The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone

Andrew NgStanford University and Coursera

ang@cs.stanford.edu

Daphne KollerStanford University and Coursera

koller@cs.stanford.edu

ABSTRACTIn 2011, Stanford University offered three online courses,which anyone in the world could enroll in and take for free.Together, these three courses had enrollments of around350,000 students, making this one of the largest experimentsin online education ever performed. Since the beginning of2012, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture,Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company whose missionis to make high-quality education accessible to everyone byallowing the best universities to offer courses to everyonearound the world, for free. Coursera classes provide a realcourse experience to students, including video content, inter-active exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and a rich peer-to-peer interac-tion around the course materials. Currently, Coursera has62 university partners, and over 3 million students enrolledin its over 300 courses. These courses span a range of topicsincluding computer science, business, medicine, science, hu-manities, social sciences, and more. In this talk, I’ll reporton this far-reaching experiment in education, and why webelieve this model can provide both an improved classroomexperience for our on-campus students, via a flipped class-room model, as well as a meaningful learning experience forthe millions of students around the world who would other-wise never have access to education of this quality.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsK.3.1 [Computers and Education]: Computer Uses inEducation—Distance learning

General TermsExperimentation

KeywordsOnline Courses; Coursera

Short Bio

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contactthe owner/author(s).KDD’13, August 11–14, 2013, Chicago, Illinois, USA.ACM 978-1-4503-2174-7/13/08.

Andrew Ng is a Co-founderof Coursera, and a Com-puter Science faculty mem-ber at Stanford. In 2011,he led the development ofStanford University’s mainMOOC (Massive Open On-line Courses) platform, andalso taught an online Ma-chine Learning class thatwas offered to over 100,000students, leading to thefounding of Coursera. Ng’sgoal is to give everyone inthe world access to highquality education, for free.

Today, Coursera partners with top universities to offer highquality, free online courses. With 62 university partners,over 300 courses, and more than 3 million students, Cours-era is currently the largest MOOC (Massively Open OnlineCourses) platform in the world. Outside online education,Ng’s research work is in machine learning, with an emphasison Deep Learning. He is also the Director of the StanfordArtificial Intelligence Lab.

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