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the author of this beautiful ability to each sell an introduction to artificial intelligence jazz improvisation the science of astronomy's these are just a few of the hundreds of college courses you can take online for free as education gets totally reimagined thanks to the Internet the classes are called massive open online courses or MOOCs and many are taught by top professors at the best colleges in the world and anyone can take them we call them control Andrew Inge is a Stanford professor and co-founder of Coursera an online education startup he says MOOCs are all about promoting access to education for everyone what we really did was create the technology that makes it possible for one professor to teach not just a hundred but a hundred thousand students this really changes the economics of higher education and lets us do this Toby and same thing right take the best causes and put them online Coursera offers classes from 80 different universities from all around the world so this is your list of partner universities it's pretty cool I'm looking back courses from all of these schools taught in English Spanish French Italian German all that which is to come in the future the online lesson plans follow a similar format to a traditional class there's a syllabus lectures homework and even tests very few classes include college credit but completing a class comes with its own rewards most students are not able to get credit for these courses or a degree so you can say I took a course but you can't say I graduated from Princeton they're free kosair hoses are not credits bearing and you don't get a DB for them for the most part but it turns out that when you finish these classes and list them on your resume employers do take those seriously well how far are we do you think from this becoming the next stage of education previously the model for education was you go to school for four years and then the next 40 years you Coast's what you learned but that makes no sense in today's world and all of us think regular booster shots of knowledge Heather Weir is one such student a user experience designer at Oracle who signed up for a course on gamification to broaden her skills they have a series of video lectures that you can watch there are quizzes that you would take as well as homework assignments papers that you write I love to learn I love being in class so this is a really easy way to do that Coursera is not the only place to get an online college education there's also Udacity and EDX and some courses can be taken online directly from colleges but the father of the movement is Sal Khan he is targeting the K through 12 crowd with his startup Khan Academy so if I take the X multiply it by five and then also subtracted by eight his unique approach which inspired this sea change in education is about helping students better learn in a range of subjects from algebra to astronomy do you feel like you've spurred a shift in the way people view education we were the first to kind of get to kind of show that with there's a huge need for this there's a huge demand but our goal is to not just replicate kind of a traditional course or just to be video lectures most of the other people on the other side of this wall are software engineers data scientists alerting experts researchers teachers we're working with them to think about can we rethink how the learning happens so it's more personalized so it's more interactive it's not lecture based it's not explanation driven it's a human being doing exercises so all this technology replaced the traditional classroom it's hard to say the most valuable thing you could get from your education is this ability to take ownership over your education this ability to say oh wait that's my goal I need to figure it out here are the resources I have at my disposal let me do it people get very cynical all the time but I think we are absolutely moving into like the dawn of humanity to dramatically