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tl;dr: Coursera was started out as a continuation of the Fall 2011 ml-class.org (Machine Learning) and db-class.org (Introduction to Databases) online classes from the Stanford Computer Science department as a way to make the idea of MOOCs sustainable.
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In summer of 2011, Professor Andrew Ng decided to offer a version of his popular machine learning class (CS229) online after Sebastian Thrun had announced that his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class (CS221) will be offered online (through what was then KnowLabs and renamed Udacity later on).
Andrew needed a learning platform built (and fast to coincide with the start of the Fall 2012 quarter), so he decided to get some freshman interns (namely Chuan Yu, Yifan, and me) who were doing undergraduate research that summer -- rather unsuccessfully I might add -- to develop the platform for him. We had about five weeks to get the platform ready in time for the the first lecture being released and I had to cut short my already too-short summer break and fly back early from Singapore to finish up and launch the project.
Near the end of the summer, Ngiam Jiquan [1, 4], then a PhD student in Andrew's lab at Stanford, came back from his own internship at Google and was brought on to the project to develop the course material and to supervise the three of us. At about the same time, we managed to convince Professor Jennifer Widom to offer her popular Introduction to Database class (CS145) online using our hastily developed platform as well [2].
We expected to have maybe 10 or 20,000 people sign up for each of the classes, but in the end, we had over 100,000 people sign up for each of those classes, which is beyond our wildest expectations.
However, Andrew and Professor Daphne Koller (who had also been interested in online education and working on flipped classroom models of teaching for a while) quickly realized that just doing this within Stanford CS was probably not sustainable. They considered both for-profit and non-profit structures and in the end decided that the for-profit VC-backed business model was probably the most sustainable in the long-run [3].
Thus, they formed a company and sought out venture funding ($16 million from NEA and KPCB plus another couple of million dollars from our university partners). They also decided that the couple of us weren't doing too bad of a job and offered us jobs (three of us took them up on the offer -- Ngiam, Yifan and I). Thus, Coursera was born.
The rest, as they say, is history.
[1] Coincidentally, he was supposed to be Yifan and Chuan Yu's research project mentor that summer, but since he was away at Google almost all the time, their project didn't really go anywhere.
[2] The first version of the platform also became a senior project for us (it was awesome to finish our senior project in the fall quarter of our sophomore).
[3] The line of reasoning then was that while for-profit businesses will be beholden to shareholders to return a profit at some point, non-profit foundations are also beholden to their major donors, and donors could be more fickle and more demanding in terms of the direction a non-profit could take, which limits the freedom to act and explore the space. It was also much harder to come up with $20 million from donors than $20 million from VCs to kickstart the venture.
[4] Andrew, Ngiam, Chuan Yu, Yifan and I either (a) spent a substantial amount of years there (Andrew for middle school and high school) or (b) grew up in Singapore (the rest of us). So Coursera can be considered a Singaporean start-up
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tl;dr: Coursera was started out as a continuation of the Fall 2011 ml-class.org (Machine Learning) and db-class.org (Introduction to Databases) online classes from the Stanford Computer Science department as a way to make the idea of MOOCs sustainable.
-----
In summer of 2011, Professor Andrew Ng decided to offer a version of his popular machine learning class (CS229) online after Sebastian Thrun had announced that his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class (CS221) will be offered online (through what was then KnowLabs and renamed Udacity later on).
Andrew needed a learning platform built (and fast to coincide with the start of the Fall 2012 quarter), so he decided to get some freshman interns (namely Chuan Yu, Yifan, and me) who were doing undergraduate research that summer -- rather unsuccessfully I might add -- to develop the platform for him. We had about five weeks to get the platform ready in time for the the first lecture being released and I had to cut short my already too-short summer break and fly back early from Singapore to finish up and launch the project.
Near the end of the summer, Ngiam Jiquan [1, 4], then a PhD student in Andrew's lab at Stanford, came back from his own internship at Google and was brought on to the project to develop the course material and to supervise the three of us. At about the same time, we managed to convince Professor Jennifer Widom to offer her popular Introduction to Database class (CS145) online using our hastily developed platform as well [2].
We expected to have maybe 10 or 20,000 people sign up for each of the classes, but in the end, we had over 100,000 people sign up for each of those classes, which is beyond our wildest expectations.
However, Andrew and Professor Daphne Koller (who had also been interested in online education and working on flipped classroom models of teaching for a while) quickly realized that just doing this within Stanford CS was probably not sustainable. They considered both for-profit and non-profit structures and in the end decided that the for-profit VC-backed business model was probably the most sustainable in the long-run [3].
Thus, they formed a company and sought out venture funding ($16 million from NEA and KPCB plus another couple of million dollars from our university partners). They also decided that the couple of us weren't doing too bad of a job and offered us jobs (three of us took them up on the offer -- Ngiam, Yifan and I). Thus, Coursera was born.
The rest, as they say, is history.
[1] Coincidentally, he was supposed to be Yifan and Chuan Yu's research project mentor that summer, but since he was away at Google almost all the time, their project didn't really go anywhere.
[2] The first version of the platform also became a senior project for us (it was awesome to finish our senior project in the fall quarter of our sophomore).
[3] The line of reasoning then was that while for-profit businesses will be beholden to shareholders to return a profit at some point, non-profit foundations are also beholden to their major donors, and donors could be more fickle and more demanding in terms of the direction a non-profit could take, which limits the freedom to act and explore the space. It was also much harder to come up with $20 million from donors than $20 million from VCs to kickstart the venture.
[4] Andrew, Ngiam, Chuan Yu, Yifan and I either (a) spent a substantial amount of years there (Andrew for middle school and high school) or (b) grew up in Singapore (the rest of us). So Coursera can be considered a Singaporean start-up
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