TED Tuesday: How To Take The Best Courses From The Top Ivy League Schools— For FREE!

With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.

Good Morning Folks,

Daphne Koller is enticing top universities including Stanford, Yale, and Princeton to put their most intriguing courses online for free — not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. With Coursera (cofounded by Andrew Ng), each keystroke, quiz, peer-to-peer discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed.

Says Daphne, "Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity. Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky.

A 3rd generation Ph.D who is passionate about education, Stanford professor Daphne Koller is excited to be making the college experience available to anyone through her startup, Coursera. With classes from 85 top colleges, Coursera is an innovative model for online learning. While top schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera's platform supports the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.

At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. (Her research group is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne's Approximate Group of Students.) In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which involves, among other things, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.

Filmed June 2012 at TEDGlobal 2012, with over three million online views since, I proudly present: Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education...


As Daphne notes, "And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. AAnd if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us.

Thanks for listening and have a GREAT Day,

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer  

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.  

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