Monday, March 10, 2014

Making higher education accessible to all

"College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either" -- Mark Twain
"The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting" -- Plutarch
"Maybe we should spend less time in universities to fill our students' minds with content by lecturing at them and more time igniting their creativity, imagination and problem solving skills by actually talking with them" -- Daphne Koller
"So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. First it would establish education as a fundamental human right...Second, it would enable lifelong learning...And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere." -- Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller is enticing top universities 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. Coursera is bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.
-- Daphne featured on Time Magazine among the 100 Most Influential People in the World

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