The Online Revolution: Learning without Limits

September 26, 2013

UCSB COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT PRESENTS
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2013
10:30 AM – 11:00 AM Reception
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Talk
Engineering Sciences Building, Room 1001

HOST: Subhash Suri

SPEAKER: Daphne Koller
Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University; Co-Founder and co-CEO, Coursera

Title:

The Online Revolution: Learning without Limits

Abstract:

We are at the cusp of a major transformation in higher education. In the past year, we have seen the advent of MOOCs – massively open online classes (MOOCs) – top-quality courses from the best universities offered for free. These courses exploit technology to provide a real course experience to students, including video content, interactive exercises with meaningful feedback, using both auto-grading and peer-grading, and rich peer-to-peer interaction around the course materials. We now see MOOCs from dozens of top universities, offering courses to millions of students from every country in the world. The courses start from bridge/gateway courses all the way through graduate courses, and span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more. In this talk, I’ll discuss this far-reaching experiment in education, including some examples and preliminary analytics. I’ll also discuss why we believe this model can support an improved learning experience for on-campus students, via blended learning, and provide unprecedented access to education to millions of students around the world.

Bio:

Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with the best universities to connect anyone around the world with the best education, for free. Coursera is the leading MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform, and has partnered with dozens of the world’s top universities to offer hundreds of courses in a broad range of disciplines to millions of students, spanning every country in the world. In her research life, she works in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to systems biology and personalized medicine. She is the author of over 200 refereed publications in venues that span a range of disciplines, and has given over 15 keynote talks at major conferences. She is the recipient of many awards, which include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACM/Infosys award, and membership in the US National Academy of Engineering. She was recently recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for 2012. She is also an award winning teacher, who pioneered in her Stanford class many of the ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. She received her BSc and MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Stanford in 1994.