

John Doerr: Coursera 'Could Be Big The Way Google Was' - jryoung
http://chronicle.com/article/Coursera-Throws-a-Massive/133227/
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.
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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

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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.

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jacoblyles
I think you underestimate how much people value brand name in education.

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david927
But currently we overestimate how much people _should_ value brand name in
education, and there's every reason to think that will change.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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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volandovengo
They are going to be huge. I totally buy it

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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.

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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.

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malandrew
"no conflict, no interest." seems appropriate here.

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StavrosK
What does it mean? I can't parse it.

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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...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-11/tech/30001236_1_twitter-
twitter-board-investment)

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StavrosK
That clarifies it, thank you.

