(Wall Street Journal) "If you put an instructor to sleep 300 years ago and woke him up in a classroom today, he'll say, 'Oh, I know exactly where I am," says Daphne Koller, co-founder of the online-education company Coursera. The same couldn't be said for agriculture, manufacturing and health care, she notes.
The former professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford hopes to change that with Coursera, a platform on which universities such as Princeton, Yale and Stanford share some 1,000 courses free of charge. Later this year, the site, which has over 13 million registered users, will open admissions for its first online M.B.A. program, from the University of Illinois.
Earlier this week, Dr. Koller, 46, was in New York for a rushed seven hours on her way back to San Francisco from Geneva, Switzerland, where she was visiting some of Coursera's university partners. Founded in 2011, Coursera has been making a more global push recently, as well as adding more career-related content. The site has worked to identify the skills that employers are looking for through job-posting websites and then asked university partners to add courses in those areas. There are currently over 150,000 open jobs in data science in the U.S. alone, she says.
Advertisement - story continues below
