E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The first keynote of the OpenEd Conference this year was supposed to be delivered by Daphne Koller of Coursera. Because some reason I don't know, we ended up with the other founder of Coursera Andrew Ng via a skype connection. He did a presentation based on the standard slide deck many of us have heard before. Anya Kamenetz did a very good job in writing a report of the keynote. You should definitely check it out.

For me the most important part was that Coursera is not interested in Open Education. In his answer to a question of UNESCO chair Rory McGreal he made it sound that Coursera owns the content and not the universities.

I'm interested to hear what public universities will say about this. Within the Open Education family we have always said that publicly funded education/research should be available to the public. Coursera thinks differently about this.

I'm very glad that my university has decided to join EdX and not Coursera. Let's see what the Dutch Universities of Leiden, Amsterdam and Eindhoven have to say about this next week at the Onderwijsdagen.