Communications of the ACM
niversities Reshaping Education on the Web
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Stanford are adding 12 universities to Coursera, the online education venture they founded.
Credit: Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times
Coursera, an online higher education company founded last year by Stanford University computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, announced an expansion that will offer more than 100 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) taught by professors at some of the most prestigious universities in the world. "This is the tsunami," says Richard A. DeMillo, director of 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. "The potential upside for this experiment is so big that it's hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn't want to be involved."
MOOCs could change the face of higher education, providing opportunities to hundreds of millions of people due to the ability to personalize material and the capacity to analyze huge numbers of student experiences. Each online course is broken into manageable sections, including short video segments, interactive quizzes, and online forums where students can answer each other's questions.
About 66 percent of Coursera's students are from overseas, and most courses attract tens of thousands of students, which is irresistible for many professors. MOOCs could prove to be most helpful to people older than traditional college undergraduates and international students, says University of Michigan professor Scott E. Page.
From The New York Times
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found