The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone with Andrew Ng
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, Andrew and his partners 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. This platform's 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, the platform has 100 university and other partners, and over 5 million students enrolled in its more than 500 courses. These courses span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more.
In this talk, Andrew will report on this far-reaching experiment in education, and why he believes 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.
Andrew Ng
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, with his partners. Their goal is to give everyone in the world access to a high quality education, for free. Today their platform partners with top universities to offer high-quality, free online courses. With over 100 partners, over 500 courses, and 5 million students, theirs is the largest MOOC platform in the world. Ng's recent awards include being named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world; to the CNN 10: Thinkers list; Fortune 40 under 40; and being named by Business Insider as one of the top 10 professors across Stanford University. Outside of online education, Ng's research work is in machine learning; he is also the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.