A new brand of technology in education is flourishing which makes online providers such as Coursera generate great hypes that they have raised as much as $43 million for funding this year.
This didn’t come as a surprise to many, knowing that the Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs) offered are affordable and high-quality, and can be acquired by anyone who has internet connection. In the past few years, top universities including Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, and Princeton have ventured into the MOOC. Coursera, a company based in Silicon Valley, has seen it’s free and affordable video courses being integrated into lecture of universities like Yale, Northwestern, and Stanford.
Coursera started in Stanford April last year as a collaborative effort of two computer science professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Professor Ng was one of the first to try the technology by making intro courses for computer science.
In order to put together the technology needed and build partnerships, the company was able to raise $22 million last year, and has to date, raised $65 million worth of funding.
The two founders want to stress that Coursera is not meant to be an alternative for college education. It was designed to be an option for students who to learn courses like Algebra or Greek History but could not afford to pay costly tuition fees.
Koller and Ng do claim that the online courses offered can serve as supplements to conventional college education. The company’s developers and partners also agree. They are currently looking for new options for students to learn using online methods.
A lot of universities and colleges are recognizing the fact that it is not conducive for students to have several instructors teaching the same information, such as intro to calculus, when online sources like Coursera has its own accredited version. This would give professors more time to teach specific courses, and have more student engaged classes.
