by Angela Guess
Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb reports, “College is stuck in the past, and tech is always trying to tow it out of the mud. The trick is finding a solution that provides more access to higher education, improves the learning experience, and enables future improvement, instead of miring college in some company’s proprietary system. Coursera has such an offering, and it announces today that some of the world’s top universities will participate in its experiment.”
Mitchell continues, “Princeton; Stanford; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania will all offer courses on the platform for free to anyone in the world with Internet access. To help bring Coursera up to speed, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates have backed it with $16 million in venture funding.”
He adds, “Coursera is a platform for instruction, discussion and grading at Internet scale. It extends the influence of universities around the world, and it provides them data-driven insights into how to adapt higher education to the global promise of the Internet. Many top universities, including Yale and MIT, offer lectures online for free. The Coursera cofounders call that ‘the afterthought model.’ It doesn’t threaten the established order to put lecture videos up on iTunes, because the experiential and interpersonal parts of learning are missing.”
