Coursera, website, here. Jeff Ullman is teaching Automata; It’s like Gandalf is coming back to the Shire to teach the Hobbitses. Sry, cannot do this all in LOTR metaphor, perhaps we need to shift metaphor to nail down the dynamics here. These Coursera guys are like the Lakers. Knuth is letting Sedgewick be the Algorithms guy, very Kareem/Bynum. Need Bill Simmons to pick this up at Grantland to do this right.
edX, website, here. These edX guys are the Celtics. Agarwal is fronting this now and he is a Rondoesque stud, but where are the big three? Wait until they finish negotiating with Michael Sandel and Justice maybe we see the big three then. Sandel is like the LBJ of online education (certainly more than a Paul Pierce equivalent). Sandel should be inline for a Lebron James-style payout here. edX better be offering a MAX+ contract there as well as the Harvard economic equivalent of a shoe deal, whatever that might be. Maybe he gets his Chair multiply endowed, or something. Is it recoverable if he decides the right thing to do is not sign with edX? Does Sandel have a posse? How great would that be if Sandel had a press conference to announce “I’m taking my talents to South Beach.” The beantown fans would revolt and burn their Justice jerseys and backpacks; they’ll have to start an edX Cares set of television spots where Mankiw and Stallman talk about how personally gratifying it is to give back to the community.
Udacity, blog, here. The Heat? This could be their year or the only defender that works against these guys is the fourth quarter. These guys better do a deal with Oxford/Cambridge kind of soon. Looks like UCB signed with Coursera.
An interactive online learning system created by two Stanford computer scientists plans to announce Wednesday that it has secured $16 million in venture capital and partnerships with four major universities.
The scientists, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, taught free Web-based courses through Stanford last year that reached more than 100,000 students. Now they have formed a company, Coursera, as a Web portal to distribute a broad array of interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences and engineering.
Besides Stanford, the university partners include the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.
NYT, Harvard and M.I.T. Team Up to Offer Free Online Courses, here.
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.
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