Experts in artificial intelligence are leaving academia to bring online learning to the world. But their most radical ideas are still on hold.

Dropouts: Artificial-intelligence researchers Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller left academia to start an online-education company.

The wave of enthusiasm for online education is unearthing some hard and interesting computational problems that Daphne Koller would love to solve. But first she has to find the time.

Last January, Koller and her colleague Andrew Ng took leave from faculty positions at Stanford Universitys artificial-intelligence lab to create Coursera, a venture-financed online-education startup with offices five miles from campus.

Since then, Courseras growth has been rapid and all consuming. The company has posted more than 200 free classes taught by professors at 33 top universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania and Caltech. More than 1.5 million students have signed up, and about 70,000 new studentsthe equivalent of four or five Stanfordsjoin every week.

Koller, 44, now spends her average day probably on a plane somewhere headed to pitch Coursera to university administrators and faculty. The last 10 months have transformed her from a celebrated expert in statistics into the co-CEO of a large and complex educational website whose money-making plans are still nascent.

As I drive home, I sometimes think this is somebody elses life, she says. She calls the experience surreal.

So far, tearing down the paywalls around higher education has been the simple part. Whats more challenging is making online classes like A History of the World Since 1300 and Algorithms I match the quality of their in-person equivalents. That means racing to set up live forums for class discussions, keeping the site from crashing amidst the crush of students, and urgently seeking ways to make classes more interactive and to automate grading as much as possible.

Given such technical challenges, its not an accident that many of the people behind recent efforts to put college courses online come from computer science labs. Another Stanford researcher, Sebastian Thrun, resigned to create the startup Udacity. At MIT, the former head of the AI department, Anant Agarwal, now runs edX, another of the organizations offering massive online open courses, or MOOCs (see The Crisis in Higher Education).

We saw the opportunity and the technology and had the ability to leverage it, says Koller. But putting classes online is only part of what the AI researchers intend with MOOCs. By following the progress of millions of students online, it may be possible to develop new insights into how people learn and tailor classes on an individual level. What we have here is an unprecedented level of detail and scale of data, she says.

More:

The Technology of Massive Open Online Courses