MOOCs and Coursera, or getting a free Stanford education

Recently I was sitting on my front porch, smoking a very nice Partagas cigar, and watching TED videos on my iPad. I happened upon this one:




and, as has so often happened with TED, I was inspired. This was the first time I had heard of Coursera. I had often had the thought that gee, it would be great to take a college class. Maybe learn Biology or History. But then the impediments presented themselves: even if I could go as an alumus to my alma mater school, there would be costs, probably pretty staggeringly high costs. And the class would be during working hours. I'd be twice or three times the age of the other students. And so I never went further with the thought.

Coursera and MOOCs have changed all of that. I am currently enrolled in a Duke University Behavioral Economics course (A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior) and I am signed up for a University of Melbourne course on Animal Behavior beginning in August. How perfect - I work at a zoo!

The cost of these - essentially zero. I say essentially because at least in the case of the first course, there is a $20 bundle of 3 books that I bought from Amazon and have loaded onto my Kindle.

My other objections - hours and student demographics - are also solved by Coursera. The course runs 6 weeks and there are reading assignments, lecture videos, quizzes and tests. But I can do them at my own pace, whenever during the week I want. So all I need is the discipline to work an hour a day.

My classmates? Well, there are probably more than 100,000 of them. They come from all over the world and are of all ages. We come together in discussion fora. Other students form study groups, some of which meet IRL and others virtually.

At the end of the class, assuming I do the work and pass the tests, I will be given a certificate. So while it doesn't much matter to me, I could add these to my resume. Others manage to transfer these to their colleges for credit. Still others get work recognition and promotions based on their Coursera achievments.

This is going to revolutionize the world. I was at the Georgia Technology Summit yesterday and Ray Kurzweil talked about MOOCs. I had to look that up - Massive, Open, On-line Courses. In a funny bit of syncrhonicity, Dr. K was talking about the very thing that TED had inspired me towards. He talked about MIT. He estimates that over the course of its entire history, MIT has taught 85,000 students. Their MOOC for Introduction to Programming had 125,000 enrolled and 20,000 complete the course.

Dr. Kurzweil talked about how this model will help us "cure ignorance."

Someone in the audience asked a great question, though. How will we prepare our children so that they have the foundation necessary to take an MIT or Stanford class and have a chance of succeeding. So there is certainly a continuing role for classroom education. One of the key things you are taught (hopefully) is how to learn. But once you have that under your belt, MOOCs can open up an incredible world of lifelong learning opportunities.