The study further breaks down funding by state and sector. California leads as a location for companies getting funded, while tech software is the sector most likely to get funded. Stanford and its Silicon Valley aren’t an island, however, and face competition from Harvard and  NYU, which have seen the most growth since the study began.

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Coursera’s new investment — which includes $3.7 million from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as $2.3 million from current funders New Enterprise Associates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — brings its total funding to $22 million. The company said it was adding twelve top universities, including the University of Edinburgh, University of Toronto and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), to the list of four partners it announced in April (Princeton, Michigan, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania).

Coursera: Online education is a new medium, we’re all inventing the basic concepts

One of the classes offered by EPFL, an introduction to programming course, will be taught in French, making it the platform’s first non-English language course (although other courses already include captions with translations).  Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said the top non-U.S. countries represented by students on the platform have been Russia, India, the UK and Brazil. But he said he was especially pleased that the French language class would make Coursera more accessible to people in the poorer parts of Africa, in which the primary language is French.

The new U.S. partners include the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, UC San Francisco, University of Washington, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Virginia.

“One of the reasons our partners are excited about working with us is that online education is a new medium and we’re all inventing the basic concepts and the basic ways to do these things,” said Ng. ”One of the things we’re doing is trying to do and collect the best practices and share them with our partners.”

For example, Coursera developed a new peer-grading system and technology for a computer-human interfaces class, but is now applying it to a Princeton sociology class, as well as a Penn poetry class.

Data collection and analysis remain key factors

Coursera, which was founded in the fall of 2011 by Ng and fellow Stanford professor Daphne Koller, is just one of several startups leading the way in online education. Udacity, which also has Stanford pedigree, 2tor, UniversityNow and the Minerva Project are others trying to make higher education more accessible through the Web. MIT and Harvard recently announced a joint initiative to create a free online course platform.

But Ng said Coursera is distinguished by its partnerships with leading universities and the range and breadth of its classes. It not only gives students free access to professors at elite universities, it offers courses on a range of subjects, from neuroscience and engineering to health policy and mythology. At the moment, students can cherry pick individual classes from a menu of courses but, down the line, Ng said, Coursera plans to provide more guidance so students can follow a course of study leading to mastery of a discipline or skill.

The courses themselves will always be free, because, Ng said, “many of the most needy people… not only do they not have $5, they don’t even have a credit card. And to throw up a barrier, I think, would be a tragedy.” But he added that possible revenue could be earned by matching students (who tend to be motivated by career advancement) with potential employers or charging students for certificates from partner universities.

Since launching, Coursera has offered 43 classes to 680,000 students from 190 countries. As the platform grows, Ng said the collection and analysis of data will continue to be a key focus.

“We log every mouse click, every time a student fast forwards a video, every time a student plays something twice,” he said. “One of the reasons Silicon Valley companies, like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are so good at what they do is because they can collect so much data on their users. This allows them to improve their services, and we are doing the same thing for education.”

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Monkey Business Images].

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This week, Modo Labs, a Cambridge, Mass.-based startup providing open source mobile platforms, said that since its launch last year, its Kurogo platform for building mobile apps has been adopted by more than 200 universities across the country, including Harvard, Boston College and Villanova University.

In many cases, the company said, the schools’ motivation for going mobile was to provide current students with schedules, campus updates and tools for keeping in touch with faculty. But, later, the schools started to realize that most of their traffic was coming from off-campus.

That observation was backed up by a February survey from the National Research Center for College & University Admissions and consulting company Noel-Levitz. It found that 52 percent of prospective college students said they viewed a school’s website on a mobile device in 2011 – more than double the percentage from 2010. Of those students, 48 percent said the mobile site experience improved their perception of the school.

“Today’s prospective students are using mobile websites and apps to evaluate schools,” said Andrew Yu, CEO of Modo Labs. “The universities are responding with interactive campus maps, guided tours with photos and videos, social media integration and detailed admissions information to enable prospective students to learn without having to be on campus and without a desktop or laptop.”

Last fall, a survey of nearly 500 IT leaders from the Campus Computing Project found that 55.3 percent of public universities had activated mobile apps or would do so in the coming academic year, compared to 32.5 percent in the fall of 2010. For community colleges, that percentage more than tripled from 12.4 percent in 2010 to 40.9 percent in 2011. A few months ago, Erica wrote about YourCampus 360, a mobile app recruitment tool that gives prospective students virtual tools of colleges from their smartphone.

Historically, bureaucracy and cumbersome technology has made it difficult for universities to keep up with technological trends, Yu said, but new open-source platforms and easy-to-use tools, such as Modo Labs and Google Apps for Education, are helping them pick up their pace. Much of the momentum he’s seeing with Modo Labs’ Kurogo platform is at the grassroots level, from students and other community developers looking to bring mobile innovation to their schools.

But while schools are using mobile platforms to recruit new students and help current students manage their college experience, it will be very interesting to see whether mobile devices will help the educational process.

“There’s a huge debate over how the mobile experience will change learning,” said Yu.  Digital textbooks from Chegg, Apple and and Amazon are bringing tablets into education, but he said the smaller screen of the smartphone poses challenges for delivering educational content.

Earlier this month, MIT and Harvard announced that they’re collaborating on free online courseware technology, called EdX. But though Yu said he’s been in contact with the schools and expects it migrate to mobile platforms eventually, he said it’s not an area of focus.

“Mobile is definitely on the list,” he said. “But it’s not the most urgent priority at the moment.”

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The discovery was announced in a triumphant blog post on the Authors Guild website. The organization claims a simple Google search allowed it to find J.R. Salamanca, the author of “A Lost Country,” a 1961 fiction work that was also turned into an Elvis Presley movie. The Guild says Mr. Salamanca was surprised and annoyed to discover that his work had been declared an “orphan.”

Orphan works are out-of-print titles that are protected by copyright but whose authors can’t be found. The University of Michigan and other prominent schools recently announced a plan to make digital copies of these works available to students and scholars. The plan is intended to allow readers to have access to millions of titles that might otherwise languish forgotten on library shelves. Many of the orphan works can be found in the “Hathi Trust”, an enormous collection of digital books that were scanned as part of the troubled Google Books initiative.

This week, the debate over what to do with the orphan works turned bitter. Authors’ groups said the plan to share a handful of orphan works was “preposterous” and “potentially catastrophic” and filed a lawsuit asking for court permission to seize university computers.

The Authors Guild’s announcement coincides with a court hearing this week at which a federal judge is expected to declare the Google Books Settlement officially dead in the water. The news also appears designed to embarrass the librarians and portray them as careless:

“…we knew that research librarians were behind the project, and they were likely to be especially careful to avoid any embarrassing slip-ups in this first go-round. We thought, at best, we might find the representative of some obscure literary estate. We were wrong.”

The news means that the authors’ groups have won the first round in shaping public perceptions of the orphan works. The debate so far has for the most part been a rhetorical one in which authors have tried to paint the librarians as legal outlaws who want to give away their books in a Napster-style free-for-all.

The reality is, of course, more complicated. The orphan works issue is not about books by the likes of Scott Turow and Faye Weldon, two of the authors who are taking part in the lawsuit against the universities. The copyrights of these authors are easily identified and well-protected. The issue instead is about what to do with the millions of works sitting largely forgotten on library shelves but covered by absurdly long copyright terms. Congress has twice tried to pass orphan works legislation but has come up short and, in response, the librarians are trying to go forward with a policy of their own.

Today, the Authors Guild won a major victory in the fight to spin the issue. The ball is back to the universities — will they stand their ground or just put the books back on the shelf?

When contacedt by paidContent, Michigan’s Dean of Libraries, Paul Courant, said that he had yet to review the Author’s Guild announcement but added that librarians welcomed an opportunity to remove a title from the orphans list.

“We’re trying to make this process as open and transparent as possible.”

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This position won’t likely go over well with publishers of educational videos, which have been stepping up their efforts to get universities to obtain special streaming licenses if they want to include videos on course web sites. The Association for Information and Media Equipment (AIME) threatened UCLA with a copyright lawsuit over video streams late last year, and the school responded by shutting down its online video platform.

AIME has been arguing that displaying a movie on a web site isn’t the same thing as showing it in a classroom, even if there are access controls for the online video in place. AIME President Allen Dohra told us last month that there are special streaming licenses available for virtually any video currently for sale for educational purposes.

However, the Library Copyright Alliance believes that in many occasions there is no need to pay for these licenses. U.S. Copyright traditionally granted fair use exemptions to educational institutions, making it for example possible to buy a single copy of a DVD and show it to dozens of classes without paying separate licensing fees for each performance.

Copyright has been amended in the last decade to include long-distance learning and other new forms of education, and the authors of the Alliance’s legal analysis believe that these amendments also cover the display of films on class websites. One example to justify this as fair use would be to accompany online screenings with virtual classrooms that allow interaction between a teacher and students.

The analysis concludes with a reminder that fair use has never been set in stone:

“Copyright’s limitations and exceptions for users (especially educators) are as important to a thriving culture as the set of exclusive rights it conveys to authors and publishers. The contours of those exceptions, especially fair use, are determined in part by the accepted practices in communities of users.”

They’re also in part determined by the courts, one might add, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the conflict between publishers and schools would eventually head that way as well.

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