With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.
Why you should listen
A 3rd generation Ph.D who is passionate about education, Stanford professor Daphne Koller is excited to be making the college experience available to anyone through her startup, Coursera. With classes from 85 top colleges, Coursera is an innovative model for online learning. While top schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera's platform supports the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.
At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. (Her research group is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne's Approximate Group of Students.) In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which involves, among other things, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.
What others say
Classes involve recorded lectures and quizzes in which the video pauses to let students answer questions.
Daphne Koller’s TED Talk
More news and ideas from Daphne Koller
Ideas
Why 259,969 people taking the same class at the same time might just be the future of education
January 30, 2014
“I sometimes look back at the TED Talk and I try to think of where we were at the time. We had four university partners, about a half a million students, 37 courses. Now we have more than six million students, more than 550 courses and 107 institutions that are working for us. And ‘MOOC’ […]
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Why 259,969 people taking the same class at the same time might just be the future of education
January 30, 2014
"The narrative is not if but when and how and to what extent will this completely transform the way we teach our students." Hear from Daphne Koller, co-founder of online education pioneer Coursera.
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What’s next for MOOCs?
January 27, 2014
“Questions Worth Asking” is a new editorial series from TED in which we’ll pose thorny questions to those with a thoughtful, relevant (or irrelevant but still interesting) take. This week: “What’s next for MOOCs?”, those online courses that have thrown a techno-bomb at traditional higher education. Here, a primer to catch you up if you’ve somehow managed […]
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