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Last year, Stanford University offered three online courses - the first of the modern day MOOCs (Massive, Open, Online Classes) which anyone in the world could 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, we have transitioned this effort into a new venture, Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company whose mission is to make high-quality education accessible to everyone by allowing the best universities to offer courses to everyone around the world, 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.  As of October 2012, Coursera has 33 university partners, over 1.6million students from 196 countries enrolled in its 200 courses, which span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more.  In this talk, I'll report on this far-reaching experiment in education, and why we believe this model can provide both an improved classroom experience for our 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.

Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with top universities to make the best education accessible to everyone around the world, for free. In her research life, Daphne works in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to computer vision, systems biology, and personalized medicine. She is the author of over 200 refereed publications in venues that span a range of disciplines, and has given over a dozen keynote talks at major conferences. She is the recipient of many awards, which include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACM/Infosys award, and membership in the National Academyof Engineering. She is also an award winning teacher, who pioneered in her Stanford class many of the ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. She received her BSc and MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Stanford in 1994.

Check out her written work on Amazon.com

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