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John Doerr: Coursera 'Could Be Big The Way Google Was' (chronicle.com)

49 points by jryoung ↗ HN
well-known venture capitalist John Doerr is backing Coursera, the upstart provider of MOOCs, or massive open online courses, that is working with elite universities. "It's doing something very, very valuable for free, so it's going to scale to be enormous," he said in an interview over the weekend.

22 comments

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googoobaby
Doerr also said Segway would hit $1B in sales faster than any company in history. I'd look out the window if he told me the weather.
temuze
I think that Udemy has a better chance of being big. Coursera is a limited platform and only allows universities to make courses.

Udemy allows any expert to do this and allows them to charge for courses. This is awesome because it'll attract more attention from experts and it will give experts incentive to make free courses to increase their reputation.

jacoblyles
I think you underestimate how much people value brand name in education.
david927
But currently we overestimate how much people should value brand name in education, and there's every reason to think that will change.
aik
True. And because of this I think at this stage it's impossible to say which one will become huge. They're all lacking two extremely core components: credibility and any sort of structured curriculum.

Credibility: What employer understands the value of Udemy or Coursera courses? Essentially none. And understandably so.

Structured curriculum: No high school student today will spend on their own time, instead of going to university, 1-4 intense years of Udemy or Coursera courses. A very large majority of high school students haven't the slightest clue what they want to spend their life doing. Without any clue, there is no way they will have sufficient drive on their own to lead their own education efforts.

I haven't seen anything from either of these websites that even come remotely close to solving these issues.

fusiongyro
I think you've hit the nail on the head. This big educational startup land grab is futile until someone can address these two problems meaningfully. The first one isn't going to come down on its own in less than a couple generations--we're talking 20-40 years.

Whoever solves these problems first stands to reap the biggest rewards.

adrianN
Why do you think that will change? Assuming more and more people become well educated thanks to Coursera and company, I only see the value of brand name education going up.
mtgx
Probably because "education" is not such a "fixed" thing anymore, and University courses are still very fixed, compared to the wealth of knowledge you could get from "experts" in a huge array of topics.
pitt1980
yeah this,

if your not getting credit, what does the name brand mean?

some people may get a kick out of taking a 'Stanford' class (myself included, I took the original AI class)

those people will get discouraged quick if they go through the whole class and don't have a good outlet for that knowledge

I see two potential outlets, 1 something to put on your resume that will get you a job,

or 2, specific knowledge that will let you complete cool, even marketable project independent of a resume line

1 is a tricky proposition for these classes, until if figures that out, whoever figures 2 out will be the winner

I went all the way through the AI class, even got over 90%, I felt like I understood a decent amount of theory, still a ways from actually being able to go out and complete a project on my own

mkramlich
> L. John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who is well-known in Silicon Valley, attended the cookout, and said he is an enthusiastic supporter of the effort (he's also on its board of directors).

He has a financial stake in seeing it become as big as Google so take with grain of salt.

malandrew
"no conflict, no interest." seems appropriate here.
StavrosK
What does it mean? I can't parse it.
telemachos
It's a John Doerr quote[1]. Here's the opening paragraphs from an article which discusses it:

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is said to have once described his investment philosophy as "no conflict, no interest."

In other words, when Doerr and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins aren't privileged enough to enjoy a potential conflict of interest with respect to a potential investment, they have no interest in making the investment.

[1]: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-11/tech/30001236...

StavrosK
That clarifies it, thank you.
volandovengo
They are going to be huge. I totally buy it
gojomo
I agree. And further, a University's partnership with Coursera may work out much like Yahoo's partnership with Google.
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Vivtek
I agree with his sentiment that this will fundamentally change education - but I have no idea who's going to take over things like certification of achievement and certification of course quality. Certainly Coursera doesn't have any plan for the first and is relying on name recognition for the second, and ultimately that's not going to cut it.

But somebody is going to get it right, and soon.

VLM
"I have no idea who's going to take over things like certification of achievement and certification of course quality"

Grade inflation and diploma mills, both incredibly popular in the brick and mortar .edu community, show "the market" doesn't care about those problems.

My gut level guess is massive gamification. I'm not going to get "a" cert for my coursera quantum computation class, I'll get a "medal" in qubit definition, a medal in inner product calculations, a medal in mastery of the implications of the two slot experiment, etc. So your QC crypto startup wants to hire a dude with minimum 500 medals in physics, minimum 300 medals in quantum physics, minimum 100 medals in quantum cryptography.

From the inside, as a coursera student, what I don't understand is why coursera is so chronologically limited. I must sign up before a certain date, must do homework before a certain date, must this date, must that date. I don't know why, other than they like arbitrary chronological limitations. So its youtube with a wiki and a quiz/survey program... why add a weird scheduling layer on top that doesn't fit the technology/culture of online education?

bcbrown
I read something where the goal is to mimic the offline community of students at a real university. By having a large group of people all taking the class at the same time, you maximize the chances that if someone asks a question on the forum, someone else who's at the same point in the class will come across it and be able to answer it.
pitt1980
"My company is a small start-up, and we're looking actually to hire someone who is skilled, so the reason I came is to talk to Andrew and the people and see if they could recommend someone in the class," said an executive who asked not to be named. "People could be very good already and they just need that certificate or they can put on their résumé that they finished the class," she added. "I don't want someone who doesn't have any experience, but I believe there are people who just do it on the side maybe it took them 15 minutes a week, and now they can claim that certificate."

facepalm, pretty sure no one completes any of these classes in 15 minutes a week