new ways, both to personalize learning and to lower its
cost of delivery.
And then, one Saturday last
October, Koller and her husband,
Dan Avida, a venture capitalist,
were having lunch at the home of
their friend Scott Sandell, the New
Enterprise Associates VC, and his
wife, Jennifer, a teacher. The couples’ school-age daughters were
running around playing. The wives
were deep in conversation. The
men were assembling the meal.
“You know, Daphne’s working
on something really interesting,”
Avida told Sandell. “But I don’t want
to interrupt our visit. Let’s make a
plan to talk later.”
“The way our schedules are, that
could take months,” Sandell coun-
tered. “Why don’t you both tell me
about it now?”
So over bagels and lox, Koller
explained that four weeks earlier,
she, Ng, and a few other teachers
at Stanford, as part of an official
university project, had announced
open online classes in machine
learning, artificial intelligence, and
programming. Each class, she
problem sets, a wiki
and forum, and a
live course manager
like a ta. courses
are organized by
level with links to
suggested
prerequisites.
Topics: focus on
computer science,
with a few other
science and math
topics.
Cost: free for now.
eventually,
perhaps $100 in
tuition for a
master’s degree.
Sample course:
cs373, artificial
intelligence for
robotics, aka
“programming a
robotic car.”
prerequisites
include knowledge
of python,
probability, and
linear algebra.
