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Forbes Education Technology Innovation Series: Daphne Koller, Coursera

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For the World’s Largest MOOC, Broader is Better

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

12-16-2013

Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.

Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.

Koller admits that some of the data surrounding MOOCs might suggest that students are not learning as much as they could, as drop-out rates are substantial, but she argues that new metrics are needed in order to determine success or failure.

(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third in the series of Education Technology articles to be featured this month and next. To read the past articles in the series, please follow this link. To receive updates on interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, FutureLearn, and ALISON among others, please click the “Follow” link above.)

Peter High: Daphne, Coursera is still in its relative infancy. What was the inspiration for starting the company?

Daphne Koller: I have been working in the States for about five years, and the pace of change in education innovation has been dramatic. In the Fall of 2011, we put three Stanford courses up on the platform we had developed, and we were pleased to find that enrollment for these courses was 100,000 students or more. I think when we saw that the impact and the opportunities that this open platform had provided in education for this many people at a lower cost, then that caused us to say we really have to live up to that opportunity.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

  • Coursera is still in its relative infancy. What was the inspiration for starting the company?
  • How do you think about which university as well as which topics and professors to include in the program?
  • You have elected to offer a wide array of courses rather than simply pre-professional subjects like STEM topics. Why is that?
  • Clayton Christiansen has predicted that the rise of innovative education technology will put substantial pressure on lesser known universities, which may be forced to close. How do you see the MOOCs and Coursera more specifically impacting the broader university spectrum across the country and across the world?
  • This is the sort of thing that is going to apply some pressure to that professor to do more in terms of collaborating with student, because the lecture would be delivered once and shown time and time again and the real value will happen in the collaboration in the classroom as opposed to the person up-on-the-stage talking to a 100 or 200 or 300 people.
  • Are you seeking experts who are not affiliated with universities as yet? Will there be a time when smart people who do not have the traditional academic backgrounds will take the place of professors?
  • You are clearly in the phase of growing your audience, and you have done so quite successfully. Once the audience has been sufficiently built, how do you see the revenue model evolving?
  • In addition to the revenue numbers and projections you just quoted, what are the metrics you monitor to gauge the progress or lack thereof?
  • Do you foresee a point at which students can get a fully accredited degree from Coursera, bypassing the university entirely in the process?
  • Can you talk a bit about the way in which you fostered collaboration through Coursera?

To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com

To explore other Education Technology Innovation Series articles, please click here.

To explore the Technovation Column library, please click here.

To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sebastian, click here.