Three Brown University alumni have joined the Coursera team to help expand the online education platform for 2013.
Jerry Charumilind, Anne Trumbore, and Norian Caporale-Berkowitz have all joined the new company after previously benefiting from Coursera’s online classes. Trumbore, for example, learned computer coding skills through Coursera courses before she joined the team.
Coursera made its official debut in early 2012. The project, started by two Stanford professors, aims to offer an online portal for top universities to offer their most utilitarian classes.
Brown University itself became part of the Coursera university list early on. The venture spent 2012 steadily adding schools and classes, bringing in universities such as Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Duke and Caltech. A significant portion of the funding for the new online education system was also invested by university organizations that consider online classes as a core component of the future of higher education.
Trumbore summed up the feelings of the Brown University recruits on digital learning when she said, “It’s not going away. The question is, ‘How do we make it better?'”
Coursera wants to make it better by offering highly flexible teaching methods for its professor collaborators. Students can take classes as individual courses instead of confining themselves only to classes available in their degree program. This allows students in one division to learn useful skills outside their major, adding to their employment value.
Professors can choose to assign recorded lectures as “homework” and use interactive class time to address particular problems. All materials are developed and owned by the universities that use the platform.
By the end of 2012, Coursera had gathered more than 33 universities and more than 200 classes, with enrollment around 1.4 million. Part of the reason students have proven so willing to sign up with Coursera is its supplemental nature. The online education system does not force students into a preset major or program, instead allowing them to pick and choose courses based on what skills they want to learn.
The future of Coursera will depend on the organization’s profit objectives. For now, there is no tuition for classes, but the young venture is searching for ways to generate revenue, potentially through a focus on its more elite classes with known experts in the field.
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