The technology for online education, with video lessons, quizzes, student-paced learning and immediate feedback, is evolving quickly. More and more universities announce their partnership with commercial companies offering free online courses for anyone to take. One of them is Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that partners with 33 world-class universities including Stanford, Princeton, John Hopkins, Duke, and Edinburgh University etc.
The aim is to give anyone access to world-class education and empower people with education that will improve their lives and the communities they live in. The new online platform enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students. Coursera was founded by two Stanford computer science professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng in spring, 2012 and now more than 20 people work on course operations, design, engineering, and business development.
Coursera provides about 200 courses in a wide range of topics, spanning the Humanities, Medicine, Biology, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Business, Computer Science, Music and many others. Each course includes short video lectures on different topics and assignments to be submitted, usually on a weekly basis. In most humanities and social science courses, and other assignments where an objective standard may not be possible, a peer review system is used. After completing the course, credit is not given for the students but a certificate.
These online classes provide opportunities not only for students but researchers and teachers as well. Coursera offers a great way for teachers and professors to test out their teaching methods in this new, open, digital setting.