On May 10th, CUCFA President Robert Meister sent the following open letter to Coursera founder Daphne Koller:

Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University?

An Open Letter to Daphne Koller,
Co-Founder and Co-President of Coursera and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

Dear Professor Koller,

Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.”

The goal of the course will be for the students enrolled in it to understand the real relation between Coursera’s visionary mission—“to offer courses, in partnership with the worlds’ top universities, to everyone for free”—and the logic of the strategic business plan that led Coursera to be named “The Best Startup of 2012” by TechCrunch last January.

You and your company’s compelling pitch to consumers suggests that the private sector--that is, venture capitalists and not taxpayers--can deliver a more equal world in which income will be based on the skills and knowledge people actually acquire rather than the artificial scarcity of credentials for which they are eligible and can afford to pay. It is natural to hope that in this more equal, and also more productive, world incomes could rise for everyone willing to acquire the necessary academic knowledge and take the tests to prove it. This, in fact, was exactly what was promised by the original California Master Plan for Higher Education using taxpayers’ money when it was adopted in 1960.

My proposed Coursera course will ask students to discover for themselves how and why John Doerr, and your other Venture Capitalists, are willing to provide an even greater abundance of knowledge in the service of greater economic and social equality than is the State of California, which clearly has the means to spend much more than it has cost your company to reach a worldwide enrollment in the millions.

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Continua qui: http://cucfa.org/news/2013_may10.php