John Doerr: Coursera 'Could Be Big The Way Google Was'

http://chronicle.com/article/Coursera-Throws-a-Massive/133227/

by jryoung • 14 years ago

49 21 14 years ago

well-known venture capitalist John Doerr is backing Coursera, the upstart provider of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, that is working with elite universities. "It's doing something very, very valuable for free, so it's going to scale to be enormous," he said in an interview over the weekend.

googoobaby• 14 years ago

Doerr also said Segway would hit $1B in sales faster than any company in history. I'd look out the window if he told me the weather.

temuze• 14 years ago

I think that Udemy has a better chance of being big. Coursera is a limited platform and only allows universities to make courses.

Udemy allows any expert to do this and allows them to charge for courses. This is awesome because it'll attract more attention from experts and it will give experts incentive to make free courses to increase their reputation.

jacoblyles• 14 years ago

I think you underestimate how much people value brand name in education.

david927• 14 years ago

But currently we overestimate how much people should value brand name in education, and there's every reason to think that will change.

mkramlich• 14 years ago

> L. John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who is well-known in Silicon Valley, attended the cookout, and said he is an enthusiastic supporter of the effort (he's also on its board of directors).

He has a financial stake in seeing it become as big as Google so take with grain of salt.

malandrew• 14 years ago

"no conflict, no interest." seems appropriate here.

StavrosK2• 14 years ago

What does it mean? I can't parse it.

volandovengo• 14 years ago

They are going to be huge. I totally buy it

gojomo• 14 years ago

I agree. And further, a University's partnership with Coursera may work out much like Yahoo's partnership with Google.

Vivtek• 14 years ago

I agree with his sentiment that this will fundamentally change education - but I have no idea who's going to take over things like certification of achievement and certification of course quality. Certainly Coursera doesn't have any plan for the first and is relying on name recognition for the second, and ultimately that's not going to cut it.

But somebody is going to get it right, and soon.

VLM• 14 years ago

"I have no idea who's going to take over things like certification of achievement and certification of course quality"

Grade inflation and diploma mills, both incredibly popular in the brick and mortar .edu community, show "the market" doesn't care about those problems.

My gut level guess is massive gamification. I'm not going to get "a" cert for my coursera quantum computation class, I'll get a "medal" in qubit definition, a medal in inner product calculations, a medal in mastery of the implications of the two slot experiment, etc. So your QC crypto startup wants to hire a dude with minimum 500 medals in physics, minimum 300 medals in quantum physics, minimum 100 medals in quantum cryptography.

From the inside, as a coursera student, what I don't understand is why coursera is so chronologically limited. I must sign up before a certain date, must do homework before a certain date, must this date, must that date. I don't know why, other than they like arbitrary chronological limitations. So its youtube with a wiki and a quiz/survey program... why add a weird scheduling layer on top that doesn't fit the technology/culture of online education?

bcbrown• 14 years ago

I read something where the goal is to mimic the offline community of students at a real university. By having a large group of people all taking the class at the same time, you maximize the chances that if someone asks a question on the forum, someone else who's at the same point in the class will come across it and be able to answer it.

ecdobry• 14 years ago

edX looks promising.

pitt19802• 14 years ago

"My company is a small start-up, and we're looking actually to hire someone who is skilled, so the reason I came is to talk to Andrew and the people and see if they could recommend someone in the class," said an executive who asked not to be named. "People could be very good already and they just need that certificate or they can put on their résumé that they finished the class," she added. "I don't want someone who doesn't have any experience, but I believe there are people who just do it on the side maybe it took them 15 minutes a week, and now they can claim that certificate."

facepalm, pretty sure no one completes any of these classes in 15 minutes a week

John Doerr: Coursera 'Could Be Big The Way Google Was'

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