Bits Blog: Coursera, an Online Education Company, Raises Another $43 Million

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, at the company’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100.

Coursera, a year-old company offering free online courses, has raised another $43 million in venture capital from investors active in both domestic and international education.

The new investors include the International Finance Corporation, the investment arm of the World Bank, and Laureate Education, an international higher education company with dozens of profit-making universities around the world, as well as GSV Capital, Learn Capital and Yuri Milner, an individual entrepreneur.

“We hope it’s enough money to get us to profitability,’’ said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera. “We haven’t really focused yet on when that might be.’’

Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., previously raised $22 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; New Enterprise Associates; and the University of Pennsylvania and California Institute of Technology, two of its university partners.

Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100, and expand in several areas, including mobile apps and its Signature Track offerings, which charge a fee to students who want an identity-verified certificate upon successful completion of Coursera’s free courses. Since January, when the Signature Track option was first offered in five courses, Signature Track fees have produced more than $800,000, Ms. Koller said — and in the long run, she said, such revenue may be enough to make the company sustainable.

The company also plans to invest in international expansion, through localization, translation and distribution partnerships, and techniques for blended learning, in which Coursera’s online materials are used alongside classroom sessions with a professor.

“We see great potential for using some of the Coursera materials in our universities, so there is a strategic element to this investment,’’ said Douglas L. Becker, chairman and chief executive officer of Laureate. “The I.F.C. made the largest education investment they ever made in Laureate, and they’re joining us in this investment. Coursera allows us to invest in something we see as a rising technology impacting higher education, and gives us access to their content and curriculum.”

Coursera has grown with stunning speed since it began in April 2012, with four university partners. Now, the company works with 83 educational institutions on four continents, offering about 400 free college-level courses to more than four million students from every country in the world.

But after the initial burst of enthusiasm last year about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and their potential for democratizing higher education worldwide, this year has brought some pushback. Faculty members at several institutions have expressed concern about how the courses may change higher education, how quickly university administrators signed on to work with MOOC providers, and whether the aim is more to save money than improve the quality of education.

So far, most of the students who have completed Coursera MOOCs have been college graduates, and it is still unclear how well the format will work to help students without degrees earn college credit for their online work. Coursera has recently started to market its materials for use by public universities in blended on-campus classes. Universities that use the materials will pay licensing fees, which Coursera will share with the universities that produce the courses.

TED Teams Up With PBS for Education Program

Television viewers — even those who watch the more sober-minded PBS — are generally not keen on sitting through long speeches. But TED, the nonprofit group that sponsors conferences on ideas, thinks it has found a way to bring its signature 18-minute talks to a TV audience that may not have found them on the Web or through mobile apps.

In its first television foray, TED has joined forces with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York public broadcaster WNET for a one-hour special, “TED Talks Education,” to be broadcast on PBS on Tuesday. If it is successful, the program could become a template for future joint projects, said Juliet Blake, one of the show’s executive producers and the TED official charged with bringing the conferences to television.

The program was 18 months in the making, a short time for public broadcasting but long for TED, which is accustomed to the more immediate online world. Other suitors have also sought to do TED television projects, Ms. Blake said, but “to reach the audience we want to reach, public television was the place.”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting paid for the show’s $1 million costs under the auspices of an initiative that addresses the high school drop-out problem in the United States. “It was the perfect marriage of ideas that matter and our core value of education,” said Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s chief executive.

Hosted by the singer John Legend, who also has a foundation focused on alleviating poverty by improving education, and taped in April before an audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the show features teachers, students and educational reform advocates like Bill Gates.

The final speaker is the English author Sir Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED talk arguing for more creativity in schools has been seen nearly 16 million times, making it by far the TED Web site’s most popular video.

The focus is on positive changes that speakers advocate. Mixed in are clips of students discussing what excites them in school.

In one concession to the medium, the show limited its speakers to 5 to 8 minutes. “People don’t sit in front of television and watch 18-minute speeches,” said Julie Anderson of WNET, also an executive producer. Some speakers went long, including Geoffrey Canada, the chief executive of Harlem Children’s Zone, so those talks were edited for the PBS program, although the full-length versions will be posted online.

Conn. Task Force Working to Bridge Impasse Over Mandatory Legal Education

The chair of a new task force that is examining whether to bring mandatory legal education to Connecticut ended his first meeting by handing out a homework assignment. "I want both sides of the argument to come in with some ideas that might allow us to bridge that gap," Superior Court Judge Elliot N. Solomon said.

Connecticut remains one of five states without mandatory, or minimum as it is now called, continuing legal education, and members of the state bar seem to be deeply divided on the issue. Solomon and 11 others were appointed by Chief Justice Chase Rogers to serve on the task force whose creation was suggested by the Superior Court Rules Committee.

The mission of the task force, which met in early October, is to try to determine what the costs and benefits of a statewide MCLE program would be, to seek ways to break the current impasse and then to go to the Rules Committee with recommendations.

It won't be easy. "Among the 11 people who were at that meeting, it broke down to six [for] and five [against]," Solomon said.

The task force is comprised of 10 lawyers from various practice groups and levels of experience. Solomon and Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis represent the bench. Other task force members declined to be interviewed, saying Solomon spoke for the group.

Earlier this year, the Rules Committee tabled the latest of several proposals for MCLE brought by the Connecticut Bar Association. The decision to delay action was based on concerns by opponents that the cost of MCLE would be too onerous for young lawyers and those in small firms.

Those concerns are still being raised, but Solomon isn't focusing on them. He wants to hear from other task force members about their own specific concerns and possible resolutions. He wants more information from task force members who support MCLE about how it might improve legal competence, performance and client service. Then he wants to hear "the best arguments on why we shouldn't have MCLE."

Solomon is well aware of the possibility that the task force might not be able to reach a consensus. Part of the equation, he said is timing. "Look, the Hartford County Bar is one of the oldest bar associations in the country, and they had 200 years to raise the issue of mandatory CLE. So raising it at a time when the economy is tough on everybody may not be the best time to raise it. I don't know where it's going, but we're going to have to do our research and report back to the Rules Committee."

SELF-STUDY, SEMINARS

The Connecticut Bar Association proposal would require lawyers to annually certify in writing that they had taken 36 hours of continuing legal education in the past three years. Some 21 of those hours would have to be in self-study, and the remainder from more formal classes and seminars. While the proposal was endorsed by the Connecticut Bar Association's House of Delegates, there was loud opposition by many over whether the cost of classes, which can run up to $900 each, would harm young lawyers and solo practitioners. Others said they wanted to see evidence that MCLE in other states has reduced the rates of attorney malpractice.

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