Coursera founder talks merits of online-education

Daphne Koller, one of the founders of the online-learning system Coursera, spoke this past Wednesday afternoon in Hodson Hall.  Koller talked to students about the merits of her new learning structure, and about how Coursera allows for people all over the world to gain access to top-tier university learning

“Coursera lets an experience that has been until now available only to a very tiny privileged handful of Stanford students become available to anyone around the world at effectively a zero marginal cost to students,” Koller said. “The implications of that are of course enormous, because education is a great solver for many of the problems across the world… with greater education, we can solve issues like unemployment, overpopulation, and others.”

Koller, a computer science professor at Stanford, put one of her own courses online in January of 2012 along with fellow professor Andrew Ng.  The course was a great success, and Koller and Ng found that they had the interest of hundreds of thousands of students from around the world.

“These are numbers you do not often hear in academic circles… the largest courses taught at Stanford have classes of four hundred, and those are the large lecture classes we all know and hate.  Even beyond the magnitude of those numbers is the fact that you are uniting students from every age group and every walk of life,” Koller said.

The success of this first course prompted Koller and Ng to expand their system.  By April of the same year they officially created Coursera, an online learning portal, and invited other universities besides Stanford to start offering course material online.

“We now have 107 other partners involved with Coursera, which involves both universities offering their course material and organization sponsors like the World Bank.  We offer 542 classes, with a user-base of 5.5 million students from every single country in the world, including North Korea,” Koller said.

Coursera began with only computer science courses but now includes courses in subjects as diverse as leadership, medicine, engineering, the humanities and the arts.

Koller shared student testimonials with the audience, many of which involved students with learning disabilities. One student in particular, Daniel, is severely autistic, and has found Coursera to be his first meaningful educational experience.

“Daniel is a 17 year old boy, who is severely autistic.  He has a speaking vocabulary of about 150 words, and communicates by typing on an iPad designed by his father. For Daniel, Coursera has been the most meaningful educational experience he has ever had, after life in special ed,” Koller said. “Not only has this type of coursework provided him a significant learning experience, but it is actually lessening the severity of his disease… Coursera has transformed his life.”

According to Koller, Daniel’s experience is not atypical of many other users of Coursera.  Part of the success of the learning system is due to its unique formatting, which employs the use of bite-sized, interactive lectures.  This is in contrast to the typical college lecture format, in which students are often detached from the information they are receiving.

“College is a place where professors’ lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes without passing through the brains of either,” Koller said.

Coursera corrects this problem by breaking up the monotony of lecture information with relevant questions that students must answer before continuing.

“The lecture video pauses in the middle, and the students are asked a question.  Every student must answer the question, they are told immediately whether they are right or wrong, and they have a chance to try again,” Koller said. “Now, this is the same kind of question instructors might try and ask students in a large lecture hall.  But speaking from experience, eighty percent of students are still scribbling the last concept down, and then there is the smarty-pants in the front row who answers the question before anybody has a chance to realize a question has been asked.”

According to Koller, a significant part of the Coursera experience is the global community that it gives rise to.

“One of the most important aspects of the Coursera community is that it’s global… especially for courses that are heavily contextualized, the richness of the courses means you get a lot of diverse perspectives, providing a richness of the interactions that you just don’t get in a normal classroom.”

Despite the virtual nature of Coursera, a physical community of students has also begun to take shape.

“This virtual interaction is only one component of the Coursera community.  Students still have the need for face-to-face communication… we have seen the formation many self-assembled communities coming together and meeting physically about the classes,” Koller said.

Koller believes Coursera is providing a much-needed service to the world.

“If you ask a poor person what they want, it’s not money but rather it’s a better education for their kids,” Koller said.