How Coursera, A Free Online Education Service, Will School Us All. Illustration by Yuko Shimizu Christos Porios, 16, lives in Alexandroupolis, a small Greek city on the Aegean Sea about 20 miles from Greece's eastern border with Turkey. "My mother's a teacher and my father's a mechanic," he explains, adding that neither is particularly knowledgeable about computers--especially compared with him. For years, he's had free rein over the family PC, and he's taken advantage of the time to teach himself programming.
Mainly, he uses sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and the Khan Academy--a portal with thousands of short, free educational videos. "Yes," says Porios. "I would call myself a geek. " "At first they were like, 'You can't learn anything that way.' Last fall, as the Greek economy spiraled toward default and rioters filled the streets of Athens, Porios was glued to his computer, but not to follow the eurozone crisis. If one teenager in one small city in Greece can become a genius hacker through an online course, does it mean the world has changed? Tech Ed. Coursera Throws a 'Massive Open Cookout' - Technology. By Jeffrey R. Young Menlo Park, Calif. Call it a "massive open cookout. " Coursera, a company that is working with more than a dozen elite universities to help them run MOOC's, or massive open online courses, held its first official "meetup" here on Saturday for students and professors to connect in person over burgers, chips, and soda.
It was a chance for even the company itself to learn more about what motivates students to take its courses, which bear no official academic credit. Multimedia Who visits a massive open cookout? With some 900,000 students registered for its courses, everything the small company does seems to get big quickly. Volleyball and beanbag tossing games were set up, but most of the students seemed happy just to talk—to each other and to the two founders, who wore jeans and blue T-shirts bearing the company's logo.
"He's cool," said Yichuan Cao, a 23-year old technology worker from Mountain View, who was one of those gathered around Mr. L. When Mr. Mr. Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education. Rapidlearning_1104.pdf. Pdf. Epal2009-decamps-depover-delievre.