CultusDaphne Koller is a third generation Ph.D in her family, who is passionate about education. As a Stanford professor, she is excited to be making the college experience available to everybody through her startup, 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. Top universities put their most intriguing courses online for free, and not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn.
With available classes from 16 top colleges, Coursera is the top innovative model for online learning. While the best schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera’s platform has started supporting the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.
At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. Her research group there is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne’s Approximate Group of Students.
In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which among other things involves, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.
Daphne Koller, Coursera: What we’re learning from online education