Invited Talk (Posner Lecture)

The Online Revolution: Learning without Limits

Daphne Koller

2013 Invited Talk (Posner Lecture)

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.

Speaker

Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller is CEO and Founder of insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery company. She was the co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, an online education platform for massive open online courses (MOOCs), which has reached over 100M learners worldwide. Daphne was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, and remains an Adjunct Faculty member. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications appearing in venues such as Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, NeurIPS, and ICML, with an h-index of 150. Daphne was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 and Newsweek’s 10 most important people in 2010. She received the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1998, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, the IEEE CS Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer award and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022. Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 2023, the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017. Her teaching was recognized via the Stanford Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research, and as a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

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