Last week, online education startup Coursera added twelve new university partners and raised an additional $6 million, bringing its venture funding to more than $22 million.
Coursera is a free online education platform that offers interactive university courses. The intent of the year-long venture is to bring classes from top-tier universities to the public for free. Last Tuesday his dream came true, or began to.
On this day, a dozen major universities: CalTech, Duke, University of Virginia, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Rice, Johns Hopkins, University of California San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, University of Toronto, University of Edinburgh and Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne announced its partnership with Coursera. Coursera was already working with Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan.
Coursera is one of several emerging initiatives. The Harvard-MIT joint project edX and Udacity are among other high-profile new free online universities.
“I like to compare it to a movie,” Sebastian Thrun explained to Education News. Thurn is a Stanford professor and founder of Udacity. “Before the cinema there was theater, small casting companies that reached 300 people at a time. Then celluloid was invented, and you could record something and replicate it. A good film did not reach 300 but 3,000, and soon 300,000 and soon three million. That changed the economy.”
While Udacity offers only 11 classes so far, Coursera’s partner universities will offer more than 100 courses this fall. Four of the classes began on Monday: listening to world music, fantasy and science fiction, history of the Internet, and introductory finance. The courses, called MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, can reach many more people than a traditional class; they are capable of delivering lessons to more than 100,000 students at a time, according to The Atlantic.
That number will only increase as they start to translate their courses and offer classes in different languages, which they have started to do. EPF Lausanne has started offering courses in French. His “Introduction to Object Programming,” or Introduction to Object Programming, will be offered this fall.
Revenue possibilities for Coursera could include career placement services or charging students for certificates from partner universities. The certificates, which could be pdf documents or badges that can be shared on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Google+, would be branded with the name of the university and sold to students. So far, only one university has said it will offer credit for the classes: the University of Washington. For the others, the certificate would only mean the completion of the course.
Other sources of revenue Coursera is considering include making students pay to take identity verification tests at specific testing locations, an option that would increase the value of the certificate to the class by confirming that the student learned the information on their own, and he did not cheat.
Coursera is also looking at offering services such as paid tutoring, recruiting advertising sponsorships, and potentially charging tuition fees to offer online courses on college campuses. This latter option is already happening as part of its partnership with the University of Washington, according to the Chronicle.
Coursera has agreed to pay universities 6 to 15 percent of its revenue, while they will retain 20 percent of gross profits. The site will be an opportunity for universities to market to the community and learn and improve their own experiment in delivering education online without having to build the technology infrastructure themselves. Also important: Universities that design courses for Coursera will retain the rights to their work.
For now, however, the university’s financial contribution to the company remains a risk. However, it is also potentially a significant investment, for them and for the future of education itself. The Atlantic calls the Coursera initiative “the single most important experiment in higher education.”
“Lectures arose several hundred years ago when there was only one copy of the book, and the only person who had it was the professor,” Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller told The Atlantic. “The only way to convey the content was for the teacher to stand at the front of the room and read the book. You’d expect us to have better capabilities these days.”
As to whether Coursera will ever become a competition to the traditional universities that provide its courses, however, another co-founder, Andrew Ng, thinks it won’t. The real value of attending elite schools like Caltech, he told The Atlantic, is the time he spends working directly with teachers and other students. Ng believes that Coursera gives schools the potential to improve that interaction by putting their lectures online.
Dr. Edward Tenner, historian of technology and culture, proposes that easy access to quality college-level online education will increase competition for slots at traditional top-tier universities. Others, meanwhile, question what might happen to traditional non-Ivy League schools. According to Harvard Business School professor and disruptive innovation expert Clayton Christensen, half of North American higher education will move online in the next ten years, with K-12 to follow in 2019.
While the world of online education is still developing, initiatives like Coursera are important steps toward a free, quality public college education for all. 360 Education Solutions is excited about this innovative step in online education and looks forward to bringing you more information soon.
