In 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 around 350,000 students, making this one of the largest experiments in online education ever performed. Since the beginning of 2012, the effort has transitioned into Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company whose mission is to make high-quality education accessible to everyone for free.
Coursera classes provide a real course experience to students, including video content, interactive exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and a rich peer-to-peer interaction around the course materials. Currently, Coursera has 62 university partners, and over 2.8 million students enrolled in its over 300 courses. These courses span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more. In this talk, Ng will report on this far-reaching experiment in education, and why he believes this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for on-campus students, via a flipped classroom model, as well as a meaningful learning experience for the millions of students around the world who would otherwise never have access to education of this quality.
Andrew Ng is a Co-founder of Coursera, and a Computer Science faculty member at Stanford. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University's main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, and also taught an online Machine Learning class that was offered to over 100,000 students, leading to the founding of Coursera. Ng's goal is to give everyone in the world access to a high quality education, for free. Outside online education, Ng's research work is in machine learning; he is also the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.
