Daphne Koller, Stanford University professor and co-founder of massively open online course (MOOC) platform Coursera, will speak at Columbia University on Tuesday, April 16 at 2:00PM in 203 Butler Library. Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia’s Chief Digital Officer, will introduce the talk. The event is free and open to members of the Columbia community with a valid University ID.

Koller’s talk, “The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone,” will discuss how the advent of MOOCs is transforming higher education. Dozens of top universities now offer MOOCs that span a range of topics including computer science, business, medicine, science, humanities, social sciences, and more. Launched in April 2012, Coursera now has over 3 million students, ranging from 10 to 90 years old, of whom 40% are in the developing world. In this talk, Koller will report on this far-reaching experiment in education, including some examples and preliminary analytics. She will also discuss how 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.

As part of her visit to campus, Koller will also meet with the University Senate Online Task Force, the Provost's Faculty Advisory Committee on Online Learning, and the CUMC Education Resource Council.

The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning will record Koller’s presentation, and the video will be publicly available on YouTube after the event.

Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and the co-founder of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with top universities to make the best education accessible to everyone around the world, for free. In her research life, Daphne works in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to computer vision, systems biology, and personalized medicine. 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.